0:00 - Welcome to the Interview
8:39 - The Nature of Wealth
17:42 - The Minimum Wage Debate
19:57 - Coercion and Moral Choices
28:09 - The Big Lie in Society
31:35 - The Nature of Coercion
34:24 - The Challenge of Truth
39:12 - Crossing the Desert of Pretend Relationships
43:40 - The Human Experience in a Finite World
48:12 - The Quest for Universal Morality
51:15 - The Lessons of History
58:36 - The Justification of Noble Lies
1:04:05 - A Radical Experiment: Embracing Truth
In this episode of "Keith Knight Don't Tread on Anyone," host Keith Knight engages in an in-depth discussion with philosopher Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. The conversation traverses a broad range of ideas primarily centered on anarchism, the non-aggression principle, economic freedom, societal truths, and the morality of lies.
Molyneux begins by addressing the concept of anarchism, framing it not as chaos but as a foundational principle rooted in childhood lessons: the adherence to non-aggression and respect for property rights. He argues that these concepts, widely accepted in personal interactions, should be universal in society. Molyneux draws parallels between the universal laws of physics and moral philosophy, suggesting that understanding the universality of non-aggression could significantly alter societal structures. He posits that questioning the initiation of force and the taking of property could lead to a new societal paradigm.
The discussion shifts to wealth disparities among nations, where Molyneux argues that economic freedom is essential for wealth generation. He elaborates on the historical context of agricultural and industrial revolutions, asserting that allowing efficient producers to acquire resources leads to increased productivity. By utilizing the concept of the Pareto principle, he explains how a small number of highly productive individuals can generate a significant portion of value in an economy. This meritocratic approach to resource distribution allows for innovation and wealth accumulation, which Molyneux defends as a natural and necessary outcome of freedom.
Knight then reflects on his past beliefs about minimum wage, acknowledging how he once thought it to be beneficial but later came to understand its detrimental effects on employment opportunities for the least skilled. Molyneux echoes this sentiment, criticizing minimum wage laws as masking failures in the educational system and contributing to automation as businesses seek to mitigate increasing labor costs.
Moving towards a broader societal critique, Molyneux examines the difference between enforced social contracts and individual morality. He emphasizes the need for societal values to align with personal ethics, warning against the dangers of collective delusion where people may conform to harmful beliefs in exchange for social acceptance. The conversation touches on how this delusion manifests in political correctness and societal norms, leading to a reluctance to engage in honest discourse.
The two delve into the implications of noble lies, particularly concerning education and narratives around figures like Santa Claus or George Washington. Molyneux argues that all lies, even those framed as “noble,” undermine truth and morality. He believes that a fundamental shift towards radical honesty and a rejection of accepted falsehoods could create a healthier societal foundation. Drawing on historical examples, he stresses that acknowledging the complexities of the past, including the reality of slavery, can lead to a more constructive dialogue about current issues of inequality and social justice.
Molyneux's reflections on history underscore the importance of recognizing the biases of mainstream narratives. He asserts that the greatest advancements in morality and justice have come from acknowledging universal truths and ethical principles that transcend specific historical events. Throughout the episode, there is a recurring emphasis on the individual’s responsibility to be morally genuine and the importance of fostering environments that encourage critical thinking.
In the concluding remarks, Molyneux articulates a vision for societal advancement—one grounded in the relentless pursuit of truth, reason, and universal morality. He urges listeners to challenge societal norms and cultivate a commitment to honesty, suggesting that the common pursuit of truth could forge genuine connections and a more just society.
Overall, this conversation between Knight and Molyneux serves not only as an exploration of philosophical principles but also as a call to action for individuals to reflect on their values and the implications of their beliefs on society as a whole.
[0:00] Welcome to Keith Knight Don't Tread on Anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Today, I'm going to be discussing philosophy with my favorite philosopher, Stefan Molyneux of Free Domain Radio. Mr. Molyneux, where is the best place for people to find all of the excellent content you have provided?
[0:16] I'm available in your conscience. Just dig down to what you know is right, and my bald head will be smiling back at you. Failing that, you can just go to freedomain.com, and that's the best place to find me on the web.
[0:29] Links will be in the description below. Assume I have never heard of anarchy or anarchism before, or maybe I just associate it with chaos. How would you introduce me to the idea?
[0:42] Well, I think the first thing that I would do is say that the concept of anarchism or voluntarism is nothing different than anything you've ever been taught about in your life. When you were a kid in kindergarten, what were the two big rules? Number one, do not belt other kids, do not hit other kids, do not, now, if it's self-defense, you know, because that's what always happens if there's a fight, he started it, man. So it's that aspect of things is pretty simple, pretty clear, which is don't initiate the use of force against others.
[1:16] And, you know, don't lie in terms of like something substantial or fraudulent or whatever, right? That's number one. And number two is keep your mitts on your own stuff, right? Don't take other kids' toys, don't take other kids' lunch, and so on. Don't steal their underpants if you're a particularly creepy kid. So, you know, keep your word, don't use force, don't take other people's stuff. I wish it were more complicated than that, because then I could claim to be some kind of brilliant guy, but that's all it is. Now, the strange thing that happens in the world is we say, that's perfectly acceptable for kids. And that's perfectly acceptable for you in your private life. You know, if you've ever had a conversation with your girlfriend or your boyfriend or whatever, and you say, hey, we're a little short on funds this month, it's very rare that somebody will say, well, let's just go rob a convenience store. It's like, well, that's not on the table. Like, let's just go counterfeit, right? That's not on the table. And so we accept property rights and the non-aggression principle in our personal lives, we teach it to our children, we expect it from strangers, and so on, right? And so there's a funny thing that happens in philosophy, and it's actually a kind of similar thing that happens in physics, which is if you absolutely universalize the principles which everyone already claims are universal.
