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June 13, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:40:16

Should You Forgive Yourself? Open Call In

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	Yes, hello everybody!
	Get in here!
	It's time to talk philosophy!
	It is the 12th of June, 2023, and we are live with you.
	Hope you're having a great day. I hope that your life is going swimmingly and not drowningly, as life is sometimes wont to do.
	If you have...
	Questions, issues, comments, problems, praise, recipes, haircuts, cool gymnastic moves, and a way to pop back a dislocated shoulder without using a great white shark as leverage.
	I am all yours.
	I am all ears.
	You can raise your hand if you want to talk.
	You can type your questions into the chat.
	And I am here to be your willing, abject, Philosophy.
	Slave. So let me just make a note here.
	Questions? I have certainly some stuff to talk about.
	Yes, I do. This is where you would type comments?
	Yes, indeed. This is where you would type comments.
	And I would be thrilled to hear from you.
	I'll just give a moment to see if anybody's got a yearning, burning question, comment.
	I know some of you all at work.
	Get back to work. You can't multitask with philosophy.
	Or can you? Well, I guess we can find out today.
	So I'll just wait for a moment.
	If you have questions that you want to talk about, criticisms, issues, the AI project is coming along swimmingly.
	It is a messy field, man.
	I guess this is bleeding edge stuff, right?
	So it is a messy, messy field.
	And it's not the easiest thing in the world to set up and get going.
	It reminds me, oh gosh, way back in the day.
	Gosh, this has got to be 35 years ago.
	No, maybe not quite.
	Anyway, I had a little computer business before I started the software company that then we grew to a fairly decent size.
	I had a little computer consulting business.
	People had issues. I would come in and troubleshoot software and hardware and make things work for them.
	And I was hired by one company to put together a network.
	For their office. Now, this is long before Wi-Fi, so I had to run cables all the way through the office and wired up, and I just could not get this network to work.
	And my gosh, was it ever brutal back then.
	This was in the land of DOS. DOS Networks.
	Oh man, it was brutal.
	And it turned out that I'd ordered the network cards, but there was a particular jumper that they had to set, which they had not set, and I didn't know anything about it.
	This is even really before the internet could give you anything useful.
	This is pre-intranet. My gosh, it was just wild how much you had to learn just to get basic things to work.
	I remember going out to a guy, he was just tearing his hair out because he couldn't get his printer to work in the network environment, and it was like half a day to troubleshoot that stuff.
	Now, it's funny because I was in a guy's office who was thinking of giving me a job, and he was having trouble with his computer.
	And I just took it over and fixed his startup problems in about 30 seconds, got the job.
	But yeah, things were just brutal back in the day.
	And it's kind of like that with AI at the moment.
	It's just wicked.
	It's just wicked.
	Was it NetWear for Novell?
	I think it was. Yeah, I think it was.
	All right, questions.
	Could you... Explain on a technical level the importance of disprovability and the probability of a theory.
	Right, right, right, right, right.
	Okay, so this is sort of propaganda spotting 101, which is a very, very important topic.
	The provability of a theory.
	Oh, okay, so, sorry, the person has edited.
	Could you explain on a technical level the importance of provability of a theory?
	Right, right. So somebody made a comment in a live stream that I had yesterday where they said that postmodernism is all about getting rid of truth.
	Nope. No.
	Postmodernism is not getting rid of truth.
	I did a debate.
	This is one of these sort of mind-blowing things that happened over the course of my life where you just go like, holy crap, people are nuts.
	I did a debate with an academic.
	I think his name was Thaddeus Russell or something like that.
	And in it, he refused to reject the possibility that a woman who Could make a baby by having sex with a tree.
	I mean, that really was way out there, man.
	Way out on the limb. And that's just wild.
	So postmodernism is not about getting rid of the concept of truth.
	It's about getting rid of standards of truth.
	See, here's the thing. The way that you promote hedonism is through suppression.
	So if you grew up being nagged to death, being controlled, being bullied, then you view with great hostility all rules to restrain your behavior.
	If you're like hyper-controlled, and I remember seeing a friend of mine, he was just trying to make some toast.
	And her mother was like, oh, you've got to clear out the bread thing, and don't plug it.
	too close to the plug and move it away from this it's going to pop up and hit the top and you put
	the settings are all wrong and it's just like nag nag nag nag nag nag nag nag right now of course if
	you're hyper controlled in this kind of way then when someone comes to you with external standards
	You perceive them as soul-crushing abuse, and you just wish to be free of all rules or standards.
	And when you get this kind of rampant hedonism sort of netted into your soul, then what happens is, You view the requirement for proof as a form of bullying, because the only way that you can survive the mass crushing down of your spirit through endless crap rules is to develop a fierce resistance to rules.
	Rules that are imposed upon you are abusive and often Contradictory, and they are mere exercises of power.
	Now, how do you resist, when you're a kid or a teenager, how do you resist the exercise of brutal and arbitrary power in your life?
	You develop a fierce will to resist the imposition of rules.
	If you, I won't do what you tell me!
	You fiercely resist rules.
	Now, When someone comes along and says, well, in order for me to accept what you're saying, you have to prove it.
	Well, you just have this blind rebellion.
	You just have this blind rebellion.
	Any imposition of any standards is abusive.
	Why? Because almost all the standards that you've had imposed upon you have been brutal and abusive.
	And this is why you get this pendulum.
	From fascism to socialism to fascism to socialism, right?
	So the fascists impose these arbitrary, brutal rules.
	The socialists then grew up resisting all rules.
	And then society trites living without any standards of objectivity or truth.
	And then the fascists, and then it all falls apart.
	And the fascists come in to try and make things working again, as they used to say in Italy, at least the trains run on time.
	And you just get this pendulum.
	Imposition of brutal rules, resistance to all rules, leading to collapse, leading to imposition of brutal rules, leading to resistance to all...
	Like, oh, it's so boring. Oh my gosh, history is like watching a children's cartoon for the 12 millionth time.
	So, if you have a theory...
	I mean, we can start with science, right?
	Because we're all more familiar with science and it doesn't have the volatility of moral standards.
	We all start with science.
	So in science, if you propose a theory, I think technically it's called a conjecture or hypothesis.
	So you propose a theory.
	And let's propose a theory right now.
	I'm going to propose a theory that says...
	The universe is doubling in size every second.
	The universe is doubling in size, or halving in size, or doubling in size, every single second.
	And people would say, well, that's a pretty wild theory.
	Ah, yes, everything in the universe is doubling in size every second.
	They say, wow, okay.
	Is there a yardstick for that?
	I mean, is there something that isn't doubling in size that we can measure ourselves against?
	You know, like if you're a parent and you've got those lines on the wall as your kids are growing up?
	Well, your kids are growing up, but the lines on the wall aren't growing at the same time, so you have something to measure.
	If you want to say something's growing, you have to have something to measure it against.
	And you say, no, no, no, see, everything that you would use to measure the universe is also doubling in size every second, and therefore, there's no way to have an objective standard by which you can measure whether the universe is doubling in size every second.
	Now, is this theory true?
	Nope. Is this theory false?
	Nope. Not even a theory.
	It's, I think in Latin, it's called a brain fart.
	Are the physics in my nightly dreams true or false?
	They are neither.
	They are not in the category of true or false because there is no objective standard by which to measure them.
	So for a theory to be in the category of true or false, it must conform to reason and evidence or can be disproved by reason or evidence.
	If I say 2 and 2 make 5, that is a theory.
	2 and 2 are 5.
	But since 4 is just another way of saying 2 and 2, I'm saying A doesn't equal A, right?
	A equals non-A, which is a violation of one of Aristotle's three laws of logic.
	So false. So if I have a theory that has no objective measure of validation or falsification, it's not a theory.
	It's a story.
	I don't know if you've seen this meme of this kid explaining his dream.
	And then, and if, and so, and then, and when, and it's like, so it's that.
	So you hear this sort of stuff.
	So I had a dream about a blue unicorn that was riding on the back of a turtle and I also had wings but I also had laser eyes.
	Is that true? It's not in the category of true or false.
	It's a dream. It's a dream.
	So, unfortunately, when you are bullied by human beings, you feel bullied by reason, you feel bullied by objectivity, you feel bullied by the requirements of proof, you feel bullied by empiricism.
	If you are unjustly accused throughout the course of your childhood, Then the requirement to prove theories feels like you're being subjugated.
	And like most people who are being subjugated, you feel an angry will to resist.
	Now, of course, it's my belief that when we finally get round to, as a culture, a society, a species, a planet, of actually having rational, empirical, provable rules...
	Then we stop this ridiculous and highly destructive and frankly genocidal and half-murderous to half the planet cycle of swinging from hard left to hard right and we actually live in the happy middle called philosophy.
	That's the idea.
	That's the goal. So if we take another example, let's say the Marxist theory, right?
	Marxist theory is that Wealth is derived from exploitation.
	The general Marxist theory goes something like this.
