"What do you think of First Amendment auditors, people who film in public areas of government facilities like police stations and post offices? I've been enjoying your novel, The Present, a lot, and thinking how long in my small town it will take for the government's authority to be ignored by the majority."
[0:00] Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. It is Stefan Molyneux from the Free Domain Radio.
And we are going to answer some questions from the listeners.
And it is the 5th of February, 2024. Well, that's a note to make you burp. All right, let's get to these questions.
What do you think of First Amendment auditors, people who film in public areas of government facilities like police stations and post offices.
I've been enjoying your novel, The Present, a lot, and thinking how long in my small town it will take for the government's authority to be ignored by the majority.
No, I don't think it would be ignored.
So First Amendment auditors, there's a very interesting aspect of the modern world that is playing out across the West.
You can see it in the States. I guess you're talking First Amendment, we're talking about the U.S., right? You can see this playing out across the state.
So, if you look at the complexity of the criminal system, it's really, really wild.
You know, just how, it's incredibly complex.
[1:08] If you have watched sort of courtroom dramas, you know the rules of evidence and procedure and objection, and it's really wildly complex.
Complex and that complexity could only develop in a society where crime was very much the exception where criminals were extraordinarily rare as a whole and you can listen to my presentation the truth about the wild west for more on this but the crime was extremely rare now because crime was extremely rare, you could have a very complex legal system.
And there's some real value in that complexity, trying to get to the truth of things, particularly when these legal systems were developed, when there wasn't video cameras everywhere and DNA evidence and so on, right?
So trying to get to the truth of things was quite complex.
And so jury of your peers, legal advocates, the rules of evidence, chain of custody.
I mean, these things are all very complex.
And they are generally to be reserved...
[2:17] For societies with low crime rates. Now, the problem, of course, is that when crime rates begin to increase, and there's a wide variety of reasons for that, you know, breakdown of.
[2:28] The family, and there's huge amounts of reasons for that increases in child abuse.
[2:37] And so on, then what happens is you get a system that is designed for a small number of people, which then has to try to accommodate a much larger number of people and the system can handle it right i mean it's like a country road trying to take rush hour la rush hour traffic right this doesn't doesn't work so then you have to find some way to expedite it how do you how do you speed up things in the system and of course what generally has happened now is that rules have been relaxed in the states of course the people the police are allowed to lie to you and you're not allowed to lie to the police so that's kind of an what do they call it a ruse we use a ruse because ruse sounds a lot a lot better a lot nicer i suppose so you allow the police to lie and then you allow the legal system to plea bargain right so to say you know we'll give you three years if you plead guilty but if you go to trial we're going to try and get 10 years or something like that right so in a sense you bribe people with their own time in order to plead guilty and you know some of them are guilty i'm sure but it's really hard to know how many because the whole problem of guilt and innocence is really tough and complex to work out which is why you have a a complex legal system.
[4:02] I think in America, is it only a few percentage points of charges go to trial?
And again, some of that is because the people are guilty and plea out, but it's really hard to know how many.
And of course, there are a lot of people who confess and plea out and then plead out and then they are later exonerated by the DNA evidence or some other kind of evidence.
So, the system is inevitably corrupted by the corruption of the morals of the people by other systems, right?
So, the welfare state breaks down the family.
When the family breaks down, and in particular with father absence, women, I mean, it's a beautiful part of women, how strongly attached and devoted they are to their toddlers and babies and little children and so on.
But there has to come a time, and particularly for boys, when the father gives more strictness and restraint and discipline and consequences, right, negative consequences.
[5:07] And when fathers are absent, women tend to, again, due to this very strong bond, which is, again, a beautiful thing in nature and in freedom, women tend to excuse and minimize and forgive and enable and so on.
And then this just catapults, particularly boys, down this tunnel of criminality to its inevitable end.
End so you have a system which is forced transfer of wealth to say single mothers and you know welfare state is not just single mothers but it's largely single mothers and you then end up with because you have one bad system which destroys the family or undermines the family in many communities then you end up with another system which is the criminal justice system.
