March 31, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:33:15
Speaking Ill of the DEAD! X Space
Stephanie Lindney and Stefan Molyneux dismantle socialist arguments by rejecting data-driven sophistry in favor of foundational ethics, asserting that initiating force is inherently immoral regardless of utilitarian outcomes. They contrast capitalist coercion with state violence, utilizing the "Gun or No Gun" analogy to expose contradictions where socialists claim capitalism steals labor while advocating total property seizure. Ultimately, the discussion argues that effective debate requires confronting the evil of theft directly rather than getting sidetracked by statistical justifications for systemic tyranny. [Automatically generated summary]
I have some Bitcoin stuff for you, but I also have glorious listener conversations to engage in to absorb.
Gelatinous CubeSile.
Reynard.
Like the fox.
Like the fox?
Reynard.
If you wanted to unmute, I would be happy to chat this fine morning.
Hello.
How you doing?
Good.
How you doing?
Thanks for taking my question once again.
I also would like to thank you.
I don't know if there's a direct answer, but I had asked a question about the prodigal son and you gave a beautiful answer.
Just wanted to thank you for that.
That's a great question.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So my question today, it's about I read a poem many years ago.
I forget the title of it, but I think it was something to the effect of, shall the weak or the meek inherit the earth, the tyranny of the weak.
And it was about a old woman who was dying in hospice and she was in the hospital.
And she pretty much sort of dominated and bullied her entire family and forced them to come down to the hospital, wash her feet, that sort of thing, and pay tribute to her.
And everybody was terrified to say no because she's a dying woman.
And the other day when Robert Mueller died and Trump said, good, I'm glad he's dead.
You know, you had the typical response where people said, that's awful and that's unbecoming of a president to do those sort of things.
And that's that.
How do people deal with people who are aggressive and assertive and hostile?
But when you push back, they fold up like an armadillo and they accuse you of being a bad person, the people that sort of use that strategy.
And, you know, how do you deal with people like that?
So can you give me an example if you've seen one other than Robert Mueller and Trump?
Give me another example.
Make sure I'm fully on board with what you're saying.
An example.
Let me see.
I mean, it could be, I don't know, it could be a husband and a wife or something like that.
And maybe the wife is snarky or combative or whatever the case may be.
And, you know, like Warren Farrell says, the facade of a man's strength is his greatest weakness and the facade of woman's weakness is her greatest strength, that sort of thing.
And, you know, if a woman is aggressive, then it's like, well, she might be depressed.
She might be this, she might be that, you know, the excuses that are made.
But if the husband, you know, pushes back, well, he's not understanding.
He's that sort of thing.
Is it more specific to death as a whole?
Is the question, why do we not speak ill of the dead?
Because that was the Trump Mueller stuff.
Of course, everyone jumps up and says, well, he may have had his flaws, but, you know, he was a family man.
And, you know, everyone attempts to humanize the recently deceased.
Is it something like that as well?
Well, I mean, I get the whole aspect of we don't want to speak ill of the dead, but I would say with Trump overall, for example, Trump, he's a good example, I guess.
He's been called an existential threat to society.
He's been called Hitler.
He's been called racist.
All these different things.
And I imagine, I think directly or indirectly, Robert Mueller and others may have been responsible for all of the lawfare against Trump and the fake dossier and the raiding of his house, that sort of thing.
So I imagine that Trump said, well, hey, listen, you know, this guy hurt a lot of people, and that's why I'm glad that he's dead.
And then no one takes into consideration Trump's position, all the things that he went through at the hands of other people.
But if Trump ever pushes back, this is behavior unbecoming of a president.
So it's like, you know, you can have a person who was perceived to be in power, and people can always punch up, but that powerful person can never punch down.
It will be held against.
But you will always have people nipping at you and attacking you, and you just can't defend yourself.
If you do, you're still the bad guy.
It's the Kobayashi Maru, you know, the Kobayashi Maru, no-win situation.
How do you deal with that no-win situation?
Right.
And this comes down to something I talked about in a premium podcast a couple of days ago, which is it is not the attacks of enemies that causes us great pain.
That is to be expected.
It is the betrayal of allies.
And the test of any social system is what happens when an evil, manipulative person comes into the environment.
That is the test of the ethics of a social system.
And in particular, a moral system, because your social relationships, if they're not based upon morality, are based on dry calculations of mutual utility and mere happenstance and convenience.
Like, I need some place to go at Christmas and Grandma Moses bakes a nice ham and things like that.
And the test of a moral system, sorry, could you mute if you're going to make a lot of background noise?
The test of a moral system is what happens when a bad person comes into the environment.
And I posted about this on X not too long ago.
I mean, other than close family friends and a couple of business colleagues, I have yet, and, you know, I'm getting up there, man.
I've got some accumulated experience in this.
And I certainly have had some pretty broad experience in this.
I have yet to see a social system in my personal life.
I mean, I think it's taken for granted in politics, but in my personal life, I've yet to see a social system that can even remotely survive a sociopath coming in, a manipulator, somebody with truly ill intent who's a power monger.
And also the people who are just kind of amused, indifferent sadists who just enjoy going in and poking around and seeing what conflict they can provoke.
There is currently, I mean, I don't know, it's hard to say what is human nature because we're all zoo animals at the moment.
But what happens is you've got some social group, the cruel person, the sadist, the sociopath, the manipulator, the destroyer, comes in and everyone immediately ejects anyone targeted by the cruel person.
Let's just use our eponymous Bob.
Bob is the bad guy here.
Often it's women, but not always, of course.
And the bad guy comes into the environment and everyone immediately, without question, without comment, without resistance, without coordination, everybody immediately says, who does Bob not like?
Let's get rid of them.
Bob comes in, starts making rumbling, starts sowing seeds of discontent, hostility, doubt, division.
And Bob signals like a shark fin in the water, once you've identified as not a dolphin but a shark.
Bob signals that danger is in the environment.
Now, of course, if the community were to close ranks and say to Bob, you know, I don't think that I don't think you're a great fit for this environment.
We don't really resolve disputes in the way that you're doing.
Or, you know, if Bob starts sliding up to people and saying, you know, you know, that Doug guy, something off about him, man, I don't know about him.
You know, have you noticed this?
Have you noticed that?
And, you know, it just starts taking tiny flaws or even inventing them and just spreading and expanding them.
Now, this, of course, is the sin of gossip, and it's well known in religion and Christianity in particular.
And if the group were to say, yeah, we don't, no, please don't do that.
I don't engage in this kind of stuff.
You know, if you could not do that, I would appreciate it.
Or if Bob comes up to someone in the group and says, you know, that, that guy's that, that guy's a bit sketchy, don't you think?
I mean, and this could be someone who's been known by the group for 20 years.
Not Bob.
Bob's a new person.
But Bob comes in and starts planting seeds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
And, you know, just enjoying manipulating and causing chaos and problems.
Splitting, sometimes it's called.
And if the group, whoever it is, that Bob comes up to and starts complaining about Doug, if somebody in the group were to say, oh, hang on, hang on, hang on, let me, I got Doug's number right here.
Let me just dial him up.
Let's have a conversation about it.
Because if you do have an issue with Doug, Bob, then let's talk it out.
Like, let's do it face to face, right?
Or at least let's do it on a call.
So if Bob, the bad person, was ejected from the group, if people refused to engage in gossip, or if people said to Bob, if you've got complaints about Doug, the best thing to do is to be honest with Doug and not float around the group that Doug is involved in, badmouthing him.
Now, all of this is known.
All of this is understood.
If you were to ask people in the abstract, what's the right thing to do in this situation?
This is part of the whole strange thing about the world.
And I don't want to sound too haughty because for me, for too long, philosophy was merely abstract.
Compromised Church Leaders00:04:32
But I didn't have philosophers saying you need to implement this in your personal life, right?
You read Plato's theory of the forms versus Aristotle's empiricism, and there's not any particularly practical way to bring these to bear in your personal life.
Even objectivism doesn't have much of a map on how to implement these things in your personal life.
But Christianity is a different matter.
Christianity is personal.
Christianity is very specifically how to implement Christian values in your personal life, in your relationships.
There are, and maybe I'll do a show on this at some point, but there are countless commandments.
I mean, I've read the Bible cover to cover.
When I worked up north, there was not much else to do in a tent in the snow in the nighttime.
And there were tons of exhortations and ideas and approaches and commandments sometimes on how to implement the values of Christianity in your personal life.
So Christian communities should be uniquely resistant to this kind of infiltration.
I posted on X and got some very interesting replies, which I'll probably go through at some point.
Why did Christianity start off so masculine and end up so kind of unbearably feminized?
I mean, in the churches that I've gone to over the last year or two, it's all land acknowledgements and self-help and personal finances and be nice.
And there's no toughness at all.
