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Aug. 28, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:55
The Immorality of Modernity: Stefan Molyneux Interviewed by Paul Duddridge
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Welcome to the politics, people.
When people say, my next guest needs no introduction, they usually then follow up with a big introduction.
My guest needs no introduction.
Stefan Molyneux, I'm just getting him on brazenly to find out what on earth is going on.
Good morning, Stefan.
Thanks for coming on again. My pleasure, Paul.
It's nice to see this new n-dimensional chessboard matrix setup you've got going on.
There must be a huge amount of screaming and spittle for you to need that much sound dampening, but I look forward to enduring that as a windstorm during the conversation.
Yeah, exactly. I may be just in my daughter's bedroom, but we have adhered some polystyrene corrugated tiles to the wall to make it look as if I've got a vaguely professional operation going on.
Thanks for drawing attention to that.
I was self-conscious, but now I'll just let it go.
I'm ensconced in one of Brad Pitt's dreamy blue eyes, blue eyeballs.
That's what I am, staring at.
No, I know exactly.
You're in this ethereal thing.
I mean, you are... If this was the Truman Show, you would be Christo, wouldn't you?
Christophe. Cue the sun.
Yeah, exactly. All right, listen, I don't want to take any more of your time than I have to.
You came on generously last May, and it was amazing.
And this podcast sort of didn't exist until you came on, frankly.
That sort of spiked everything and brought in a lot of...
So I'm just trying to recapture the magic.
We've not spoken since last May, and that was the beginning of really, I think, the pandemic really biting, I think, February, March, April last year, and it's like, obviously, the war was going to be over by Christmas, and it was pre-Trump, etc, etc.
And now, everything's mental.
There's only one person I can go to and go, what on earth is going on and what's going to happen?
You, Stefan, I'm going to sit back and just listen.
You tell me and the world.
Encapsulate the whole pandemic, what's going on and what's going to happen.
All right. Yeah.
All right, that's going to need another swig of coffee then, and we'll be good to go.
From your ethereal headquarters, somewhere above the cloud line.
Look at you. But yes, anyway, let's actually give you a proper question.
This pandemic thing.
We'll work backwards. Pandemic.
Is everybody right to be paranoid about this being used as an excuse to introduce a global fascist state?
Whenever I look at somebody making decisions for other people, which we all have to do, you know, you're a parent, you make decisions for your kids, we make decisions that affect other people if we're bosses or even employees, right?
So whenever I look at people who are making decisions for other people, Paul, the first thing that I do is ask myself, okay, what happens if they're wrong?
Right? You know, if you're a student, I had a friend of mine in university who wrote down the wrong date for an exam, showed up a day later, and they flunked his ass.
Because he had made a decision, he'd made a mistake, and who suffered the negative consequences?
Why, he himself suffered the negative consequences.
You must have had this when you were a kid.
You know, when I climbed the wrong...
Wall, to get a ball back in boarding school when I was six years old, they caned me.
You know, you would make decisions and you yourself would suffer the negative consequences.
On the other hand, if you made good decisions, like you decided to study for the test rather than go out drinking, you reaped, in general, the rewards of that.
So whenever people are making decisions on behalf of others, my question always is, What happens if they're wrong?
Now, if the answer is one of two things, either A, nothing happens if they're wrong, nothing bad happens if they don't lose their jobs, they don't lose their house, they don't lose their wife, they don't lose their savings, they don't lose their reputation.
If nothing bad happens, I don't care what they say, because they have no skin in the game, no stake in the game.
The Royal College in the UK came up with these unbelievably disastrous predictions.
Regarding the spread and death rate of coronavirus, this was back in last spring, last early spring, and they were completely off.
What were they off? By a factor of 100 or 50 or something like that?
Okay, so an entire economy comprising tens of millions of people got shut down.
People lost their businesses, their livelihoods, their savings, their dreams.
And what happened to the people who made such a disastrous mistake?
Nothing. It's true. I mean, this is, this I think, you know, you touch on the actual, this is the subtext of practically every one of these kind of political, you know, there's the whole division in politics at the moment, people like you are ostracized, there are many other commentators like yourself who are kept out of the so-called mainstream.
The recurring point for me is that you and people like you are challenging the notion that we are being led by, I'm not putting words in your mouth, but we are being led by people who deal in just ideas for whom there are no consequences.
If you're an architect and your building falls down, you may go to prison.
If you're an engineer, etc., you know, there are real-life consequences to most people in most businesses.
And we uniquely, you know, for the first time probably in human history, have been led for the last sort of 50 years by a political class that has only traded in ideas for whom there are no negative ramifications should their ideas be found to be unsuccessful.
Well, I wish it were true that there were only no negative ramifications, right?
So I had two categories there of people who are making decisions for others.
The first, of course, is they suffer no negative repercussions.
For their failures. So, for instance, China was let into the World Trade Organization, and the very first thing that they had to sign the most solemn document to gain entry to the world economy was if there's a pandemic, you have to let everyone know immediately because we're all interconnected in this global web of commerce.
And you have to tell people the moment that you even suspect any kind of pandemic might occur.
Now, this was probably underlined in red semi-communist ink for China, because China is the source of a vast number of pandemics throughout human history, not least, of course, being the Black Death.
So China, the report just came out from the US government.
I read through it in great detail.
There's significant evidence that it was the summer of 2019 that China first began to suspect that there had been a leak.
There was a $600 million retrofit of the HVAC and waste disposal system at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.
There were satellite photos that showed cars gathering in unusual numbers at hospitals.
There was a wide variety of indications that there was some pretty bad stuff going on.
They took down their entire database of virology specimens in the middle of the night, their time, like at 3 o'clock in the morning, and they appointed a bioweapons expert to be in charge of the whole situation.
Now, of course, at this point, they should have immediately informed the world as a whole that they had something on their hands, but they didn't.
And who's talking about this?
You know, we're literally more angry at the unvaccinated than the people who facilitated the pandemic, to put it mildly.
And the evidence does seem to point in this U.S. government report, the evidence does seem to point to the obvious facts that I talked about last March that, yeah, I mean, it most likely came from Wuhan.
It most likely was mishandled.
You know, We're good to go.
Is anyone putting in trade embargoes?
Is anyone kicking out their diplomats?
Is anyone refusing to honor debts owed to China as recompense for the cost of the pandemic?
Of course not. It doesn't matter.
As one conservative commentator put it, well, they're just too big to bully.
Okay, so then you're just saying that morality is who you can bully people with.
So people like you and I, we can be bullied because we don't have a large standing army and a huge consumer market that people want to gain access to.
So we can be bullied. It's nothing about morality.
It's just an exercise of power.
So the first is people who suffer no negative repercussions.
That's column A. Column B, which is a lot worse, which is why I think we are, is people who gain exactly what they want through being wrong.
Ah, now that's a very interesting matter.
So there was a time in the past when leftists, people, socialists and so on on the left, were very, very suspicious of big corporations with a massive profit motive.
They used to say, well, you know, Coke is just interested in selling your Coke.
They don't care about your health.
And cigarette companies are corrupt.