	Your workers produce $20 worth of value.
	You only pay them $15 an hour.
	Every hour your worker produces $20 worth of value, but you only pay the worker $15 worth of value.
	The profit, which is your $5, is exploitation.
	You're stealing from the worker.
	So, exploitation is the source of wealth.
	Now, there are certainly times when that is true.
	So, for instance, look at the East India Company under imperialism.
	The East India Company was a mercantilist company.
	In other words, it was a company that was a fascist offshoot of state power.
	Now, the East India Company had a monopoly on a lot of the transfer of goods from, say, India to England and some of those goods, the most important ones were things like tea and spices and dyes and so on.
	I can't remember if tea was India.
	I know tea was China. I can't remember if it was India as well, but something like that.
	Now, the East India Company Had a monopoly.
	How was that monopoly enforced?
	That monopoly was enforced via the state in that if you decided to transfer some goods and you weren't part of the East India Company, you decided to transfer some goods from India to England, you would be arrested, fined, thrown in jail, whatever, right?
	So the East India Company outsourced the enforcement of their mercantilist or fascist monopoly to the state and the state Taxed citizens and robbed citizens of their liberties by forcing them into, press-ganging them into the navy where they would often die, often from scurvy.
	And so, yeah, that's absolutely wealth generated through exploitation.
	An individual company that says, I want a monopoly, let's say that there was no state.
	Oh, tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
	So let's say there's no state and there's a company that wants to trade from India to England.
	Is it beneficial to them?
	Is it economically efficient for them to hire their own giant navy and enforce their own monopoly?
	It is not. It is ridiculously economically inefficient, so the only way that you can get profits as the East India Company is to offload the costs of enforcing your monopoly to the hapless, helpless and ground down general population.
	So yes, that absolutely is a form of exploitation.
	Slavery, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of exploitation.
	Whether it's hard slavery, like you direct to own people, or soft slavery, like you own a certain percentage or proportion of their labor, that is exploitation.
	So, according to the theory that wealth is the result of exploitation, it's fairly testable.
	And what you would do is you would say, okay, okay, so then those countries where in the – oh, those economies, they say it might just be not one single country.
	Those economies where the exploitation is the greatest should also be the wealthiest because you see wealth comes from exploitation.
	All right? So you would look at, say, the late Industrial Revolution And say, yeah, there certainly is some exploitation.
	There's a lot of taxes. There's the draft.
	There's putting press gang into the Navy.
	And there's a lot of regulation.
	And there's an empire that has to be fueled and supported and maintained and so on.
	A lot of government workers.
	So yeah, there's a certain amount of exploitation.
	But it's less exploitation than there was, say...
	In India, with the caste system, there's less exploitation than it would have been in ancient Greece with the slave system and so on, right?
	So you'd say, okay, well, if exploitation is wealth or exploitation generates wealth, then the more exploitation there is, the more wealth there should be.
	That's a testable hypothesis, right?
	But we find the opposite to be true.
	We find that wealth tends to accumulate where there is less exploitation because exploitation It's the opposite of meritocracy.
	I mean, forced exploitation is the opposite of meritocracy.
	Forced exploitation means conniving political worm-tongued toadies tend to gain control of the reins of power and use it to steal money from the general population.
	What Marx would refer to as mere capitalist exploitation really can be considered, I mean, it is fundamentally a form of trade.
	So when I worked in a restaurant, I made, I don't know what it was back then, like maybe $10 an hour with tips, maybe $12 an hour.
	I'd say $10 an hour for ease of math.
	So I made $10 an hour in the restaurant.
	And the restaurant owner sold my services for $20 an hour, give or take, right?
	So they were making $10 an hour.
	And if you don't understand anything about economics, it's easy to be drawn into this nonsense that somehow somebody was stealing $10 an hour from me, right?
	When the reality is that I made $10 an hour as a waiter...
	Because I made $20 an hour as a waiter, but I paid the restaurant owner $10 an hour to have a restaurant that I could work in, right?
	Because I could just come in there without any investment.
	I didn't have any risk.
	If the restaurant went out of business, I wasn't in any debt, and I didn't owe suppliers, whatever, and I didn't have my credit rating destroyed.
	I didn't have to declare bankruptcy or anything like that, right?
	So I was making $20 an hour In the restaurant or is generating $20 an hour in the restaurant and I paid the restaurant owner half of my wages so that I could make $10 an hour because if I wasn't willing to pay the restaurant owner half my wages or half my value in order for him to have the restaurant, there'd be no restaurant or he wouldn't hire me.
	I mean, I remember a friend of mine, one of his mother's friends was like, hey, you guys, when we were teenagers, he's like, hey, you've got to come up for the weekend.
	Come up to the cottage. It'll be great.
	It's on a lake. It's beautiful.
	It's going to be great fun.
	And so we very enthusiastically went up.
	To the cottage for the weekend.
	And we were put to work like a bunch of lake-chained coolies almost, right?
	I mean, I remember like in the crazy heat with immense amounts of bugs around, we had to dig a well.
	And you can dig a well with your hands if you want.
	It's going to take a long time.
	You're going to get some pretty bloody fingernails, but you can dig a well with your hands.
	He had fairly sensibly Decided to buy some shovels.
	Now, buying some shovel cost him, I don't know, 40 bucks for a couple of shovels, right?
	But that's efficient because you get the hold dug much quicker and you don't injure your hands or your workers' hands or your half-slave's hands in this case.
	So that's not exploitation.
	It's not like, well, you know, We have this hole, but this hole is minus $40.
	It took us four hours to dig this hole with shovels, so it's four hours, but we lost all this money because we paid for the shovels.
	And it's like, no, you didn't, because it would have been 40 hours without the shovels and injuries.
	So the shovels is producing the hole in four hours as opposed to 40 hours.
	The shovels are injury-free.
	Don't use the shovels.
	Your hands are... Cracked and scratched and broken and bleeding and all, right?
	So, the worker is paying the capitalist for the factory out of the proceeds of his earnings.
	They're both winning, as long as it's voluntary, like as long as it's not coercive or it's enslaved or even if there's mercantilist monopolies or the worker's equivalent of mercantilist monopolies, which is monopoly unions and so on.
	So what's the falsification theory?
	For wealth is the result of exploitation.
	With M, the more exploitation, the more wealth there should be.
	And there isn't. Now, wealth is a little bit more – can be a lot more concentrated under exploitation, but there's not more wealth in the society because as society gets more coercive and free trade is further diminished in labor and capital and materials and services, the more that free trade is interfered with, the more – the poorer society gets.
	I mean, if you look at the American economy, the GDP growth is down at least 50 percent since the 1960s.
	And, of course, the 1960s were a relative economic paradise of free market perfectionism relative to what is going on now.
	So it's all sort of testable things, right?
	So the other theory, of course, that Marxism has is that a society goes from feudalism to industrialization To communism without any particular effort.
	It's just the natural evolution of things.
	And so then when communists, say, take the Russian economy from feudalism straight through to communism through a violent revolution, they're saying they don't believe in their own theory, right?
	It's called scientific socialism.
	Then it goes very much against, right, the...
	The theory, the Marxist theory says that the bourgeoisie, the middle class, a small number of them escaped to the wealthy class and most of them fall down into the proletariat class.
	And so over the course of the 19th century, as the bourgeoisie or the middle class grew in size, wealth, numbers and influence, that went directly against the theory.
	So it's just, is it falsifiable?
	Is it something that you can prove or disprove?
	And if it's not one of those things, it's noise.
	It's exploitation. It's propaganda.
	It's propaganda. All economic differences between men and women are the result of sexism.
	Men hate women and want to pay them less.
	Okay. So, therefore, the countries...
	Which have the greatest amount of options for women should have the greatest closing of the gender wage gap.
	Because if men just hate hiring women into petroleum engineering departments, then when women have the greatest ability to choose petroleum engineering as one of many examples, which is the highest paying engineering job out of college, Then when women have more choice and there's less holding them back and societal acceptance for women in engineering roles, then you should get more women in petroleum engineering jobs or computer programming jobs or whatever, right?
	But of course, the exact opposite is true, that the more choices women have, the more they choose traditionally female, people-oriented, and lower-paying jobs.
	So when you have a job that involves things, you can make more money because things can be reproduced.
	Whereas if you have a job involving people, you can't really automate that, you can't control C, control V, you can't copy paste that.
	So you're going to make less money overall.
	A computer programmer puts his code in, that code can be copy pasted on a bazillion machines and he can make a fortune.
	But a kindergarten teacher has to teach a number of children every year and you can't reproduce that in the same way you can reproduce computer code or other things.
	So these are all theories.
	What's the falsification?
	What's the falsification for the theory of a global warming?
	Of course, they put out all these predictions that the Arctic ice will be gone by 2020.
	It, in fact, is much larger.
	The global temperatures will increase, even though over the last...
	Since 2015, there has been a significant increase in CO2, but the temperature has gone down.