[5:58] Losing much of its integrity because it is overwhelmed because father absence has led to increased criminality and so on right so this is it's all very complex and interconnected, and i mean you you can't solve it of course except with foundational morals like thou shalt not steal or you pp span on right to have to solve the murder you just you can't solve any of it really because it's so complex and interconnected.
[6:25] You can't. It's like trying to work out one muscle, just one muscle, one big bicep or something like that.
Well, even if you were to do that and you end up with one big bicep, it still affected everything else in your body, right?
Heart has to work harder, blood flow has to improve and so on.
So the reason that I'm saying all of this is that one system tends to corrupt another system. in this sort of oligarchical environment, right?
One system tends to... So the reason I'm saying, what do we think of First Amendment auditors?
Well, I am talking about this because the First Amendment was developed when lying, and we just talk about sort of defamation and free speech as far as that goes, lying really wasn't that profitable.
Lying really wasn't that profitable.
And because lying wasn't that profitable when the First Amendment was founded, you could have these laws and you could expect a relatively speedy resolution.
Of course, this is the other issue, too, is that in America, and of course, in a lot of other places, you have a legal or in America constitutional right to a speedy trial.
But a speedy trial, it's like having a right to a speedy commute when...
[7:45] It's down to one lane, right? You can have a right in a sense, but it's not really practical.
So people have a right to a speedy trial, but because the system is so clogged.
[7:57] And of course, as the system is clogged and trials are delayed, what was it, Michael Mann and suing Mark Stein for Mark Stein's comments on the hockey stick graph, and it's been 12 years. Now, I'm sure some of that's been delays.
That may be conscious, but some of it is delays just in the procedure.
So, of course, over that time, I think some of the key witnesses have died, and if you don't get a trial for a couple of years, then people have moved away, they've forgotten stuff, and chain of custody has gotten hazy, some evidence might have scattered.
I mean, videos have been erased, all that kind of stuff.
[8:30] It's crazy, right? So, in the First Amendment times, like when America was founded, the Constitution was founded, lying was not very profitable.
Lying was not very profitable. But as the government begins to control more and more wealth, then falsehoods can become more and more profitable.
And I'm not going to get into any specifics because the general principle is so clear that I don't think we need examples.
But not telling the truth, falsifying things, falsifying data, falsifying reports, you know, falsifying, that's just lying.
[9:16] Just become so massively profitable.
I mean, you can see this, of course, all the time in election season, and this happens on both sides of the aisle, in the left and the right.
There are just falsehoods that are spread because winning the election has such massive consequences.
I mean, you know, I think prior to the income tax, prior to all of these regulations, and prior to all this sort of hyper-intrusive government stuff that goes on, If you live in a rural farm in, I don't know, Montana or Pennsylvania in 1830, do you really care who's in power in Washington?
Thousands of miles away, they don't really have any power to enforce anything.
There's no property tax, no sales tax, no income tax.
I mean, it doesn't really matter. matter and so you're not going to be tempted oh you may be tempted but you're probably not going to spend much effort roaming around and making up things and and so on falsifying data or evidence or whatever right i mean you know the theory that the vaccine for covid was delayed until.
[10:28] After the election that it might have been ready earlier but they wanted to they didn't want to give trump the victory right i mean that's sort of a theory i don't know if it's ever been really established, but I mean, that would be pretty bad if it were true.
Or good, I guess, depending on what you think of the vaccines.
[10:47] But that stuff is enormously tempting because.
[10:52] The election controls trillions of dollars, trillions and trillions of dollars, right?
So the First Amendment is the right, obviously, to free speech.
And when free speech doesn't control that much, like there's not that much money that free speech can control through politics, then I think, you know, free speech, yeah, makes sense, right?
The problem is, of course, when free speech, and in particular with the internet, right?
Free speech plus the internet has the opportunity to sway elections.
[11:27] And people don't like that. They don't like the political party they consider nefarious, right?
They don't like that political party to get into power.
So they're not happy with free speech because free speech now has the ability or the potential to control trillions of dollars.
Now i mean some people will kill for 50 bucks right so so will people suppress free speech for the sake of i mean it's not just the money right this is the moral crusade you know like if, if your political opponents are the worst people known to man and will destroy your whatever whatever right then you have the money you have the moral mission and so on right, And, of course, a lot of people's lives, I'm going to do a whole show on this separately, like a lot of people's lives are really, really tragically bereft of meaning.