[2:39] Really weird and dizzying things happen to your brain right so of course you know we're on the earth we stand we look around it all looks kind of flat and it looks like the sun and the moon and everything else is sort of rotating around us and that's our perspective and we know that there's gravity and so on right and so we sort of understand we're constantly falling to the center of the earth but the earth is pushing back up with resistance and so that's what keeps us down and so we also know that if we throw a ball up you know it goes up in this parabolic arc it goes up slows down and eventually comes back down to the ground and so on so there's everything's falling all the time which is why we don't jump off the edge of a cliff because then we'll just continue our fall until we splatter right so everything's got gravity everything's falling and everything that we look at pretty much looks like a sphere right we look at the moon You look at Jupiter, you look at the Sun, and so on. And they're all spheres, right? So, we know that about physics. Now, if you take that principle of physics and you say, okay, everything's falling everywhere all the time, then you get the heliocentric system of how the planets and the Sun work together, you explain the retrograde motion of Mars and so on, and everything just kind of makes sense. But it freaks you out. I don't know if you remember when you were a kid. I remember when I was first learning this as a kid. I'm like, no way.
[4:03] It's too weird. It's too bizarre. How can everything be falling and we're falling? I don't feel like the Earth is falling around the sun. I don't feel like the sun is rocketing at massive velocities around the galaxy. None of this makes any sense. And once you understand, of course, you know, and I remember reading about Aristotle almost drove himself mad, as a lot of ancient philosophers did, trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the tides, and they couldn't picture that the moon would have a gravitational pull on the Earth's oceans and have them sort of slither back and forth. The same thing happened, of course, with the speed of light. When you view the speed of light as a constant, well, the entire universe starts to become very bizarre and strange, and you get the redshift, and you also get time dilation at high speeds. Like, if you just take one constant, everything about your life and your mind just gets really thrown out of place. So if you say to kids, don't hit other kids, and they say, well, can I get a pass on Tuesdays? Just Tuesdays. That's all I need. I can wait till Tuesday. I can belt that bully. I can hit that kid. I can take his lunch money. You're like, no, no, no, no.
[5:08] Monday, Tuesday. Like, every day of the week, it's universal. Okay, what about if we're at the zoo? Man, if we're at the zoo, and let's say we're in the monkey enclosure, I mean, the monkeys are hitting each other, come on, man, let me go monkey at the zoo, no, no, no, doesn't matter. I don't care if you fall into the zoo enclosure, into the monkey enclosure, doesn't matter. You cannot be hitting people. And it's universal. Well, what if we're on vacation? What if it's really cloudy? Or what if I have a headache? It's like, no, it's a universal rule. Everyone all the time, no matter what, you can't initiate the use of force, you can't steal stuff. And so you say, okay, so if that's what's claimed for moral rules, and that's what we teach our children, and that's what we accept ourselves, what if that's just a universal rule? What does that look like in society? In the same way with the gravity and momentum and the speed of light, when it becomes a constant and a universal, it's really, really freaky. And I remember when I was originally of course an objectivist I was a minarchist which means the government that's only involved in the law courts and national defense and maybe some prisons as well but you know just a a government that's very small and I remember when I first started working with the idea of okay but if the non-aggression principle is universal.
[6:26] I mean, it sounds almost like a tautology, but it's like, what if what we claim to be universal is actually perceived of and accepted as universal? That means no initiation of the use of force.
[6:36] And that means that you can't wrap yourself in a concept that gives you the opposite morality from what is universal. Like, universal is universal, right? We don't say, well, mammals are warm-blooded, give birth to live young, they have hair on their bodies and so on. Asterisk, platypus is weird. here, go talk to a biologist. It's not my deal. It's not my area of expertise. So we don't say, well, this is the definition of a mammal, except from 2 to 4 a.m. July 13th on the Galapagos, right? It's universal. It's everywhere, all the time, no matter what. So what if we just say the initiation of the use of force and the taking of people's property and fraud are just immoral, and that's universal? Well, then our society begins to look a whole lot different and this is why for you know decades and decades now I got into philosophy over 40 years ago I've really been talking about the non-aggression principle property rights in a universal phenomenon what happens if nobody gets to initiate the use of force well we have to question everything about our society we have to question at a personal level spanking child abuse lying to children and manipulating children defrauding children we have to think about national debts we have to think about all of the various initiations of the use of force that are currently justified in our society. And I would say, just to sort of wrap it up, that everywhere we look at where society really isn't working.
[8:02] It's because there are violations of moral rules. And people get, you know, kind of fussed and say, well, what if we just violated them different? What if we violated them better? What if really good people were violating moral rules? It's like, no, sorry, that's looking for healthy cancer. It's not a thing that we can accept. So I would say, what if the moral rules that you accept in your own life, that you call universal, that you teach your children, Children, what if they are just universal? Well, society looks a whole lot different, and it is kind of dizzying, but it is in fact true.
[8:39] Why are some countries wealthy and others impoverished?
[8:44] So wealth is something that happens in a state of economic freedom, but wealth brings inequality of outcome. So I don't know if you've ever been in a garage band. I don't know if you've ever tried to play a musical instrument. I know I have, both guitar and myself. And I remember, it was called a bone scraping war cry when I attempted to sing the old police song, Roxanne. It's not my voice at all. The man's virtually a countertenor or orchestrato. And so um i i was not i wanted to be the lead guy i i you know i'm not exactly averse to being the center of attention think i can provide some value didn't have the voice didn't have the musical talent so i uh i nobly stepped back and deferred to somebody who could actually do the positive value of being able to sing well so the lead singer goes to the guy who sings the best and who has the best stage presence and so on, right? Depending on the genre, right? I mean, there's Freddie Mercury and then there's Bob Dylan, but it's a different kind of genre. His voice is appropriate to the genre.