	So, is it falsifiable?
	So, of course, theories which are proposed not for the pursuit of truth, but for the pursuit of power, Theories which are proposed not for the pursuit of truth but for the pursuit of power, those theories, I mean by definition, cannot be falsifiable.
	In other words, if Marxism is put forward to rouse the resentments of the working classes, as they're called, then it can't be falsifiable.
	If global warming is put forward in order to increase control over the economy and so on, then it can't be falsifiable.
	Because the purpose...
	If you're interested in the truth, then your propositions should be provable or disprovable so you know whether you're closer to the truth or further away from it.
	Which direction are you heading in?
	You understand? If the purpose of your GPS is to get you to a destination, it will try and get you to the destination and it will tell you if you're deviating from that destination.
	On the other hand, if the purpose of your GPS... Is to serve the oil companies by burning gasoline, then it's just going to drive you around randomly and never get you to your destination.
	It's got a fundamentally different purpose.
	And so all theories which are proposed, which are not falsifiable, where the people who propose them don't say, well, if these conditions are met or aren't met, then my hypothesis is false.
	Anybody who proposes a theory with no falsifiability is using that theory as a mechanism to gain power over you, which is why postmodernism and the significant expansion of oligarchical power in society goes hand in hand.
	Anything which is not falsifiable is there as an excuse to gain power over you.
	So it's basic self-defense to promote Proofability or falsifiability within particular theories, which is Mark, in particular, political power to deny the need or requirement for falsification.
	All right. Hope that helps.
	Great question. I appreciate it.
	All right. You can ask in the voice chat.
	Yeah, absolutely. If you have a question, you can just raise your hand in the voice chat and you can chat with me.
	I'm more happy to chat than to read texts.
	I am more happy to chat than to read texts since I'm trying to do sort of a voice Q&A. All right, let's see here.
	I'm just going to check in here, see if anybody has their hand raised.
	They do not. Oh, we have a shy group today.
	Well, it's probably a group that's at work, right?
	All right, let me do another question here.
	The real-world applicability of disprovability comes to play in refuting Lysenkoism or Fauciism, where a power organ makes assertions, usually under the guise of science, but offers no test against which the assertions can be disproven.
	So no matter what, you lose the argument.
	For example, Lysenko implemented Soviet agriculture reforms, and when they failed, and Ukrainians died in the millions in the resulting famine, he followed up with, the Kulex did it wrong or got in the way.
	Next time his reforms failed, It was some other excuse.
	The crux is that his reforms couldn't be tested because we'd need a multiverse to test his theory with an A-B test.
	So how can we combat this can't possibly win power play by state organs?
	Well, I don't know about the last...
	I mean, you can't win against the state, right?
	You can't win against the state.
	So as far as you need a multiverse to test his theory with an A-B test?
	No. No, no.
	You don't need that at all. Because you're thinking that the test of a theory...
	Is only in empiricism.
	No, no. The test of a theory, like if I said we should base the building of a bridge on the assumption that gravity is one-sixth what it is, right?
	In other words, if we were building a bridge on the moon, but we were actually like if I said, well, we'll build a bridge on Earth, but we'll pretend we're building it on the moon, right?
	Answer me this. Riddle me this, Batman.
	If I said...
	We're going to build a bridge on Earth, but we're going to pretend that it's only one-sixth of gravity as the Moon is.
	The bridge would fall, right?
	It would fall down. Now, would you say, hmm, that's interesting.
	That's interesting. So build a bridge on Earth as if it's on the Moon.
	Ooh, that's a tough one.
	I think what we'll have to do is we'll have to take your design, we'll have to build one bridge on the Moon, we'll have to build one bridge on the Earth, and we'll have to see which one stays up, right?
	You wouldn't need any empirical tests, right?
	You wouldn't need any empirical tests because you would know, based upon the logic, or illogic that I was proposing, that my moon-Earth bridge would fail.
	If I said, let's build...
	A bridge designed to take heavy loads and will build it out of a combination of balsa wood and soap bubbles, would you need to build it to know that it would fail?
	You would not. Because the load-bearing capacities of balsa wood and soap bubbles is extraordinarily low, and certainly far lower than the heavy trucks that would be required to cross the bridge.
	So, if there are contradictions in the hypothesis, you do not need to test the empirical outcome.
	If I said, I have a scientific theory that requires that gravity both attract and repel at the same time, and that gases both expand and contract when heated, you would say, I don't need to test that theory because it's a contradiction.
	So, if you have a theory that says, say for instance, that capitalism is It's evil because people are too greedy.
	Human greed, just you exploit and you grind down and you destroy and you harm people.
	Human greed is so great that free market exchanges end up with people being ground down and destroyed.
	Okay. So, you have a theory that says, well, If a small group of people take complete control of the government and enforce their will, everything will be fine.
	So what you're saying is that voluntary transactions are too corrupted by greed to be moral.
	However, coercive impositions are not subject to greed or the less for power.
	That's insane.
	You don't need to implement it.
	You know that if you dial up the corruption of human greed and the lust apparently every human being has to exploit others, and you put that in a voluntary free market interaction, that that's just deeply evil.
	But then, when a small number of people gain control of a totalitarian state apparatus or create and then control it, that that's fine.
	In other words, greed plus voluntary trade equals unbelievable levels of destruction and corruption.
	But greed and the thirst to exploit plus virtually limitless political power is paradise.
	That is wild.
	It's like saying, well, men really want to have sex with women, and that's a huge problem.
	So if we legalize rape, that will be fine.
	It's a massive contradiction.
	If greed is such a big problem, then free market voluntarism is the only way to minimize its evil effects, and therefore no communism.
	If greed is not such a big problem, then you don't need a massive totalitarian structure to solve such a small problem.
	So, yeah, you don't need the A-B testing for this kind of stuff.
	Alright, let me just go and check in here.
	Ah, yes. Yes!
	I'm sorry, I'll ask a question if they won't.
	Go for it. I'm sorry, I typed this out a moment ago, but after years of being a fan of yours, I decided to look into things that are more or less in agreeance with a lot of things you believe in.
	And over the last year, I started reading a lot of Ayn Rand, and I started trying to get also...
	A little more acclimated with economics.
	And I'm struggling to make sense of the idea that Austrians regard voluntary exchanges as mutually beneficial, and Ayn Rand saying that there can be a sacrifice in an exchange.
	And she says this applies to all exchanges, including economic ones.
	So it seems like those two are at contention with one another, and I really don't know how to make sense of that.
	Could you give me an example of the Randian example?
	Yeah, she makes the point in her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, that if you give somebody money that you know you need and would be severely detrimental to you, but you give it to them because they feel bad and they benefit, that would be a sacrifice.
	I could read verbatim what she has if I just grabbed the book, but that's kind of horrible.
	I think, yeah, because I've been misquoted so many times, I'm not saying you are doing that, but it might be better to get it from the smoky horse's mouth, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, yeah, I could do that.
	I think she actually uses the word disaster to describe the effects on you, but here it is.
	It says, if you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice.
	If you give it to a worthless stranger, it is.
	If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice.
	If you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial value
	according to this moral standard, or sort of moral standard.
	If you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself, that is the virtue of sacrifice
	of the pool.
	So it's a matter of what you trade and the value that you perceive.
	So you are willing to trade some time in conversation with me in the hopes that you will gain value out of this conversation.
	I hope we can fulfill that.
	I'm sure we can, but that's the idea.
	I'm willing to sacrifice some time doing other things in order to have this conversation with you and with the world also.
	As a whole, because I will benefit from it in terms of satisfaction and hopefully some donations, freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
	And so we're both exchanging time and hoping to be better off.
	The standard example, of course, in Austrian economics is somebody has a dollar, somebody has a pen, right?
	Bob has a dollar, Sally has a pen.
	And Sally then buys the pen from Bob for the dollar.
	Now, because it's a voluntary transaction, we know with absolute certainty that in the moment of transaction Bob wants Sally's dollar more than he wants his pen and Sally wants Bob's pen more than she wants her dollar because they're doing a voluntary exchange.
	So, both parties in the moment of exchange, and this isn't like, should be your kind, like, praxeologically, like, by the very definition of the interaction, two people exchanged in voluntary trade, both perceived themselves to be better off by making that trade.
	I'm sure you've read that.
	Does that sort of make sense? Yes, it does.
	Okay, now, what Ayn Rand is talking about is something quite a bit different.
	So she's saying, if you sacrifice something higher for something lower, then you've lost.
	Now, of course, this raises the question, why would you sacrifice something higher for something lower?
	Now, what she would probably reply is, if you accept a toxic moral...
	Which says, and this is Kantian ethics, right?
	She's a massive foe of Immanuel Kant.
	So Immanuel Kant said, look, if you give $5 to a homeless guy and you do it and feel better, it's not moral.
	Why is it not moral?
	The reason it's not moral is because you're not helping him.
	You're buying $5 worth of feeling good about yourself.
