Sept. 24, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:45
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| In your original argument, when you said, would you kill me in defense of your beliefs? | |
| What if I were to say, well, you believe in anarchism and anarchism is chaos, and more people would die in anarchism than if I killed you right now? | |
| The shoot Hitler argument, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I haven't argued with someone like that for a while, but I certainly know that they're out there. | |
| Okay, so I would say that, you know, can you step me through that, right? | |
| I'm a big one for play dumb, right? | |
| And sometimes I'm not playing. | |
| Well, no. | |
| No societies that survive. | |
| Yeah, there's no societies that survive in a free market society, and why don't you all move to Somalia or ancient Ireland or Iceland or whatever, right? | |
| Well, the first thing that I would do, there's a whole chain of reasoning in what you said there, right? | |
| As I'm sure you're aware, right? | |
| Anarchy is chaos. | |
| Like, that's a huge logical leap, right? | |
| And chaos equals death. | |
| Therefore, you're advocating death, therefore it's a self-defense of the future people you're going to kill to shoot you now. | |
| So it's a big back to the future argument that blows my mind, right? | |
| But I would say to the person, I don't understand what you're saying. | |
| Because I really don't, right? | |
| And I really, I learned this from a guy I worked with in business who would get these big convoluted answers from salespeople as to why they didn't make the sale, right? | |
| You know, well, you know, there was raining and then there were frogs coming down from the sky. | |
| And he would say, like, I don't understand. | |
| Explain it to me like I'm three years old. | |
| Like, and there's nothing wrong with playing dumb, because statism is such a bizarre thesis when you break it down. | |
| It is a bizarre magical theory that there's this golden gun somewhere in the world, that if someone who's just good and great enough picks up that gun and waves it around, we end up with utopia. | |
| I mean, that's such a bizarre theory. | |
| I mean, you might as well say that Aragon from Lord of the Rings would make the perfect king, and let's do that, right? | |
| And so I would say to that person, I would say, okay, so tell me what you understand by the word anarchy. | |
| And if he says, chaos, it's like, well, that's actually not true, right? | |
| It's not the meaning of the word, right? | |
| Because we already have the word chaos, and we're not that redundant in the English language, somewhat, but not hugely, right? | |
| So it's not a synonym. | |
| So I would say, well, what do you mean by chaos? | |
| And if he thinks anarchism is, you know, Mel Gibson with a Viking helmet riding around shooting people for gas, right? | |
| Then I'd say, well, that's a good movie idea. | |
| Maybe we can talk about that. | |
| But that has nothing to do with the theory and practice of a nonviolent society, right? | |
| So I wouldn't go into the argument. | |
| I would just explore what that person meant. | |
| And you'll come across one of two things, right, in my opinion, in my experience. | |
| One is that the person hasn't thought at all, right? | |
| Hasn't thought at all, even a little bit. | |
| And they're just using prejudicial terms, right? | |
| In which case, they're probably not going to start thinking now, right? | |
| Because, you know, best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, right? | |
| And if they haven't thought by now, they're not about to turn that corner. | |
| The other is that they have thought about it, but they've just made mistakes, in which case you can help step them through those mistakes. | |
| So I would question every premise that that person is putting forward and see what their level of understanding and curiosity is. | |
| And then you can hopefully have a fruitful discussion that will get them, put the safety back on, right? | |
| Is that useful? | |
| But play dumb, you know, so I don't, I don't, you know, the Colombo, you wouldn't know, you're too young. | |
| The Colombo thing, you know, it's like, I don't understand, you know, I don't follow. | |
| You know, if you can get an old raincoat, it's so much the better. | |
| But have something on underneath. | |
| I found that out pretty early. | |
| That's important. | |
| I don't understand. |
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