[12:24] A lot of people's lives are really, really tragically bereft of meaning.
[12:30] And when you don't have meaning, which is a central moral purpose to your life, when you don't have meaning, you tend to get swallowed up by ideology.
Ideology and ideology doesn't give you morality it gives you hysteria and hysteria where the stakes are raised artificially high hysteria gives you purpose and the purpose is largely fake but the sense of meaning is real like you know that famous woman who when trump was inaugurated with somewhere, I think in Washington, just screamed, no, just screaming no. Well, that's kind of a hysteria, right?
[13:14] So when people don't have meaning, then they are easy to, and with ease a lot of time comes a lack of meaning, right?
I mean, for me, I'll be happy when children in the the world aren't abused.
Right? I'll be happy. And that's a multi-generational project at best, right?
Could be hundreds of years. Probably will be, at least.
[13:43] So I'm not short of meaning and purpose when people accept the non-aggression principle and respect property rights and understand UPB and so on.
But again, UPB is only 15 years old, which is like nothing in the history of philosophy that goes back thousands and thousands of years.
And if we count prehistory, I'm sure people were thinking about the meaning of life 25,000 years ago. 15 years is like nothing, and particularly for such a radical advance in the philosophy of morality.
[14:16] So I know I'm going to die with my life's goals vastly incomplete, which is a good thing.
It means that you have very big goals and a very big purpose, and that will summon the very best within you.
I was always struck by those stories of moms who can lift cars if the cars happen to have landed on their kids, or the kids are stuck under the car, they can lift a car.
Now, I mean, I'm sure that's not entirely true, but I'm sure there are pretty negative physical consequences to doing that, even if it is true, but people can do extraordinary things when the stakes are high enough.
So for me, the extraordinary things that I have done and that I feel I do every day, even this conversation to me is an extraordinary clarifying conversation.
So people who do extraordinary things do so because the stakes are high.
Now, of course, I talked about the stakes being high in ideology in terms of hysteria, but stakes are real.
The stakes are true. The stakes are empirical and valid and all of that here in what I'm doing, right?
It's not, oh, Trump called Nazis very fine people.
It's all made up nonsense, right?
So the purpose of a lot of ideology in the past has been to achieve material satisfaction.
[15:43] Let me just say the purpose of a lot of belief systems in the past have been to achieve material satisfaction. So I remember it was Sam Neill in the old Jane Campion movie called The Piano.
[15:58] Where the woman wants to play piano, but they're stuck in this desperate land.
It's in New Zealand or something like that.
And he says, everybody needs to do their part. Everybody needs to pull their weight.
And this idea that you kind of got to get up and work around the farm and help and so on is really important, right?
Loyalty to the family and work hard and all of that and Protestant work ethic.
Although, of course, it's not like Catholics don't work hard.
But it really became a very foundational belief system particularly I mean certainly it would be the case in farming communities but I mean also hunter gatherers you've got to come and help with the hunt, And so all of this belief system was about providing material comfort, material satiety, right?
Or in the Amish, everybody's got to come and help raise the barn.
So that way you get a barn out of it, right?
So these belief systems were around survival, loyalty and community and hard work and all of that.
What's that? It's a pretty funny movie with Kirstie Alley and Tim Allen, Allen, where they end up in this Amish community.
And one of the Amish guys gets up and rings his bell or something like that.
And he's like, it's 4.30 in the morning. We have to get up.
And he's like, Tim Allen, he's very funny. He's like, is it 4.30? I must have overslept.
[17:27] Half my life has lived that. So it's a very funny movie.
I can't remember what it's called, but I think I watched it twice.
It's one of the few movies I've watched multiple times.
And they're, you know, get up early, milk the cows and all of that.
That's for to survive, right?
So because most human belief systems have evolved to adapt to survival, right?
What happens when survival needs are met and exceeded?
Well, belief systems, discipline, ideology, ideology, morality, it all collapses, right?
I mean, if some guy is desperately swimming to reach the shore, what happens when he reaches the shore? Well, he stops swimming and he collapses.