[9:54] So value maximizes when we let those who can best increase the value get hold of the most resources. So if you look at sort of what was the foundation of the Industrial Revolution, which was the agricultural revolution, which occurred before, In order to have a large urban workforce, you have to have very efficient farms. And so what happened was you began to have a free market in farmland for a variety of reasons. And so if you're going to go and bid on 10 acres of farmland, who can bid the most? Well, the person who can bid the most is the person who perceives at least that he can get the most value. So if you and I are up for bidding on the same land and you can produce twice the crops, then you can afford to bid the most for that land, right? If you can produce twice the crops, get twice the profit.
[10:45] Then you can bid twice or even more for the land, which means that the most efficient farmers end up owning the most land. And because the most efficient farmers end up owning the most land, you get a massive increase in productivity. And this is what happened in the Middle Ages, early to middle of the Middle Ages.
[11:01] Was you got an increase in crop production that was not just double, it wasn't even quadruple, it was 5 to 15, sometimes even 20 times the production. Because, you know, they're just people in this life, who have freakish incomprehensible talents you meet these people i mean they're actually kind of annoying in a way because you know they give you your own humility right i mean i remember wrestling to try and learn guitar and a friend of mine was just like and it's like he just picked it up and it's like oh this is easy and i'm like my hands are mangled and bleeding and and i have these like stubby little uh girl guide fingers so i couldn't you know play anything but a c or an f and it's just kind of annoying you know there are some people who just open their mouths and glorious sounds come out there are some people who look at math and it just makes sense to them and there's just these weird incomprehensible talents i mean they can't explain why some people are better at growing crops so they have this it's a green thumb it's it's magic it's elves it's communal with nature and it's just weird freaky talents that people have and some people have it they're obsessed with uh say animal husbandry like turning wolves into dogs that instead of eating your livestock, they guard your livestock, things like that. Just people with weird, bizarre, incomprehensible talents. I mean, some people that double joint it and make me flinch every time they show that off. I'm like, ooh, that would break me in three, but apparently it's totally fine for you.
[12:25] So when you let the people with these incomprehensible talents gain a hold of the most resources, then they maximize those resources. If you let the guy who's bad at farming get the farmland, you don't get much food. If you get the guy with the incomprehensible genius at growing food, if you let him get the farmland... Then you get a whole lot of food. And then when you have a whole lot of food, then you need fewer people to be farmers, and they can then be released from doing dumb farm work, so to speak, and they can go off and do things in factories or being entrepreneurs. You know, at 1900, like 80 plus percent of Americans were involved in farming. Now it's two to three percent in America. That's released, you know.
[13:10] Tens or hundreds of millions of people, certainly over the years, to go off and do other things that aren't just farming the introduction of machinery you know some people are just obsessed with tinkering with machinery i mean i had a friend of mine when i was in a high school who was just obsessed with building robots and i i in more power to a man i couldn't i couldn't do it you couldn't pay me enough to tinker with that stuff but he loved it and so those are the kind of guys who build labor-saving devices and instead of having you know, a hundred people in the field with scythes, you end up with one combine harvester that can do the job in an afternoon. Well, those hundred people are then released to do other things, and that gains the wealth in society.
[13:53] But the problem, of course, is that, as you know, it's called the Pareto principle, which is like the square root of any group of productive people in a meritocracy produces half the value. So if you've got a company of 10,000 people, 100 people of those are going to be producing half the value, and 10 of those are going to be doing half the value of that so you've got 10 people out of 10 000 who are producing fully 25 percent of the value and they need to get paid or they're not going to do it there's this weird if you just let the free market do its thing it unlocks this these bizarre freaky geniuses like the elon musks and the bezos and so on it unlocks this weird freaky genius where they just become these krakatoa volcano eruptions of productivity and wealth but they also get all the cool mansions and the hot wives and they they gather a lot of resentment and then people are saying man it's unfair it's unfair that he gets all the land this is what the i did a whole documentary on.
[14:47] Hong kong and china and this is what happened when the communists come along as they they go to all the people who either through lack of talent or lack of ambition or lack of intelligence just aren't able to compete with these weird productive genius freaks and say well he's only got all that land because he stole from your forefathers and we're going to steal it back and give you stuff for free and then everybody who's an idiot rises up and takes stuff away from the productive people and gives it to the unproductive people and then everybody starves to death and this cycle generally repeats so yeah wealth it comes out of freedom it comes out of a free trade it comes out of allowing people to accumulate capital because they're the best ones that increasing it and you know you obviously want to give the research equipment to the cancer researcher who's the very best in his field. You don't want to share it equally with all the people who are bad at doing that stuff.
[15:41] So you have to accept that inequality, and then that rising tide lifts all boats. If you don't accept that inequality out of resentment, you know, Nietzsche was very big on analyzing this resentment. He used the French word, like resentment, of just, you know, people who are really good. Like everyone who's in the audience at a rock concert wants to be the guys on stage. Everybody wants to be the guys on stage. Funnily enough, not that many people want to be prominent philosophers. I don't know why. It's such an easy gig, and nobody ever has any problems with you. but everybody wants to be the rock star and but of course if everyone gets to be the rock star there are no rock stars you know if if the beatles had to cycle in everybody who wanted to be a beetle there'd be no beatles and nobody would have so you just have to find a way to manage your resentment not envy too much and find whatever your weird freaky productivity thing is and work on that but there are all of these you know fairly devilish intellectuals and and sophists who come along and say it's unfair that you're not getting what he's getting and we're going to take Take it from him and give it to you. And everyone's like, yeah, I'm going to get stuff. And it's like, no, you're going to get starvation and enslavement. But it just seems to be a lesson that we keep having to learn.
[16:47] In 2012 i was very passionately uh supporting mitt romney and i went to the debates in arizona and we watched it on a big live uh on a big screen outside and they asked ron paul a question about the minimum wage and he said uh no i wouldn't import any federal or state minimum wage and i remember thinking how could someone be so stupid and evil and i said i just have to look into the reasoning because I can't imagine how you could not support the minimum wage. And then it turns out that the minimum wage hurts the people with the least amount of skills and the least amount of experience and creates oligopolies and helps bigger businesses, giving employees and consumers fewer choices than they previously would have had. And I remember sitting in my chair thinking, oh my God, I was so wrong about this. And I was so passionately wrong about it.