	It's selfish. So you can only do something moral if there's no benefit to you.
	In fact, the more it hurts, the more moral it is.
	Because you really should want to help the homeless guy, not just feel good about yourself.
	I mean, we call this virtue signaling in...
	In sort of the modern world.
	In virtue signaling, he says, look, if you're just doing stuff to feel good, you have no way of knowing if it's moral or not.
	In fact, because you're doing it to feel good, by definition, it's not moral.
	You're just doing it out of a kind of hedonism rather than a genuine desire to help someone else.
	Does that make sense? I'm not saying you agree with the argument.
	Do you sort of understand the approach?
	Yeah, totally. Okay.
	So the Austrian economics thing says you should exchange For mutual benefit.
	And by definition, it is for mutual benefit.
	So if I give $5 to a homeless guy, he wants the $5, obviously.
	And I want to give him $5 more than I don't want to give him $5.
	And the reason we know that is because I do it.
	So we don't know what the motives are.
	But we do know that – I mean this is based on – it's more of a psychological understanding.
	Anything that human beings do, they must prefer to do.
	I know it sounds kind of almost like axiomatic or a tautology, but it's a really important insight.
	Like whatever a human being is doing, he prefers to do.
	Now this is not incomprehensible in certain areas.
	If somebody works very hard to get a raise, then he wants the extra money and whatever.
	So we know that he prefers to get the raise rather than have more free time.
	If somebody has a job that doesn't have a lot of upside to it, it's a dead-end job,
	and that person goes to night school to improve his skills and then gets a better job, we
	say we know for a fact that he prefers to give up his free time in return for career
	advancement.
	We know that for a fact.
	Now, he may be right, he may be wrong, but I mean what the Austrians would call praxeologically
	or axiomatically, whatever a human being is doing is what the human being prefers to do.
	Can we sort of agree on that as a basis?
	Yes.
	Can I also provide an example?
	Yeah, great! Let's just say me and a friend are pretty late on paying rent or mortgage, but I have a little more money and I would be able to pay my mortgage, but because he's begging me for that money, I decide to give it to him and he can now pay his mortgage and I'm going to be late on bills and all kinds of economic or financial problems will arise from that.
	From my understanding, Ayn Rand would recognize that as a sacrifice, but The Austrian perspective asserts it's mutually beneficial because I'm exchanging money for his, I don't know, good emotions, good friendship.
	So if you do an exchange that's not coerced, it is beneficial to you in some way.
	Otherwise, human motivation makes no sense at all.
	We just act randomly then.
	Like, I just take a blender to my hand for no reason.
	You know what I mean? So yes, the Austrian would say if you voluntarily...
	Give money to your friend at the expense maybe you even get kicked out of your home or whatever, right?
	If you voluntarily give that to him, then that's what you prefer to do and there's a benefit to you and we know that because you're doing it voluntarily.
	Does that make sense? It does, but do you believe that that is against your rational self-interest as she would call it?
	Well, so hang on. So, I mean, these are the two poles.
	So the Austrians say, look, you're getting a benefit from risking homelessness by paying your friend's mortgage, right?
	So the Austrians say, you must be getting some benefit, otherwise you wouldn't do it.
	And the fact that you're doing it means that you're getting some benefit.
	Now, Kant would say, you were only moral in doing it if you gain no benefit, right?
	And this is what Ayn Rand has in terms of rational self-interest.
	This is what Ayn Rand has a huge issue with.
	And it's really, really, really impossible to universalize sacrifice.
	Because if you say to your friend, I'm going to pay your mortgage even though I might get kicked out of my own home and be homeless.
	I'm going to pay your mortgage because I'm going to make a sacrifice to you.
	I gain no pleasure from it.
	It's not beneficial to me.
	I don't want to do it, but I'm going to do it because it's, quote, the right thing to do.
	The right thing to do is sacrifice.
	Okay. Well, when you try and universalize that, what happens?
	Well, your friend, let's call him Bob, your friend Bob should not take your money.
	And he should sacrifice himself and say, listen, I don't want to take your money.
	It's my house. It's my responsibility.
	My bills to pay.
	I'll find some other method.
	I'll figure something out.
	Or maybe I will end up being homeless.
	Or maybe I'll end up moving in with you for a little while until I get it back.
	But I'm not going to take your money.
	Because I will take pleasure out of taking your money because it will get me out of being homeless.
	So if it's universalized, everybody must sacrifice their interest to others.
	Everyone must do things that are unpleasant to them that benefit others.
	Okay? So you say, okay, well, I'm going to give money to Bob to pay his mortgage.
	Because it's negative to me, but beneficial to Bob.
	But then Bob should say, there's no way that I'm going to take your money to pay my mortgage, which is negative to Bob, but beneficial to you.
	You see, it's asymmetric.
	One person benefits, one person loses.
	That's the Kantian argument.
	But if it's universalized, because Kant also says, act as if the principle of your action becomes a general rule for everyone, then everyone must sacrifice.
	But everyone can't sacrifice.
	Anymore than everyone can steal at the same time.
	Because for there to be sacrifice, it must be asymmetric.
	In other words, someone benefits and someone loses.
	But the moment you have someone benefits and someone loses, it can't be moral, it can't be universalized.
	So Ayn Rand's fundamental argument, I think, is be extraordinarily wary and suspicious of people who say you have to sacrifice.
	Because someone is collecting.
	And almost certainly the one who's telling you to sacrifice is the one who hopes to collect.
	So the government says to you, here's another example.
	So the government says to you, hey man, there are all these poor people in the world.
	You've seen them. You've got this giant building with bankers in it in Toronto.
	There's a bank building that literally has gold dust in the windows.
	Like it's a golden building.
	And you can see, of course, that there are these golden buildings that reach up to the very sky.
	And sometimes at the bottom of these buildings are guys living in cardboard boxes and shuffling around, whatever, right?
	Doing that streets of Philadelphia shuffle.
	So the government comes along and says, look, you have enough money.
	You're a middle class. You're whatever, right?
	You're wealthy. You have enough money.
	You should sacrifice some of your money so we can help these homeless people, right?
	And it's a sacrifice, right?
	Now, clearly the government doesn't think that you'll do it on your own.
	Otherwise, they wouldn't need to force you to do it, right?
	So they force you to do it and they say, no, no, this is a sacrifice.
	Now, funny story.
	It turns out that the government schools and the government propaganda that's telling you to sacrifice your wealth for the poor, it turns out that 90% of the money that you give to the government to help the poor is It gets kept by the people in the government.
	Like only 10% of that money ends up, thinking for the welfare state as a whole and other sort of poverty reduction programs, only 10% of the money, right?
	So they're saying you got to make all these sacrifices, right?
	Okay. But they're the ones benefiting.
	The government benefits because they get an underclass of people dependent upon government handouts and they get to swell their political base.
	They get to break property rights through income transfers and so on.
	So governments benefit. So they're saying, well, you've got to make sacrifices.
	But it turns out that everyone who's telling you to make sacrifices are the ones expecting to benefit from those sacrifices.
	In other words, they're exploiting you.
	They're saying, you should give me money even though it's negative for you, but then they keep the money that's positive for them.
	So they're not doing anything negative for them.
	So it doesn't...
	I think that's sort of the difference.
	So when it comes to trade, there are mutually beneficial trades.
	And we can think of a situation where you would pay Bob's mortgage, even if it meant you'd be homeless.
	I mean, we could think of a million circumstances.
	One that pops into mind is maybe Bob gave you a kidney and saved your life.
	And now Bob has fallen on hard times and you're willing to help him out.
	Because he's the only reason you're alive.
	He was the only match in the universe or he did something.
	He helped you out when you were really down and now you're just repaying the favor, in which case you get the satisfaction of justice and friendship.
	So there could be So Ayn Rand is saying, look, if you want to help your friend and your friend is a good guy and he's helped you in the past or it's mutual, yeah, by all means.
	Obviously, that's win-win, right?
	You're cementing the bonds of friendship and repaying value for value, the value being his past generosity to you or expected future generosity in return or something like that.
	Good for you, right? But she says, look, do not fall prey to this sacrificial mentality where you...
	Have to, quote, help others at your own expense with no benefit to yourself.
	Because that's just being exploited.
	Does that... So I hope that squares some of these circles.
	Or unsquares them, I guess.
	Yeah, yeah. I think it does.
	I think just listening to you talk about it, kind of...
	For a second, I thought...
	Maybe I'm backpedaling a little bit, but like...
	The idea that when you exchange...
	In that moment, you both assume you're benefiting from it.
	I don't think that has to account for your rational self-interest in order to explain whether it's mutually beneficial.
	Because in the moment, like you said, that's what you prefer to do.
	Even if it's not in your best interest, or as she would describe it, your rational self-interest.
	So you decide to do it.
	That's the preferable thing.
	You do it. Well, so for Ayn Rand, sacrifice is the surrender of a higher value to a lower value or a non-value or maybe even an anti-value.