And whenever there was a big profit motive, the antenna, the spider sense of the leftists used to go right through the roof.
But now, in a very strange turn of events, a little hard to predict, but I guess in hindsight makes a bit more sense for reasons we'll talk about in a bit.
Now they're just like, oh yeah, well, the social media companies are making a fortune with you staying home and obsessively thumb-scrolling through the doom list of variants and shutdowns and lockdowns and so on, right?
So you're home and you're going through Twitter, you're going through other social media companies and so on, and they're making out like bandits, right?
So do they have an incentive To allow counter narratives to, we're all going to die, we need to lock down and inject everyone from here to eternity.
Well, no, because their business model is making literally hundreds of billions of dollars from the pandemic.
So there's a positive incentive for them to keep that narrative running.
Of course, the pharmaceutical companies, blah, blah, blah, it doesn't really matter, it'll be so obvious about that.
But governments, what is it in Scotland now, the government is asking to hold on to the pandemic measures in perpetuity?
And when governments get to order people around, when governments get to lock people down, when governments and particularly leftist governments get to destroy conservative bastions like small businesses, right?
Big businesses often go pretty left because they can control politicians and politicians enjoy that relationship.
But small businesses... Well, you have to deal with reality.
You don't like high taxation.
You have to deal with payroll and so on.
You're kind of reality and economic focused and you can't get together and manipulate the state in the way you want.
So they tend to be pretty conservative.
And so if you can punish your political enemies, if you can reward your political friends, If the mainstream media, which in America at least gets the vast majority of its income from – well, a significant proportion, I should say, of its income from pharmaceutical advertising, well, they don't want to annoy the pharmaceutical companies by pushing against the narrative.
They get people – it's like war.
I mean, who benefits from war?
Not only to the people who said around Iraq in 2003, oh, there are weapons of mass destruction.
We know them for sure. It's okay.
Well – What did they get?
Well, they got a military industrial complex, got trillions of dollars in income, and I assume hundreds of billions of dollars in profits.
The media had everyone glued and upped their revenue.
The government got to expand its powers out of a fear of external enemies.
And, you know, we don't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud, as Condoleezza Rice famously said about Saddam Hussein's supposed ability to deliver weapons of mass destruction to American cities, which he never possessed, of course, in a million years.
And so not only are there groups of people who suffer no negative consequences for being wrong and exaggerating the danger, but people gain hundreds of billions of dollars.
They gain unprecedented powers.
The powers that the government is taking can only really be matched by...
The powers that the governments take during a war.
But a war, if you look at the Second World War, the First World War, I mean, America was like jailing dissidents and throwing draft dodges in prison left, right and center and shutting down newspapers and all of that.
But at least when the war comes to an end, there's a push, of course, to return to normal.
When is this going to end?
What's the endgame? I mean, the endgame is about as likely as there being an endgame for Afghanistan, for which it seems to be to deliver as much weaponry as possible to the Taliban.
That seems to be the entire purpose of the endgame.
And of course, I assume that all just came from orders from China and all of that.
So when people benefit from fear-mongering, in the two things that people care about the most, when you don't have morality, when you don't have a conscience, the two things you care about are money and power.
And they get both, right?
The media gets the money and the government gets the power.
And now the US is saying, oh, well, no, vaccine booster shots.
Eight months after the start of vaccination, now we need boosters, right?
I mean, this is so predictable. I talked about this.
Where's the end? Where's the end?
Yeah. Hard to know.
I know. I feel it's a rhetorical question.
But yeah, I stay...
I stay very optimistic, weirdly, because I think that one of the great upshots of the way that governments are handling themselves, even the Scottish Government, is...
Look, you've been a proper professional outlier in politics and broadcasting for a long time.
Little idiots like me might just be the one on the edge of a group that he's just like, he's got some weird ideas, he votes Trump, etc.
I'm in Los Angeles and I'm getting lots and lots of people.
Basically now people are ashamed of having voted Biden, for instance.
I'm on the ground seeing a culture shift where people are not embarrassed about saying that they perhaps voted the wrong way.
Now they can actually see how the sausages are being made.
Perhaps this is leading to some kind of chance of people finally taking back freedom in the future.
Any thoughts on my naivety?
I mean, there's no future but what we work to create.
I mean, there's no train track that we're all on.
Particularly now with social media, you can reach people direct without gatekeepers.
This is unprecedented in human history.
There were always... The academic toadies who would gain privileges from the state in return for keeping genuine questions out of the public sphere, right?
They're generally professors and other sorts of people.
Whereas now, we can talk directly to the people.
Now, of course, it's been challenging.
As you know, I was kicked off YouTube.
I've been kicked off Twitter. Twitter, of course, still allowing the Taliban to have their Twitter accounts.
Taliban. Taliban can have their Twitter accounts.
President Trump banned Taliban.
Not a tidy-widey philosopher with impeccable credentials.
I'm sorry? I'm saying, yeah, philosopher, Trump banned, Taliban permitted.
Yeah. I mean, that just tells you where the society is and where the social media companies are.
But if I remember rightly, I think Saudi Arabia has a significant investment in Twitter.
So maybe there's some politics afoot there.
Yeah, that's... I mean, anybody who allows that situation to occur is...
I don't even know what to say.
Corruption is too kind of a word to put into that kind of stuff.
As far as where things go, you know, we simply keep speaking the truth.
The one thing that has happened, of course, is that it's not a correct analogy biologically, but it's a correct analogy philosophically.
You know, that old analogy that if you slowly boil the water the frogs are in, they'll die.
But if you turn it up fast enough, they'll jump out.
So people are seeing an extreme fast forward of the growth and power of the state.
And people are seeing that the most solemn documents signed by the government, including the Nuremberg Code, Nuremberg Code says very clearly it came out of the Nazis, so medical experiments, and I think also to some degree it came out of the Japanese medical experiments or weapons experiments that they conducted, and I think also to some degree it came out of the Japanese medical So the most solemn documents that come out of the horrors and 40 million killed in World War II and the Holocaust
and so on, the most solemn documents were you can never, ever, ever force someone to participate in a medical experiment.
This is the gravest sin outside of genocide and war.
The gravest sin is to force people to participate in a medical experiment.
You cannot bribe them and you cannot threaten them in order to gain their participation in a medical experiment.
I'm rooting for the vaccines.
I hope, I hope, I hope.
Safe and effective would be fantastic.
I'm checking the news.
I'm thrilled whenever new safety data comes out.
There's a lot of stuff that's coming out about fertility seems to be okay relative to the drugs and so on.
So I'm fully rooting for them, but let's not forget.
This is an experimental authorization.
There is no approval of these vaccines.
So I really, really want them to go well.
I really, really want them to work, in particular, of course, because so many people have taken them already.
So I'm keeping my eyes peeled, but the idea that you lose rights of employment, that you lose rights of travel, if you don't participate in a medical experiment, is so far against the Nuremberg Code that it's staggering.
And yet, nobody cares.
We're bringing in the Chinese social credit, aren't we?
That's what's happening. Well, it's already happened to me, but it's happening to others now.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that's what I was alluding to.
It's like people like you were the barometers, if you like, were the canary in the coal mine, the way you've been treated.