And so what happens is, of course, the society is built, you know, good times.
[18:18] Create soft men, soft men create hard times, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times.
And the basic thing is that you have all of this discipline and these belief systems and these morals, and people look at that with great admiration.
You know, that shaggy, jawed, side-combed Nordic guy in the memes.
People look at that and it's like, wow, that was a really strong discipline time.
But the discipline came from necessity, right? ideology, belief systems, morals, loyalty, like all of the virtues throughout human history, they have not arrived from reason.
That wasn't UPV. So what do they arrive from? They arrive from necessity.
And so necessity builds wealth, right?
The ideology of necessity builds wealth. and then the wealth is used by the state as collateral to borrow money and then the money is given to people and the meaning that they got from their belief system collapses because their belief system was only necessary in a state of scarcity when they live in a state of plenty particularly unearned plenty their belief systems collapse and then because their belief systems, collapse, they lose meaning, which means they're further susceptible to ideology.
[19:40] Their morals get corrupted because now they're simply praising the hand that feeds them rather than having any objective sense of ethics.
[19:47] They're also living through centralized coercion off the sweat, blood, tears, and toil of others.
And then they fall to hedonism. This is sort of Roman's argument in my novel, The Future, which you should really check out if you haven't, freedomain.com slash books.
So beliefs, morals, meaning, purpose, they all arise from brute physical necessity when you have a society with any excess wealth in a state, and the state controls the currency, then the state will simply inflate the currency, bribe the people, which causes them to lose their meaning.
Of course, this is happening in the present as well. They lose their meaning.
Now, also when they lose their meaning, well, we have to have some way to organize our life.
Some way to, like, what am I going to do with my day? Now, of course, if you are working, well, a good chunk of your day is organized.
Well, according to that, of course. But for the people who are not working, or the people who have unearned wealth.
And, you know, it's really, really important to remember that the average person on welfare lives infinitely better than the richest person even a hundred years ago.
[20:54] They are the ultimate aristocracy in history, right?
Because they have access to modern technology and healthcare and dentistry and food varieties and fridges, right?
So if they have access to these things, they have these things.
So there's no sane king from a century ago who would not choose to change his place with somebody ensconced in the welfare state in the modern west so what happens then is that people.
[21:29] Don't organize themselves over the satisfaction of necessary wants which is in food and shelter and enough food for the winter and survival and so on.
So people no longer organize themselves according to necessary needs.
They now organize themselves around unnecessary needs.
So, you know, they fight over status items like, I don't know, sneakers or whatever they...
Get very excited over beating a video game. They pursue sexual conquests.
They eat too much, right? So now this is satisfaction of unnecessary needs.
In other words, they turn from the discipline and strictness of scarcity to the hedonism of plenty.
[22:19] Hedonism of plenty. They turn from from serving their needs to serving their pleasures.
[22:29] And hedonism is not a philosophy. Hedonism is emotionalism.
I have, I need, I want.
And the service of emotion, the service of need, hedonism, is really diametrically opposed to philosophy, philosophy, in the same way that gluttony is opposed to nutrition.
Gluttony is just eating whatever you feel like any time you want.
And if gluttony is true, and it's a valid and fine approach to life, then nutrition is a false science and a lie and a necessary deprivation.
But of course, we all know that's not true.
So you don't need discipline if you're simply going to follow your pleasures.
You don't need free will, really, as a concept, if you're just going going to follow your pleasures, because once you're a hedonist, then you simply follow.
[23:25] Pleasures and that's your only guidepost you don't need any self-restraint you don't need, any philosophy do what that will shall be the whole of the law right this is a satanism thing right do what you want though it doesn't harm others is people just tack that on like that's just something you can control like yeah you can eat whatever you want it's not going to harm others well of course it's going to harm others right if you're if you're a glutton it harms others.
[23:53] I mean, you drive up the price of food, which harms the poor.
[23:57] You are ill and unwell, which makes those around you who care about you unhappy.
You consume an unnecessary excess of healthcare resources. I mean, and clothing to some degree, right? Clothing, fabric.
And so you are harming the interests of others.
And so the idea that hedonism is the lie that we can and pursue our own pleasures without harming others. That means false, right?