I mean, when I was growing up 50 years ago, I went to church a couple of times a week in boarding school, and the priests there were about as feminine as a hairy leg.
Hashtag French women not included.
So there was a lot of masculinity in the past.
In Christianity, it's kind of become feminine.
Is this a kind of infiltration?
People talk about, oh, but the church has been infiltrated and so on.
It's like, well, but the church has God on its side.
And the church leaders in particular, we would assume, have a pretty good pipeline to God himself.
And say, oh, no, but the church leaders have been compromised.
It's like, well, then God has to be telling someone, right?
If the church leaders are compromised, then the congregation, God would talk to the congregation and say, oh, these church leaders are compromised and so on, right?
Because if the church leaders are compromised and God doesn't tell the congregation and most people get their education from the church leaders rather than the Bible itself, then those people have no chance.
Those people have no chance.
I mean, it would be like if you raised a kid on a desert island and taught him the wrong words for everything.
He would not have any particular chance to speak well.
I mean, there's this sort of language window that opens and closes.
So Christianity has at its core, you know, do not gossip, thou shalt not bear false witness.
And Christianity says, if you have an issue with someone, talk to him directly.
Talk to him directly.
Christianity doesn't say, the Bible doesn't say, yeah, if you've got a problem, if you're Bob and you've got a problem with Doug, what you want to do is not check whether it's a just or unjust issue.
What you want to do is go and spread lies about Doug to the people he cares about, or the people who care about him, to go and whisper and plant seeds of doubt and hostility and so on, right?
And that's the way that things unravel or unroll in social groups.
Now, I, again, please understand, I do say this with real humility because it took me longer than it should have.
But I also felt like I was kind of having to reinvent the car from the concept of the wheel on upwards.
So I give myself some forgiveness and patience with this.
So please accept a similar amount with you, other than the fact that the show exists.
And if you've been listening for a while, you know that I have brought the Christian teachings and run them through the process of philosophy and then recommended them as a whole.
Which is if you have a problem with someone, go and talk to them.
You've got an issue with your parents, go and talk to them.
Navigating Life's Sails00:03:18
And talk to them, have a number of conversations until they have, if they do that, indicated that they will not change and that will only punish you for further honesty.
And then you don't have to have them in your life.
Conversations, relationships, affection, love, connection, intimacy, all of these things are based upon the truth.
If you're in a relationship where you can't tell the truth, it's not a relationship with anything other than being bullied.
Because why would you not tell the truth?
Because you fear being attacked for telling the truth.
So what happens, of course, is that people get a delicious little thrill when mean old Bob sidles up to them and starts badmouthing Doug.
Oh, yeah, I don't know.
I've always.
And everybody joins in a feeding frenzy.
Or what Ken Casey wrote about in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a pecking party, where chickens just start pecking at one particular chicken until they strip him of feathers or kill him.
Just boom, boom, boom, attack, attack, attack.
That's what they do.
And I can't imagine, like, I can't imagine, really genuinely can't imagine, what it must be like to sail through life as Bob.
Bob the sociopath, Bob the cold-hearted, Bob the sadist, Bob the divider, Bob the Conqueror.
I can't imagine what it must be like to sail through life doing great ill, doing great harm, and always getting your way.
Right?
I mean, can you imagine?
Can you imagine what it would be like to go through life with ill intent and always, win with no resistance, with enthusiasm and encouragement from the worm-tongue court toadies of every social group you ever came across.
You come across some social group, some sewing circle, some book club, some congregation, some philosophical community.
I know it's happened in Freedom Ain communities as well, though not always, but sometimes.
You come across some community and you just rub your hands together.
And you say, ah, fresh meat.
Mmm, what's on the menu today?
And you boil up a pot and you tell everyone it's soup, and everyone jumps in and boils themself.
To go through life with ill intent and always, always, always win.
Everyone folds like a cheap tent in a windstorm.
Everyone breaks like soap bubbles on the breeze.
Everyone acquiesces.
And every now and then, and maybe this is what makes the hunting worthwhile, every now and then there's some person who's kind of onto you.
And this is probably what makes it fun.
Is that every now and then in some group or another, there's someone, let's call him Sam.
The Danger of Resistance00:08:16
There's someone who puts up some resistance and says, you know, Bob's not great.
You know, let's, how's the group been going or doing?
How's the group been doing since Bob came along?
You know, we lost this guy, this woman, this person.
We're kind of tense, we're fractious, we don't get together anymore.
This person has broken confidences.
He's planted seeds.
He's lied.
I know he's lied about so-and-so and so-and-so.
How is our like somebody who puts up some resistance and tries to rally the community against the dangers of Bob every now and then?
And this must be delightfully amusing to Bob.
This must be what it's all for.
Is that, you know, you kind of clint eastward western whistle, you're standing across the dusty streets of an old western town, and all the townspeople are up in the buildings and they're scared, and there's a shoot-off.
He's gonna quick draw a duel without the pacing.
And Bob is facing Sam down the dusty streets of Dodge City, Dodge Town.
There's no sheriff.
And Sam is like, man, I gotta take Bob out.
It's a social analogy, right?
And Bob just smiles giddy with glee at his upcoming triumph.
Because Bob has come to town and has started tearing that town apart with his lies, his poison, poison in the ear, both Iago and Claudius in Hamlet.
Poison in the ear, tearing their community apart.
And Sam decides to take him on to save the community.
And Bob finds this hilarious because Bob has experience, Sam does not, or at least much more experience.
And so Bob knows that when they face each other on that dusty street, in the town on the edge of nowhere, buzzards circling overhead a cloudless sky, a tiny breeze tickling the stubble, Bob knows exactly what's going to happen.
Bob knows in that face-off with all the townspeople up in their windows, looking down with excitement and horror at the unfolding gunfight, the imminent gunfight.
Bob knows exactly what's going to happen.
Sam does not.
In Sam's mind, he takes out Bob, and the townspeople cheer, give him the keys to the city, and the whore in the bar will sleep with him for free.
He's going to be a hero.
Songs will be written and sung.
Poems will be carved into trees.
His statue will rise above the city square.
And tales of the man who shot Liberty Valence will be sung by balding, wobble-voiced folk singers well into the 20th century.
See, that's what Sam thinks is going to happen.
Or even if Bob draws first and Sam goes down, at least he will be lionized as a heroic person who tried and failed to rid the town of an evildoer.
But that's not what happens.
Not to stretch the story out too long.
I'm not being paid by the word.
That's not what happens.
What happens is there's a twist.
There's a twist.
What happens is Bob and Sam facing each other on that dusty street in that lonely town.
What happens is all the townspeople in the windows whip out their guns and shoot Sam.
Now Bob knows that's going to happen.
Sam does not.
And that is the true triumph of Bob.
That's what he does it for, is to watch the townspeople shoot Sam, the hero, who's standing up to Bob.
Because that's what happens.
Now why do the townspeople shoot Sam?
Well, because Sam is provoking conflict by not acquiescing to Bob.
Because if everyone acquiesces to Bob, maybe Bob will get bored and move on.
But Sam, by standing up to Bob, is provoking conflict and violence, and it's Sam's fault.
Also, Sam comes from a good family, which is why he's standing up to violence.
And what that means is they probably won't take vengeance upon the townspeople.
They will simply move away.
His wife, his kids, his brothers, or whatever.
Also, nobody's exactly going to know, since all the townspeople shoot at the same time, nobody's going to know who shot Sam.
Whereas if they shoot Bob, well, Bob's got a gang, maybe.
Bob's got brothers who are probably as crazy and evil and bad and dedicated and resolute as he is, so that's not good.
And of course, if they were capable of fighting out in the open, they wouldn't be hiding up behind the shutters and blinds in the second-story dusty buildings.
There's only conflict, say the townspeople, because Sam is causing it.
So if we get rid of Sam, there's no conflict.
This, you understand, is also the story of the pandemic and everything.
So you've got somebody who's very aggressive, somebody who's fighting back, and the social group gets rid of the person who's fighting back.
And that way, the conflict seems to evaporate because the bad person gets his way, or often, her way.
Men used to fight like men, now they fight like slaves, serfs, courtiers, and helpless women and children.
I mean, we see this happening all over the West, of course, right?
You have groups that are pretty aggressive, and any group that speaks out against it, the person who speaks out against it, is silenced.
Because if nobody interferes with the actions, plans, and goals of evildoers, conflict is diminished.
Because if you give someone what they want, they tend not to fight you.
But if you resist what they want, right, the most dangerous time to leave an abusive relationship, well, so the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship is when you are leaving.
You're trying to get out.
That's when the danger, the beatings, the violence, sometimes even the murders erupt.
See, it looks okay as long as you're complying the moment you stand up for yourself.
The violence comes out.
