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Aug. 25, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:07:28
The ACTUAL Costs of Child Abuse
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Good evening. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
It's Friday night. We're going to try this on Telegram, and we are going to touch on a couple of topics of great importance, I believe.
Of great importance, I believe.
Now, okay.
I put this question out a little bit earlier, and you can, of course, tell me what you think.
The question that I had earlier...
A week or two ago. How much more expensive is it for dysfunctional children in society?
In other words, how much more expensive is it for society as a whole when children are raised in highly dysfunctional environments?
What do you guys think? What do you think?
What have you got? What is the multiple?
What is the multiple?
Give me a shout. Let me know what you think.
A hundred times.
Well, you know, again, this is how it's been quantified in the mainstream literature, so you're probably right, but that's probably not how it's going to come across other than that.
Any other guesses? Any other thoughts?
Any other guesses? What do you got?
All right, so... Where's the telegram?
It's right here, man. 40 times.
Okay, so, and I did get a wide variety of estimates.
So the closest estimate, and look, understand this is very mainstream, so whatever, right?
So the estimate is about, it costs society about 13 times more when there is a child raised in a dysfunctional environment than when that child is raised in a functional environment.
It costs society about 13 times more.
Now, if that doesn't blow your mind, I haven't been doing my job.
If that doesn't blow your mind, you haven't been paying attention 13 times.
So, I want you to think of something.
What is the state, really?
Yes, monopoly of the initiation of force, monopoly over, quote, dispute resolution, with the stunning success of 3% of violent crimes being actually solved by the police, and that's with plea bargains.
What is the state? Well, I'll tell you what the state is, fundamentally.
And this is why I focus on parenting so much.
So here's what the state is. Are you ready?
Are you steady? Well, no, you won't be steady.
You'll be unsteady after this, because this will blow your mind.
The government is an unholy bargain to subsidize abusive parenting.
The government is an unholy bargain through which...
Taxpayers are forced to subsidize shitty parenting.
And that's why the state has so much power, because it's united with child abuses.
And this is why, when I first started to talk about and reveal the extent of child abuse in society, there were particular repercussions that came on a broad social spectrum.
Because here's how it would work in a free society, right?
In a free society, parents would be responsible For the costs of their children.
Parents would be responsible for the costs of their children.
Makes sense. I had a friend who, when he was a kid, a neighbor's dog got free and bit him on the leg, and his father went after the neighbor in a civil suit and won damages.
And that's a dog!
Not a kid. Not a kid, right?
That's a dog. So, in a free society, if you raise some absolute half-demonic hellion of a criminally inclined kid, who pays the price for that?
Who is responsible for that?
In a free society, well, it would be the parents, right?
It would be the parents who would be responsible for those costs.
If your kid is crazy expensive to educate because he's disrupted and violent and abusive, well...
He won't be accepted by schools.
Or if he is accepted by schools, you have to pay a lot extra for the extra teachers, the security, the jujitsu, the mattresses tied around the other kids so he doesn't rip their arms off.
It's going to be way cray-cray expensive for you if you're an abusive parent and your kid is having real trouble, right?
If your kid gets involved in criminality when he's still underage, right?
So, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
If your kid gets involved in criminality, what happens?
Well, what happens is You as the parent would pay the price for that.
You would pay the price for that in terms of money, in terms of restitution, perhaps in terms of restricted social access for whatever reason.
You would pay the price for that.
You would pay the price for that.
Now, the state Buries all of those prices.
So if you raise a child who becomes a criminal, you, as the parent, don't pay any liability for that, right?
Because let's say that your kid is 20 and he goes and beats someone up and then that person then sues and then finds out that the parents beat the child up Well, the parents would then be coarsely implied in the attack that the adult made, the 20-year-old made, on the other person.
How that would play out in a free society, I don't really know, but we can terms morally.
Morally, if you have somebody who's very violent at the age of 20, and they're two years an adult, it means they've only spent 10% of their life as an adult, and 90% of their life was under the care and control of their parents.
So if they've turned out violent, isn't that 90% of the parents?
At least, at least... Given that the first two years are way more important for development than the years 19 to 20, I would put even more on that.
But if you are a violent parent and you produce a violent child, wouldn't you be liable in a free society?
If your child steals, aren't you liable?
If your child vandalizes, aren't you liable?
If your child does graffiti, aren't you liable?
If your child disrupts, abuses, if your child is an arsonist, aren't you liable?
In a free society, you would be, just as my A friend's neighbor was responsible for the dog that went and bit my friend when he was a kid.
Wouldn't you be liable with counselors?
Of course you would. Of course you would.
Who should pay if the abuse can be traced back to child abuse, right?
If an adult prisoner, if an adult criminal has to go to prison in a free society and you can trace back the abuse of To violence on the part of the parents, should the parents not pay some price of that incarceration?
Well, of course they should. Of course they...
Now, I'm not talking if somebody's 50 and is a con artist or whatever, but if they're, you know, 25 years old and they're very violent and then there's evidence or testimony or witnesses or whatever to significant acts of violence against that child by the parents...
When that was a child, they would be responsible for some portion.
I don't know what it would be. It would be worked out.
They would be responsible for some portion of those incarceration costs.
Why? Because if you abuse a dog, you torture a dog, and that dog goes out and bites people, are you not causally responsible?
Now, I get it. A human being is not a dog, and there's free will.
I get all of that. But would you not pay some cost of that?
If your child...
Grows up without a father and with sexual predators in the environment, your daughter, let's say, then your daughter is pretty likely to turn out to be promiscuous, right?
Okay, who pays for the cost for the STDs?
Who pays for the cost for the unwanted pregnancies?
Who pays the cost for all of that?
Well, surely it should be the parent. Surely it should be the parent.
If you fail to protect your child, let's say that you're a single mother, you invite a guy into the house and he ends up raping your daughter...
Who pays for that? Obviously the man who rapes your daughter is the woman who invited the man into her daughter's life, into her bed, into her house, to some degree responsible.
Well, of course. Of course.
It's called negligence, right?
It's called negligence.
None of these are legal terms as we know them now, but I've been talking about a free society.
So in a free society, what about the additional health care costs Of bad parenting.