It's fundamentally false. Because pleasures are selfish.
And if you're only pursuing that which gives you immediate sense pleasure, I'm not talking about love is a great joy, parenting is a great joy, but you're not just pursuing your own immediate sense pleasures.
But if you're pursuing your own immediate sense pleasures, other people, by definition, are not included in your calculations.
Or if they are, like if you're a sex addict, then they're only included in your calculations insofar as they serve you as an empty physical object rather than a person with a mind and a spirit and a soul and so on, right?
[25:02] So, this problem with excess leading to decadence, like we all know, I'm just sort of explaining why this happens, right?
Because we all know, oh, late Roman Empire, so decadence and vomitoriums and so on, orgies, right? it's a very, you know, vomitoriums and orgies are hedonism.
And hedonism is what arises when the strictness of your discipline has been rendered pointless by an excess of resources.
Nobody goes hunting when they've just brought home a deer, right? I mean, can you imagine?
Because, I mean, especially in the past, you couldn't store things, so you had to keep working, right?
Right? And you just bring home a giant deer, which is enough for your tribe to feast on for a couple of days. You don't immediately go back out and start hunting again.
Now, what do you do when you bring home the deer? Everybody knows, right? What do you do when you bring home the deer?
You party, right? You roast it up. You dance. You cheer. You praise the gods.
If you have alcohol, I guess you do that, or ayahuasca or something like that, right?
You chew some funky leaves from the jungle, and you party.
Right? So the excess leads to the hedonism. You don't need discipline when you have excess. And when you bring home a deer to your tribe, you have an excess.
[26:22] So when you have what you perceive to be a permanent excess, well, the decadence, which is your life being organized by pleasure rather than principle, or sense pleasure, right, not sort of sophisticated pleasures, right, love and to some degree self-sacrifice.
And one of the things that one of the reasons that parents used to bond with their kids right people used to bond with their kids because they needed that bond in order to survive their old age to have their children love and and care for them and so on and so and this was more true of women than men because women generally lived longer i mean if they made it to old age right if they didn't die in childbirth or something.
[27:09] So women would devote more to children because they would require more devotion from their children when they got old.
But of course, once you get the forced transfer of wealth from the young to the old in the form of pensions and health care and so on, dental care, then you don't need to bond with your children as much.
So the principles were all derived out of necessity.
When the necessity is lifted through forced redistribution, the morals all vanish as well so you see one system corrupts another system right if you don't gain your resources through the respect of property rights which is what happens in a trading society or an agricultural society or a hunting society even a hunting society would get its resources based on property rights in that there would be an understanding of the hunters is bringing home the kill and then sharing the meat, everybody would know that they would get that, so there would be property rights established in that way.
Of course, farming doesn't work at all without property rights for land because there's no point clearing and planting if you can't keep the products of your land.
Of course, a free market system definitely relies on property rights. So, property rights.
[28:26] Respected, because that's how you survive.
But if you survive on forced redistribution, then you are surviving on the opposite of property rights. You are surviving on violations of property rights.
And so property rights as a concept then become a threat.
They become like a predator, and they become a threat to that which you perceive you need to survive.
[28:48] So to reel it back in, I know we've had a little bit of a journey here, but to reel it back in, First Amendment and auditors go around recording stuff and well the question is why are they necessary why are they necessary why is looking at what might have happened between governments and social media companies in the run-up to elections like why is that important because the stakes have become so high in terms of money and power and prestige and status this the stakes have become so high that morality really can't survive the stakes have become so high and the redistribution has become so immense that morality really can't survive you know it's like a wall that can handle the regular ocean but a tsunami washes it away right when the stakes get so high when the water gets so high the defenses become somewhat irrelevant so you know to work Work is a good thing, but if you are a mom with two kids and no husband who provides, and you're on the welfare state, then to work until you make more than $100,000 a year to work taxes you at a rate of 100%.
[30:12] Now, people respond to incentives.
[30:16] Of course, we wouldn't be here if people didn't respond to incentives.
[30:20] I mean, one of the incentives people respond to is the sex xDrive, and so on, and to decide to procreate, which, you know, comes a little bit like an afterthought sometimes, but we wouldn't be here if people didn't respond to incentives.