Things were peaceful until Sally decided to try to leave Bob.
And dealing with Bob is actually quite easy.
If you simply say, right, the one, two, three.
One, don't trash talk Doug behind his back.
Two, if you do that, if that's your habit, this is probably not the group for you.
And three, if you've got a problem with Doug, I'll dial him up right now.
Let's hash it out.
Done.
Then the bully is going to move on because there's lots of social groups.
And you have some pride.
You have some self-respect.
You're actually living by the values you proclaim and the values that you instill and inflict into and upon your children.
Have some dignity, some integrity.
But nope, everybody just falls.
Honestly, it's like Jenga in a hurricane.
It's like a house of cards with a geisha rushing by, the flowing robes, knock everything over.
There's not even any resistance.
This is the foundational corruption of the world.
Now, again, I've not been perfect in this way, caveat, caveat, caveat.
But to a reasonable degree, I have taken on the Bobs of this world.
To a reasonable degree.
Not perfect, inconsistent sometimes, but where I have been conscious of it, I have tried to fight the good fight.
Choosing Who We Fight00:04:43
And I've lost some, I've won some.
In the business world, I had my share of Bobs around.
When I was a director hired into a company as a director, there were two Bobs in the organization.
And it took me six months, but I got them out.
And I remember people coming to me almost in tears thanking me.
I've won some, I've lost some.
At times I've been kicked out.
But in general, as a whole, I've tried to take on the Bobs of this world.
And I have tried to take on the Bobs of this world alone.
Again, if you're supporters, and I appreciate that.
But in the public sphere and square, everyone's seen it for over 20 years, that when I take on Bob, everybody runs away.
There's a premium show about this, The Truth About My Deplatforming, which I recorded a couple of days ago.
This is late March 2026.
You can check it out in the premium section, freedomain.com slash donate to subscribe, get a hold of that.
So I won't go into it in more detail here because that's really a donor thing.
And then the power of Bob.
Let's switch genders just to mix it up a little.
And we'll say Mary.
Mary.
No, that's too Christian.
Let's make a Wanda.
Wonder.
Yeah, Wonder.
Why not?
Wonder.
Now, Wanda, let's say, was a bad person.
And Wanda dies.
What happens at the funeral?
Well, we all know what happens at the funeral.
Celebrations, GEI tributes, lovely pictures.
And you cannot speak ill of the dead.
This is the Robert Mueller thing, right?
With Trump.
You cannot speak ill of the dead.
Why don't people want to speak ill of the dead?
Well, they can't do you direct harm anymore.
But of course, there is this belief in ghosts that the bad people live on after they die and will attack you if you speak ill of them.
Well, in any community, if you speak ill of Wanda, you are also criticizing the community that supported and enabled Wanda.
And her allies will come for you.
This is what is meant by ghosts.
Also, if you've known Wanda for a long time, Wanda lives on forever in your mind, in your head.
She's an alter ego.
She's an alter.
She's part of your consciousness.
She's part of what I call the Miko system, which is not we are.
We're not an I, but a we, an aggregation and collection of genetic traits, personal experiences, personal choices.
And just about everyone we've ever rubbed shoulders with for more than five minutes comes in to our mind and takes up permanent residence.
It's why it's very important to choose the company you keep.
Choosing the company you keep is determining the peace or virulence of your mind.
Choice of companions equals choice of consciousness, what is in your mind.
And some people we can choose.
Of course, as children, we cannot choose.
Our parents, our family, our circumstances, our school, our teachers, we could choose our friends to some degree, but a lot of our friends are chosen.
Or what's on the menu of friendships is largely predetermined by our parents and how they have taught us.
If you've been raised in a brutal, negative, Hostile, destructive environment, it's kind of tough to make friends with the functional kids because you're just too jumpy and scattered and defensive.
And they all scan that.
So even the palette of your friendships with which you paint your social circle is largely limited and controlled by your parents.
Maybe directly, certainly indirectly.
So Wanda dies.
We can't speak ill of the dead because Wanda might haunt you.
Well, in a way, that's true.
Because if you weren't able to criticize Wanda in life, and Wanda has taken up residence in the mental patterns of your consciousness as a defense mechanism against Wanda's dangerous tendencies in real life, then if you speak ill of Wanda, you activate the alter ego of Wanda in your mind, that is the ghost aspect or apparatus.
And so people will not speak ill even of the evil dead that is considered forbidden for Botan.
Because Wanda has allies, Wanda has taken up residence in your head.
And to criticize Rhonda after she dies is to provoke the same kind of defenses that existed to protect you from Wanda by stopping you from criticizing her when she was alive.
Bowling Alleys and Lies00:15:03
I don't know how to create a community that is resistant to the urge by evildoers to turn human communities into bowling alleys.
You know, I like bowling a lot.
I think bowling is a lot of fun.
I like micro skills games.
You know, with tennis, the difference between the serve going in and going out is a micro skill.
Baseball, same thing.
Bowling, a micro skill.
One jewel left or right is the difference between a strike and a gutter ball.
Same thing with MIDI golf.
I mean, I like golf as well, but I can't play golf in any consistent way because it's expensive and very time consuming.
And it would also mean spending four hours with golfers.
Not number one as a whole on my list.
And I'm too old to take up a new hobby that's so time consuming.
Golf is a good work spoiled.
I would go with that one.
But it's a micro skill.
I like micro skills.
Now, the satisfaction that you and I, if you like bowling, get when we bowl a nice thunder jugger strike, they all go down.
That's good.
That's a good feeling.
Doing some mini golf, get a hold in one.
Serve a perfect serve, get an ace.
In tennis, somebody rushes the net.
You got to do a lob.
A lob is too high for them to hit it.
The net bounces behind them, still in bounce, and it causes them to have to retreat from the net, which means you can rush the net.
It's really hard to return the lob with a lob, so it's fencing.
It's micro skills.
The satisfaction that you and I would get from bowling a perfect strike, well, we get to knock everything down, and that's really satisfying.
And of course, there are two types of people in the world.
Well, three, I guess.
Number one, the people who love to build.
Number two, the people who love to destroy.
And number three, the enablers of the destroyers.
So people like Bob get the same satisfaction out of ripping apart and destroying a social group as you and I get from a perfect serve, a perfect sink of a putt, a perfect strike in bowling.
It's satisfying to apply these micro skills to a perfect outcome, and they love it.
And of course, what happens is when Bob comes into the social circle, sets everyone against each other, gets them to turn on Doug the good guy, Sam the good guy, then of course, when all of the destruction is complete, what does Bob do?
What does Wanda do?
Well, they move on.
They move on.
After the shark has eaten the seal, it doesn't follow the fading skeleton, the bloody remnants into the depths.
No, leaves those for the crabs and the shrimp and the krill.
Man, the tiny non-predators can feast on the carcass.
I'm moving on, because mommy and daddy need their feast.
So after Bob or Wanda has torn apart this social group, they enjoy the chaos.
They enjoy what?
What do they enjoy?
They certainly enjoy tearing the group apart, as you and I would enjoy bowling.
And they enjoy inflicting the brutal lessons of the real world on any proto-hero who tries to stand up against them, thinking that, well, I'm fighting the good fight.
Everyone agrees with me.
Everyone's got the same values.
Be honest.
Don't gossip.
Stand against evildoers.
But Bob is like, oh, Doug, man, Sam, you guys are funny.
I think it's time for you to learn the truth about this world.
Is that people lie to themselves about being good, and that is what they prefer to actual virtue.
Because lying to yourself about being good, when you are in fact a colluder with evil, lying to yourself about being good is much easier than actually being good.
It's easier to buy some spanks or a corset than lose weight.
So Bob is a brutal educator.
Bob is a brutal educator.
Wanda is a brutal educator, teaching the wayward, semi-virtuous resistors or virtuous resisters of evil who attempt to rally a social group dedicated to virtue to actually doing something virtuous.
Nope.
So the sad thing is that the group colludes with Bob and Wanda against Doug and Sam.
And then Bob and Wanda, if it's a social group, they'll just move on.
And the group is broken.
And the group that remains, the shattered innards of the broken seal, the group that remains dissolves.
They can't look each other in the eye because they know, they know, they know, they know deep down what just happened.
That a dangerous person came into their life and they all turned on, attacked, and expelled the only person willing to stand up to the bad guy.
And they can't look at, I mean, the whole thing is broken.
They can't look at each other.
They can't stomach each other.
And the group falls apart.
See, they lose the group anyway.
Or those remnants that remain are really sad and pathetic.
And so they're going to lose the group anyway.
And it's just social stuff.
How often are Bob and Wanda armed?
No, it's not a thing.
And what Bob and Wanda like as they wander off is that they have inflicted the greatest curse of the aftermath of evil, which is they have caused everyone who's come in contact with them, except Doug and Sam and whoever stands up to them.