And excluded from so-called polite society is now happening to more and more and more people.
And now to people that never really had a political bone in their body, but now are having to register for, you know, just to be able to allow to go into a cafe or something.
You know, it's like the way the state is so...
Brazenly and casually implementing...
I'm so glad you picked up on the Scottish statement, because Scotland, trying to present itself as this progressive, nationalist, forward-facing small nation, has announced the most draconian interpretation of any of these laws, that they are in perpetuity, as you say.
They won't be the last country to make that announcement, but that's now what's going to happen globally.
And I think, as I said, I just come from the school of thought that maybe finally this is now unarguable, that it's going to be the supporters of this state control are going to be marginalised over the next couple of years.
Not in the realms of power, because we don't really have any power, but certainly in the realms of public opinion.
Yeah, I mean, the etymology of this is really fascinating.
Like, how is it that people are just rolled over?
I mean, I know in France and Italy and places, they're burning these vaccine passports and so on.
But it really is quite remarkable, this level of, sure, you know.
And look, I understood it at the beginning.
You know, there was an unknown virus that seemed to be coming out of a...
Half Weapons Lab in Wuhan, which was handling deadly viruses with a level of security equivalent to your average American dentist.
So yeah, I could understand. We didn't know what it was.
We didn't know what the effects would be.
I mean, the data's in now that if you're not obese, if you're not very elderly, and if you don't have any comorbidities, the odds of you dying is, I mean, very, very low.
Not infinitesimal. That's more around kids, but it's very low.
It's very low. So the question is, and I find this really fascinating, and I'll ask you a couple of questions about this because it's a personal history thing.
We don't seem to, we seem to have lost completely the capacity to assess risk.
There was a study that was done recently where people were asked, what are the odds of dying of COVID? And people said 13 to 14 percent.
I mean, that's off by a factor of 100 or so.
It's like massive, right?
So how have we completely lost the ability to assess risk?
Now, I was sort of thinking about this, and I was thinking about when most people don't have an ability as an adult, it's because they didn't learn it as a child.
I can't speak Mandarin because I didn't grow up in China.
I speak English because I grew up in an English-speaking household.
I spoke German because my mother's German, but I lost it many years ago.
So my question is, and I want to ask you about this, when you were a kid, what kind of risks did you take?
How did you explore the question of danger and injury?
Well, yeah, well, I was brought up in Wales, which is in itself a massive risk, first of all.
There's only 3 million Welsh people, but I think there's 10 million born, but there's only 3 million of us that make it.
And one of the few places children are actually born with black lung.
That's not common. But no, you were out exploring, you were out riding your bike, you were out swinging on ropes, you were out doing crazy stunts.
I mean, you learn as a kid, and particularly I think as a male, you learn how to manage risk, right?
That's that sort of foundation.
Yeah, I was just, obviously I'm just being flippant.
But yes, exactly. And, you know, that's the, there was a societal change.
There was lots of crimes against children that were brought to the fore in the 60s and 70s.
Again, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
Like I said, I think that people, I think huge corporations and people with power take advantage of prevailing trends.
And there's a there certainly was much more awareness of the dangers for children playing out when you have things like the Moore's.
I mean, I was born in the year.
I think that the Moore's murderers were caught, for instance.
And so that certainly had the beginning of a shift of people, you know, not letting their children out to play so much.
You know, it's not as common now.
Well, no, when you say people, you mean moms.
Because you've probably seen this meme, which is, you know, it's a dad throwing his child up in the air, right?
And the child goes up maybe two or three feet, right?
And that's what's actually happening.
What the child feels is five or six feet.
What the mom sees is 10 or 12 feet.
Right, so women, for very good reasons, right, women of course evolved to take care of infants sort of zero to seven years of age, right, when they are kind of death magnets, and you do have to childproof, and they will eat anything that they come across, and you need to watch them like a hawk.
And if they get sick, of course, historically, you know, 50% mortality rate for kids up to the age of five, so you I constantly had to worry about disease and predators and them eating the wrong things and tumbling down rocks.
And so there's a joke when I was a kid.
Mom's saying, if you break your legs on those rocks, don't come running to me.
And so women have a heightened stimulus response to risk, which is perfectly fair, perfectly right.
I love them for it. It's why you and I are alive.
And so women have a heightened response to risk.
Now, the problem is, of course, in society, You take dads out of the equation, and that has been the focus.
Whether it's conspiratorial or not doesn't really matter.
What the intent was doesn't really matter.
What the facts have been with the introduction of horrible divorce laws, with the introduction of alimony and child support.
And child support, I understand. Alimony is kind of weird.
Like, marriage is a job.
If you get fired or you quit, you don't keep getting paid.
It doesn't make any sense, right?
And then, of course, you have in particular the introduction of the welfare state.
You have feminism turning women against men and thinking they can do it all alone.
You have, of course, the displacement of early childhood educators being men because apparently all men who want to work with children are pedophiles in the eye of the public as a whole, which is about as prejudicial a statement as you could possibly make about any group in society.
Imagine saying that about blacks or Hispanics or East Asians.
It would be completely intolerable.
And so we've taken...
Men out of the equation of raising children.
And what's happened, of course, is that women who feel nervous about their children's safety, which again, when they're very young makes perfect sense.
When they get older, it becomes claustrophobic.
It becomes paralyzing.
And so what's happened is children are no longer out there exploring the limits of risk and figuring out what they can do and what they can't do and taking the inevitable punishments of going too far.
And then they're staying home and they're artificial risk, right?
Like video games, like artificial risk.
Oh no, I might lose a video game.
Well, that's a little bit different than I might fall out of the tree that I'm climbing, right?
So because we've grown up without men, we have been bubble-wrapped children.
We don't have any capacity to assess risk.
And now what's happened, of course, weaponizing the air is the foundational goal of any claustrophobic dictatorship.
If they can make you frightened of the air, well, that's everywhere.
If they say, hey, man, you've got to watch out for leopards, it's like, well, I'm in Edinburgh in January 1st.
Unless there's been a very rare zoo escape, I'm pretty much okay for the leopard thing.
If they say, you know, beware of falling trees, well, you know, just don't be in the woods or whatever, you're okay.
But if they say, the air will kill you, well, you can't get anywhere without breathing, right?
So even in the 300 feet under the ocean, there could be coronavirus in your...
Scuba gear. So they went from the air going to kill you from CO2, right?
The plant food will kill you.
And then, of course, that began to become less believable as there was like 18-year pause in global warming.
So now they've moved to the air will kill you through coronavirus.
And we don't have a capacity to look at the data.
Math illiteracy is through the roof.
They constantly had to dumb down the standards for a variety of reasons in school.
So people don't know.
What the story...
It's like that old story of A&W tried to compete with McDonald's back in the 70s because McDonald's had a quarter pound burger and A&W said, well, we're going to give you a third pound burger and it's going to be cheaper.
But it didn't work because people thought that because the number four is greater than the number three, a quarter pound burger was bigger than a third pound burger.
And this is why it's sort of pointless to argue on the internet.
This is how dumb... I think that old George Carlin line, like imagine how dumb the average person is.