[17:42] And now Now, I guess just everything is up for me to start to question when it comes to things that majority populations are very set in their ways about what are some things that majorities are totally wrong about today?
[17:57] It's funny, boy, Mitt Romney, I haven't thought about that greasy, greasy haired Ken doll from hell. So, yeah, Mitt Romney is Romney is quite, quite the character. Nothing says political acumen like an acceptance of magic underpants. But yeah, the minimum wage, just to touch on that really, really briefly, the minimum wage is a Band-Aid that's thrown over the absolute cratering of young minds by the government, quote, educational system. It's like, can you imagine you're in a training program to be economically productive and intelligent for 12 straight years? And you come out of that...
[18:35] And you ain't even worth five bucks an hour. I mean, that's just absolutely staggering. I mean, you know, it takes 12 years to become a neurosurgeon. Can you imagine after 12 years, you couldn't even cut an apple? I mean, it's just completely bizarre. I mean, so yeah, the minimum wage, and of course, raising the minimum wage to cover up for how bad the government schools are, just drives automation. And then, of course, the government likes that, because it gets to bribe people with imaginary wages, they then get replaced by machines, end up on welfare, and will vote for more and more government because they've adapted to live off the blood money of coerced redistribution of cash so uh there's a lot of fun stuff in there so it is it is very very tough and i got asked this question uh the other day like why is the west failing so badly i mean i think that what people don't see is and it always reminds me of that quote from the old monty python movie come see the violence inherent in the system and it's like Like, so every time you are asking for a coercive political solution, and all political solutions that aren't around the direct support of self-defense are coercive. So every time you're asking, well, let's pass a law for this, or there ought to be a law for that, or we got to regulate this, or we got to control that, you are saying to people, if you don't do what we want...
[19:54] We will raise guns against you if you don't comply with what we want.
[19:58] We will escalate until you comply or die. And we will throw you in jail where, you know, rape is common and other forms of violence and so on are common. So we will either torture you or kill you if you don't do what we want. Now, of course, if you were to try this in your personal life, if you were to try this in your business life, If you, heaven forbid, were to try this in your dating life, that would be recognized as assault, theft, rape, sexual assault, and so on.
[20:28] But people have this weird layer they go through where the opposite becomes true. So that which would be, sort of tying into the point I made at the beginning, that which would be abhorrent in your personal life becomes a social contract and totally justified and moral and good, right? I mean, we all accept that if three guys come across some woman in the woods and they vote to assault her, that the fact that they're in the majority doesn't make it right. When I was a kid, that was a constant theme, and it changed from London Bridge to the CN Tower as I went from England to Canada as a kid. So in England, it was London Bridge. So say, well, why did you do this? Well, everyone else is doing it. Oh, and if everyone else was jumping off the London Bridge, would you do that too? And then, of course, it changed to the CN Tower. Well, if everybody was jumping off the CN Tower, would you do that too? So the majority had no sway on the moral choices of the individual. The majority could not overthrow morality. And we accept that, we teach our kids that, and we shame them for following the herd. You know, you got to resist peer pressure, but you also have to legally submit to a democracy of mostly programmed brain-dead people. So, we don't like to really view and resolve these contradictions, but they seem somewhat important to me.
[21:51] There are a bunch of abstractions that people use to reverse morality. And it's very, very strange. So one of my very first videos was about concepts. And, you know, hey, everybody wake up. I know it's concept formation. It seems really, really dull, but it's really, really essential. so we have these concepts that overturn morality that are very very strange when you really sort of think about them deeply right so i cannot impose a contract on someone else right i can't sign up for you to buy a car and then drive the car myself right i mean that would be fraud i would be forging your signature and and i would go to jail for that i also can't go into debt on your behalf. I can't say, hey, man, I got this really big coke habit.
[22:41] It's either in a bottle or it's lines on a table. I'm not sure what, but just Bill Keith for my coke habit, man. He'll pay. He's happy to pay. He's a big enabler. He never wants me to stop. I'm fine, right? But that would be, if I used your funds to fund my addiction, that would be bad. Even if I used your funds to fund medical treatments for me, that would be wrong and bad. So the idea that you can sign a A contract on behalf of other people is immoral. The idea that you can fund your own habits or preferences by running other people into debt, we all understand is immoral. But then we create this thing called the social contract. And then we create this thing called the national debt. And somehow it becomes all right. I did, I gripped my teeth, I put in my mouth guards and all of that, went into the crash fetal suck in my thumb position and listen to the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the sort of quote debate. And as was the case with the previous debate in 2020, the national debt is never mentioned. Never mentioned. It's like the biggest single factor affecting American life at the moment. And it's just not mentioned because you can't talk about the elephant in the room because the elephant is going to trample all the math you throw at it and come out with a bunch of villages squeezed between its tusks. So you can't talk about these things. So.
[24:03] What I would say to people is, there's no magic in concepts that reverses morality. If, you know, three guys voting to assault a woman in the woods is not moral, then the majority is not moral.
[24:15] The majority wanting it so does not make it moral. Now, that's bad enough when the majority can think for itself.
[24:21] But when the majority is raised in, you know, control C, control P, copy paste, brain stamping, indoctrinated minds in these government education camps, the lack of concentration camps called government schools, and you either have to comply, nod and go along, or they will drug you. They will drug you. Like this is what the Soviets did to dissidents. Well communism you see is perfect communism is perfect therefore i mean if you don't like communism you're mentally ill and we need to stuff horse tranquilizers up your ass till you pass out on a park bench and then ship you off to siberia so the idea that the system is perfect and anybody who has a problem with the system is mentally ill and needs to be drugged is about as monstrous and evil as can be conceived of particularly with regards to children so the idea that there are all of these concepts uh the the state uh the social contract uh and and so on uh that these things are justified by concepts but are actually enacted by individuals like all moral choices and all initiations of the use of force are enacted by individuals and you can't wrap people in concepts and turn evil into good and there's all of this baffle gap that goes along about wrapping concepts around immoral actions and then somehow magically transforming them into abstract virtues, it doesn't work.