They've inflicted the greatest curse that evil is capable of.
And the greatest curse that evil leaves in its wake in its aftermath, in the fading bright light of its atomic infliction of potential self-knowledge.
The true curse that evil leaves behind is permanent lying to the self.
Permanent lying to the self.
Because everyone in the shattered aftermath of Shark Finn, Bob and Wanda moving through and shredding their social circle, everyone goes to themselves, maybe complains to others, man!
Oh God, what happened there?
Holy crap hola!
Holy crap hola!
I mean, what the hell happened there?
And they pretend ignorance.
I don't know, man.
I mean, I guess Bobby quit, Jody got married.
I mean, I don't know.
I guess I guess it wasn't that great a group to begin with.
I don't know what happened there, man.
All these secrets came tumbling out, everyone turned against each other.
It's human nature, I guess.
I don't know, man.
Wasn't that great a group to begin with.
I mean, people say, hey, you used to hang out with this chess club, this book club, this DD club, this social club, this bowling league.
Like, what happened?
Oh, man.
It was a shit show.
Turned out this and this and this and blah, And nobody can tell the truth.
Nobody can tell the truth.
Once evil can get you to lie to yourself, your job is done.
Because once you have the convenience of lying to yourself, you never have to do good again for the rest of your life.
Because you can just lie to yourself about being a victim, about other people always being at fault.
It's never you.
You didn't do anything wrong.
Circumstances happened.
Stuff happened.
It's like physics.
It's like gravity.
You don't blame those forces for the things in the world.
Nobody gets on a scale and says, well, gravity must have been dialed up over the last month.
No.
It's like physics.
You know, this is just the way things are.
Human nature, blah, blah, blah.
The fall of man, we're born sinful, whatever, whatever, or whatever.
So the aftermath, why they move on, is their job is done.
They have now got everyone to lie to themselves about what happened to their social circle.
And nobody will ever reach out to the few good people who tried to stand up to the evildoers and say, never, never, never will this happen.
Get it out of your mind.
In the world that is, it is not a possibility.
You might as well expect to wake up on the moon.
You will never get a message.
If you are a Doug or a Sam, somebody who stands up to evildoers, you will never get a message later on saying, man, you know what?
I'm so sorry.
There you were standing alone against this terrible person.
And I nodded along with the bad guys and I didn't give you any help or support.
I didn't even send you any messages of encouragement.
I just kind of withdrew into my shell, went along, nodded along.
I'm so sorry.
It was a humbling and brutal experience to realize the corruption that I was capable of.
I don't know if we can re-establish our friendship or anything like that, but oh my God.
I really did you dirty, man.
I really, really betrayed you.
And you deserve better, and you deserved an ally, or at least not somebody who handed the knives to the backstabbers.
I'm sorry.
You're never going to get that message, my friends.
I've been fighting since my mid-teens against the Dougs and the Wonders.
And I cannot think of a single message that came after being betrayed, as inevitably happens, in the good fight against the bad people.
I cannot remember a single message from people saying, you were right.
You were doing the right thing.
I did the wrong thing.
I'm sorry.
Can you forgive me?
I've learned better.
Nope.
Doesn't happen.
This is the world wherein the truth is that parenting and child abuse is far worse than we can think.
And it's far earlier than we think.
And this is why people hate philosophy, because philosophy removes from people the ability to lie to themselves.
That's what philosophy does.
I hear about a conflict.
I say, oh, okay, so Bob was doing this bad stuff.
Doug was trying to do the right stuff.
What happens?
And you get all this fog, right?
You just get all this fog.
Well, it was complicated.
Well, I'm not really sure.
I tried to do this, but that didn't really.
You just killed this fog, right?
You just ask the basic questions.
So Bob was in the wrong.
Doug was in the right.
What did you do?
Well, I tried to talk to Bob, and I, you know, blah, It's like, okay, yes, but Bob wasn't listening, so Bob was in the wrong.
Doug was in the right.
What did you do?
And you get to the core.
Nothing.
You certainly did nothing to help the good guy, which helps the bad guy.
And this is, again, the story of COVID.
And let's not fool ourselves.
It wasn't like 80%, 85%, 90% of people complied under COVID, but 10% of heroic, blah, blah, blah.
No, no, no, come on.
Come on.
Come on.
Our positional defiant disorder.
Just being part of a different social group, you have to conform.
But it wasn't like everyone who resisted the vaccine was mentally healthy and a free thinker.
The chronically angry, the chronically hostile to authority, even moral authority.
Those involved in subgroups where they would have been booted out.
Those with nobody left except that subgroup had to conform.
I mean, I'm not saying, of course, that everyone who didn't comply was not a free thinker, but it wasn't like everyone who didn't comply was a free thinker.
That is the world that is.
And if you can find yourself half a dozen or a dozen people who will stand by you through thick and thin, and with whom you will stand by through thick or thin, you have a golden treasure in this watery world.
That's not ideal as an analogy, because if you're holding golden treasure in a watery world, you sink Kevin Costner style.
So let's try that again.
You have a bright light in the sticky and darkness of this planet.
Now, having a bright light in the sticky and darkness of this planet is going to draw you both friends and enemies.
So beware.
Be alert and test people for their moral courage early on.
Test people for their moral courage early on.
And the last thing I'll say, and of course I'll get back to the calls, appreciate your patience.
It's a big topic, and I hope it overlaps with what the caller was asking about to some degree.
But this is all the way back to the very beginnings of this community of Free Domain, back when it was Free Domain Radio.
We had a message board.
And on that message board, we would have regular troll attacks.
And this is what I'm talking about.
Sometimes around determinism, sometimes around drugs, sometimes around prostitution.
People would come in guns blazing and divide the community.
And I remember somebody was pointing out later that one of these guys was a professional troll who just enjoyed stirring up shit in a community and watching everyone turn on each other and then lie to themselves.
And once they see people lying to themselves, then you have disabled an enemy.
So the old argument that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, good people to do nothing.
Well, yeah, but I mean, but why do nothing?
The only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for people to lie to themselves about being good.
To lie to themselves about being good.
I mean, there's the cancer, right?
And then there's the blood vessels that feed the cancer.
The cancer is the malevolent structure in the body.
The blood cells are the allies that keep it fed and growing.
It's the same thing in social circles.
So I appreciate your patience with the lengthy answer.
If you wanted to unmute and tell me if that scattershot did any.
It did.
So would you say the Sams of the world, the Doug's of the world, before you take on Bob, you should evaluate the quality of the group and decide if you even want to be a part of that group?
Well, you should test that, right?
Theft, Murder, and Time00:14:02
So when Bob shows up, you probably get a pretty good instinct that someone malevolent has shown up.
And what you do is you probe people's ability to see evil, right?
I mean, generally, the way that things used to work is if you wanted to know if you were safe from COVID, let's say, then you would be tested for antibodies to COVID and natural immunity, broad spectrum natural immunity, until five minutes before COVID was considered the best immunity.
Because, of course, the vaccine was developed for very specific strains of COVID that had mutated by the time the vaccine was really in wide deployment, went from alpha to omega and so on.
So you test the community for resistance, for identification of malevolence and resistance to it.
So if you hear that Bob is spreading rumors, you say to the group, hey, Bob is spreading rumors.
What do we do?
What do we do with that?
Like, what is your approach to that?
If it's a Christian group, you say, well, we don't even have to make up an approach.
God tells us specifically what to do.
We've got to confront Bob individually, then we've got to confront Bob as a group.
And if Bob still doesn't conform after the third confrontation, we kick him out of the community.
That's what God says to do.
And I'd like to think that we as Christians don't know better than God.
That would be kind of satanic, right?
To think you know better than God.
So when you identify corruption, misdeeds, falsehood, manipulation, then you go to the community or you go at least to one person.
You might go to the head of the community or somebody with authority in the community and say, what have you noticed?
What have you noticed that's happened since Bob came into the community?
What have you noticed?
Is this good behavior or bad behavior according to your values?
And if it's good behavior, explain why.
If it's bad behavior, what are you going to do about it?
And you just probe.
Do they identify evil and what is their plan to deal with it?
And if they can't identify evil, get the hell out.
And if they can identify evil, but they do weak need stuff, like, oh, I'll talk to, I'll talk to him in some watery, gaseous, non-confrontational, non-measurable fashion.
I'll have a word with him.
But it's like, come on, man, this is an evil doer.
Having a word with him ain't going to solve the problem.
You've got to be something a bit more robust.
If somebody's lying about someone else, do you get the two of them together and work it out?
Or do you just kind of do nothing?
So, yeah, you just probe the group.
And or when you want to join a group, say, you know, everybody knows that there are bad actors in the world.
Why is that background noise, man?
That is so annoying.