Well, half of them are even dumber than that.
And so we have this bubble-wrapped, no capacity to assess risk.
No mail out there to tell you how to handle risk and lead you along with that.
And you know, you're a dad.
I'm a dad. You know how it goes.
Your daughter wants to do something or your son wants to do something risky.
And the mom is like, I can't watch you.
And the dad's like, go for it.
And if you think you can, right?
Yeah. So we just lost our capacity to assess risk.
We're told that the air will kill us and we just seem to fall down like bowling pins.
No, we do. That's interesting.
That's the underpinning.
Do you think that that's a causation or is that just a byproduct of the prevailing?
Because I think the welfare state, when you refer to the welfare state, I think that's the beginning of all social ills.
Because I think that that takes away any real jeopardy that we have in our lives.
The fundamental risk of having a child outside of wedlock.
Having a child outside of wedlock used to be a total disaster for a woman, for a family, for the reputation.
There were shotgun weddings.
There were trips to Switzerland if you were wealthy enough to have an abortion or to give the child up for adoption.
There were sisters being raised as if they were – well, there were children being raised as if they were the daughters – as if they were the mother's daughter when they were, in fact, the daughter's daughter, right?
It was a late pregnancy and so on, right?
And that's because children are a massive liability.
Now, when children are a massive financial, they're wonderful, beautiful, I love them to death.
But as far as money goes, there are hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise a child, right?
So for a woman, given that she wants to have kids, if she wants to have kids, and most women do, if you want to have kids, that's a huge liability.
So you need to find a quality, responsible man who's going to go and make money, not cheat on you, is going to be serious and dedicated to his family, and isn't going to leave you.
So the male virtues were necessitated by the costs of children.
Now, when you get the welfare state, you turn children from a liability, which require a virtuous man to support, into an asset.
Then women's reproductive strategies shift completely.
They don't need to worry about the man being reliable or employed or good with children or moral or anything like that.
They can just, you know, bang any hottie with a six-pack and a hip holster and And the government will rush in to take care of this.
So you've got this reproductive strategy where women, you know, everyone's attracted, like guys are attracted to the hot girl, but if she's crazy, we've got to grit her teeth and move on.
And women are attracted to the bad boy, you know, with leather pants, tattoos and stubble, but they've got to grit their teeth and saying, yeah, but he's not going to stick around, so I've got to go maybe find a guy who's a little more boring or a little less thrilling and exciting.
You know, maybe he rides a...
A Topaz instead of a Harley.
But, you know, it's better for the kids, right?
And so we've changed.
The whole marital choice, the whole dating choice, the whole romantic choice used to be around what's best for the kids because if things went wrong, you were really hosed, right?
And now it's changed to what's most attractive to the woman's hormones and what's most attractive to the men's hormones.
And the kids are toast.
I mean, the kids are just totally tossed by the wayside.
And now we've got, unfortunately, a generation, you know, half of leftist women, half of liberal women, half of labor women have a diagnosed, not just a diagnosed mental disorder.
And, you know, we were told, well, you know, you raise girls without fathers, it's going to be so much better because of all that toxic masculinity.
And as it turns out, it's, you know, being catastrophic for children, particularly in the black community where three quarters of kids are growing up without dads.
And it turns out society needs men.
And the result of not having men is you get people like Jacinda Ardern, who I warned the New Zealanders about when I was down there trying to give a speech, which was then I told the New Zealanders about Jacinda Ardern.
Now she's locked down the entire country because of one suspected case of COVID. And for a woman, right, because women view things very individually, which again, no disrespect to women.
We are two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
We fit together perfectly. But women look at things individually.
Like, you know how this goes. You read some article about something negative in society.
Now, for a man, it's like, okay, give me the facts.
Just give me the ratios, give me the data, give me the charts, give me the graphs.
I need to assess this from a larger perspective.
Whereas for women, it's always like, you know, so-and-so sobbed as she clutched her something-something, and they go into details about this woman.
They individualize it, right?
Because when you can individualize it...
Women view, because they're relationship-based, they view any disaster as happening in their personal circle, inside their house.
So, you know, for someone, I can't read just into Arden's mind, but, you know, it's like, oh no, there's COVID, that's like right next to me, because that's sort of women work relationally.
Whereas men are like, yeah, one, okay, well, you know, deal with that, but I don't, and we lock down the whole country, right?
And so this sort of emotional reaction to relationship-based proximity...
I mean, you saw this with the migrant crisis, you know, like this one terrible family took an overloaded boat across the Mediterranean.
It got swamped and their child drowned.
And it's like, you know, you and I don't put a bike helmet on our kids.
We get a ticket, but this guy can take his kid on an overloaded boat in a storm.
And women see that drowned kid.
Now, of course, for men, it's like, wow, that's really terrible.
That does happen in life.
But... Death happens all the time and the people responsible for it are the parents who put a kid in an overloaded boat and the captain who took them out or whatever in my view.
Whereas women are like, that's happening right in front of them.
That's a child that they just have this overwhelming, we need to save everyone.
Again, I love them for it.
I think it's beautiful. But when you combine that with state power, it tends to be a little claustrophobic if I can say that word again.
No, I think, listen, I think, you know, it's a compelling point.
I mean, we are Human, animals, and we act in our own self-interest.
And largely, if those self-interests aren't distorted or warped or rigged by any other umbrella, power or influence, we can pretty predictably kind of end up in family groups and, you know, the normal nuclear family kind of setup and then extended families, etc.
I'm obsessed with this, how much the game gets rigged.
And then what we will do, look, if you introduce alcohol into that equation, it will warp a family dynamic.
If you introduce money, basically free money with no need to actually be resourceful and to earn it, Then that will warp the family and then, by extension, other families, communities, society, etc.
The root of it for me, and again, this is my hobby horse, I'm obsessed with the Federal Reserve.
I think the whole thing comes back to the Federal Reserve.
Because I think if your business is distributing tokens, you have, and you said this at the very beginning, we're not dealing in morality anymore.
Morality has gone out the window.
And morality was actually, I think, a really cohesive quality that we had before we figured out that you could have a piece of paper to represent wealth.
Before we had anybody distributing a chip or a token, we had notions of morality that kept our families together and our communities bound, etc, etc.
All we're doing is, all our requirement is in the world, is to basically carry a little token around with us, and it doesn't matter whether we've worked for it.
And you can see now, the economies have been shut down for 18 months, makes no difference.
As long as we are trading these tokens, the dollars in this case, or the euro, As long as we are trading these chips, we are serving our purpose.
We're like honeybees with pollen on our back now.
We're not actually...
It was as they say, if you get something for free, you're not the client, you are the product.
And I think that that's kind of what my obsession is.
It's just like, we think, you know, we think we're working and saving and somehow the government's spending our money.
And it's like, Not our money.
There's no real money. We stopped making money.
We're $30 trillion in debt now.
There is no money.
There is just IOUs and a gun at the end of it to enforce the value of that IOU. Well, I think you're entirely right to be obsessed with the Fed because, I mean, there's an old basic principle of economics, right, which is that... Human desires are infinite, but resources are finite, right?