	And the argument really against this Kantian ethics of if you benefit from it, it's not moral, is you can't escape it.
	So let's say there's a guy, I absolutely hate him, right?
	He's done terrible things to me and he's an awful person and so on.
	And he's now fallen upon hard times.
	Now Kant would say you should give him money and it's moral to give him money because you don't want to.
	Okay, so if I genuinely don't want to, then I won't do it.
	However, if I want to conform to Kantian ethics, then I will do it to be a good person, according to the Kant thing that the more it hurts you, the more negative it is for you, the more moral it is.
	So I'm still doing it because I want something, and what I want is to conform to Kantian ethics.
	So we haven't escaped the old, you have to have a benefit.
	You can't have a benefit when you do something moral.
	Because now, I've got this inverse world where the more it hurts, the better it is.
	And I'm still doing something to get a benefit.
	And the benefit is, I'm a good person according to Kantian ethics.
	So what Kant is trying to do in some ways is to say, you should act...
	With no motivation to act whatsoever.
	Or you should act in the opposite of your motivation to act.
	Now, that's impossible.
	Because if I say, well, I really don't want to help this guy, and I also really don't want to conform to Kantian ethics, then I'm not going to give him the money, right?
	So the only reason I give him the money is because I conform to the Kantian ethics that says the more it hurts, the better it is.
	The more you don't want to do it, the more you should do it.
	But then I'm gaining the benefit of conforming to Kantian ethics.
	So he's saying you shouldn't get any benefit out of doing it And therefore, you should do it to be a good person.
	But the only reason you would conform to that is because you believe that being a good person is more important than holding onto your property, even to give it to someone who's hated, or especially to someone who's hated.
	So it's completely impossible to conform to the Kantian ethics.
	And of course, Ayn Rand, as a rational egoist, would say, if you have a moral standard that's impossible to adhere to, it's just being inflicted on you to conform.
	To exploit you.
	And one of the great dangers of these kinds of exchanges, right, a sort of charity, is that if someone doesn't have anything to offer you, Then what they will offer you is one of two things, a stick or a carrot.
	One, they will offer you feeling like a good person, right?
	So the homeless guy says, you give him 10 bucks or whatever, and he says, oh, bless you, you're such a wonderful person, and he's grateful, and okay, so you feel like a good person.
	So what he's producing is not a good, but a service.
	He is a dopamine dispenser.
	So he's going to be really, really grateful, and you're going to feel like a good person, and he's triggering dopamine in you.
	He's kind of like a drug dealer.
	He's triggering dopamine in you to make you feel like a good person.
	And so you're buying a high from him by giving him the $10.
	Okay, that's something that can happen.
	So he doesn't have anything of immediate value to offer you, but he has the magic wand to make you feel like a good person, get the dopamine, and all of that, right?
	Now, the problem, of course, and in this Kant, he's kind of right, I think.
	That is kind of dangerous because if you are giving money to homeless people in order to feel like a good person, you're not fundamentally interested in solving the problem of homelessness.
	So let's say you're kind of depressed, but every morning you give $10 to a homeless guy to feel better about yourself.
	Let's say the next morning there aren't any homeless guys, then you're going to feel bad.
	If it's a selfish pleasure that you're getting out of a problem, then you don't really want to solve the problem.
	That Kant has, I think, a nugget of truth.
	We all know this about the revolutions that never end.
	The women who want equality, and then they want subsidies, and then they want female supremacy.
	All of this, it's just the revolution never ends.
	I get... I get where that is coming from.
	Now, the other thing, of course, that happens is the carrot and the stick, which is guilt.
	So let's say that your aunt has been super mean to you your whole life.
	She's unmarried. She's alone.
	She lives a couple of streets over and she's ill and she's depressed.
	And she calls you and wants you to come over and take care of her and clean her cat's litter box and all this kind of stuff, right?
	And you don't want to do it because she's been mean to you, horrible to you and all of that.
	Now, what she could do is she could say, well, I'm very wealthy.
	I'm dying. I'm going to put you in my will.
	Okay, so that's a carrot. But generally what happens is people will inflict negative emotions on you if you don't conform with them.
	And that's that you feel guilty or you're ungrateful or I'm going to tell your mother what a horrible person you are or, you know, like I'm going to just inflict as much guilt as humanly possible on you.
	And then you go over and you conform, not in the pursuit of a positive, like the dopamine when you give the homeless guy the $5, but the avoidance of a negative, which is the self-recrimination of the guilt bomb that she's implanted, I assume, successfully in your head.
	So the problem with this approach is that If you are in pursuit of the dopamine to feel good by giving the money to someone, then you're always going to need someone worse off than you and you're going to somewhat resist lifting people up because you want to feel like a good person by giving money.
	And that's one of the great problems of charity, which is complicated and so on.
	But the other thing too is that if you give resources in order to avoid feeling negative, right?
	Like, I mean, a lot of people, let's say you have a dysfunctional mom and And she calls you and she's really upset about something and it sounds kind of petty and stupid and she wants you to call back and you know it's going to be an hour of listening to her water torture drip drip complain about her neighbor who gave her her funny look or something like that.
	Okay, so you don't want to call her back.
	So why do you call her back?
	You call her back so that you avoid feeling guilty because you know she's going to inflict guilt upon you if you don't call her back, right?
	So... That is a trade.
	You're trading time to avoid feeling guilty.
	But when you do that, you fuel the value of inflicting guilt.
	So when you act in a way that provides other people resources, because otherwise they will abuse you, or try to, or verbal abuse or whatever, then the problem is that you are making the infliction of guilt Valuable.
	In other words, your mother doesn't have to provide positive, wonderful things to you.
	Of course I want to help.
	Of course I want to call, see how you're doing.
	And if you're upset, you know, you're a great person.
	You've done wonderful things in my life.
	If you're upset, I'd love to hear about it.
	Anything I can do to help, even if it's just listening, fantastic, right?
	You know, if my daughter has a problem, I mean, I'll sit down with her all day to talk about it.
	Friends and so on. Wonderful, right?
	So there's the positive economics, which is trading value for value.
	And then there's negative economics, which is gathering resources via the threat of punishment.
	And of course, you know, the state is in the latter.
	The free market tends to be in the former.
	And the decisions that we make about virtue in our lives...
	I mean, this is, I think, really, really important.
	If you reward people...
	Based upon the threat of punishment, then you are making threats valuable.
	You are paying people with your time, energy and maybe even money, resources and so on.
	You are paying people to threaten you.
	So if your mom wants you to call her back and you don't want to call her back, but you call her back out of guilt, you are rewarding her for threatening you with guilt.
	And then people wonder why there's so much manipulation and abuse and guilt-tripping and all of that.
	Well, because every time you feed it, whatever you feed grows, whatever you starve shrinks, right?
	So if you feed the infliction of abuse and reward it with resources, time, effort, energy, whatever...
	Then you are helping make the world a worse place.
	Because rather than people providing positive values in the positive economic sphere, they are providing negative value.
	In other words, it's not the bestowing of a positive but the withholding of a negative that you're buying.
	And whenever you pay people to withhold a negative when you have a choice, you're just rewarding dysfunctional and destructive behavior.
	Contributing to why there's so much of it in the world.
	I hope that wasn't too much of a tangent, if that helps.
	That's great. Mind if I ask one quick question before I go?
	This has been the most thought-provoking lunch break I've ever had at work.
	Excellent. Just quick questions.
	I know the last few years you've focused more on philosophy rather than politics.
	I love listening to you examine other philosophies.
	I'm just curious, being a Rand fan yourself, I've been very caught up on her for the last year.
	I'm going to go.
	I think almost entirely on epistemology. I know you don't agree with her political conclusions. I'm on board with you
	But it seems like her ethics aren't far divorced from UPB and I was just curious if you'd ever
	Consider doing an examination of objectivist ethics in comparison to UPB because I believe UPB is the correct
	thing It's the rational, it is coherent.
	I just don't see too much divorce from the two theories.
	I'm curious if you'd ever voice your contention.
	Yeah, so I think what you should do is go to fdrpodcast.com.
	I have a three-part series, The Truth About Ayn Rand.
	Yeah, I've checked that out.
	And I thought the fourth one was supposed to be a critique, and I didn't see it there.
	Yeah, I never got around to the fourth one.
	I mean, I think that's an interesting thing.
	I will make a note of that. The comparison of UPB with objectivist ethics would be a very good project, and I appreciate you bringing that up.
	Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for answering these questions today.
	Like I said, you inspired me to even look into it because of years of listening to your philosophy.
	I knew you had a lot of agreements with her, so I decided to check her out.
	She's great. She's just been a wonderful inspiration to be in the realm of philosophy.
	I'm not sure I answered the questions, but I think there's some fairly good rebuttals, and these questions can really be answered in half an hour or whatever, but I think there's some fairly good rebuttals, and hopefully that's school for thought for people who might want to go further along that.