I don't know why people call into a show and have all this background noise and don't mute.
It's very rude.
Because it puts work on me after the fact.
I have to go and clean all of this stuff up.
Man, speaking of people who aren't being entirely productive in the conversation, I already told you about it.
It's just rude.
It's just rude.
Okay, he's out.
He's out.
I just, I mean, it's just so rude.
Don't put additional work.
I'm working for free here.
I'm not doing commercials requiring donations to talk.
So at least don't make all of this background noise or mute yourself when I'm trying to talk.
Man.
So you go to the community and if you want to join them and you say, what has your experience been with bad actors in the past?
And if they say, oh, we haven't really had any, then they're lying, right?
And if they say, well, you know, there was a guy here a couple of years ago, blah, blah, blah.
You ask him, what happened?
What did you guys do?
How did you identify the issues?
Just ask them.
Just ask them.
I mean, if somebody wants to be your doctor, they better show some expertise.
And if some group wants you to join them, then they should show you some expertise in dealing with evildoers.
All right.
Let us move to conservative non-believer.
I believe I can fly.
All right.
If you wanted to unmute.
Good morning.
Four grand noise.
How you doing, man?
Not bad.
You can call me Kyle, by the way.
All right.
Kyle, what's on your mind?
Looking for some advice here because of the prevalence of call-in debate shows.
And it's funny that I'm asking for an advice on how to engage call-in shows to a call-in show.
I'm sorry.
I'm not sure what you mean by call-in debate shows.
Oh, okay.
On TikTok and YouTube, there are many, many shows now that will engage people to click in and debate.
And I run in atheist circles.
So I'm in many of these that hold very left-leaning positions.
Sorry, I'm sorry, sorry.
I missed atheist circles.
I wasn't quite sure what that word was.
Atheists?
Atheist circles, my apologies.
Okay, got it.
Go ahead.
And as my name says, I'm a conservative non-believer.
And so they present these leftist positions that are just ridiculous.
And I feel as if I need to correct them.
So I call in.
And I hold strong, but my biggest problem is getting past the sophistry of the argument.
Now, I have read The Art of the Argument.
I have it in my audibles.
Feel free to promote the book.
Great book, Safon.
Awesome.
Thank you.
But I would like you to maybe give me some pointers on, I don't know if you've ever engaged in these activities.
I sometimes wish you would because I think you'd have a blast at it.
How to address sophistries in an argument, you know, that just completely sidetrack your point.
Okay.
Can you give me an example so we could deal with something more specific?
Okay.
The one that comes to mind was I made the contention that socialism leads to either, because the host claimed to be a socialist or wants to go that direction.
And I said it leads to either famine or tyranny.
And in the conversation, he brought China into it and made the claim that poor people do better in China than Americans.
And, you know, I pushed back against it and he started throwing data is what he said.
I finally got the source on it, W-H-O-N-U-N.
But when you look at the data, it's not, he's cherry-picking, which is sophistry.
And how do you address that without, you know, it's just a dishonest argument.
And I'm not sure how to take it without insulting the host.
Maybe I should, but seeing as how the host is also the moderator, that's not a good move in a discussion.
Okay, got it.
So once you're in the realm of data, you've lost.
Because the issue with socialism is not the outcomes.
It's not the data.
The issue with socialism is the violence.
That socialism relies upon the initiation of the use of force and violations of property, rights, by a well-armed elite of political cadres, right?
So the problem is the immorality.
It's the evil.
It's the violations of persons and property that are required for socialism to function.
So it's kind of like if you are arguing about whether murder is good or evil or rape is good or evil based upon data, you've lost the argument.
Because what you're saying is the most important thing is outcomes gathered by highly motivated, methodologically suspicious actors.
So if there was some pro-murder society, then they would say, well, you know, murder has its benefits.
And they would come up with all this data and interview a bunch of murderers and so on.
And then they would say, well, you know, murderers, they take out people who would otherwise be collecting a bunch of Social Security.
It frees up health care and pensions for other, like they would just come up with all of this data.
And the moment you engage the pro-murder society in the realm of data and surveys, you've lost.
So sophistry is trying to vault over the moral questions and go to questions of utilitarianism or pragmatism or, well, some people benefit under evil, because that's basically the statistical argument or the data-driven argument for socialism is some people do better under evil.
And it's like, well, no shit, Sherlock.
Of course, some people do better under evil.
If nobody did better under evil, it wouldn't exist.
So what you're saying is some workers did better under communism.
Yep.
And if you legalize murder, then people who want to kill people are going to be happier and do better.
That's not the question.
The question isn't who might or might not do better under evil.
The question is, is it immoral to point guns at people and take their property?
Yes or no.
And of course, socialism is a foundational contradiction because socialism and communism in particular is based upon the labor theory of value and what that says, and I'll keep this brief, right?
But it's important.
So the labor theory of value says that if Patrick creates a widget that's worth $20, but the capitalist only pays Patrick $15 for that, that the capitalist has stolen $5 from Patrick.
That's all, right?
Just that.
Because they just take time slices down to the individual.
They don't think about the costs of taxes, heating, overhead, accounting, building the factory, the risk, the, you know, it's just that particular time slice.
Because what socialism does is it takes things down to a tiny time slice because it's a low IQ phenomenon and because it's a whole lot easier to say, I want a living wage for people than it is to actually create a business and pay people more.
So it's just people bleating around saying nice things.
Healthcare is a human right.
It's like, you know, why don't you just become a doctor and give your services away for free then?
Well, I can't do that.
It's just a whole lot easier to just bleat tiny time slice.
I would like a flying pony wish fulfillment than it is to actually solve problems in the real world.
So socialism communism is founded upon the concept that theft is wrong.
That the capitalist is stealing the excess labor value of the worker and keeping it all for himself, mooaha ha, his monocle, his money bags.
He runs to his house in the Hamptons, counts his money, and spits on the pictures of his poor workers.
So socialism communism founded on theft is wrong, that the capitalists are stealing the excess labor value of the worker and that's evil.
So theft is wrong.
Okay.
So then, of course, the socialist communist creates a massive government that steals everyone's labor completely without having to provide any value in return and without any choice in the matter.
It's sort of like saying, well, seduction is wrong.
It's bad.
And therefore, we're going to create a ministry of rape, right?
I mean, that everyone has to go through this.
It's even worse than that, though, because so they say, we need socialism because theft by capitalists is bad.
And we substitute a small percentage theft by capitalists, even if we accept that paradigm, to 100% theft by communist governments.
They take all of your salary or 80% of it or 70% of it or whatever it is.
So this is the massive contradiction.
So when debating a socialist, you say, is theft wrong?
And you won't get an answer.
Because if they say theft is wrong, you say, okay, theft is wrong.
What is the definition of theft?
And at some point, they'd have to say the forced or fraudulent transfer of property against somebody's wishes.
It's like, okay, well, under communism, what happens to the workers' wages?
Because under communism, the government can take any and all of your wages and force you to work in a particular job, which they consider important.
It's all central planning.
And the government controls the currency, and the government can print whatever currency it wants and so on, right?
And the government orders around everyone.
And of course, the Ukrainian famine was taken, which was caused.
10 million people starved to death, which is just about the most awful way to go.
They were eating feathers out of pillows, bark off trees, you name it.
And so the government can just take all your property.
So if theft is wrong, even if we were to accept the argument that somehow the capitalist is in a free market environment stealing the excess labor of the workers, they say, well, theft is wrong.
Okay, under communism, does the government take through coercion more money than the capitalist ever could through non-coercion?
Because the capitalist isn't forcing you to work there.
It's a mutual benefit situation.
Because again, if you take a tiny time slice, you say, well, the waiter is paid less than the manager.
Well, but the manager is doing more at a higher skill level.
And if the manager created the restaurant, it took a lot of capital to create the restaurant.
But they just say, well, in this tiny time slice, the waiter is producing $30 of value, but only getting $20 of pay or $25 or whatever, right?
And the other thing you could say, of course, is that if workers are better at negotiating, could they get higher wages?
Of course, they'd have to say yes.
Say, okay, well, then why don't government schools teach children how to negotiate for higher wages?
Why don't they teach them the true mechanics of capitalism and negotiation and so on?
And of course, if you want higher worker wages and the government runs the schools, why don't graduates from 12-plus years of education, why don't they have any practical and valuable work skills?
Because you have the government in charge.
So isn't the government stealing 12 years of life while providing almost nothing in value, 98% of what you learn in school outside of reading and basic arithmetic gets forgotten?
So that's exploitation.
People are forced to pay.
And the government is really stealing 12 years of children's lives.
Government Control Fails00:15:46
The older I get, like it's just, by the by, the more I look back and say how absolutely wretched my education was.
You know how much I love learning and arguing, debating and thinking and challenging myself and others.