[25:49] The beginning of wisdom, as the saying goes, is to call things by their proper names. If I have a weird lump on my arm and it's a tumor, but I call it a muscle, that doesn't transform it into a strength, right? It just means that I've mislabeled it and getting people to say, let's start locally. Let's start with what is moral for you. Let's test if it's universal to you and then let's apply it universally. Most philosophy goes from these weird abstractions inward, right? You've got the platonic forms, you've got Kant's new amino realms, you've got the nirvana of the Buddhists, you've got these weird, spacey, up-is-down, black-is-white cats and dogs living together in sin. You've got all of these abstractions that just baffle you into incomprehension like Hegel's world spirit, you know? Boy, let's try talking to particular countries in Europe and say, Oh yes, there's this world spirit, you see, that picks you to rule over every other nation at particular points in time. It's like, yeah, that's going to go just swimmingly, isn't it? So you've got these weird abstractions that just baffle people into accepting clear immoralities. And as an empiricist, I say, well, let's start with what you accept locally. What do you believe locally?
[26:57] And let's work out from there. If you say, I accept this moral, and this moral is universal, I mean, you've actually solved it. And, you know, I mean, the work that I've done, rape, theft, assault, and murder are the two, sorry, the four major immoralities in the world. And if you accept that those are wrong, and they're always enacted by individuals, it doesn't matter whether the individuals have a funny hat or a costume or can do cartwheels or it's a Thursday or they happen to be sitting in a big white building. It doesn't matter. the morality is the morality the rules of physics don't bend around costumes and the rules of morality don't bend around peculiar rituals and once we start accepting that man we could just have a great world.
[27:36] If you were say the martin luther king jr of today and you were to give a speech in hopes of uniting the west but the genders the races people at different income levels what is something you would focus on in that speech to really give some people uh something to rally around.
[27:59] So, you know, just pull out of my armpit a Martin Luther King Jr. Speech. Yeah, that's totally fine. Totally valid. No problem. Hang on. I'm going to need a little more caffeine.
[28:10] Just as far as general topics go.
[28:12] No, no, no. I accept the challenge. I have a dream. Okay, I accept the challenge. I'm on it, man. I'm on it. Let me just limber up a little here and get myself all sinewy and ready to strike like a viper at the jugular of irrationality? So, what'd I say?
[28:33] It's hard to accept how much you've been lied to. When you have someone who genuinely and generally tells the truth, and there's a couple of white lies in there, we can accept that, right? Right? I mean, yeah, my wife generally tells me the truth, and then she tells me that I look fine in the jeans that I used to wear 20 years ago, right? So, you know, a little white lie here and there, we can live. There's a general edifice of truth, you know, in the same way that you can see, even if you're a couple of those little weird, hairy floaters in your eyes, you can generally, you can generally see. Now, where things become really difficult in life is the big lie. When you have just about every major institution, just about every major media outlet, just about every major university and think tank and everything that you can imagine all parroting the same lies, that's really tough. Because most of us who are interested in morality have that wee little bugaboo called a conscience where we don't like to lie, and if we have lied, we generally feel bad about it, and we'll often circle back and say, yeah, I kind of fell prey to that little satanic temptation of falsifying, so I'm sorry, here's the truth. And so we feel bad about it, we don't like it, and we assume, naively, and I put myself first and foremost with the least excuse into this category, we assume that there are people out there, who feel bad about lying.
[30:00] But depending on how you measure it, 5, 10, 20% of people don't really have a conscience. And those people tend to float to the top because the people who have a conscience don't like to lie. And so the people who can lie without feeling bad about it tend to rise to the top and tend to dominate these institutions. So.
[30:26] Most deer would feel pretty bad about injuring another deer. I mean, unless it's the male deer's button heads over females or whatever, but most deers would feel bad about that, right? Some mother deer steps on her baby deer, she's going to feel bad about that.
[30:39] But the wolves don't feel bad about it. In fact, the wolves really like it. I mean, because that's how they get their food. Lies are currency in a coercive system, because if you can get people to believe that the coercion is moral, and you can get them to believe that it's necessary, or you can get them to believe Hobbes-style that the absence of a coercive system is far worse, right? So this is the sort of Hobbesian argument that we start in a state of nature, bloody in tooth and claw, where life is nasty, brutish, violent, and short, and then we all surrender our rights to a central coercive agency so that we can have some rights protected, right? So we can't protect ourselves against warlords, but if we have a state, it will protect us against crime. This, of course, doesn't really happen on any sustained basis. For a short amount of time, it can seem the case. But, you know, the beginning of any addiction is more fun than not.
[31:36] Otherwise, there'd be no such thing as addiction. So what happens is we say, well, we're going to surrender our rights in order to have our rights protected. We're going to surrender the right of the state to take our property virtually at will in order to protect our property rights. We're going to surrender the right of the state to start wars on our behalf, to conscript and draft us and send us into useless wars for nefarious purposes, and we're going to do that so we can protect life and property. That is absolutely, you know...
[32:08] Cutting off your arm because you sprained a finger well i guess you don't have to sprain finger anymore also your minus one arm which seems important so the amount of lies that go on in society are staggering the amount of falsehoods that go on in society are absolutely staggering you see this of course in politics all the time you see this in advertising.