Right? So if you are a bad parent, I mean, I knew a guy once, he let his daughter fall asleep sipping on juice, like in those little juice boxes, which basically is just candy bar.
Juice is just candy, right?
And so she'd fall asleep and, oh, I don't want to wake her to make her brush her teeth and, you know, because she's asleep finally.
Okay, so what happened?
Well, his daughter had 10 cavities because she just fell asleep with pools of sugar on her enamel and the bacteria went nuts and, right?
Who paid for that? Well, he didn't make much money, so it's you and I, the taxpayers.
We pay for that, right? But of course the parents should pay for that.
The parents should pay for that.
Who pays for broken and breaking children?
Should be the parents. Should be the parents, without a doubt.
But... It's not, in general.
I mean, they may pay emotionally, they may have legal fees, and I get all of that.
But, foundationally, the costs are covered up by the state.
Now, why, why, why does the state cover up and pay for the crimes of abusive parents?
Why? Ah, well, now we get into the core of the matter.
Because the state needs criminals.
The state needs criminals...
With which to scare the general population into thinking that they need the protection of the state.
Right? You can't sell fire insurance in an underwater city, to take a sort of silly example, right?
So... Can you sell insurance for ice damage in sub-Saharan Africa?
Well, no, you can't, right?
So if the threat isn't present, you can't sell the security.
So the state needs a continual supply of dysfunctional people to come into society.
And I know this explicitly because a lot of leftists and communists, I did a whole presentation on this, the destruction of America's mental health care system, that they really worked hard to make sure that crazy people...
We're flushed out of the asylums or out of the mental health care units and put out on the street where they did massive damage to the neighborhoods, massive damage to themselves, created a massive sense of insecurity.
And when people feel insecure, as we can see from COVID, they run to authority.
You need the predators in order to prey on the general population.
So if...
Abusive parents are doing a service to the state by producing broken and breaking people.
Then the state will, in return for that service, cover up the costs and subsidize the costs and pay the costs of the abuse and the abusers.
We'll take that 13 times.
13 times the price for dysfunctional kids.
It's not paid by the parents, because if it was paid by the parents, abuse would virtually stop tomorrow.
I mean, I remember doing a presentation on circumcision.
And when the parents were then responsible for the price of circumcision, a couple of hundred bucks, rather than it being covered by the state, circumcision rates dropped enormously.
And that's a couple of hundred bucks. To raise a child, on average, $200,000, right?
Let's just do some rough calculations, right?
If something costs $200,000 when done reasonably well, but costs $2 million when you do badly, wouldn't more people want to pay the $200,000 than the $2 million?
So just take it a rough 10 times, like a 10x the cost, Because we can shave some off some of the stuff happens as adults or whatever it is.
Let's just say it could be five times, right?
The $200,000 becomes a million.
Let's say ten times, right?
So the $200,000 becomes $2 million.
It costs $2 million to raise a dysfunctional child.
It costs $200,000 to raise a relatively functional child.
Relatively healthy child. I mean, even in the general quagmire of the modern age or whatever.
So who's paying the $1.8 million to taxpayers?
Right? The taxpayers.
The government subsidizes bad parenting because the bad parents produce the boogeymen with which the government can scare the general population into general compliance.
Now, in a free society, The way it would work, guaranteed.
Guaranteed. Well, first of all, there'd be very little child abuse in a free society because we can't get to a free society as long as we keep violating the non-aggression principle with regards to our children.
We can't get to a free society until we stop assaulting our children.
But in a free society...
You can very easily detect child abuse on a brain scan.
Did you know that? Like, you can very easily detect child abuse on a brain scan.
You can see where empathy is not being developed.
You can see where damage is being done to the neofrontal cortex.
You can see where there's an exaggeration in the fight-or-flight response in the hippocampus and other places.
You can see child abuse on a scan.
Big fucking question, right?
The BFQ. Big question.
If you can Detect the signs of child abuse very easily in a brain scan.
Why aren't the brain scans being done?
It's kind of an important question, right?
If you could see signs of cancer, well, you can in a scan.
And if half the kids have cancer and you're not doing the scan, it's because you want the cancer.
In a free society, you take your kid into the doctor.
The doctor says, excellent. Good responses, growing well, need a brain scan.
Brain scan comes back.
This child is not developing empathy.
This child has an exaggerated fight-or-flight response.
This child has deficiencies in behavioral inhibition circuits.
Something's going wrong. Something's not going right.
We suggest taking this parenting class.
But what we have to do is we have to pass these results along to your insurance company.
And if the insurance company sees that there's a kid who's not developing empathy, who's not developing emotional self-regulation, the insurance company is going to be like, oh, did you take up smoking two packs a day when you're 60?
I'm afraid we're going to have to adjust your rates a little.
And if you're raising a child, Much more likely to become a criminal.
Much more likely to cast society, which the insurance companies would have to pay to a large degree.
Much more likely to cast society 13 times.
I'm afraid your premiums are also going to have to go up 13 times to cover the risk.
Or you can take these parenting classes.
We can review it in three months and make sure that the kid is developing properly.
Do you see how a free society...
We do an unbelievably fantastic job, fantastic job, of protecting the most dependent, helpless, and vulnerable members of our society, the children.
Now once you understand, you take your kid in to a doctor, doctor does a scan, scan shows deficiency, scan shows effects of abuse or neglect, It can be solved and remediated early on, right?
Three months, six months, nine months, twelve months, eighteen months.
You can intervene and you can fix this stuff early on.
Raises the question. Governments run healthcare systems in all Western countries, except for America, where they run over half, more than half now.
It was half before Obamacare.
So between three quarters, between 75% and 100% of healthcare systems are run by the government.
So why on earth would the government not do relatively cheap and inexpensive brain scans on children to detect signs of child abuse?
Why wouldn't they do that? Why?
Well, obviously because they don't want to.
That's kind of a tautology, but why don't they want to?
Because they need the abuse.
They need the chaos. They need the violence.
They need the destruction. In order to save you, you've got to be damned first.
In order to protect you, you've got to be in danger first.
Can you imagine if the governments did the brain scans, say, oh, well, the brain scans cost a couple of hundred bucks or a thousand bucks.