Scarcity is the foundation of economics, which is why there's not a lot of economics of air, right?
Because air, everybody breathes it.
It's not in short supply. But where something is in short supply, then you need the principle of economics.
Now, I don't think people understand the degree to which morality is also based upon scarcity.
So scarcity is, I mean, the practical effects of morality.
So thou shalt not steal is based on, like, there's no such thing as thou shalt not steal air, right?
Oh, don't breathe too much air around me because air is basically an infinite resource to all intents and purposes for human beings on the ground.
And so thou shalt not steal is based on two things.
One, don't take other people's property because what they've got is scarce.
And number two, if theft becomes a general principle, nobody will produce anything and everybody will starve to death.
If you go and steal everything from farmers, the farmers stop planting anything and just start living off subsistence farming and everybody starves to death.
So, Scarcity and morality are very closely tied together.
I mean, when you're in a monogamous relationship and you cheat, you're breaking the scarcity.
You're supposed to be, scarcity is your sexual behavior is supposed to be with one person and not anybody else.
And so you've got the scarcity, which you're then breaking against the contract or implicit or real in the relationship.
Murder, of course, the most scarce thing is time.
And you take away someone's time for the remainder of their life by killing them.
Then you've enforced scarcity.
So scarcity is the essence of morality.
And where there is no scarcity, there is no morality, which is why, you know, Polynesian islands where fruit falls from the trees and fish jump into your net and so on, they don't really have any sense of property rights because food's all around.
And there's very little scarcity and therefore there's no real morality.
So when you think about the Federal Reserve, it's the principle of infinite money for all intents and purposes.
Yeah, the bill comes due eventually, but it's the principle of infinite money.
And so where there is infinity, where there's no scarcity, there can be no morality.
So should it be any surprise that we have lost any sense of property rights, we've lost any sense of self-restraint, we've lost any sense of propriety and morality and commitment and integrity, Because we've turned a European-centric culture, which comes out of significant scarcity, particularly in the colder countries, we've now got this tropical abundance coming to us through the fantasy fruit production of the Federal Reserve, and it's driven us crazy.
Like, literally has driven us crazy.
A psychotic is someone who has beliefs that they completely accept that are completely the opposite of what reality is.
And we now view any restraint in government spending to be the same as stealing from someone.
In other words, refusing to steal from the next generation is somehow stealing from the present.
If you look at the vaccines, right, what I want to know is what's the cost-benefit?
What's the cost-benefit of the vaccines?
Okay, what's the cost-benefit of lockdowns?
Well, this was not allowed to be discussed.
Why? Because the government can just create or print or borrow money to pay for the vaccines and therefore they appear to flow through this magical portal from another dimension and there's no cost.
And so because there's no cost, you can't do a cost-benefit analysis.
And so none of this was discussed, in fact, discussions of the cost-benefit analysis.
I remember I said this, I think it was last March or early April, I said the lockdowns are going to result in far more harm than good because people are being denied health care.
But unfortunately, people being denied health care, those costs are spread out down the road over a wide, they're tough to concentrate, right?
They're tough to correlate.
So somebody who doesn't get a cancer screening for six months, you know, some percentage of them will go on to develop cancer that otherwise wouldn't have developed if they had screenings.
But you can't track that very well.
There's no alternative universe.
You can look at the opposite. Whereas the, quote, benefits of the lockdowns in terms of slowing the spread or whatever, that's something you can see.
But the diffuse costs, and now you can see in the UK, we've got one million new alcoholics in the UK because of lockdowns.
They've been tracking all of this stuff.
One million new alcoholics.
What's that doing to their children?
What's that doing to their health?
What's that doing to their employment opportunities?
What's that doing to the marriages and the friendships that they have?
I mean, it's catastrophic. And child suicides are double in some places the rate of coronavirus deaths.
And of course, coronavirus deaths among children are almost always kids so sick they're not even in school, right?
So it's a whole different category.
But because we've got...
Infinite money. Nobody is seeing their taxes go double because of the vaccines.
So there's no possibility, really, of doing a realistic cost-benefit analysis.
And to even talk about it is like, well, what?
You don't want to save people from dying from COVID? Yeah, I accept the vaccines reduce symptoms considerably.
I think that's wonderful. I think that's great.
I mean, that's the upside.
And I hope that there's no downside.
And, you know, other than the ones we know about already, the myocarditis and, you know, the deaths that have occurred from the vaccines and the injuries.
But where's the cost-benefit analysis?
That's what I would like to see.
But because everything's run by the government, it's a monopoly in the healthcare system for the most part.
It's a monopoly on money creation and money printing.
It's a monopoly on the scientific establishment.
It's a monopoly on licensing.
It's a monopoly on funding.
What cost-benefit analysis could you possibly have?
And this is why when you mandate the level of risk that people have to take, what is the level of risk that people have to take?
Well, the problem with the mandating is we don't get to explore it, right?
So when I was a kid, when you were a kid, I don't know if you were into dirt bikes, I was into dirt bikes, right?
So I had friends who wouldn't touch a dirt bike because it was too scary, right?
Okay, that's fine. We'll go dirt biking without you.
I had other friends who were quite mental when it came to dirt biking and would like bike off cliffs and like just long before GoPro or they're just, you know, for the fun of it, right?
And I was, you know, I'm always the Aristotelian mean kind of guy, you know, like I just, you know, wanted to be somewhere in the middle for the most part.
And so my friends who didn't go out dirt biking, okay, so they didn't gain leg muscles, they didn't get out into the fresh air, they'd get sick a little bit more, maybe they'd get a little pudgy or whatever.
Okay, so that's then taking the risk of being overweight, right?
It's the idea that locking kids into this bubble-proof Xbox chamber so they're not in any kind of danger is like, well, they just lose muscle mass, they lose bone density, they lose...
Heart and lung capacity, they gain weight, and that's not keeping them safe, like locking kids in because you're afraid of them being in danger.
It just puts them in danger for certain, just, you know, diffusing down the road.
So I had a wide, a bell curve.
There's always a bell curve, right? And again, I'm like right in the middle of the bell curve.
So I had extremist friends who would, I can remember, had a friend who would like bike off walls, like he would take his dirt bike off walls, Like six or seven feet high onto a slope.
And I just wouldn't do it.
I had friends who would climb up trees like blindfolded spider monkeys on jetpacks.
And I would like, I would climb, but I would inch my way up.
I'd be careful because I would, you know, you think of falling and banging your head all the way down, flipping around like a rag doll.
That's no fun. So I had friends who did the bell curve of risk.
Some took too little risk, which turned out to be negative for them.
Some took too much risk.
My friend, unfortunately, ended up dying in a motorcycle accident in his late teens because he was not very good at assessing risk, even though I pointed it out that it was a bit too much risk.
His risk profile was a bit of a thrill junkie.
But you got to see these experimentations.
You got to learn from it. When the government mandates the amount of risk you can take, you don't know where the end of the envelope is, right?
So if we didn't have these mandates, there would be people taking fewer risks and people taking more risks.
And we'd have the examples in society of people who took too little care and people who took too much care.
But because it's all mandated, we don't have that exploration.