[32:29] I mean you see this even you know in in the filters that people use on social media i don't know if you've seen these videos where it's like hey this woman looks fantastic on social media you and here she is coming out of the swimming pool on a sunny day and uh it ain't really the same uh i mean other than me i'm actually 950 years old i'm just very youthful looking uh so this is how i've managed to gather so much wisdom and so little hair so the amount of falsehood in society is enormous but falsehoods are incredibly profitable so the problem is is that we generally base most of our relationships the question is why do people have such a tough time seeing the truth. I mean, one sort of simple example, which I talked about, I think, back in 2015 or 2016, 2016, was the fine people hoax, right? This is all the people saying that Trump said that neo-Nazis and white supremacists were very fine people.
[33:21] Of course, false, and I've been lied about myself, so I sort of understand where this is coming from. It's false. Even the left-wing site Snopes has debunked it. The video has been played at press conferences to debunk it. And you can literally beam the truth into someone's ass on the cell phone, and they can take one minute to watch it like you've never had anything like this you know it's like well in order to discover the truth about this you need to learn ancient aramaic and you need to travel to alexandria by camel and then you need to study for a year it's like no no i can beam the truth to your ass in 60 seconds i mean it's two seconds to beam it to your ass and then 58 seconds for you see the truth literally you can beam the truth to people's appendages and get them to see the truth in one minute so there's no barrier to any of this and people still continue to believe these ridiculous falsehoods? Well, that's because they're in a shared tribe of delusion.
[34:12] Most tribes around the world are shared tribes of delusion. So the reason why people, and this is what I would say to people, the reason why it's fine, you find it hard to get the truth, is that if you get the truth, people aren't going to like you.
[34:24] Now, that's really tough because everyone says, well, I'm liked for who I am. I'm liked because of the magical pixie dust essence of me. I'm just all of that. Yay. What is that that people do, this thing that girls do? They do this, right? I'm sorry, this is going to burn itself into everybody's brain like I'm some 14-year-old tween flipper merchant. But people do this, you know, rosy-cheeked, they think, I'm just loved for who I am. And I'm like, okay. So if you're loved for who you are, pretty easy test to figure out. If you're loved for who you are, think differently, tell the truth, and that's who you are. Are people still going to love you?
[35:01] And we had this with Trump, of course, Trump and COVID it are the two big things that people have had problems with this right so with trump if people say uh no look what people say about the guy is is not true you know it doesn't mean he's perfect doesn't mean he's a great guy doesn't even mean he's a good guy but it does mean that what they're saying about him is actually false and what happens if you tell the truth to people who claim to love you do they love you or your participation in their delusions and most of us over the course of her life, you know, tragically, if it's your family, but of origin, but most of us over the course of her life have had someone around who's addicted to falsehood, and claims to like you. And then what happens if you tell the truth? Well, if you tell the truth to people about things they don't want to accept, generally, they will drop you like yesterday's leftover fish and chips, they will just abandon you completely. And you are kept in pretend relationships only to the the degree that you're willing to support the falsehoods that people believe and that is a very very tough thing for people and that's really how power is maintained power is not vertical generally power is horizontal it's you know slave on slave violence so to speak right so power is like you think of censorship right censorship and particularly america is not so much top down censorship is horizontal you know the the family dinners where you say okay so So...
[36:29] You all got vaccinated and you said that the unvaccinated like me were really terrible people.
[36:35] But the vaccine doesn't last that long. You don't take any boosters. So now you're effectively unvaccinated. What do you think? Or, you know, you all seem to be kind of baying for me to have my rights taken away because I didn't want to take this experimental whatever it is. Right. And so if you say any of that kind of stuff, people will get really tense. They'll get really upset and they will attack, often ostracize and reject you. And then you have to wake up to the reality that you're not loved for who you are. You're loved or pretend loved for who you aren't. In other words, the thoughts that you don't have, the conformity that you're willing to embody, the lies that you're willing to repeat, the judgment that you're willing to suspend, the thought that you're willing to reject, everything that you're not is what people claim to love about you. And the moment you show up with reason, thought, evidence, facts, reality, questions, curiosity, skepticism in particular, the moment you actually show up as a living, thinking human being, well, a lot of people aren't so pleased. And so the reason why we tend to be so enslaved is because we are punished horizontally for thinking, not vertically. I mean, certainly that happens sometimes, but it's usually not a top-down thing. It's a horizontal thing. And this is the big challenge, is that are we loved for who we are, or are we accepted for who we aren't? And i myself i i can't live i just i can't live like that keith i just i can't live.
[38:01] Smiling and npc-ing and pretending that i don't know what i know pretending i don't have access to the facts that i have access to that are very easy to share you know don't take my word for it i'll beam the truth to your behind right and i can't live like that i would strongly suggest people stop living like that stop living in the realm of pretend relationships based upon conformity to mental slavery. Stop being absent and thinking you have a relationship. Stop not thinking and somehow thinking that that means that you're actually accepted. No, you are just voluntarily chaining yourself to the galley slave deck and that's about it. That's tough though, man, because you got to cross that desert, right? If you leave the desert of pretend relationships, it's a big ass stretch of sand you got to get to before you get to the tribe of people who actually think.
[38:53] Right? So, people just don't want to cross that desert. And I understand that. I didn't like crossing that desert either. What's on the other side is, you know, actually great people and wonderful love and friendship and people who genuinely care about you for who you are and what you know, rather than who you aren't and what you blindly parrot.
[39:12] It but it is uh i mean every and it's funny because every hero's journey has that time in the wilderness every hero's journey has that um crossing into danger and nothingness uh and everybody says who writes these stories and who consumes these stories everybody says and understands that there's wonderful stuff on the other side yet people would rather cling to the desperate non-relationships they have based on empty conformity than to strike out for better relationships if they can't bring real life to the people around them and that's a choice everyone has to make. And I would just say, make it a choice. That's all. I mean, if you choose to stay in these empty relationships where you're chained by conformity, just accept that and say, well, I'm too fraidy cat to cross the desert. So I'm going to sit here and pretend that we all have this great relationship when all we are is united in enslaving error. Just be honest about it. And that's tough. That's tough for people to be that direct and honest. But I mean, if you can't be honest with yourself, this is an old quote from Hamlet, right? To then own self be true. It follows then as night follows day. You can't be false to anyone. But getting that level of reality and truth in your own mind is, it really is like...