It's like, yeah, compared to 1.8 million extra dollars for a dysfunctional child.
I think it's a pretty good deal, wouldn't you say?
If I said, give me a thousand bucks or 5,000 bucks or 10,000 bucks and I'll give you back 1.8 million dollars, you'd be all right with that, wouldn't you?
By the way, my name then would be Bitcoin.
The government doesn't do it.
The technology has been around for a long time.
Science has been around for a long time.
Bombinthebrain.com. You go bombinthebrain.com.
I've done all this research for you. Why isn't it done?
Because they don't want to do it. Why don't they want to do it?
Well, children don't vote.
Parents vote, right? Can you imagine?
Can you imagine? Can you imagine what would happen in society tomorrow if the government announced that all children coming in would have scans on the brain to determine the effects of child abuse or neglect?
Can you imagine if the government mandated that you bring your children in?
For a scan to detect child abuse and neglect.
Can you imagine the fear, the terror, the rage, the outrage, the pushback?
I mean, parents, people would leave the country.
People would completely freak out.
They wouldn't do it. They wouldn't do it.
Any more than a guy who's been text cheating on you for six months wants you to go through his phone messages.
No thanks. First thing the robbers do is put silly string on the cameras.
Can you imagine? The unbelievable detonation of fear-terror outrage.
If the government said, yeah, you got to bring your kids in over the next three weeks, we got to scan them for signs of child abuse and neglect.
I mean, some people would be fine.
I mean, I'm putting them in. Do it.
It's a violation. Take this vaccine instead.
Isn't that wild? Isn't that wild?
Can you just imagine what would happen?
Now, of course, if you can imagine If you can imagine the reaction that society would have in the face of a mandate to bring children in to detect child abuse through scans.
Crazy. You might need to update your application if you can't hear me.
Wouldn't that be just wild?
Now, of course, the reaction is exactly why it doesn't happen.
If you propose that, it would be a willful and violent and egregious invasion of privacy and parental rights and it could have bad data and people would be unjustly accused and it would be wrong.
Just imagine the moral pushback and outrage and horror.
Oh, vaccine the kids, sure.
I mean, you want to stuff the kids full of psychotropics because they're bored in school?
Oh, that's no problem. Scan for child abuse?
Outrageous! Unthinkable!
Unacceptable! You'd have all of the foghorn, leghorn lawyers going all over the place, right?
We'd go nuts. People would go absolutely nuts.
Absolutely nuts. Just crazy.
Crazy stuff. And this is why I'm interested in a free society.
In a free society, if you are an abusive parent, you pay the price.
You've got to pay the cost to be the bad boss, right?
You would pay. And people respond to incentives.
Basically, it's like paying people $1.8 million to be good parents.
Now, that doesn't mean that Every one of them would become good parents.
But can you imagine the shift?
We will pay you $1.8 million tax-free.
We will pay you $1.8 million to be a good parent.
Can you imagine? Now, mother absence is brutal on children.
Right? I mean, kids put in daycare for long enough experience exactly the same Traumas and effects of children who experience maternal abandonment, babies in particular, right?
So when moms go off to work and dump their kids in daycare, where they have developmental delays, where they have social anxiety, they have social skills delays, they have a wide variety of mental health issues when put in daycare, and you can look at the Quebec studies for more on this.
But when moms go, they say, well, because I've got to make money.
Now, they go to work, the kids go to daycare, and society pays the cost.
Taxpayers pay the cost. Good parents pay the cost for bad parents, in general, as a whole.
Now, can you imagine the financial argument that would come if a woman said, well, I need to go to work to make money.
And then society came back and said, oh, we'll pay you $1.8 million to stay home.
It'd be a little tough to go and work your little job as a hairdresser or even a lawyer and justify that.
We'll pay you $1.8 million to stay home for six years.
You don't need to stay home the whole time because, you know, the kid's first five years is the key and you've got empathy then.
It's not going to go away. God help you if you're me, but you just for half a decade or, you know, half a decade plus two years per kid, 18 months of breastfeeding or whatever, right?
And the whole argument, well, first of all, in a free society, you have to pay for your own childcare, and secondly, if your children turn out dysfunctional, which they probably will if the mother is abandoning them, then the mother and the dad, they have to pay for that dysfunction, and they have to pay full freight for childcare.
And then there's no way that it's economically even remotely viable for the women to dump their kids and go to work.
Breastfeeding. Eight or more IQ points.
Eight to ten or more IQ points.
Breastfeeding adds eight to ten or more IQ points to the baby.
Higher IQ is associated with lower criminality, lower impulsivity, lower addiction, lower promiscuity, lower expenses to society.
So let's say that breastfeeding saves society half a million dollars on average.
You breastfed, your brain develops.
When your brain develops, you get far more out of working in the free market than you do from being a criminal.
The sweet spot for criminality, as you know, is about IQ 85, unfortunately.
So let's say society saves half a million dollars per child for breastfeeding.
Okay, so that's $250,000 a year.
You're paying women. To breastfeed.
Or, to put it another way, you're charging women $250,000 a year to go to work.
Now, unless they're making a million dollars a year, it's not a very good deal.
And that's why the economics, like, the economics are so weird in our current society.
Nobody pays the cost for anything except telling the truth.
Nobody pays the cost for anything in modern society except telling the truth.
Everything is subsidized and protected.
Every bad decision is subsidized and protected.
The only thing that is punished is integrity, honesty and virtue.
You punish the virtuous and you reward the malevolent and whatever you subsidize you get more of, whatever you punish or tax you get less of.
Can you imagine?
If the people who went to work had to pay for the social costs imposed by the dysfunctional children, largely as a result of them going to work, there would be no economic value in them going to work.
It would be far more economically advantageous.
They would make or save far more money, infinitely more money, almost, by staying home and raising their kids.
You wouldn't have to pay for childcare.
And you wouldn't have to pay for the massively increased insurance costs for dysfunctional behavior on the part of your children because they turn out to be under-functioning, dissociated, dangerous, violent, depressed, anxious, criminal, you name it, addicted.
Can you imagine? It's like all the sex addicts that we have to pay for the STDs and unwanted pregnancies and broken hearts and shattered homes and we have to pay for it all.