And my God, it was just a dead zombie march through useless trivia as a student.
They just took 12 years of my fucking life and gave me propaganda I had to then scrub from my brain with Clorox.
So yeah, so once you get into the data and the outcomes, who cares?
Is it right or wrong?
Is it right or wrong?
Well, Stalin dragged Russia into industrialization.
And as a result, better off, blah, blah, blah.
I don't care.
I don't care.
I don't care if the rapist is happy.
I don't care if the murderer is happy.
I don't care if there's statistical arguments.
I don't care.
You could say in those societies where there's immigrants who are performing a lot of sexual assaults, say, well, you know, but it advances the goals of socialism because they tend to vote left, the immigrants, right?
It's like, what?
Once you're into data, you've lost the argument because data is almost always false.
Almost always.
Especially data that's not like empirical, directly empirical.
So it's sort of like saying, well, you know, in North Korea, the ruler just got like 98.5% of the vote.
Boy, that must mean only 1.5% of people have any problem with them.
What does that data mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
We all know the data under COVID was appallingly wrong.
And once the data was released, it was realized that it was 100% efficacy, was like double the efficacy.
It was like in absolute, not relative terms.
Oh, sorry, relative terms, not absolute terms.
So once you get into the realm of data, don't you feel like you just can't win and it's just you're trying to climb a mountain with rock slides and everything just crumbles under your hands and you can't get anywhere.
No, just go back.
Okay, so you think socialism is good because it's better.
Okay.
What does better mean?
What is moral?
What is virtuous?
How do you know what is virtuous?
How do you know what is true?
Just get to the basics.
Once you're arguing at the top level, the frothy level of data, you're not getting down to the absolute roots of things.
How do you know what is true?
How do you know what is good?
How do you know socialism is better compared to what?
What is your metric?
And is the metric moral?
If it's moral, how do you know what morality is?
You're an atheist.
And it turns out to be circular, right?
Because atheism says basically the good that this thing is good because it had better outcomes in society, right?
And then you say, well, what is the good?
Oh, well, the good is that which produces better outcomes in society.
It's tautological, right?
So how do you know?
And also look for complexity.
Second order effects, third order effects, right?
So look for complexity.
And if somebody says socialism is good, say, what are the costs?
Right?
It can't all be just benefits.
What are the costs?
And I can certainly argue for the costs of capitalism, which is it's a moral system for sure, but the costs are that it will widen absolute gaps between rich and poor, which provokes a lot of resentment.
And as long as you have a state, then the poor will use that resentment to steal from the rich and destroy capitalism and so on, right?
So I can talk about these negatives that wealth in a society funds a lot of corruption, funds a lot of military adventurism, and funds a lot of imperialism and war.
And so there's downsides to capitalism, particularly with the state.
This is arguments made by my character Roman in my novel, The Future, which everyone should read: free tomand.com/slash books.
So, yeah, avoid the realm of data.
People love to stay at the level of data because they don't want to reveal their appalling ignorance.
When I came back on X, I asked atheists, why don't you lie?
Why not lie?
I mean, Christians, there's an answer, right?
Thou shalt not bear false witness, commandment from God, the Almighty, the all-good, the all-perfect, the all-knowing, who gets you heaven or hell.
So there's, you know, you may not agree with the methodology, but there certainly is a reason.
So they're atheists, why do you?
And they didn't have an answer.
And I didn't get any single message from an atheist saying, you know what?
That's actually a really good question.
I've kind of missed that one.
This is the Socratic question.
I want to teach people all about justice.
Oh, okay, good.
What is justice?
What are you teaching?
Hemlock.
I'm teaching you to drink hemlock because you're blowing my racket here.
So, yeah, so that's don't engage at the realm of data because it's all just like, oh, what's the source?
And here's the methodology.
And I have different data and it just doesn't go anywhere.
Data and morality are antonyms.
They're opposites.
Morality is too good.
Who cares about the data?
Right?
I mean, in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, if I could get away, let's not say me.
If Bob can get away with robbing a gas station, which only takes him an hour and he gets $500 from robbing the gas station, it's $500 an hour.
It's like low-rent lawyer wages, as opposed to, you know, if he's only, if he gets 50 bucks an hour at some job, that's 10 hours.
And therefore, it is cost efficient for Bob to rob the gas station because he gets 10 times the money for the same amount of labor.
Like once you're at that level, you're not able to progress in the argument because then, well, but you know, it costs the gas station owner.
Yes, but it benefits Bob.
Right.
Just go with the basics with the morality.
Totally.
Oh, that's great.
Thank you, Stefan.
I would like to follow up with this, though.
Is there a way to formulate my position?
And sorry to say I'm looking for a magic bullet here.
A way to formulate my position that would avoid the data trap.
Okay, so why don't you propose, let's do a little mock debate here.
Propose the socialist argument and you be the socialist atheist and I will be the me guy.
Okay.
You have to start.
Oh, I got a steel man here.
All right.
Socialism is good because, or socialism ideal or socialism is the best system.
because it brings inequality.
There's less poverty, and it works towards- Sorry, I hate to thank you at the beginning.
You don't want to say it brings inequality because it sounds like it brings inequality as opposed to it brings in equality.
That's what you sort of mean, right?
So if you can just start that again, because it's a little confusing for people.
So sorry, go ahead.
Okay.
Socialism balances the playing field between classes so that we don't have any ultra-rich and we don't have any ultra-poor.
And so far and so forth, it would create less human suffering.
It's almost a humanist position.
Okay, great.
How does socialism balance the wealth between rich and poor?
Well, the state takes control of the means of production, whether that be factories or oil wells, and that money is evenly distributed across all the nation to, you know, redistribute the wealth.
So those that have-nots have some and those that have a lot still have some.
Okay, got it.
Everybody prospers.
Got it.
Now, what if you don't want the government to take the property that you have worked hard to build and maintain?
Well, we have entered into a social construct that we look at the collective as the beneficiary.
And although as the individual, you might lose a little bit overall and for the benefit of humanity, that is one of the sacrifices we have to make.
But look at the trade-off.
You get free health care.
Your kids get free education all the way through college.
So, yes, the benefits obviously outweigh the negatives.
What's one little piece of property to a person when we're feeding the world?
Excellent.
So I'm sorry, that's a lovely little pamphlet, but I'm looking for specifics.
What happens if you don't want the government to take the farm or the business or the factory or whatever that your forefathers and your father and you have worked hard to build and maintain?
What happens if you don't want the government to take that?
Well, I don't have all the answers on how to make it happen, but I know this current system is so messed up.
Okay, I'm going to need to stop you.
I'm sorry.
This is within the bounds of the argument.
What specifically, you got a bunch of adjectives that sound all very nice, right?
What happens to someone who doesn't want the government to take their property?
I mean, you should know how the system works, right?
What happens?
I'll tell you, I can't steal, man, that I'm going to have to stop our lower debate.
That's no, you just say, sorry, yeah, the government takes it.
And if they resist, if they resist, the government takes it by force.
They'll say that.
Yeah, but that's obviously theft.
I mean, I can't believe they would.
Well, no, no, they would defend it, right?
Because they would say, do you want to switch positions?
I'll steal man, the government nationalizing things, no problem.
All right.
All right.
So you'd get me to say that the government uses force to take it, right?
Right.
Okay.
And I would say, well, the government isn't taking property.
It's taking it back.
That factory only exists because the capitalists stole from the workers.
So the government is just stealing it back on behalf of the workers.
I mean, if somebody takes your bike, you can go and take it back, right?
So the government is simply taking back the factory, which was stolen from the profits of the workers and giving it back to the workers.
So there's nothing wrong with that.
Yes, but it doesn't work because it is a level of slavery.
You are, there's no problem.
No, no, no, no.
Sorry.
Sorry to interrupt.
I hate to be an ag, but you did ask me for feedback.
What did you say?
The first three words in your response were what?
You'd have to use, well, where I was going.
No, you said, no, no.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
The first three words you said was, it doesn't work.
So now you're in the realm of pragmatism.
Okay.
Like if you were to say, we need to ban rape, you say, well, that doesn't work for the rapists.
When you say it doesn't work, you have jumped out of the realm of morality.
I mean, everyone who wants a moral rule recognizes that the moral rule benefits some people and causes problems or negatives for others, right?
So if you have a law, a rule, a law, thou shalt not steal, it benefits people who've justly earned their property and it harms the interests of people who want to steal, right?
Right.
So if you say, well, maintaining property rights doesn't work or violating property rights doesn't work.
Well, it does work for some.
Violating property rights works for the people who steal.
I mean, if you get to print a million dollars and your friends get to spend it first, they get a free million dollars anytime they want.
It works for them, right?
It just doesn't work for everybody else who loses value through inflation.