[40:20] You know those those old videos of the nuclear tests right like this massive explosion and then the houses you know just that's thought man that's thought is this actually thinking for yourself going with reason and evidence is this light that half blinds people and then wipes out entire inhabited areas and that is that is tough but the alternative is to do that mentally and socially or it's going to happen for real in the world i mean everybody knows that there's a massive push for war at the moment right there they're you know they're pushing nato east and east and east and now they're funding these um rapid rockets to go to moscow which can only be funded and and manned and with nato and with the satellite data that only nato can provide they're pushing for this war so you either have this mental battle which leads you to a wonderful place and gets you out of corrupt non-relationships or if you stay in those corrupt non-relationships everybody ends up being pushed off the cliff of war by the fairly sociopathic elites so there is no good option like there's no option which is like well i'm just going to live in peace i'm just gonna i'm just gonna conform and nothing bad's gonna happen because conformity leads to war.
[41:38] Because when you conform then you uh hate whoever they point at whoever the media and elites point at whether it's the unvaccinated or uh republicans or russia or whoever like you'll just blindly hate whoever they point at and that leads directly to war your conformity does not keep you safe your conformity will get you shredded into by some drone in a remote country there is no safe option. So I say to people, take the battle that is mental over the battle that will cost you your life or your limbs. The mental battle is far better and easier than the physical battle, and it is one or the other. So not quite Martin Luther King Jr., but that's what I would say to people.
[42:20] I get that there might be a lot of overlap between that answer and this one, but I'm curious. Assuming there is no afterlife, how can humans make the most of their scarce time on this earth?
[42:35] There is no afterlife. Assuming there is no afterlife. Well, let's say that it is a dead void that we fall into, and we have no more life after death than we had before birth. Let's just say that. Yet, as conceptual beings, we do partake of eternity and infinity, because we have the concepts eternity and infinity. So, while we ourselves physically and mentally may not be eternal and infinite, we do have the concepts, and therefore we partake of these things. So how is it that we can best spend our time in this world well as human beings the best use of our time must be that which is most quintessentially human so let's say we just say oh it's hedonism man we'll take a page out of alcibiades from the old platonic dialogues and say the life of pleasure man orgasms and food and napping and exercise if you feel like it and sunlight and And the life of physical pleasure is the best. It's like, well, that's not specifically human.
[43:40] Of course, right? Every organism that has any pain or pleasure receptors avoids pain and pursues pleasure. If you think that having sex is the best use of your time, well, then you're in good company with rabbits and frogs, which does not seem the most, you know, intellectually or spiritually elevated thing.
[43:59] If you enjoy a good meal, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a good meal, but if you say, well, hedonism and eating as well, then you're in good company with lions and anglerfish who also enjoy a good meal. So it has to be something that is specific to humanity that is our highest calling and the best use of our time. And it can't be something that is simply an old artifact of the lizard brain body. And again, I don't do the mind-body dichotomy. I have no problem with physical pleasures. I think they're wonderful and they are a lovely side dish on the main course of life. There's nothing wrong with that, but what we are as human beings is partakers of and involved with eternity and infinity. So, if we say there's no afterlife, then we have to say that those of our thoughts, which are most combined with universality, are the most human thing about us, and what is most likely to last. So, if we think about all of the, let's go back to the time of Archimedes, right? So, we think of all of the mathematicians and people who weren't even that good at math, who scribbled and dabbled and got things wrong. We don't remember them, because they were wrong.
[45:17] However, Pythagorea's theorem, Archimedes' theorems, and so on, all of the things like, how do you measure an irregular shape? Nobody could figure that out. And then, oh, well, we'll put it in a bucket of water. We'll measure the water rise. We know the volume of the irregular shape, and so on, right? So the things that are true and universal last. And what we remember of the people in the past the most is those who got things right.
[45:39] So there were lots of prophets around, of course, in the time of Jesus. Even if we say outside of divine intervention and miracles, Jesus took morals and made them universal. They were no longer in group and tribal. You didn't just owe moral allegiance to people in your tribe. Morality was universal and absolute, and that was his great revolution. And, of course, he is remembered. The argumentation style of skeptical questioning that characterized Socrates' inquisitions, we remember. In fact, it's the essence of philosophy and of law school cross-examination at the moment, right? Right and the three laws of logic from Aristotle we still remember and use to this day because they thought deeply on that which was most universal and thus their thoughts live on to this day as vividly as if not only were they in the room with us but we were actually them right when you incorporate somebody else's thoughts they live forever in your mind as the thoughts are passed down through the miracle of written language and now recordings then we live forever So the closest you get to the universal and the true, the more you will be remembered. And if you add in one other wee spicy ingredient, which has been the source of my greatest challenges and pleasures, universal, true, and moral. Ah, now then you're cooking with some real spicy gas, right? Because we want morals...
[47:07] To go forward in time as universally and as passionately and as powerfully as possible. So the Quakers and the Christians who worked to end slavery, not just within their own tribe or region or religion or countries, but worldwide. In fact, England only recently finished paying off the debts incurred to end slavery around the world. Well, the end of slavery and the people who worked to end slavery, which of course was a central evil and barrier to modern progress through all of human history. As far back as human history goes, we find slaves, and in fact, the majority of populations were often slaves. So those who ended slavery have bequeathed us a universal value and virtue that we accept as self-evident and will, as far forward as time will go. There's no one, certainly in the West, who would ever get anywhere trying to talk about reintroducing slavery.