We have to pay for it all. The Julie, yes, breastfeeding is the best for you and a baby.
I did it for two and a half years.
Good for you. Oh yeah, the immune system too.
I mean, the immune system boosts from breastfeeding is huge.
It's huge. Think of the allergies and all that, right?
And here's another study that came out of the U.S. So they got a bunch of kids in Rhode Island, fairly wealthy neighborhood, mostly white kids, And they measured the IQs of the kids before the pandemic, and then they measured the IQs of the children, babies, obviously, after the pandemic.
And there's some overlap, of course.
Now, you can't exactly give...
An 18-month-old, an IQ test per se, but there's lots of ways of measuring motor skills and reaction times and cognitive abilities.
There's lots of ways you can do it where you can approximate an IQ out of that.
It's fairly accurate, as far as I know.
So, as you know, the average for whites is 100.
Average IQ for whites. And it changes, right?
If whites get dumber, as they generally tend to do over time, then the IQ will simply be recalibrated every year so that the average is 100.
Standard deviation up or below is 15 points, right?
So they measured, with the cognitive tests and the reaction tests, cognitive development tests, they measured the kids, and of course the average kids in this neighborhood, mostly white, average IQ of 100.
Do you know what the IQ was of the pandemic babies?
I first started reading this, like, oh my gosh, if they've lost 5 points or, God, 10 points, that would be unbelievably awful.
Unbelievably awful.
No.
The IQ of the pre-pandemic babies was 100.
The IQ of the pandemic babies was 78.
78.
That's like a standard deviation and a half.
Down. And the 70s used to be where, not the 1970s, the IQ 70s used to be where mental retardation was considered.
It's a 22 point drop in IQ for the pandemic babies.
You say, why? Well, nobody knows for sure.
We've got some theories.
You got parents home stressed.
You got parents home trying to do work.
At the same time, and you can't do both.
Come on. You can't even remote.
You can't do both. It's not even close.
Can you imagine? I mean, you can't do...
Can you imagine me doing an interview with...
A year-old toddler clawing at me.
I mean, you've seen these videos where the guys are trying to do their Zoom calls on the mainstream media and some nanny lets the kids break free and they come running into the room to be with their father.
And the father pushes them aside and then some jokes are made.
So the parents are trying to do work.
Gotta pay the bills.
Gotta pay the taxes.
to fund all the welfare and daycare for people who don't work.
So lack of stimulation, What do the parents do with a 10-month-old when they're both home working?
Well, can you get a nanny to come in in the middle of a pandemic?
Probably not. Can your grandmother come over or their grandmother?
Probably not. So, what do you do?
You've got to raise some babies.
You've got to work your computer.
You've got to work that phone. What do you do?
Well, as usual, it's the children who are sacrificed and the baby's needs who are not met because clients can make your life difficult.
Babies just sag in their cribs staring at the Lion King on total repeat like they're some psycho-developing nutcase in a Romanian abortion mill orphanage.
You know the Romanian story, right?
Ceausescu banned abortion.
You've got 100,000-plus babies who sat in these daycares.
They were taken care of physically.
Their needs were met. They were given medicine.
They were given food. They had videos to watch.
And a lot of them turned into complete psychos.
Like, they were adopted by a bunch of couples in France in particular.
I don't know what the connection was.
And these are the kids who go into blind rages, smash people, throw things, throw cats out of windows, and have to have rage rooms where you stuff the kid until he wears himself down while he's getting bigger and stronger and you're getting older and weaker.
And that's irreversible as far as I can tell.
A 22-point drop in IQ for pandemic babies.
Sticks made this point.
It's a good point. I mean, I think we've all thought of it.
It's like, what's happening to kids' emotional and psychological and social development when they're growing up in an environment where they can't see people's faces?
We got the COVID veil.
Eyes without a face, right?
Can't see faces. What happens?
What happens to a child's sense of value and self-worth when he keeps wanting to play with mommy and mommy keeps pushing him away in shame and horror and embarrassment because a child showed up in a Zoom call?
What happens when the entire world's educational environment becomes a blank, glassy, Zoom-faced video game of unlearning?
Where you can easily cheat on a test.
There's no point showing up.
You can just play games and play videos of you listening.
What happens to all of the complex negotiation and navigation of bullies and friends and potential boyfriends and girlfriends and clans and cliques when that all goes?
This is why Teen suicide, child suicide is on the rise.
Anxiety disorders are through the roof.
Mental health disorders are through the roof.
And the only thing not going up is IQ, which is sinking like a stone.
Crazy.
Absolutely crazy.
Is this potential evidence for environmental factors being more than a standard deviation?
I suppose we'll find out in about two decades.
So... We hope that the genes are going to kick in in time.
We hope that the genes will rescue from a bad environment.
You can break IQ, you just can't make it.
Like, you can drive it down. Nobody knows how to bring it up on a permanent way.
Like, the $100 billion they spent on the Head Start program largely to bring the black kids up to the standards of East Asians and whites, it, you know, some gains, but they didn't last.
They just faded away. And...
No. So what this means is that if the child is vastly understimulated, their cognitive development is going to suffer.
Now, whether that means that they're going to stay at an IQ 78 for the rest of their lives, I don't imagine that's going to be the case.
I mean, you could see the Dutch children who grew up in situations of extraordinary malnutrition, like...
Belly buttons touching their spines, ribs countable from space, unbelievable levels of malnutrition.
The same thing happened with North Korean kids or Vietnamese kids during the war, just staggering levels of malnutrition, like eating bugs and tree bark and ripping apart pillows to eat the feathers.
It's like true collectivization of the farmland under Stalin and Mao levels of unbelievable starvation.
Starvation like in Stalingrad, where people would die in the streets of malnutrition, And people would tear off their thigh muscles and ass muscles, their glutes and their quads and eat them.
That level of unbelievable starvation and the East Asian kids, the Korean kids, the Vietnamese kids, the Dutch kids grew up to have average IQs.
I mean, it's unbelievable. It's almost complete, because the body will burn up almost anything before it burns up the brain, because once you burn up the brain, you're dead.