Lust and hormones is an incentive, and that's sort of why we're here.
So, yeah, people respond to incentives, and you can say, well, it's good to work, but less time with your children, less time enjoying your life, and being taxed at a rate of 100% until you make over $100,000, and then you're being taxed as if you're making more when you're functionally making only a little bit, like if you make $110,000 a year.
[30:59] I mean, you're being taxed at $110,000, but functionally and effectively, because the welfare state gives you like 100 grand a year if you have two kids in some places.
I mean, in terms of like net benefits all in, right, including the cost of child care if you're working.
So you're being taxed at $110,000 rate, but you're only making $10,000.
[31:20] And if you work that down to hourly after taxes, it's pennies, making pennies an hour, working very hard and not seeing your kids you say ah yes but it's the responsible blah blah it's like you know but that's like going to the soviet worker under stalin and saying well you should just work hard it's the right thing to do and blah blah and of course there was lots of propaganda about that but it generally didn't really happen it generally didn't really happen i mean we know this as well i mean it was in california they changed the rules about unemployment insurance or welfare and people people just got jobs.
Or, you know, if you have a year of unemployment insurance, generally people only start looking for work at around 11 months. I mean, for real, right?
[31:59] So yeah, people respond to incentives and we can complain about that, but I don't really know what the point is since we're only here because people respond to incentives and nature knows that we respond to incentives, which is why she gives us lust and greed and, you know, things that in moderation are positive and healthy and helpful people respond to incentives you understand like if you if you complain about that then you're complaining about being alive right so one of the reasons we drink a glass of water is because we're thirsty responding to the incentive the incentive being i'm thirsty and i'm uncomfortable because i'm thirsty i'll be more comfortable if i have something to drink right so So even at that level, we respond to incentives, right?
So the First Amendment auditors, the question is, why do we need them? Well, because...
[32:50] Falsehood has become so profitable that it has changed from lying to others to lying to oneself.
Or lying to others to lying to oneself.
[33:02] And that's a tough situation. When people are lying to themselves, philosophy can't reach them. Philosophy can't reach them.
If somebody genuinely doesn't believe that he has a problem, a solution can't reach him.
Right? I mean, I'm happily married. I don't have a problem called, I can't find the right dating app.
Or I can't meet somebody new to date. I don't have that problem.
So if somebody says to me, Stef, I can find you the right dating app, I'd be like, what are you talking about? I'm happily married. I want a dating app.
So if somebody doesn't have a problem or doesn't believe he has a problem, the solution can't touch him.
It's beyond the realm of philosophy, which is why praising people for dysfunction has become the norm, because when you praise people for dysfunction, you place them beyond the reach of improvement, of virtue, of philosophy.
You give them the plenty of praise so they don't require the discipline of improvement.
Oh, some of those phrases are just great, aren't they? Pop into my head, roll off my tongue.
Amazing. So, rather than say, is it good to do this or that, you have to look at how the interactions between the systems.
[34:15] Just about everything. So why is the First Amendment having such trouble these days, or free speech?
Because it was designed for a time when lying wasn't nearly as profitable.
And now that lying has become profitable to the tune of trillions of dollars, free speech is really designed to uncover falsehoods.
The value of free speech is to uncover falsehoods.
And And when a society is profiting from lies, free speech becomes the enemy, right? And you can see this.
The elites coming out of American universities are almost uniformly of the opinion that there's way too much freedom and free speech in America, right?
And that's because they plan to join a system that profits from falsehood and therefore free speech. I mean, many of them, not all, right?
But they plan to join a system that profits from falsehood and therefore free speech is are going to interfere significantly with their interests.
So it's a great question. I hope that the answer is, at least, these are outlines of an answer.
This is not sort of syllogistically worked out with footnotes, but these are outlines of an answer that could be helpful and useful if you find these answers helpful and useful.
If you could help me out at freedomain.com slash donate.
[35:32] Freedomain.com slash donate. I would really appreciate that.
And if you join the community at freedomain.locals.com, you get serious goodies, my friends.
Serious, serious goodies. Very important and useful show. So I hope that you will do that.
And I will look forward to talking to you next time. Take care. Bye.
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