And so we don't know what the acceptable level of risk is.
We only know what the mandated level of risk is because there's no exploration at all.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more.
I think to that point, we also don't know, we don't know, it hasn't been articulated, what the motive of those governments or the state is.
Again, you can pretty much figure out what the motives of your next door neighbour are largely, you know, all the people in your street, because they generally got the same motives.
It's either personal indulgence or family security.
You know, give or take a few alcoholics.
What you've got with the current state of affairs and the growing state of affairs is we actually There are people who aren't on our side, for want of a better word, who are trusting the motives of the state and state power, etc., thinking that they must be looking out for our best interests.
But the evidence doesn't seem to be that.
It doesn't seem to be built on morality.
It doesn't seem to be built on the normal kind of interests that we would have as families and be looking out for each other as a community.
Does it make sense? There's a lot of people trusting that the powers that be have our best interests at heart.
And just everywhere I turn, I see that they do not.
They work into some kind of motive, but not the motive of what is best for the individuals in society or the families in society.
Yeah, I mean, it's a lot and there's a lot of what you said.
And one of the things that has been really suppressed in our modern educational system is a, you know, the grim reading of factual history of the relationships between citizen and state.
The grim reading of factual history.
Now, men, we tend to be I don't know about you.
I was into like war comics as a kid and I read war books and I was really fascinated by the Battle of Britain.
I actually brought all that to life in a novel I wrote recently called Almost.
People can get it for free on my website at freedom.com.
But I was really fast.
So as men, we can have a pretty leery relationship with the state because we can be drafted and everybody knows you can be drafted should push comes to shove.
So we're all like, yeah, you know, they're you know, I guess there's some good, good minded, good meaning people in there.
But they can also force me to go kill or be killed at a moment's notice.
So, you know, a little leery, right?
And this is traditionally why men voted because men were drafted and that was the price of political involvement.
And so you were always skeptical of government power.
Because they could start a war, they could draft you, and you could be completely destroyed, and death might not even be the worst thing that could happen to you.
We saw what happened in World War I with four plus years of war, trench warfare, people sitting in iron lungs because of mustard gas for decades after the end of the war with no lives whatsoever, and shell shock, and psychological trauma, and PTSD. It was just monstrous what happened, right? And then of course, It happened again 20 years later, or I think Marshall Fox, the French general, said, it's not the Second World War.
It was just there was a break between the First World War and this one.
It just continues. Exactly. So we're always pretty leery of the state.
Plus, of course, when men did the earning and the government took the taxes, we were very leery of that because generally we paid.
We weren't paid by the state.
We paid into.
So they took our money and they drafted us, right?
So for men, state power has always been, okay, maybe it's a necessary thing, but it's pretty dangerous.
That's George Washington's old thing that the government is like fire.
It's a dangerous servant but a deadly master, right?
So we've always been pretty leery of state power.
When you get women, and this is statistically very well correlated in a wide variety of countries, when women get the vote, what happens?
Well, they're not drafted and they can vote for free stuff from the government and they do in hordes, right?
I mean, you get free.
So when women get the vote, you get socialized medicine, you get old age pensions, and you get the welfare state.
That's inevitable.
It's always going to be the case because women can't resist free stuff any more than men can resist free sex.
which is to say a few can, but not that many, right?
And so you end up in this situation.
Where there's just free stuff rolling down and people lose all sense of reality and just terrible.
I'm so sorry. I completely lost the thread of your question and my original point.
I went on one too many tangents and lost my way back home.
Not even slightly. No, I think you're being too generous even suggesting that there was a point to my rambling.
I'm just... We were on a topic, though, and I feel I wanted to close it off somewhere.
What was the thing you were talking about? The motive of the state I was talking about.
Yeah, so for... Thank you very much.
I appreciate that. So for men, motive is like, okay, yeah, they got power of us.
They can take our stuff and they can take our lives.
So you got to keep a bit of an eagle eye on these and we've got to push back against state power.
But for women, this state appears...
Almost completely benevolent.
Particularly, as you say, when it gets control of the money supply, when it can create money out of thin air, right?
So for women, the state appears like a husband.
It appears like a good husband, a husband who will never leave them, a husband who will always give them resources, a husband who will protect them from every mistake they make.
So men, traditionally, Have always been like, oh, I got to want you on that government, man.
Okay. Yeah, we can't really use the legal system.
Most poor to middle class people have no access to the legal system because it's too expensive and too time consuming.
And so the legal system doesn't particularly help me.
It's often a weapon used against me.
So I don't really get that.
Property rights being enforced by the state.
Well, you know, contract disputes going into the legal system is kind of a mess.
And If you've ever had anything stolen and called the cops, they're like, yeah, we'll take down the serial number, I suppose, but I guess it's just time to call your insurance company.
Like, are you going to do anything about it?
I'll put it in a file. Okay, so how does the state really benefit you as a man?
Okay, well, you know, you could probably point out a few things here and there, but mostly it's a giant cost and a giant risk of your very life.
But when women, of course, gain the power to vote and they vote for free stuff.
And again, I'm not blaming women.
It's the way we're all wired and so on.
Self-interest, isn't it?
We act in our self-interest.
Ida May, the first woman who got a social security check, paid like, I don't know, two bucks and got tens of thousands of dollars locally in return.
It's like trying to convince someone not to cash in a lottery ticket because it's not real money.
It's like, good luck with that. So because of all of that, we have this view of the state as benevolent from women.
And of course, as women train the children, as they do, there's almost no male teachers up until junior high or sometimes high school in places.
So what do a lot of boys see?
Well, they've got single moms who rely on the state.
They've got kindergarten teachers, all female.
They've got primary school teachers and a lot of junior high school teachers, all female.
So women run early childhood at home, in daycare, nannies, nurses, teachers.
It's all female all the time.
And they're getting a lot of their money, these women, from the state.
And they're getting monopoly from the state in the educational field.
You have to pay for the school whether you send your kids or not.
So, the women who view the state as a benevolent protector are teaching the children.
Now, if it's men, they're like, yeah, you know, I'm forced to pay for it.
I don't agree with some of the curriculum, but I have no particular power over it.
And, you know, they look at the state with a pretty leery eye because they know if the state gets in trouble...
then they're going to take more money from the men or they're going to draft them.
So we're kind of skeptical.
So the children are trained by an entire cadre of women.
And again, there are tons of exceptions, but this is generally the principle.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're trained by a cadre of women who view the state as a benevolent protector and provider.
And so when they grow up, it's very tough to shift that perspective.
I mean, as I've said this before, once you hand over the education of children to the state, I mean, as far as liberty goes, it's just erosion.
It's just a matter of time. Because what are parents going to do?
Are they going to say, oh yeah, as Barack Obama pointed out, he said...
The state is an agency of violence.
It's an agency of coercion.
And that's known by men because we're the victims of that coercion so often.
But because women get the benefits, they don't see it.
They don't see it. It's found money, so to speak, or voted money.
And so is the mom going to say to her kids, oh, yeah, no, I sent you to a coercive monopoly called government school?
And are the teachers who say to kids, what do they say to the boys?