You've got nothing. You'll burn heart muscle, you'll burn leg muscle, you'll burn arm muscle, you'll burn just about anything before you'll burn the brain, because once the brain's feeding on itself, you're done.
There's nothing left. It's the thing it protects.
It's our most expensive organ, right?
The third of our entire energy goes into the brain.
So, I don't know. We'll see.
We'll see. I can't imagine that...
Yeah, I can't imagine that this is going to...
I mean, 78 is unbelievably catastrophic.
Like, it's unbelievably...
I mean, you can't have a civilization with IQ. 78.
Like, you can't. You can't.
I mean, you're eating mud cookies on an island or something like that.
So... Yeah, it's wild.
That's where things are.
That's where things are.
That's the cost. That's the cost.
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All right. I'm not going to do a long show tonight.
I did a show with my daughter.
We went through an article on all the reasons to not have kids.
As a kid, I thought it would be very interesting to get her response, and she was most engaging.
You can get that at freedomain.locals.com.
Did a long call-in show yesterday.
Did another long call-in show today.
You ever cheated? You ever cheated on a girlfriend or a boyfriend?
Hit me with a Y in the chat if you've ever cheated on a girlfriend or a boyfriend.
Because this guy, he had it pretty rough, man.
Let me tell you, he had it pretty rough.
He was born... Premature.
Two and a half months premature and addicted to heroin because his mother was a prostitute and a drug addict.
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Nina with a no. LB with a no.
Marcelo and Artax with a no.
No. No, you were cheated on once.
I'm sorry to hear that. Aren't you just a bunch of Boy Scouts?
It's beautiful. Very nice.
Very nice people. No.
No. Good.
No, it was cheated. Oh, yeah, you already said that.
Oh, two people cheated on once.
Okay. Anyway, this guy cheated on his super hot girlfriend and couldn't figure out why.
So that was a long call. So I'm not going to do too long a call tonight.
I'm trying this new because I was standing and I actually went for a hike while doing this call.
I've got this new little computer which has a cell phone card built in so I can actually go, hold it away from my body, of course, but I can go and actually roam around and go for a hike and While doing a show because I'm kind of sick of the studio.
So that's why I'm kind of sitting because I did a lot of shows today while I was standing or walking.
So what else have we got here?
No. Can't cheat with no girlfriend.
All right. So...
That's good to know.
Good to know. You're all very...
Very honest. Very high integrity.
Good for you. Good for you. I appreciate that.
So, I did have, did have somebody, I'm sure we'll have a conversation about it at some point, but somebody came in with a fairly acidic, which is not to say wrong or bad, but a fairly acidic skepticism to a stateless society.
And I get that. I understand.
I have no problem with that. Skepticism is a good thing.
It's a positive thing.
And I wrote down a couple of objections, and I thought I would go through a few responses.
And a couple of things I wanted to mention, just as a...
A general principle, just a general kind of principle thing.
A failure of imagination is not an argument.
Saying I can't see how something could work doesn't mean it can't work.
And particularly when you're not well-versed in the subject matter, a failure to understand something, a failure to imagine how it could work, is not an argument that it can't work.
And I'll give you sort of a simple example, right?
So let's say 20 years ago, somebody said, oh yeah, no, um...
We're going to come up with phones that can just do this amazing stuff.
They can broadcast live video.
They can be video chats virtually for free all over the world.
They can look up anything you want.
They can guide you in your car and blah, blah, blah, right?
Or 30 years ago or 50 years ago or whatever, right?
And I would say, I would say, I don't know.
I don't know how that could work.
And therefore, it can't work and therefore, these things would be impossible.
Like, you understand? That's not a good argument.
It's not even an argument. It's like an argument, I'm ignorant of something, I don't know how something could work, even though I've never really studied it, and therefore, that thing can't work.
I mean, when you put it that starkly, I'm sure you understand, I'm sure you accept that that is a terrible argument.
A terrible argument.
Just because you don't know how something can work doesn't mean that it can't work.
Got it? Yeah, you got it.
You understand, right? So when people come along and say...
And they're really saying, I don't know how something could work, and therefore it can't work, right?
That's sort of the basic argument.
And they're also saying that they are not themselves...
Let me give a little light here.
A little too much. I'm going to get tanned from my screen here.
They're also saying, I'm not well-versed in the subject.
Right? So it's like, I don't know much about how, you know, the regular old vaccines that used to be called vaccines.
I don't know really how, I kind of get how they work.
I don't know how to make them. I don't know how to get a half-attenuated, semi-inert, smallpox vaccine at the right dose to provoke an immune response so when you encounter the live virus, you toast it, no problem.
I don't know how any of that works.
Like, I get it from a theory.
I don't know how it works. So if I say I'm not educated enough to know how something could work, Therefore, I won't believe that it can work?
I mean, that's, you know, with all due respect, that's pig ignorant.
You understand, that's totally pig ignorant, right?
I mean, that's a ridiculous thing to say.
Particularly if you haven't studied it.
Now, the people, of course, who've studied stateless societies and understand the historical examples, understand the moral arguments, understand the practical examples, understand the contemporaneous examples, understand the ethics and the process of the free market and how it could work.
People who've studied all of that stuff and know that stuff, when other people come along and say, well, I don't know how it could work.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
There's no way it could work. You understand, again, all due respect, you're just being an idiot.
And I know that sounds harsh.
You understand when I say, if I don't understand how something works, I don't understand how most things work in this world.
You understand? No clue. And neither do you.
Do you know exactly how an SSD works?
No. Do you know exactly how a digital clock works, or a cell phone, or a radio tower, or a receiver, or an amplifier?
No. I don't even know how to make a cabinet.
I mean, I kind of get the general idea, but I couldn't make a nice one.
99.9999% of the things in this world that work, we don't know how they work.
We don't! So, the idea that you don't know how something could work, and therefore it can't work.
Therefore it's impossible. The other thing too, like when you are approaching people who have a lot of knowledge in something, and look, having a lot of knowledge doesn't mean that you're right.
I understand, of course, right? But when you approach someone who has a lot of knowledge in something, and you haven't done the research, and you haven't read the basic arguments, and then you say, you demand that they answer the most common, blindingly obvious questions that you've heard a bazillion times before.