	Yes, thank you very much.
	I appreciate that now. Tim, did you come and go?
	You have a good day. Yeah, thanks, man.
	I appreciate it. And let's do Mr.
	HH, if you want to unmute.
	I'm all ears. Hey, good evening, Seth.
	Hello. Can you hear me?
	Yes. That's correct.
	Recently... In the chat with a guy who visited 12 prostitutes, you said that it wasn't his fault because he didn't know any better.
	And recently in the freemium chat, we had a discussion about people acting out their childhood trauma.
	And there's always free will.
	How do those two pair?
	I'll probably end up asking this question about once a year.
	How does re-enactment of childhood trauma Yeah, I'm pretty positive, my friend.
	And here's the thing, like, if you hear something that's kind of surprising for me, like, I say to an adult, you're absolutely not responsible for any moral choice you made as an adult.
	I don't think I would ever phrase it that way.
	So the problem is that I think it's something you kind of remember or you got this impression, but without the precision, I'm just defending against a straw man.
	So I don't know that I said to the guy, I don't remember saying to the guy, and I can't imagine I would, that you are 0% responsible for visiting 12 prostitutes as an adult.
	I may have said you have to find a way to forgive yourself because there were, you know, pressures and history and abuse and a lack of training and you have to find some way to live with it, which means you can't just say, well, I'm just a terrible person and I'll be a terrible person forever and there's no escaping this moral hell that I've created and all that.
	I may have said that there's – you have to find some way to forgive yourself, which means understand the influences that led you to that decision, but I don't think I would say that you're absolutely zero – Yeah, listen, I mean, I want to answer the question, but I don't want to...
	I mean, it's not always – obviously, I make mistakes and so on, right?
	And maybe I overemphasize something, but I can't imagine, since I've always said that 100% responsibility is the way to live in life.
	But 100% responsibility, it's something like this.
	So let's say that it's really important for you to learn Japanese as a language.
	And your parents didn't teach you Japanese, obviously, when you were growing up.
	That's why you have to learn it.
	Now, is it your fault that you don't learn...
	Sorry, is it your fault that you don't know Japanese?
	Well, no, because if you'd grown up speaking Japanese in Japan, you'd know Japanese.
	But you also... It wouldn't be your reward or it wouldn't...
	We wouldn't say to you, wow, it's fantastic that you learn Japanese, if that's the language you grew up with, right?
	So as an adult, if you need to learn Japanese, you shouldn't say to yourself...
	I'm just a complete and total idiot for not knowing Japanese because you weren't raised with it, right?
	In the same way, if you're raised without any standards or any morals or any virtues and so on, then, well, you're still responsible as an adult for failing to learn these virtues, for failing to figure these things out, for failing to go to therapy, for failing to develop self-knowledge.
	But at the same time, I think it's important to have some gentleness with yourself and not just sort of lacerate yourself because that's usually a continuation of abuse.
	So find some way to live.
	So, I mean, I've talked about this before that I was a good, I don't know, probably 15 years that I was studying philosophy before I genuinely and deeply began to implement it in all of my personal relationships.
	So, 15 years, right?
	So, for 15 years, I had people around me who were resolutely anti-rational, anti-genuine self-knowledge, in many ways anti-therapy, and I had those people in my life.
	So, what's my relationship to that?
	Am I responsible for having those people in my life?
	Absolutely. 100%.
	However...
	I didn't really understand an alternative.
	Now, am I responsible for not understanding that alternative?
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	However, am I going to sit there and say, well, I was just a complete hypocrite for 15 years, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Well, I didn't have any examples of moral integrity in my life.
	I mean, I remember when I read Barbara Brandon's book Judgment Day about her time in I mean, I don't want to use a C word, but her time in Ayn Rand's inner circle and the fact that Ayn Rand had an affair with one of her acolytes and cheated on her husband and was fairly vicious towards her husband and so on.
	And the fact that Ayn Rand was on...
	Uppers for decades because she didn't want to get fat and that she was a chain smoker who never overcame her addiction.
	And, you know, just things that, again, nobody's perfect.
	I understand all of that. But, you know, that she would go over to Nathaniel Brandon's place and kick his wife out and she'd wander the streets while her husband was having sex with Ayn Rand.
	That's gross. Like, that's vile to me.
	And again, nobody's perfect.
	I understand all of that.
	And I don't think I have hysterically high standards.
	But maybe don't kick your student's wife out of the house so you can have sex with him and she's got to wander the streets.
	And again, I don't know the absolute truth about any of this sort of stuff, but I think that the major facts of the matter are not particularly in contention.
	So I remember, honestly, I remember the word that I used.
	I said, I'm devastated.
	I'm devastated. I'm devastated by that.
	So even people that I looked up to enormously, you lift the lid and it's...
	It's pretty vile, a lot of times, what's going on.
	And of course, people are sort of seeing this in some of the right-wing influences, marital immolations and so on that's sort of going on.
	And again, nobody's perfect.
	I'm not perfect, but I absolutely promise and guarantee you that I'm not banging some fan of this show and kicking his wife out to wander the streets to do so, or her husband out, right?
	Kicking her husband out. To do so.
	So again, I didn't know perfection, but, you know, there's certain sort of...
	So I didn't have, in particular, standards where I looked and said, you know, like, she was one of my biggest influences, and when you read about her private life, I mean, it was fairly wretched in many ways.
	And I also remember when I saw her being interviewed, I think Dick Cavett and Phil Donahue and some other people I think were interviewing her and she just, the whole body language, sort of hard-eyed, suspicious, cold and aggressive and just, there was no particular spiritual joy or any sense of happiness or positivity in her.
	And again, this was older, she was older and so on.
	And also the fact that she, in one of her books, You know, there was a sort of Kurt statement at the end of it, which said, you know, Nathaniel Brandon is no longer associated with me or objectivism or anything like that.
	Now, Nathaniel Brandon was doing a lot of work to formalize and structuralize and bring psychology into objectivism.
	Ayn Rand said she didn't really understand psychology, was never particularly interested in it, which you can kind of understand from her portrayals.
	So... Nathaniel Brandon was a very good communicator and more charismatic and so on.
	And even when I saw – this isn't a stupid thing, right?
	So even when I finally got a chance to see this guy, he was kind of a hero of mine when I was younger.
	The Psychology of Self-Esteem was a very powerful book for me because basically it said you have to earn your self-regard.
	You can't just will it, which is away from the sort of fantasy Barbary flu flu that was going on in the 70s and 80s.
	And even when I saw him, I was actually quite struck by his massive obesity.
	The guy was huge, and that's, you know, not necessarily a very positive thing to see when you are looking at somebody who talks about self-restraint and virtue.
	And I remember having a conversation with him when I first saw him speak, and I was, I think, in my late teens or early 20s.
	And he had a question.
	He sort of phrased a question in the speech.
	Where he said, we don't know why some children seem to be kind of indestructible.
	No matter how much trauma they go through, they end up relatively okay.
	And I went up to him afterwards and I said, listen, Dr.
	Brandon, I really appreciate this.
	I'm a huge fan. You know, one thought that I would give you is that there is a kind of hibernation that traumatized children go into.
	Where you simply resist all the negative stimuli by shutting down your inputs in a way and going inward and becoming more imaginative.
	It's sort of like when you, you know, I have a computer and when I put the computer to sleep, it's not off, it's not dead, but it's waiting, it's in hibernation.
	And he leaned forward and he said, oh, what kind of computer do you have?
	It's like, of all the...
	And again, I'm not, you know, maybe he was just having a bad day or something like that, but I thought it was a fairly interesting point to make, and it was certainly very important to me, because I'd struggled with how I survived when so many other people didn't, and I just got the most nonsensical, irrelevant, whatever. And now, of course, I had conversations with him later over the course of this show, which were better and so on, but...
	It's a little disappointing. I didn't find his speech particularly great.
	I found his appearance to be rather off-putting in terms of virtue.
	And when I tried to explain something that was very important...
	Now, again, I'm not sitting here saying, you know, you will now be my literary assistant.
	You know, it's just like anything that would be of interest.
	I thought it was a fairly decent explanation, which is also why a lot of traumatized children end up very creative and imaginative.
	You just have to put up a wall between yourself and outside stimuli so that you can survive.
	It does cut off some of your social skills development, but it does allow you to survive.
	And disassociation is quite common to torture as well.
	You're sort of floating outside your body and so on.
	It's a way to survive. Not the most brilliant insight, but not bad.
	But this non-sequitur of like the least important thing was the brand of computer that I used in the analogy, but it was the only thing that he focused on.
	And again, bad day.
	We all have them, but...