I mean, I worked in a daycare, right?
What do you say? Share, be nice. Share, be nice.
So what do they say to the kids?
They say, don't take another kid's property.
Don't hit him. Don't use force to get what you want.
Are then those same teachers going to say to the kids, oh yeah, my paycheck is based on coercion?
My paycheck is based on property taxes, which are taken from your parents against their will, and if your parents don't pay them, they lose their property.
So my entire funding, my entire income, my summer's off, my pension, my health care, you name it, is all funded through coercion, but you can't possibly take a cookie from another kid because that's wrong.
I mean, you can't maintain property rights when the education of children is founded on the violation of property rights.
I mean, it's not going to happen.
And, of course, it takes time, but this erosion seems to be virtually complete now.
God, you're good. Yeah, yeah.
Well, if I wasn't good, I wouldn't be deplatformed, would I? Yeah.
No, if you weren't that good, you would be replatformed.
That's the thing. Yeah, yeah, I suppose so.
If you weren't effective, then they wouldn't be...
Yeah, but the good thing about being a philosopher, and my education was in the history of philosophy in particular, the good thing about being a philosopher is that, fuck the present.
Don't give a shit. You know, fuck the present.
I mean, you don't get to live in the future if you conform to the present.
You just vanish like everyone else, right?
So, you know, I'm not speaking to the present.
This is sort of why I gave up on political analysis last year, is that I'm like, okay, I've done my work, my yeoman's work in the present day, in the current time, you know, on the dictum of Plato, that those thinkers who remain uninvolved in public affairs pay the price of being ruled by evildoers.
So I did, you know, 10 plus years in the political arena.
And I was doing other things too.
And then I'm like, okay, so...
The political conversation is largely over.
I mean, I think that was pretty much the case in the 2020 election and all that.
So for me, it's like, okay, I'm going to work on the individual philosophy that I do with my callers to help them sort of get better lives, be better parents, and learn how to be more virtuous in a way that doesn't get them too negative a social credit score, so to speak.
But I'm going to work on epistemology.
I'm going to work on metaphysics.
I'm going to work on ethics and so on because that's the stuff that passed the longest shadow.
The taller you are, the sun is straight above.
The taller you are, the less shadow you're going to cast.
But if you lean out of politics, you cast a much longer shadow.
And I think that the point now for philosophy is not to rescue the present, particularly given the escalation of state power over the last 18 months.
The purpose of philosophy is to...
We're like the monks who are holding on to Plato and Aristotle through the Dark Ages in order to deliver them to the future Enlightenment and the Renaissance.
Absolutely, it is. You're the keeper of the flame.
Because, yeah, I totally agree with you.
It's just like, I was having a conversation with somebody yesterday who's really, really upset about the politics of the world, if you like.
And I'm like, I mean, you can't act surprised.
It's like, this is, we are in that inevitable place and you've articulated much better my point of view.
It's just like, no, but you can...
We can all as individuals.
There are free thinkers in North Korea right now who are holding on to some notion of liberty and free thought.
It doesn't have to be that everybody...
I'm rambling, but I'm always minded of the Soviet Union.
You had an entire state there for 69 years.
And when the balloon went up, it went up really, really quickly, and it turned into something recognizable almost overnight.
They had control over all media, even billboards and posters and newspapers, and they still couldn't quash the notion of people just like, don't tell me what to do.
And I always find that... I find that fascinating.
It's like, if people, when they deal with human immortality, when they can actually create immortal humans, we might have a problem.
But the very fact that the most powerful despots on Earth have to be recycled.
The great thing about human immortality is that, can you imagine if we had people alive who'd lived through the Roman Empire?
They would say, oh, yeah, let's not do this again.
The whole point of mortality is you get to erase history if people are still alive, right?
I mean, immortality would be fantastic.
Sign me up. Hey, maybe the vaccines will make us immortal.
Who knows, right? But that's the great thing about the fact that we're mortal means that you can just continually erase history.
You know, the fact if you say to people, outside of war...
How many human beings, innocent human beings, were murdered by their own governments in the 20th century?
Right? People have no idea.
And again, women have even less idea because they view it as a benevolent river of goodies, right?
And the actual number is 250 million, conservatively.
Amazing. 250. Not including war.
Just direct... I mean, Cambodia, the communists took over Cambodia, killed a third of the population.
You look at the Holodomor under...
The Soviets and Mao, of course, I think the greatest killer in human history with the collectivization of the farmland and so on.
So you've got a quarter of a billion people.
in the 20th century.
And men know this, at least a lot of men do, because again, we've got to keep our eye on this dangerous beast.
And women are like, well, you know, I get lots of free stuff and they provide healthcare and they educate my children.
And, you know, it's like, you should have a husband for that.
And sorry, just to that point, this might seem totally incidental, but, you know, for most of that time, I think up until like 1950, 1960, the population was like 3 billion.
So you're getting a quarter of a billion people killed at a time when they weren't at 7, 8 billion like we are now.
It was at a time when a lot of that killing took place when the population was half what it is now.
Well, and this is so the people who've studied history intelligently, which means not through an ideological lens and with particular reference to principles and mathematics, to philosophy and mathematics.
One iron law in history.
One iron law in history.
Population swells through debt.
When the debt can't be paid, population reduction measures ensue.
One iron law throughout history.
Population swells through debt.
When the debt cannot be paid, population reduction measures ensue.
Now, generally in history, the population reduction measures have been It's collectivization of farmland resulting in famine, which kills off a lot of people.
War is the big one, right?
War is the very big one.
The welfare state generally tends to swell the ranks of the slightly less intelligent.
And so governments traditionally will start wars with an intelligence test.
And they will put the least intelligent at the front and they'll keep the more intelligent, the more productive in the rear.
I mean, this is why the intelligence test was originally created.
The IQ test was originally created to make sure that you didn't send the smart people to the front.
And so I don't know, and I'm not saying this has anything to do with what's going on now, but this has always been the tension when governments cannot run out, when they cannot anymore sustain the payments of whatever it is they promised.
You know, in the US it's $180 trillion of unfunded liabilities.
I mean, it's completely mad, right? So what do they do?
Well, if they can't pay off their debts, they generally face a revolution at home.
But they don't want a revolution, so then they have to create an external enemy, and they have to find ways to point people at an external enemy.
And whip up hatred against that, and then they whip people into a war, and they depopulate that way.
And, you know, as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.
That's a line from Shakespeare. And, you know, the history of the state is just that, that they will give you lots of free stuff and lots of free money in order to gain your allegiance.
They will make promises they can't possibly keep.
And then when they can't keep those promises, the lives that they have created through debt seem to be fairly expendable in history.
Again, I'm not saying anything about the present.
I'm just saying that history. And I've been keeping my scurvy eye on this for quite some time.
Okay, I know, I know in history when the debts can't be paid, what happens, right?
I mean, this is one of the proximate direct falls of the Roman Empire, right?
I mean, the Roman Empire, I mean, it fell for a variety of reasons.
I've got a whole presentation on this.
People can find this. Just for those who want to look up my presentations, fdrpodcasts.com, just do Fall of Rome, and you can find the video.