Well, without the government, who would build the roads?
Wow. Roads.
Holy shit, you're right.
Roads! Ah, I can't believe I've been studying this for 40 years and I've never, ever thought of how the roads could be built.
Roads were built before governments.
The best roads are built without governments.
Governments don't even build roads, they just subcontract.
And if the government builds too many roads, you end up dependent upon lunatics in the Middle East.
Especially if they bar domestic production.
So, yeah.
So, you just, you know, do a little bit of reading.
Don't ask other people to do the introduction to voluntarism or anarcho-capitalism or a voluntary society.
Just don't, like, don't do it, right?
And don't argue from incomprehension.
I mean, you can, but we've all seen it before, and it's really, really boring.
And it's very tough to want to engage with someone who doesn't give any respect for your knowledge.
So here's what I do. I mean, you've seen me interview a bunch of people, a lot of people.
I've interviewed hundreds of people on the show.
And if I am talking to, I don't know, someone who's an expert in immunology, I don't assume that they're right.
That would be an argument from an authority.
But what I do assume is that they have studied it a lot more than I have.
And therefore, the thing to do is to ask them questions and not tell them that what they're proposing is impossible because I don't know how it might work as somebody who's not trained in the field.
I mean, come on. That's...
That's silly. I mean, at least show the respect for the knowledge.
Again, it doesn't mean that I'm right or the immunologist is right, but if somebody's been studying something for 40 straight years, and I've been doing philosophy for 40 straight years, and most of that has been either tiny-state libertarianism or straight-up voluntarism, a stateless society, a society without a state.
It's the only moral society we could ever possibly have.
And so if...
Someone comes to me and says, oh, but without a state, there'll just be a power vacuum and another state will take in and take over, so they'll come in and take over, so there's no point at all, right?
So it's really insulting and annoying, right?
Because, of course, everybody's had to wrestle with that question, just like the roads, just like national defense, just like police and law courts and prisons and welfare and charity and you name it, and borders and immigration.
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it.
The good questions, I got no problem with the questions, right?
But here's the thing.
If you're going to someone who's very knowledgeable about something, very knowledgeable about something...
I mean, I've written two entire books on a voluntary society, Everyday Anarchy and Practical Anarchy.
I've read Lord knows how many books by people who have worked on these subjects.
I've talked to a whole bunch of voluntarists and anarchists and anarcho-capitalists and, you know, radical libertarians about how things work in the absence of the state...
I've put a huge amount of thought into it.
Again, it doesn't mean that I'm right.
It doesn't mean that I'm right.
But the better way to approach people is to say something like, it's kind of an obvious question.
Everyone thinks of it. I know you've got an answer.
It doesn't mean your answer's perfect, but you've got an answer.
How do you do with the Rhodes thing, right?
That's fair. And again, I could come up with some nonsense answer that you don't believe or accept.
Fine with that. You can disagree with it.
You can oppose it. Whatever, right? But at least show the basic...
Empathy and reading the room reality processing that, yeah, the very first or second or third question that I ever thought of with regards to a small state or no state society is, oh my god, what about the problem of the commons?
What about national parks?
What? What about pollution?
What about water?
Rivers, right? I mean, yeah, you understand, right?
You understand that if somebody's been studying a core topic for like 40 years, and you come in saying, well, it can't work because power vacuum.
It's an incredible insult.
It's a troll behavior.
Now, saying...
Okay, I mean, this is a pretty obvious question, but what about the power vacuum?
I mean, I know that there's a bunch of answers.
What's yours? I'm happy to answer that.
Because that's showing some respect for somebody who's been studying something for 20 years, or 40 years, or 40 years in my case, right?
I'm sorry, I'm just going to have, like, there's not a lot of comfort sometimes to getting old, although it sure beats the alternative.
Hair's gone. Bones a little creaky.
Muscles a little stiff. But by God, I've learned some stuff over the years.
And if you just come wandering into my truly laser-like and expert area of knowledge and just basically call me a complete idiot, and you understand that's what you're doing.
If you come in and you say, well, it's a power vacuum, and somebody else would just come in and take over a free society.
All right. You can't get national defense without the state.
Can't have police without the state.
How are you going to adjudicate disputes?
Right? So you're saying, I've studied this for 40 years.
I've debated it publicly countless times and privately for 40 years.
And I've never thought of these questions.
Those questions have never been asked of me.
I've never formulated a response and I have no way to answer that question.
In other words, I'm so literally brain-dead retarded that I believe in something after 40 years of intensive study without ever addressing the most obvious and basic questions against it.
You understand? If I was that person, if I had been studying something in depth, and for the last 16 years, kind of half my job, if I'd been studying something in depth as a very smart and well-educated person for 40 years, and you come in and try and smash over the basics, You're just doing a form of leveling up like a kind of I'm superior, you're an idiot.
And you're just telling me about your bad dad.
You're not telling me about knowledge or facts.
And I'm saying this to you. I don't hate the fact that people do this.
It's kind of understandable.
It's kind of natural when people are...
Here's the thing. If you want to be a smart person, don't rely on other people being dumb.
Have you ever had this thing like, well, what if I was just the smartest person in the whole school?
And what if it wasn't because I was super smart, but just everybody else wasn't?
Don't think that you're a smart guy because you think everyone else is an idiot.
Because then what will happen is you'll base your ego.
You'll base your ego on being a pretend smart guy.
And so you'll need to surround yourself with idiots.
And because you surround yourself with idiots, you'll never actually get smart.
It's a vanity question.
It's a vanity thing, right? You understand what I'm saying?
If you want to be the smartest guy because you think everyone else is dumb, you have to have only dumb people around you because smart people will put paid to that delusion pretty quick.
Don't ever found any part of your identity on the subjugation or low opinion or humiliation of others.
Never, ever do that.
It will trap you in an underworld of needing to have dumb people around you all the time.
Because smart people...
You know, if I go into...
Let's say some friend of mine is an expert.
I do have a friend who's an expert engineer, right?
And... Comes up with great ideas for things, right?
Now, I don't know much.
I know software engineering. I don't know much about physical engineering at all.