So the moment you say it doesn't work because, then you have lost the argument because now you're wrangling about what works and what doesn't.
And for every single choice, there are costs and benefits, right?
So I am doing a show right now.
I'm not working out.
I'm not learning how to play the cello.
I'm not flying a plane.
I'm not doing a face mask.
I'm doing a show.
So I've chosen to do the show, but there's costs to everything else, right?
There's costs to my heart to do this show rather than do hard cardio for an hour and a half or whatever, right?
So you can't say what works and what doesn't because everything works and doesn't work.
Every decision you make works and doesn't work, right?
I'm choosing to do the show rather than go buy a slice of pizza.
That works for you, the audience.
It doesn't work, or it's negative for the guy who would have sold me the slice of pizza.
Does that make sense?
So works doesn't work.
Okay.
Maybe it's my own personal conversation style.
I was getting to, I should have just went straight to the point.
Well, that's theft.
And then go into the moral stance of theft being immoral.
Okay.
And they would say, so the socialists would say, I absolutely agree.
Theft is immoral, which is why we have to take back the means of production unjustly stolen from the workers.
I don't believe it was stolen by the workers without the workers.
You've got to be precise.
He says it's stolen from the workers, not by the workers.
Well, I think it was being stolen from the business owners who it's being stolen from.
This guy has everything invested.
He took his resources and built this company.
Okay, no, no, now you're talking effort, right?
Hang on.
Now you're talking effort.
The socialists would say, but the workers worked even harder.
He might have been an absentee landlord just getting rent from people.
So it's, I would, if I were in your shoes, I would flip it to gun or no gun.
So let's flip the argument again.
And I would say, okay, so did the capitalist use a gun to extract property from the workers?
In other words, do they roam around the streets?
Like, you know, there were slave catchers in Africa and in the South.
And if you like, they would catch slaves.
They used violence, right?
If the slave resisted capture, they could use violence.
All right.
They could even kill the slave if necessary, if the slave was acting in self-defense.
So the question is, ding, ding, ding, we've got a new game show in town called Gun or No Gun, right?
And so did the capitalist get his workers at the point of a gun?
No, and I'll be honest, it's really hard for me to steal man.
I understand their position, but no, see, what they do is they say, what the leftist, sorry to interrupt again, what the leftists do is they say circumstances are the same as violence.
Words are violence, circumstances are violence.
So then they would say, okay, so you're born in a small town, you're born to a single mother because capitalism for some reason, and then you don't get a good education and you have no choice, and therefore you have no choice but to go and work in the factory town.
You don't have really, really options, and therefore it's the same as coercion.
Which is sort of like saying an ugly girl can only get one boyfriend and that's the same as rape or something like that, right?
So they say circumstances are the equivalent of violence.
Well, that's from my perception, that's anecdotal.
And I have plenty of other stories of just the opposite of people.
Okay, but we don't need stories.
Don't need stories.
Say, hang on, no, gun or no gun.
You just have to keep pressing them on that.
Gun or no gun.
Does, okay, there are circumstances wherein we have less choice, blah, blah, blah.
But does the capitalist, does the capitalist pull out a gun to hire and keep the worker?
And you have to just push them on that point.
And of course, they can't say yes.
Now, is there anything fundamental in social media?
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
You got to stay with the argument, man.
You keep jumping out to the abstractions.
Stay with the argument.
So at some point, they have to say, not directly, or, you know, the gun is the circumstances, it's the social class, it's access to capital.
It's like, okay, whatever.
A woman with fewer choices about who to marry is not the same as a woman forced at gunpoint into, quote, marriage, which would obviously just be institutionalized rape, right?
So reduced opportunities is not the same as violence.
Is there a gun or not a gun?
So you say, did the capitalist get his workers at gunpoint and does he keep his workers at gunpoint or can they quit at any time?
Stay With The Argument00:14:47
Is it a voluntary, now we can say limited, whatever, right?
You know, the ugly guy can't get the cheerleader, unless he's got a lot of charisma or whatever.
The low sexual market value guy can't get the high sexual market value woman, right?
So he has reduced choice.
Does that mean that it is that does that mean he dates at gunpoint?
If he has reduced choices, let's say he's smelly, he's fat, he's got bad skin, he's balding at the age of 20, whatever it is, right?
So he can't date many people.
He has reduced choices.
Does that mean that anyone who engages in a relationship with him is raping him?
Well, of course not.
And then they would say, ah, yes, but everyone's forced to work, right?
In capitalism, everyone's forced to work in socialism.
You don't have to work if you want to, Bob.
Okay, and that's sort of a different matter, right?
But they say forced to work.
And what they mean by that is that because human beings have to produce in order to consume, then it's violence.
Again, they go back to circumstances are violence, or reality is violence, which is actually kind of a psychotic position, right?
If you woke up every morning incredibly enraged that there was still gravity and you couldn't fly, people would call you psychotic, right?
So being enraged at reality that human beings in order to consume have to produce somebody's got to grow your food, somebody's got to give you shelter, somebody's got to give you heat in the winter and cool in the summer, although maybe the latter is optional, what it is, because most of human history we didn't have it.
But they're just angry at reality.
And which is the actions of a terminally depressed person is to be angry.
Reality, and it's kind of circular.
You're angry at reality, so you get depressed because you're depressed.
You get more angry at reality.
But at some point, it has to be ding, ding, ding, we're back on the game show.
Gun or no gun.
Does the capitalist get his workers at the point of a gun?
Does he keep them working there at the point of a gun?
Can they quit?
Right?
And so at some point, if the socialist, the socialists will just avoid that question.
Of course, right?
And you just have to keep dragging them back.
And you don't be afraid to interrupt.
I have been here, right?
Because you want to get the information across.
I never interrupt somebody who's in the process of answering a question.
I interrupt people when in the process of not answering the question because it's a waste of everybody's time.
And I'm just trying to be really direct here about the coaching.
Gun or no gun.
Now, at some point, he has to admit, well, technically, they'll put all these weasel words.
Technically, literally, he doesn't have an actual tangible gun to his head, blah, It's like, okay, no gun.
No gun.
Now, if you own the factory and the government comes to take it away and you resist it, does the government have a gun?
And they'll try to avoid it.
But at some point, if they're, and at some point, you're looking for the people in the middle, right?
The people who already agree with you is fine.
The people who disagree with you and are committed and dogmatic, they won't ever believe you.
You're looking for the people in the middle.
At some point, when you're asking clear and direct questions, people get annoyed at those who aren't answering them.
And they then begin to suspect, and they're right, that people who don't answer clear questions are con men, right?
You go to some con man, right?
And some pyramid scheme guy, and you say, show me the actual books, right?
I mean, when I was out there in Australia and the people couldn't pay me for all my speeches, which were life-threatening, people couldn't pay me.
They said, oh, we don't have the money.
And I said, okay, send me the accounting.
Quick question.
Do you think I ever got the accounting?
I did not.
Right?
So, yeah, people who can't answer direct questions are usually bad actors with bad intent.
And right?
So you say, gun or no gun.
Okay, so you've already admitted there's no tangible gun in the capitalist situation.
But if you disagree with the government coming to take your property, they have the right to pull guns on you and they have the right to shoot you if you keep resisting.
So in the game called gun or no gun, violence or no violence, capitalism is better unless you prefer violence.
Now, if as a socialist you prefer violence, you should just say that.
I think we should use guns.
I think theft is good.
I think violence is good.
Okay.
I mean, you should be honest about that.
I prefer negotiation, peace, reason, and voluntary relationships.
I prefer lovemaking to rape.
I prefer trade to theft.
I prefer peace to violence.
Now, you prefer violence to peace, but let's just be honest about that.
So the game called gun or no gun is really, really important to play because otherwise you're stuck in these UN bullshit numbers at the bottom of a PDF from 20 years ago.
Yeah, absolutely.
I've never went that way with the gun.
Is there something inherent to a socialist government that they take guns away also just to expand on that argument?
I know history would show that, but is there something in because my understanding of socialism straight up is that the government or the people own the means of production and that makes it socialist.
Sorry, when you say the government takes away the guns, you mean from the non-government?
Yes, from the people or the citizenry.
Okay.
So if somebody was saying, like, that's the argument for gun control, right?
Yeah, because they think less guns, less violence, but people are violent whether they have guns or not.
Well, the simple question, and it's a brutal question, would be, is there less violence if a woman doesn't resist rape?
These are some great questions, Stefan.
I wish I.
And the answer is no.
There's more violence because if there's no resistance, then the rapist can have free hand.
Is there less theft if somebody doesn't defend his property?
No, because if everybody knows, if all the thieves know no one's going to defend their property, there'll just be more theft.
And this is back to people who are, not you, of course, but the people who just look at time slices, right?