But one of the proximate causes at the very end, well, of course, they had to bring their troops back home to protect...
Rome, because the empire had been overextended, which could be something to do with Afghanistan.
And of course, we know from history that when did Russia fall after being kicked out of Afghanistan?
Two years later! Again, probably won't repeat that way, but that's sort of what happened in history.
But in Rome, they had the welfare state, and they had bread and circuses and a huge dependent class.
They had a destruction of the nuclear family.
They had easy divorce, a kind of hyper-feminism among the upper classes.
And what happened, of course, was they had a giant empire, and empires from the British Empire to the Carthinian Empire to the Roman Empire, all negative economically.
A few people profit, but most people suffer enormously.
And so they had to defend their empire, which had become large and fractious.
They, of course, because they had an empire, they had increasing multiculturalism at home, which became progressively more difficult to manage and lost their sort of core values that united the empire.
The Rome, sort of united Italy at the time.
So they had to print a whole bunch of money.
They devalued the currency. When you devalue the currency, then whatever you pay your troops in isn't worth much.
So the troops get kind of mad.
Now, of course, they also were raising taxes and conscription to manage the length and breadth of the empire.
So for a young man, you didn't want to be in a city.
Because if you're in a city, that's where you're going to get taxed, and that's where you're going to get conscripted.
And you're going to get 20 years of godforsaken military duty.
Maybe you'll get a couple of acres of land afterwards if you've still got all your limbs, which is unlikely.
Or if you don't die of disease, because like one cut in the ancient world gets infected and you're toast.
So all the young men began to leave the city.
And so they couldn't conscript because the young men left.
They couldn't get enough tax money because the young men left, who were the tax drivers of the entire economy.
So they had to start hiring more and more foreign troops.
But they couldn't pay the foreign troops because the tax base was collapsing.
So eventually the foreign troops just come to get their money and Rome collapses.
So this cycle is really grim in history.
And when people look at debt, it's been a very abstract thing, deficits and government debt and unfunded liabilities and so on.
What I look at is I look at a giant raft in shark-infested waters that is keeping people alive called debt.
And when that raft begins to sink, what happens?
And when governments can no longer pay off their debts, very bad things in history tend to occur.
What's happening in the present is really hard to know.
But of course, if we studied history, Intelligently, we would know that debt is just deferred destruction.
That's all debt is. Government debt is deferred destruction.
Whether it's war, whether it's famine, whether it's collectivization of property, whether it's whatever, gulags, all debt is deferred destruction because they're not going to...
Give up bribing people as long as they can.
And when they can no longer bribe people, they tend to destroy them.
It's really a very bad situation historically.
Where that lies in the present is still unknown, at least to me.
But we're just not learning any of this stuff anymore.
And I say, oh, the only lesson we learn from history is that people don't learn from history.
That's nonsense. People learn from history all the time.
Governments have no interest in teaching you history.
Because history roundly condemns governments.
It condemns debt. It condemns democracy.
And it also tells you that wars are based on lies.
Almost always wars are based on lies.
And so is the government going to teach you any of that?
No, people would love to learn from history.
It's just that the government monopoly on education prevents that.
So people think it's some human condition stuff.
It always annoys me when people take the current statist reality and say, that's human nature, man!
That's just human nature!
You know, it's like looking at monkeys masturbating with a...
With a water bowl in a zoo and saying, well, that's just monkeys, man.
It's like, no, that's monkeys in a zoo.
They're weird. They're confined.
They're messed up.
They're claustrophobic.
They're screwed up because they're in prison.
And you look at people in prison and say, wow, you know, there's a lot of rape and showers.
It's like, I went to the gym. I used to go to the gym all the time.
Never had any rape in the shower because we're voluntarily there.
You can't look at prisons and zoos and think you're learning something about animals or people other than how they behave in confinement.
So yeah, it just kind of bothers me when all these statements are made without reference to the fact that we're kind of in tax farms and human zoos.
Listen, that's genius.
I'm like, that's...
Only talking to you, I hear things I've not heard before, and I'm going to go and process that.
That's extraordinary. Well, you know, because you have to acknowledge there's a lot of people in this space that are kind of regurgitating or recycling the same point, I think, because you come in as a philosopher, and as you say, now you've sort of abandoned...
Current politics and looking at the how we think almost more than what we're currently, less of the data, more of the actual kind of the processes.
You always say really, really profound things and I don't I don't know if you realize how profound they are sometimes.
I am probably 20% responsible for what I say.
Maybe. Maybe on a good day, right?
Because it's kind of like just, it's like a fountain.
It's like it just, these thoughts assemble, they come out of my mouth, and I'm a little bit of a puppet for something deeper within me.
You know, some sort of unconscious thing or some sort of talent or ability.
But It's sort of like saying improv jazz musicians are writing a song.
It's like, well, you kind of, but kind of not, right?
So I just sort of wanted to point it out.
That is a certain amount of inspiration.
And that also comes from the fact that you haven't had someone in your life who tells you the same story again and again.
Oh, my. I had a boss once who would, like, literally, like, one day to the next would tell me the same story.
And I'd interrupt him and say, yeah, you just told me yesterday.
And he's like, yeah, but, you know, just continue on.
That drives me mad. And I studiously try to avoid reusing.
Occasionally, right? I mean, it just comes up.
But I really do try, because that's not being alive at the moment.
And a lot of people do seem to have these, like, you know, five talking points.
They sort of bounce between and so on.
And like, damn, they're the real racists.
I mean, it's just, I can't.
To me, I would rather not I could rather be a waiter than do that because that just feels like I'm not alive in the moment in the communication and in the formulation and in the connection.
And I think that spontaneity of thought that arises a fair amount out of prior discipline and thought, but that spontaneity of thought is, I think, what people like to listen to because they know it's not a talking point and they also know that I could...
Blow up my entire career at any moment, right?
Because I am so spontaneous that I could literally...
Well, I mean, I wouldn't say that anything I've done in the past was that accidental, right?
I mean, I knew I was taking risks in talking about particular topics, and I was happy to take those risks because...
That's the gig, right? But I think people are like, you know, like if you watch someone, you have the parkour videos with someone right on the edge, your kind of heart's in your mouth and you can't look away.
And I think with people like, hey, he's spontaneously riffing on history and violence and the state and so on.
Is he going to make it? Is he going to land this successfully?
Is he going to fall off the edge?
I think there's a certain amount of excitement around that.
And there is for me too, which is one of the reasons I prefer it this way.
Amazing. Well, listen, I can't thank you enough, Stefan Molyneux, one more time for coming on again.
I mean, this is really, really greedy of me, but can I get you back again in like a few months or something?
Yeah, keep me posted. I'm always happy to chat philosophy.
There's almost nobody I won't talk philosophy with.
It's a good thing I don't have a dog.
Otherwise, I'd have the wisest dog known to man.
That's great. Let's end on me not feeling very special.
That's great. Thanks a lot. That's a fair point.
You gave great talking points, and I really, really do appreciate that.
You're incredible, mate. Listen, I appreciate your time, and thank you once again, Stefan Molyneux.
Take care, freedomain.com.
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