Virtually nothing. So if this person is telling me some great idea that they have, and that they've been studying this idea for 10 years or whatever, and I say, well, I can't imagine how that could work.
It's ridiculous. I don't want to hear about it.
You're wrong. I mean, how enthusiastic is that person going to be to share their ideas with me?
The answer is, well, they're not going to be enthusiastic because I'm full Dunning-Kruger.
I don't know what I don't know, and so I think and can pretend that I know everything, right?
It's just a bit of a Socrates thing, like the more you know...
The more you realize you don't know.
When you learn something deeply in one field, you recognize just how much work you'd have to put in to learn something deeply in another field.
I've spent 40 years in philosophy.
I haven't spent those 40 years in physics or engineering or medicine or anything like that, right?
So now that I know 40 years takes a long time to become good.
It took me a quarter century to become original in philosophy.
It took 25 years of studying to start to come up with original things in philosophy.
It's a quarter century before I wasn't doing scales and learning other people.
It took 25 years of being a cover band to start writing my own material.
And it really gives you, when you become really good at something, because of detailed and repeated study, it gives you great humility with regards to other people's expertise.
Because you understand the opportunity costs.
I've been studying this, not that.
Therefore, I know much more about this than that.
Therefore, other people who've been studying that, not this, know more about that and can tell me about it.
And again, it doesn't mean defer to experts, but it means at least understand.
If you want to have smart people around you, you have to respect the fact that they've studied and learned stuff.
I mean, it's kind of a basic and obvious thing to say, right?
This is why this guy, I can't remember his name, was getting pretty negative responses on the message board here.
And people just didn't want to engage with him because he was coming in basically saying, well, you're all idiots.
These obvious questions completely blow away your philosophy.
Now, of course, he would deny this.
No, I was just curious.
It's like, no, you weren't curious.
He was saying it doesn't work.
The things that other people have been studying for 10, 20, 30, 40 years just don't work for the most obvious reasons.
You're just basically saying that everyone around you is an idiot and you can see things really clearly and you can see things in a moment that other people have not seen when studying something for 40 years.
Come on. Come on.
Come on. You're wrong, Steph.
Plenty wanted to engage with the person.
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, you're right.
That's a good correction. Wise people did not want to engage with him.
But people who wanted to prove that, because, you know, he comes in basically saying, you're all idiots, and people who are insecure are like, I'm not an idiot, here's the answer, right?
And then he just moves the goalpost.
Right? Yeah, no, that is a very wise thing, because it's a very good detail.
I mean, if nobody wanted to engage, then the dysfunctional behavior wouldn't work, right?
You understand that? So, that was a very wise correction, Eva, and I do appreciate it.
I'm very helpful. Thank you. Wow, that video really makes it look like I'm about to do an OnlyFans video, doesn't it?
All right. Let's not do that.
It will make rumbling sounds.
Rumbling sounds.
Alright. So, yeah.
With regards to the power vacuum...
Okay, so the power vacuum...
Well, because there's a state, you take away the state and some other, like just a new state will reform, a new state will coalesce.
Okay, but you can think of tons of examples where that didn't happen, right?
When the Roman Empire ends, it's not like some new Roman Empire immediately forms.
I mean, there was the Dark Ages, right?
When slavery ends, it wasn't like, oh, new slavery, exactly the same as the old one has suddenly formed.
I get it. It went from slavery to taxation and so on.
It's still an improvement. I'd rather be a slave who gets to choose his own job, thank you very much.
And nobody is now saying, let's return to slavery, right?
So when there is moral advancements, those moral advancements tend to stick.
There's nobody in France who's saying, let's go back to the monarchy, right?
There are moral advancements that...
And the power vacuum, of course, is a psychological argument saying that people need to be dominated, people need to be bossed around, people need to be told what to do.
And that's sort of the void pill argument, right?
Which is that you can't ever instruct people because they're too busy and eager to...
To be ruled and dominated and injected or whatever it is.
So it's human nature, right?
It's not human nature. I had this argument with the German guy the other day.
Looking at the current world and saying this has anything to do with human nature is like looking at a bunch of animals in a zoo and thinking you've understood about animals and their natural habitat.
You haven't. It's just animals in a zoo.
You know, kids are abandoned.
They're brutalized. They're terrorized by bullies.
They're indoctrinated with dangerous, toxic nonsense in government schools.
They're lied to by the media. They're indoctrinated into self-destructive behaviors.
And then you say, well, but people have a need for this, that, or the other.
It's like, you know what? It's like the guy I was talking to today who was born addicted to heroin because his mother was a heroin addict.
And you look at that baby born addicted to heroin and you say, well...
That's human nature. It's human nature to be desperate for heroin when you come out of the womb.
That's an inflicted situation based upon dysfunction, tragedy, and abuse.
People don't want to be told what to do, but they've been so conditioned and bullied into it that it's like you feed kids a drug for long enough and they become addicted to it.
It's not human nature. It's an addiction.
And again, you don't get to a free society without improving parenting.
Once you improve parenting and you stop using violence to raise children and neglect to raise children, then they will grow up and you teach them how to think, how to reason.
Do you see me running around begging people to tell me what to think and what to do?
No. I bet you the same is true of most of the listeners.
The power of vacuum argument is based upon the idea that Human nature as it is now constituted, or human beings as they are now constituted, when they are prodded, poked, controlled, drugged, bullied, terrified, and beaten into a terrified and terrifying compliance, that this is somehow how human beings are going to be for the rest of time?
No. No.
It's like saying, well, black people are unmotivated because they're slaves, so when they're not slaves, they'll be unmotivated.
It's like, no, they're unmotivated because they're slaves!
No. You free them and they'll get quite motivated a lot, right?
All right.
Given that Steph live-read many of my comments on the stream, I now consider myself to have reached acknowledgement, and his absence of replies to my text post in this chat just means I haven't said anything sufficiently overwhelmingly stupid to mark a chat one-line response.
That's very funny.
That's very funny.
What is it? There's the singer for Men at Work, Colin Hay?
Colin James Hay?
I used to look up on apps way back in the day.
Colin James. And Colin James Hay, wayfaring son, would come up.
Colin James Hay, the Australian singer.
Anyway, I just remember him years ago.