	I was so the point was that all the people who had significantly influenced me
	I did not see them acting with particularly
	spectacular nobility and integrity in their own personal lives
	and I think that threw me into a bit of a spin at the time and philosophy was a bit more abstract
	and a bit less something that you actually do in your life because if you think about sort of the affair
	between Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Brandon
	that affair did a lot to crater the whole movement in other words they both put lust
	above virtue and the achievement of virtue
	in the world because that Nathaniel Brandon was sort of the public face of
	objectivism in a way that Leonard Peikoff was not able to Nathaniel Brandon was, I think, a lot more charismatic and a better public speaker and so on, although the I mean, it's a good way of explaining it.
	It's good stuff, but he just doesn't have that charisma.
	Of course, Leonard Peikoff was severely beaten as a child, if I remember rightly, and this was all very tragic, and I think it interfered a lot with his ability to positively and gainfully engage with an audience.
	So Nathaniel Brandon was sort of the public face of objectivism.
	And the affair, or I think it was more than one affairs in the whole group, it kind of split things and it was a wreck and it was a mess and it really did fracture the capacity of Nathaniel Brandon to bring objectivism to the mainstream.
	And so this just seemed to me sordid and ugly and messy and just wrong, really, to say The sort of high moral mission is virtue and then to fall prey to at least what to me would be characterized as the sin of lust and so on and to wreck marriages and wreck the sort of public reception and acceptance of philosophy.
	It's just not great.
	It's not great at all.
	It's not evil. Because it was all voluntary.
	But you can have things be very negative without them being evil.
	And I also do think that there was a certain amount of deception.
	I mean, when I read that statement, I was still in my teens, and I read that statement.
	I remember talking to a friend of mine, the statement where Nathaniel Brandon is no longer associated with the objective of the mind or anything like that.
	And I remember saying to my friend, oh, they had an affair.
	And he's like, oh, come on, don't be ridiculous, right?
	So my initial instincts turned out to be correct, but it took me a long time to actually get a confirmation of that.
	And of course, you go into biographies of people you respect with a certain amount of trepidation.
	I mean, I do, don't you? Sort of go into...
	Biographies with people with a certain amount of trepidation because you just don't know what rocks you're going to kick over, right?
	I mean, like John Maynard Keynes and the boys that he had for rent in Tunisia and so on.
	It's just, you know, it's...
	Not that I had a huge amount of respect for John Maynard Keynes, but there's just this sordid stuff that goes on.
	It's kind of like a friend of mine was saying, I just wish that artists I liked would stop tweeting because I like their art, but their thoughts are just horrifying.
	Unfortunately, when you lift that lid, it's kind of bad.
	For me, does that mean I wasn't responsible for failing to fully manifest philosophy in my daily life?
	No. No, I'm still 100% responsible for that.
	But in order for me to have an understanding and some sympathy for where I was coming from, it's pretty easy to use a computer.
	It's pretty hard to invent a computer.
	And I felt when it came to personal integrity and the most abstract principles being the most manifest in your immediate life, that's not a big thing in philosophy, man.
	That's just not a big thing.
	It's not a big thing in philosophy.
	Philosophers will talk about abstract values and virtues and the caves and reason and so on, but how many philosophers said, well, violence is bad and the place where violence is the most enacted is in the home against children?
	That's a very obvious, obvious thing, right?
	And it's not really in libertarianism, and I really do think that I was the one who put the most emphasis by far on that basic thing, right?
	If you are for the non-aggression principle, then you should oppose violations of the non-aggression principle.
	And the most widespread and grievous violation of the non-aggression principle is abuse against children.
	And it's perfectly legal to not abuse children, right?
	You can't necessarily say, well, I'm going to oppose foreign aid because you can't really do much about that.
	But you can do things about violations of the non-aggression principle in your own family, in your own life, with your own children, right?
	And so because I sort of finally crossed that bridge to say that the most abstract principles should be enacted where they're the most prevalent and where you have the most control.
	And the most prevalent violation of the non-aggression principle is aggression against children, and it's the one in which you have the most control.
	So promoting that, you know, it took me a while to get from the abstract principles through the hypocrisy of a lot of the people who are philosophers.
	It took me a long time.
	But that's a big journey.
	That's a big journey, and I did not have a precedent for that.
	I did not have a precedent to that.
	I mean, even Ayn Rand, when she kicked Nathaniel Brandon out of the movement, which is when Nathaniel Brandon no longer wanted to sleep with her, and I think she was a multi-decade chain smoker who was like 60, and I imagine that the lust element probably kind of evaporated over the course of that relationship.
	So she kicked him out.
	And the impression that I got was, you know, he had committed some grave moral sin or crime or something like that, when, as far as I understand it, he just didn't want to sleep with her anymore.
	So it was, you know, fairly petty and squalid sexual rage, in my opinion.
	I don't know, obviously, for sure.
	They're both dead now. We'll never know for sure in many ways, but that's...
	That's not good. Shouldn't she have been honest, since honesty is very important, and said, well, we had an affair with him, he didn't want to sleep with me anymore, so I don't want him to be part of the movement.
	Well, that's honest. But that's not what she did.
	As far as I know, maybe there's exceptions or there's things that I'm not aware of, so this is all just based upon my understanding, which is far from perfect in these matters, but sort of the stuff that I have read.
	But all the caveats of the known universe, I... So, for me to go from abstract values and virtues to the most visceral implementation in the most personal spheres is a journey that philosophy had not made for 3000 years.
	Philosophy had not made for 3000 years.
	Philosophy is all about reason over force, but somehow, over 3,000 years, the idea that we should reason with children, not force them, had completely escaped philosophers as a whole.
	It's incredible when you think about it.
	I mean, the world looks flat.
	I get that. It turns out to be a sphere.
	It looks flat, you know, down at the bottom of where we are, real close up, nose deep to it.
	I get that. But the idea that we should...
	Philosophy is all about the primacy of reason over force, the elevation of reason over force.
	But somehow, philosophy says, well, you know, people should be rational, but we should absolutely beat them for the first 20 years of their life or the first 15 years of their life.
	We should greet children in the world with beatings and screamings and punishments, and then we should really, really demand that they be rational When they're older.
	So we'll spend the first 15 years beating the hell out of them and then we'll chastise them for not being rational enough.
	That's a trap, you understand?
	Philosophy in that sense, that's a trap.
	That's a psych.
	That's a gotcha. Because surely philosophers should say, well, if we want people to be reasonable, surely we should reason with children.
	Surely that should be what we do first and foremost, reason with children.
	You know, if you want people to speak Japanese, maybe teach them Japanese when they're children.
	It's a whole lot easier.
	Right? See, to be children rather than reason with them makes them averse to reason because it's scar tissue.
	It's one thing to not teach a kid Japanese.
	It's another thing to beat a child every time he tries to learn Japanese and then chastise him as an adult for not knowing Japanese.
	I mean, it's a mind frack of the very first order.
	So, do I sit there and say, gosh, you know, for like, I don't know, from the age of 15 to 30 or whatever, I really wasn't living my values hugely well.
	Yeah, I'm 100% responsible for that.
	I'm 100% responsible for that.
	Do I castigate and blame myself and say I'm a hypocrite?
	No. I mean, that's a hell of a journey.
	To say, I have got to take a leap, let's say, 20 to 30.
	I've got 10 years...
	I've got 10 years to make a leap that philosophy hasn't made in 3,000 years.
	That the greatest collective geniuses of the planet have not made that leap in 3,000 years.
	That reason starts with children.
	And that spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	Even libertarians are all big on the NAP. We're not a huge fan of that particular slice of obvious reason.
	So... Am I going to say I'm 100% responsible for not living with significant integrity in my personal relationships?
	Absolutely. However, the mitigating factor, Your Honor, so to speak, is that no one had and that when I did start to live with genuine integrity in my personal relationships, there was a hell of a desert to cross and I sure as hell did not know if there was anything on the other side.
	I had to let go of everything with no knowledge if I was ever going to get to anything.
	And I talk about this in one of my books, The Desert You Have to Cross to get to the small but growing village of the reasonable.
	So I'm not going to sit there and say, my gosh, I was such a hypocrite.
	Fifteen years straight, I was such a hypocrite.
	I'm not going to say that. I'm still 100% responsible.
	For not implementing.
	But you also should not ask of yourself the completely impossible.
	Or the almost impossible.
	In other words, if I'm going to get mad at myself for taking 10 years to implement philosophy, and I know I started studying philosophy at the age of 15, but let's talk about when I had some reasonable financial independence and so on, after I'd done my work up north, when I finally went to university and so on, I'd say around then I probably had a bit more independence and could have done more with that.
	So if I sort of say, well, you know, gosh, you know, I'm just a terrible person because I didn't Implement philosophy in my personal life over that 10-year period.
	Okay. But there's 3,000 years before that where the greatest philosophers in the world didn't.
	So am I going to sit there and say, oh, well, you know, but I'm going to really get mad at myself.
	How about I get a little mad at those guys for not pointing that obvious fact out?
	How about I get a little mad at a culture That claimed it wanted to protect children but did the exact opposite in practice, usually.
	So if you're not taught something, it's grueling to learn.
	You're 100% responsible for learning it and for avoiding learning it.