This is back to the argument about the Wild West town with Bob and Doug or Bob and Sam, right, opposing each other down the dusty street, which is, if you don't resist, there's no violence.
If you resist, there's violence.
And so it is the resistance that is considered bad.
So socialist governments want to take away guns because it gives the appearance of less violence.
It allows them to expand without resistance.
And of course, if guns are bad, then the government should disarm itself.
But of course, gun control is never about reducing the amount of guns in society.
It's about making sure that only the most sociopathic and corrupt leaders and political powers in society, that they're the only ones who have guns.
It's not about gun control.
It's about making sure that only the greatest criminals in the world have all the arms and guns that they want, and it's a legally disarmed citizenry.
And again, that's just immediate order thinking that if there's resistance to the socialist agenda, it's probably going to take place with guns.
And that way, socialism looks bad because socialism is all about covering up guns.
And you can do a search for early shows I did on this from like over 20 years ago.
The topic is the gun in the room, the gun in the room.
All you need to do is expose the gun in the room.
And socialists want their system to look less violent.
And so what they do is they remove the capacity to resist.
It's like saying, well, if some evil guy roofies a woman, then has his evil way with her, that it's not violent.
It's like, well, no, no, it is.
It is violent.
It's even worse in a way because she doesn't even have the opportunity to resist.
So socialism can only create the illusion that it's not a violent system by removing the capacity of self-defense from its citizens.
Okay.
So the big thing I got from this is I need to not necessarily avoid the sophistry, just ignore it and stay on track of the original position.
That's sophistry.
What you need to do, because that's very blanket and non-specific, what you need to do is what's the game show called?
Yeah, let's make a deal.
I don't know where you're going, Stefan.
What's the God?
I'm sorry.
You just made the last 40 minutes of my life completely worthless, bro.
You're not even listening.
Oh, my.
Are you doing something else?
Are you multitasking?
No, what's the game?
And I have listened.
No, you haven't.
No, you haven't.
Honestly.
And I got to tell you this.
If you are coming in to an expert to ask for advice and you don't listen to the response, the expert will not ever want to talk to you again.
I'm just telling you that straight up.
Like you are denying yourself access to expertise.
No, we didn't.
Because hang on.
Go ahead.
No, no.
I promise I've been listening.
You've not been listening.
I've got no respect.
Yes, sir.
I have been.
No, you have not been listening.
Don't gaslight me, bro.
And you need to get better at listening if you're going to debate, because debating is all about listening.
So I said many times over the course of this conversation, we're going to play Ding, Ding, Ding, a game show called Gun or No Gun.
So then when I say, what's the game show?
And you say, I don't know, deal or no deal.
It's like, no, no, the central analogy was revealing the gun in the room, a game show.
And I said it two or three times, a game show called Gun or No Gun.
Fair enough.
Fair enough, Stefan.
And yes, I need to go to the direction of the gun and enforcement of socialism.
But my primary reason for coming here was forming an argument, not looking for a point.
And I thank you for the point.
I apologize if you think I haven't been listening because I have.
Well, the other reason, sorry to interrupt.
The other reason I think you weren't listening was I said you need to focus on morality.
You need to focus on the foundational ethics and the gun or no gun, the violence or no violence.
And you didn't mention any of that when you were summarizing the conversation.
So it's a disappointing, it's disappointing.
And on the plus side, I think we got out to the world.
Good arguments.
But you know, there's this thing.
I'll just, I'll shut up in a sec.
But yeah, there's this thing in the modern world where, you know, people just don't listen.
They just don't listen.
I, you know, when I, you hurt me at the beginning, when I misheard one or two words, or I'm listening very carefully, very, very carefully.
Like my, sometimes you, I mean, you've probably seen me on live stream.
I'm closing my eyes.
I'm like, really trying to absorb.
Sometimes I'll make notes.
So when I go through for 40 minutes saying, here's how you argue with socialists, and then the guy summarizes it and gets it completely wrong.
And then I say, well, what was the game show I was talking about?
Or what's the game show?
And he doesn't even remember me using the analogy of game shows.
It means that he's not listening.
And I'll tell you, listening, listening to people is a superpower.
I didn't hear a word he said at the beginning.
I couldn't catch the word atheist.
And then he made a stolen by the workers rather than from the workers.
So I'm really listening to every detail.
I'm obviously not a perfect listener, but it is kind of my job.
It's the call-in shows, right?
You hear me do a two-hour, two and a half-hour call-in show for the first 90 minutes.
I'm just asking questions and listening.
And then you'll hear me gather the threads together at the end.
Listening is a superpower.
If you can't listen, can't have relationships.
If you can't listen, people won't want to talk to you.
I don't want to talk to this guy.
I think it's useful for the audience as a whole.
But if this was a private conversation, I'd bookmark that person in my head and never talk to them again.
I mean, if he'd been honest and said, you know, I kind of was browsing X or, you know, I did get kind of distracted.
And it's fine.
Listen, if you get distracted or whatever, then you have to say, listen, I'm so sorry.
I kind of gapped out there for a second.
I zoomed out.
Can you just repeat that?
I'm sorry.
I'll really work to focus harder on the conversation.
But you get, you know, especially as you get older, well, after your kidhood years, like after you become an adult, you get like one chance with people because the best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior.
And if somebody doesn't listen, and this guy sounded older, he's probably in his 40s or 50s.
If somebody has not developed the habit or skill of listening by the time they're in their 30s, 40s, 50s, they're just not going to listen.
And if you have identified in yourself a bad habit, and we all have bad habits, but if you've identified in yourself a bad habit, like I don't listen, I kind of zone out, I kind of space out and blah, blah, blah, right?
Okay.
Then you need to work on that bad habit.
And whatever you need to do.
If you get distracted, then you need to, if you're going to ask a question to someone who's an expert like myself, then you need to put your phone on the other side of the room.
You need to sit there and take notes.
You need to close your eyes.
Maybe the room needs to be in darkness.
I don't know.
But you need to deal with your bad habits.
As do I, as do everyone.
I have a habit of irritability, so I'm working on that.
Impatience because of intelligence.
I could put any number of labels on it, but people say to me, you have the patience of a saint, and that's good.
I mean, but that's not a skill that just I was born with, right?
It's a skill I had to really work to develop.
And it's not a muscle that is innate to me.
It's a muscle I needed to create.
And I'm still working on it.
I'm still working on it.
And so irritability can lead me to hostility.
So I allow myself to feel irritable.
I try not to go over into hostility because that's more destructive.
Irritability could be helpful, right?
So when I'm really working hard to coach someone and when they summarize my coaching, they get it completely wrong.
Focus on the core issues.
Like, that doesn't mean anything.
If the only thing he got out of the coaching was to focus on the core issues, that's not at all implementable.
You can't implement that.
Focus on the core issues.
It doesn't mean anything.
If I say, well, you've got to focus on whether a gun is present or absent in an interaction, that you can focus on, right?
That's why I made the game show.
Go gun or no gun.
Ding, ding, ding.
Again, made it kind of funny and all of that.
And then he doesn't.
And you notice at the end, he didn't say, oh, that's what you're referring to.
He didn't say that at all.
He didn't say, oh, I thought you meant some other game show, right?
Which also wouldn't be great listening because why would I introduce some random game show after talking about a game show two or three times in the middle of a relatively short conversation?
This is not multi-hour.
But he didn't say, oh, I'm so sorry.
Yeah, I remember that.
Listening Without Awareness00:01:57
I just thought you were talking about another.
He didn't say that because he didn't remember, which means he wasn't listening.
Now, it's different in a public conversation.
You all get the value.
It's a double value, how to argue socialism and how perhaps to deal with people who don't listen.
But in a private conversation, no.
No, if you, for somehow, somehow you get someone at a dinner party as a lawyer, and you ask them a bunch of questions about the law, about something particular.
And let's say somehow they bypass, don't give legal advice to friends or whatever.
Let's just say you could get good advice from someone or somebody maybe who's a fitness expert and you say, you know, I've got the stubborn belly fat or whatever it is, right?
And for 40 minutes, they go through with great energy and detail everything you need to do.
And then at the end of the conversation, you don't remember really anything they've said.
It's kind of annoying, right?
And that person will not want to give you advice again.
If you were to call that person up and say, listen, sorry, could you, sorry, could you just repeat everything you told me before?
They're going to say, well, no, I'm not.
I'm not.
I mean, I gave you some advice out of the goodness of my heart, didn't charge you a penny, and you weren't even listening.
So I'm going to save my words for people who listen.
And, you know, I say this with sympathy to the fellow.
He may not be aware that he doesn't listen.
This may be a shock to him.
I think by the age he sounded in his 40s or 50s, which is not obviously absolute, but I think I listen back to myself from 20 years ago and I'm like, wow, my voice sounded younger.