He's a pretty funny guy.
And he was like, yeah, you're in L.A. and you tell a joke and people don't laugh.
They just say, hey, you're a funny guy.
That's funny. You're a funny guy.
It's really funny. It's like, can you laugh?
No. But I'm going to tell you, acknowledge you in a very serious way.
You're a funny guy. Anyway, I was struck there.
It was kind of funny. All right.
Any last...
Botox stops them from laughing.
Yeah, that's probably right, right?
I could laugh, but then I will shatter.
And the Crypt Keeper underneath the egg.
You know, you can see this with actresses, right?
Like, the actresses when they just can't move their faces.
You know, like, so Jennifer Lawrence, right, in The Hunger Games?
It's like a porcelain doll.
She's got two... Like, she's either screaming at the top of her lungs, sobbing like a banshee, or is completely China doll stone-faced.
You know, that's all she's got.
She's got three notes, right?
Scream, sob, stone-face.
That's all she's got. She's got soul Botox, like Kim Kardashian style, before she even hit 20.
It's kind of funny, right?
Funny, funny, funny. All right.
Let's see here. What else have I got?
You guys are fun. But I should stop being a workaholic.
Is it a workaholic when you enjoy it?
Yeah, kind of can be, right?
Kind of can be. All right.
Last time for questions.
Last ditch for comments. Make me laugh.
Say you're a funny guy. But yeah, the stone-faced actresses.
What's it, Holly Hunter, when she's in that movie 13?
Her entire movie was like, I'm shocked and horrified at how evil you are.
That's the whole movie. Although she's a pretty good question, right?
Sorry for the stupid questions, but where's the other chat?
I don't know. I ain't got nothing, Steph.
I'm just scrubbing my feet.
I'm sure that's an OnlyFans option as well.
You're awesome, Steph! Thank you very much.
You like this format too? Yeah, you know, I mean, I thought it would be fun to try the Telegram video chat.
I probably should mention to them that it might be kind of nice if you could actually choose which camera you're going to use because I had this whole camera set up over here and you're basically getting my groin shot here, you know?
Look, I'm getting around.
All right. All right.
Will I be doing crypto roundtable anytime soon?
I mean, I could. I mean, but crypto is doing exactly what I said it was going to do, that they were going to stabilize the price, then start doorstepping it up or stepping it up and then stabilizing it for a bit and stepping it up so they can get into the high value, low risk accounts as an investment.
So if it's doing exactly what I thought it was going to do and said it was going to do, I'm not sure there's any particular need, but maybe, maybe.
If you want to, if you want to, you can just let me know.
Are you recording video too?
I like seeing you talk while listening.
I am recording. I got a little video camera over here as well.
I much prefer the Telegram live streaming.
It's real nice. Not as...
Oh, I thought you said chunky.
Not as clunky. Oh, there's me doing that dance.
There's me doing that. That is my, that is in fact, if people think that's photoshopped, that is my torso.
I'd hit that. Hey, when I was a teenager, I think I might have.
All right. So, yeah, just give me a why if you, do you think there's a dollar cap for Bitcoin?
No. There's no dollar cap.
I don't do caps.
I don't do limits. I don't do limits on myself.
I don't do limits on my daughter.
I don't do limits on Bitcoin. I don't do limits at all.
Limits are a form of vanity because it's saying you know what the top of something can be ahead of time.
I don't know what the top of my talents are.
I'm still exploring them. I don't know what the top of Bitcoin is.
I don't know what my daughter's abilities are.
I refuse to future judge based upon, you know, to judge the present with reference to the past.
It's to limit yourself to the empiricism of history.
That's no good. So, sorry, I don't mean to give you a big lecture, but no, I don't need to talk about it.
You like Telegram 2?
Can turn my phone screen off and audio keeps going.
You are not enjoying the giant thumb of the big chatty forehead?
My God. My God.
Lucy! My God.
What else? Oh yeah, hit me with a Y if you like this setup.
And this is pretty good too because...
I can do audio.
I actually did have microphones here, but I ended up doing the speeches.
So I can do audio here easier than a lot of other places, and it seems to work pretty well.
So yeah, next time we can do it.
Maybe I'll try this for Wednesday night, if you like it.
I gotta drive, even though I'd rather see your beautiful face.
That is a wise statement.
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
So you like this format?
Yeah? Yeah, because we could then tap into voice chats and all of that as well.
Which would be nice too. All right.
I suspect it may be close to ramble time.
So I will stop here. But thank you very much for dropping back tonight.
I really, really appreciate it.
Don't forget. FreeDomainNFT.com.
Pick up my Rationalist Manifesto.
What is it? Quarter Ethereum?
If you're a crypto guy, it's very little.
It's going to be a great collectible.
I guarantee it's going to be.
I mean, imagine having 100 copies of Socrates' work.
It would be amazing, right? So, not that I'm comparing myself to Socrates, because he didn't have this video ability.
And he had a nagging wife.
And apparently he's quite ugly. So, yeah, we can do this stuff.
Freedomain NFT. Check out the NFT. It's really, really wonderful.
It's like two and a half hours of me going through the brain of 23-year-old Steph versus Marx.
It's really, really wild.
So, freedomain.com forward slash almost.
Get my free novel. Pick up my free novel.
Please, for the love of God, get this free novel.
It's amazing. It's fantastic.
It's beautiful. And, you know, I don't care if you get to see my artistic side.
Just get to meet the people in this book.
You will cry when you don't get to spend time with them anymore.
They're just amazing. Did you ever have that when you were a kid or younger?
You'd read a book and you'd come to the end of it and you'd miss the people like you had friends who got drafted or something.
Got drafted into non-existence.
I even missed Raskolnikov.
So, yeah, I'm glad you guys like it.
And freedomain.com forward slash donate if you'd like to help out the show.
I would appreciate that as well.
Have yourselves a truly delightful and wonderful evening.
I love, thank you for, and appreciate all of your incredible kindness and generosity and support in making this show still a viable option after this.
So much excitement over the last couple of years.
But we're still there. We're still talking to the future.
And we're still reasoning with the present.
Thanks so much, everyone. Have a great evening.
Lots of love from up here.
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