	But there is a history and a past that we come from.
	And I just don't want people to get mad at themselves.
	Like I say, okay, well, I can get mad at myself 10 years.
	Okay, but what about 3,000 years?
	What about 3,000 years?
	If I'm going to get mad at myself for 10 years which I finally figured out, how about 3,000 years where they didn't figure it out?
	Who am I supposed to be more mad at?
	Me at the age of 20 not figuring it out or brilliant philosophers at the age of 70 who didn't mention it once?
	So it's really about this kind of perspective.
	So this listener had really dysfunctional parents That was a giant mess, as you've heard in the call.
	And okay, so let's say he gets mad at himself for his dysfunction when he was 20 or 21 or 25.
	Okay, then he's going to be even more mad at his parents' dysfunction when he was a kid.
	What I am against is the isolation, the laser-like isolation of your choices.
	And if I just say, well, I was a hypocrite for 10 years or 15 years or whatever, right?
	Because I didn't live all these abstract values in my personal life.
	As much as I should. I did a lot of them, right?
	I mean, I wasn't completely ignoring.
	There wasn't a magical, interstellar, alternate universe divide between my values and my life.
	But I did not apply them consistently to my personal relationships.
	And as it turned out, when I did apply them consistently to my personal relationships, they all folded and failed and fell away, which is a pretty tough thing.
	It's a pretty tough thing. So I just don't want people, you know, if you've done something wrong in your life, and we all have, obviously, if you've done something wrong in your life, I don't want people to laser-like just focus on their own failings without also taking into account the failings of others that contributed to that.
	That's what I don't want, people to isolate themselves and blame themselves and feel like terrible people until the end of time, but to put things in their proper context.
	I mean, you could argue that in the application of abstract principles to one's personal life, in particular in the realm of parenting and spanking, that I made more progress in 10 years than philosophy had made in 3,000 years.
	That's a case you could make.
	That in 10 years I made more progress in the application of the non-aggression principle and the growth of reason than philosophers have made in 3,000 years.
	Now, am I going to sit there and say, well, boy, it took me 10 years, that's really bad, or am I going to say, holy crap, philosophers hadn't done it in 3,000 years, I did it in 10.
	Now, I didn't do it alone, and I'm not going to, right?
	So, I'm simplifying it down to the extreme, but just for the sake of vividness and connectability, right?
	And it was more than me, and I made mistakes, and so on, right?
	But I have absolutely...
	I think had one of the biggest changes in history has been how I was raised to how I'm raising my daughter.
	Right. How I was raised was with mysticism, anti-rationality, violence, abandonment, despair, hatred, and wild punishments, not just from my own parents, but from society as a whole.
	I was beaten in boarding schools and so on.
	I think that I've made enormous progress in the realm, certainly, of intergenerational trauma.
	My daughter is a very happy and joyful hero.
	We have so much fun together.
	She is such a blast to spend time with.
	And she is smart and wise and funny and engaged and sarcastic.
	She's a teenager and I have a little bit of that too.
	So she's just a real delight.
	And I have managed to implement peaceful parenting 100%.
	I mean, it doesn't mean it's perfect parenting.
	I don't even know what that means. And I still have to live in contemporary culture and so on.
	But I've never hit her, obviously.
	Never called her a name. Never raised my voice at her.
	Never punished her. So I can say, wow, that's a lot of progress.
	And really the progress is what matters.
	If your parents raise you and lock you in the house and drug you with video games and couches and feed you like you're a sumo wrestler, and then you enter into adulthood with terrible eating habits and obesity, and it takes you 10 years to get to a healthy weight, Do you just blame yourself and say, well, I was just fat as an adult?
	Yeah, you were, and you're 100% responsible for taking control of your health.
	But you do have a history that matters.
	Now, the history should not be an excuse, but erasing the history makes you 100% responsible for how you entered into adulthood.
	And that leads to self-attack.
	So I hope that...
	I'm sorry for the lengthy speech, but it's a very, very complicated and fascinating topic about sort of personal ownership and responsibility.
	I mean, I would be an entirely different philosopher if I spoke Arabic, not English.
	And I'm not responsible for growing up learning English.
	It's just where I was born, right?
	And the family that I was raised in.
	I hope that...
	It makes some sense, and I'm certainly happy if you have more questions or criticisms or issues.
	And it's a great question to raise, by the way, so if you want to chime in, I'm all ears.
	Well, you can make the counterargument even stronger by turning on the TV. The amount of misinformation in the culture, it's frankly ridiculous.
	Women are encouraged to start OnlyFans.
	Young men are encouraged to sit in their mom's basement and play video games.
	Everyone is encouraged to take safe and effective treatments.
	And the amount of willpower it takes to resist that, it's rare.
	And so I keep wondering, How much are people to blame for the consequences of their mistakes if those mistakes are actively encouraged by society?
	That's another complicated question.
	It's another complicated question.
	The internet has made it much easier, of course.
	The internet has made it much easier to hold people accountable because when you have the
	infinity of human knowledge riding your ass in your back pocket, you're a little bit more
	responsible.
	Like so I've mentioned this before but people who believe obvious media hoaxes, you know
	the fine people hoax that Donald Trump referred to neo-Nazis as fine people, you're literally
	30 seconds away from being told the truth about that and people get sent these links
	and if they don't watch these links or they don't, well they watch the links but they
	make excuses.
	Okay, so the responsibility level has gone way up.
	And you sort of think of your average medieval peasant like a serf in Spain or France or England in the 13th century.
	Well, they usually couldn't read.
	They didn't understand Latin.
	And how much were they responsible for their beliefs about the world?
	Well, I mean, very little, I would say.
	The information just wasn't there.
	And the books weren't really available until the late 15th century with the printing press.
	And even then, they were still pretty elite items.
	But now everybody has the entirety of human knowledge sitting in their pocket.
	Accessible, right? One quick look up and it's right there.
	So this has made people enormously...
	You know, and I do think, and it's really, really, really sad to think about this, but I think of all the people who, you know, I got deplatformed a couple of years ago, and all the people, and it was most people who didn't follow me to a new platform, and I think about all of the literally life-saving information that I've been pumping out over the last couple of years, and what a shame it was that people didn't follow.
	It could have saved them An enormous amount of problems on just about every sphere.
	I think we all kind of get what I'm talking about.
	Are they responsible?
	Yeah. I mean, if they followed me and I had useful and good things to say and they chose not to follow me and made bad decisions on a variety of things based upon a lack of information when I was still pumping that information all out for free, they knew all about me.
	Well, obviously, they would be responsible, if that makes sense.
	Yeah. Yeah, it is quite sad, but for those of you, of course, who did come along on the journey, I think you got massive and even potentially life-saving or health-enhancing benefits out of it, and that's good for you.
	I like to think you made the right call.
	Yeah, and it is this OnlyFans thing as well.
	I was reading an article about some woman who dropped out of medical school to start
	an OnlyFans because she's going to make much more money selling digital nudity to simps
	than actually, I don't know what shilling for Big Pharma, I don't know what doctors
	do these days but something like that.
	Alright, well listen, I appreciate the call and I appreciate the question.
	Thank you, as always, to everyone for goading me into very, very important topics.
	I hugely, hugely appreciate it.
	Don't forget, of course, freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
	As you know, it has been A substantially rough ride over the last couple of years.
	I mean, it's been off and on rough over the last 17, 18 years, but...
	All right.
	Let me just go in here.
	Yes, you can if you're on this platform.
	Let's see here. Yeah, I'm working on being able to donate on this platform and so on, but...
	I'm happy to take another question if anybody has anything.
	Otherwise, we can stop for a day and we can digest this glorious philosophical conversation that fates and technology and willpower and your donations have allowed us to have, which is a lovely, lovely thing.
	All right, let me just look forward to questions here.
	Yeah, the truth about internet trolls.
	I've done shows about trolls before.
	I've actually had a conversation with a troll who trolled FDR some years ago.
	You can go to FDRpodcast.com and just do a search for troll in the search window and you can get a hold of that show.
	I do have some more thoughts about trolls, which I won't do right now because I want to make sure I'm available to you if anybody else has any questions.
	And I sort of turned my heart inside out for an hour 40, so I might take a bit of an exercise break.
	So, all right. Well, listen, thanks everyone so much for dropping by today.
	Such a pleasure. Freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
	If we do get enough donations, I'll be thrilled to do a documentary this summer.
	It'd be nice to get back out on the road and talk with some people and say some things.
	So, Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	If you want to go to Freedomain.locals.com, you can use the promo code.
	All caps, UBB2022. You get a month free to try it out.
	And boy, some of the best work I've done is the History of Philosopher's series, which you can get a hold of right there, freedomand.locals.com.
	And I love you guys for listening.
	You really do bring out the best in me.
	I hope that helps with you as well.
	And have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful day.
	I will talk to you Wednesday night for Wednesday Night Live, as per usual.

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