June 6, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:18
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Why do you think the idea that human beings were sufficiently equal to all vote and not be slaves came from? | |
| Humans. | |
| Yeah, but so did the idea of slavery. | |
| So did the idea of God. | |
| Fine, but what's your point? | |
| Like, you're not making an argument. | |
| You're just saying all thoughts come from humans, regardless of the thoughts. | |
| Now, that's actually a very good, again, Dr. Peterson, a very smart fellow and a good debater, no doubt. | |
| So, that is very true. | |
| And the question of where the End of slavery came from. | |
| Again, there's lots of different arguments. | |
| One that I would make would be that the end of slavery came out of the Black Death, right? | |
| So the Black Death wiped out a third, sometimes even half of the general population. | |
| And so the serfs, the slaves had a much better bargaining position and the lords and the landowners had to make pretty significant concessions in order to get people to work from them. | |
| Some of those concessions involve freedom. | |
| So then what happened was, when you gave more freedoms to your workers, you found out, lo and behold, that they were more productive, right? | |
| So you had a shortage of workers, you give more concessions to workers, you start to erase serfdom, which was a prequel to the erasure of slavery. | |
| And, I mean, slavery is worse than serfdom, but serfdom had to go first, because it was more tied to the Western era. | |
| So what they did was you had the Black Death. | |
| The Black Death restricted the number of workers. | |
| Therefore, the landowners had to give many more concessions to the workers. | |
| They had to give them more freedom, more ownership, more property rights, more liberties, and so on. | |
| And then they very quickly found out that the more freedoms their workers had, the more productivity their land produced. | |
| Now, that's a very powerful thing. | |
| It's a very powerful thing. | |
| So there then became a race between lords within a country and countries within the international framework to say, who can we liberate the most to become the most productive? | |
| So, for instance, if you've got Lord John and Lord Ralph, right? | |
| Lord John and Lord Ralph. | |
| Now, Lord John gives his workers a whole bunch of freedoms, and then they produce 50% more as a result of that, right? | |
| And maybe he taxes half of that or whatever. | |
| But they're still producing 25% more. | |
| So because Lord John, I think it was Lord John, sorry. | |
| Because the lord who gives his serfs more freedom ends up with more wealth, so he can buy out the other guys. | |
| And this is how that kind of freedom spreads. | |
| So then the other guys, like, holy crap. | |
| Also, he might lose workers to go over to the freer demands, the freer lands, right? | |
| And so he's then got to offer more concessions, more freedoms, and then it becomes an upward spiral. | |
| And then what happens is you end up You should get it at justpoornovel.com. | |
| But I wrote about all of this, about you had 10, 15, sometimes even 20 times the crop productivity with winter crops, with turnips, with, you know, there's a whole turnip townsend. | |
| Like there was whole books written and all of this kind of stuff about how to increase agricultural yields. | |
| But all of that had to do with property rights and trading rights and market rights and freedom. | |
| So when you start to get a significant excess of crops being produced, you end up with an urban proletariat, right? | |
| You don't need that many workers on the land, and so you kick people off the land. | |
| This is called the enclosure movement, and then they end up in the city, and they're a great pool of labor for the beginning and the foundations of the Industrial Revolution. | |
| You can't have an Industrial Revolution unless you have excess food productivity. | |
| In the countryside, because there's just not enough for the city dwellers to live on, right? | |
| Cities all survive on excess crops from the country. | |
| So there was a war between those who gave their workers more freedom, whether it was urban or rural. | |
| There was a war between those who gave their workers more freedom and those who gave their workers less freedom or kept their freedom. | |
| Limited. | |
| And this was not just within particular countries where the most liberal lords ended up with the greatest productivity, the greatest wealth. | |
| They could buy out the other people. | |
| They could bribe the king more. | |
| They could move up in the hierarchy because they were wealthier. | |
| And then this also occurred between countries so that the more productive countries, and in particular I'm thinking of England and Let's say the Netherlands, right? | |
| It was very productive. | |
| The Netherlands was actually the birth of the stock market, which is the defining characteristic of a free market. | |
| And so the countries that liberated their serfs and their workers, such as England, ended up with immense amounts of power. | |
| Not just in terms of economic productivity, but once you give people their liberties, they become incredibly creative and productive, right? | |
| So you had the invention of all sorts of ships and weaponry, navigation systems, transportation systems, the train. | |
| I think it was 1825 that the train first was really the steam engine because there's intellectual property rights, there is the ability to buy and sell, there's a stock market so you can get the investment. | |
| So you get this cycle where the most Economically liberated countries win the race of colonialism. | |
| So, of course, we just want to keep that going until people are free from all political violations of persons of property. | |
| So that is a start, right? | |
| Is that a perfect explanation? | |
| It really depends on whether you say, well, it was the Black Death or whatever it was, right? | |
| I mean, it could be any number of things, but the Black Death was certainly a pivotal and seminal event in European history to the point where, when we know from the very facts of the matter, that massive concessions were wrung from the Lords by the workers on there. | |
| On their fields, on their lands, and as a result of that, productivity went through the roof and people got kicked off their land and went to the cities. | |
| That for sure we know. | |
| There's all the dominoes, right? | |
| So it's not that the Black Death caused it because the Black Death hit other people, but the Black Death plus offering more liberty to the serfs and the workers and so on. | |
| And so it's not just, well, Christianity just happened to win this. | |
| And, I mean, another argument would be that why did it come out of the Protestant countries? | |
| Well, the Protestant countries, by allowing the most educated to have children, right? | |
| So, remember, in Catholic countries, a lot of the most educated and the highest IQ people are priests, and the priests can't have kids, at least not officially. | |
| I mean, I know there was a lot of stuff on the wayside. | |
| So, the countries that became more Protestant had higher IQ people have children, IQ is 80% genetic by late teens and I think goes up even further after that. | |
| You have more and more intelligent people over generations. | |
| And so that is another aspect of things as well. | |
| In other words, freedom for priests to get married and have children, which occurred in Protestant countries and not in Catholic countries in general, that level of freedom was Positive for the intellects of the people over generations, right? | |
| You've got smarter and smarter people. | |
| So, did it come specifically out of Christianity? | |
| Because, as Dr. Peterson says, it's the Protestants. | |
| Well, why was it the Protestants? | |
| Well, the greater the abstraction, usually the higher IQ that is required not to understand it, but to discover it, right? | |
| So, the greater the abstraction, the higher the IQ is required to discover it. | |
| So, look at physics. | |
| Look at UPB to pat myself on the back a little bit. |
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