[47:55] So if you go for what is true, you go for what is universal, and you you go for what is moral. Now, physicists can go for what is true and universal, as can biologists, geographers, mathematicians, geologists. It's true, it's universal, but it's the moral philosopher who adds virtue to the mix.
[48:13] And if we can bequeath universal morals to those who come after us, that is the closest thing to immortality that we can possibly have. And that would be how I would suggest people do it. They don't have to be, you know, big public thinking giant thumb heads like me. They can be people who just advance morality in their own personal circle with their children of course teaching your children what is true and right and good and being humble in your exposition of that is is a good thing to do because then your children will have children and that will pass on and spread evil is constantly working to do its dirty vicious ugly human mind and body disassembling business and evil as the old saying goes the only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing, well, that's the same thing. Evil is constantly at work because it's addicted, and we have to be addicted to truth, reason, and virtue in order to have any chance of keeping the light of life alive.
[49:08] When I was in high school, I'm not saying that the teachers explicitly said America invented slavery in 1776, but they damn near almost explicitly said what made America's founding unique was the practice of slavery. And this original sin is very terrible, and it's something we all kind of need to have collective shame about. So I was quite surprised a few years later when I learned about the Code of Hammurabi, the Code of Ur-Nammu, legal texts going back 2,000 years, which discuss slavery. So it seems like when I was in school, all the history lessons were extremely shallow and very narrowly focused. Someone like you with a degree in history, what are some important lessons we can embrace today from the past?
[49:57] I mean, the slavery question is pretty wild, because white Christian Western Europeans practiced slavery the least for the shortest amount of time and ended the practice worldwide. Those are incontrovertible historical facts. And slavery in america did not last very long at all because of course when you think of america you're going to think of post-revolution slavery was inherited from the british system and so slavery lasted less than 100 years in america about five percent of people in america owned slaves so it was a minority position and it was ended around the world so again white Western European Christians practiced slavery the least in all of human history, had the fewest slaves, and burned immense amounts of blood and treasure to end slavery worldwide. Incontrovertible historical facts.
[51:01] Now, it's a funny thing in life that when you say you care about something, you get blamed for it. There's an old saying in business, if you want something done, give it to the busy guy. another saying in history that no good deed goes unpunished.
[51:16] So white Christian Western Europeans ended slavery and practiced slavery the least and for the shortest amount of time. And white Western European Christians are the only group blamed for slavery.
[51:33] You know, I get that there's a sort of sociopathic, ooh, that person really cares about something, so I'm going to stick it to them. White people really dislike slavery, so we're going to blame white people for slavery, and then they're going to feel bad, we're going to hammer that vending machine of resources and reparations and stuff. And it's like, okay, you can indulge yourself in that crap if you want. I say this to the world as a whole. You can indulge yourself in that. But the problem is everybody then sees that whoever does good in the world gets the most attacked and blamed and undermined and subverted for that. So what that means, of course, is that if you punish people for doing great good in the world, you're just going to end up with people not wanting to do great good in the world. I mean, if you look at, and I used to tweet about this back in the day on Twitter, I pointed out the very obvious fact that 400,000 slaves came to America, but 20 million slaves went to the Middle East under the Ottomans, where there are very few blacks left because they were castrated.
[52:36] So, again, I'm no expert mathematician, but if memory serves me right, 20 million is quite a bit larger. Than 400,000, of whom the descendants are still alive. So that's much worse. Two million white Western European Christians were taken, often by the Saracens or the Muslims, in slavery, and were raped and murdered and worked to death and so on. So that's five times the amount of slaves that were taken to America. But there's no complaining, there's no historical record, there's no manipulation, there's no profit in it, So it just doesn't exist. It just doesn't exist in history. So accurate history is really, really tough. And it goes against a lot of the falsehoods that I mentioned earlier that gain people significant resources. So accurate history is very tough. I mean, I did a whole tour in Australia talking about the actual history of the Aborigines in Australia, and for my pleasures, you know, the venues were attacked, and listeners were attacked, and there were bomb threats and death threats and so on. For what? For telling the truth.
[53:49] And, you know, and the media seemed to be cheering this on with great and giddy abandon. And so, okay, so you can decide to say, well, somebody who's telling the truth, or even not telling the truth, but is holding a sincerely held belief, we're not going to debate them, we're not going to disprove them, we're just going to be violent and attack them and, you know, lie about them and so on. Okay, well, you can indulge yourself in that. But all that happens is the conflict shifts from the verbal to the physical. In other words, you don't eliminate conflict by destroying people's capacity to speak freely. Really, all that happens is you move it from verbal debates to physical violence, and we really don't want that. I mean, I guess some people who are better at violence than thinking, maybe they want that for the whole, but yeah, so the big lessons of history to me...
[54:42] Are just about how powerful lies are, how you don't ever want to give the powers that be control over the, quote, education of your children, because they will be taught to hate everything that interferes with the expansion of power. And we can see, of course, this happening at the moment. And the wild thing too, and I'll sort of close on this point, but the wild thing too Keith is that when you see what happens in politics and with the rise of social media and the internet you can see lies being dismantled in real time so people make false claims you know community notes is a great feature in in X so people are just lying compulsively all the time and then there's the truth is posted underneath so the lies you know lies like oh McCarthy was wrong and there were no communists it's like yes they were in fact he was way more right than even he thought and that's not even a an opinion that came out of the decommissioning of the decrypted soviet cables the venona papers and so on that that he was absolutely right and more right than even he imagined in his worst nightmares so what happens is in the past they used to be able to build these giant castles of lies with moats and boiling oil and and gators and archers and to To try and take on these lies was to try and take on a fortress that's been impregnated by reinforced falsehood for like 40, 50 years or 100 years or 200 years or whatever.
[56:08] And so now what the wild thing is, is they don't get to build the Velistas of bullcrap, like the castles of calumny. They don't get to build this stuff and reinforce them because they're dismantled in real time. And when you see how many people have no conscience about lying, right? I mean, you saw this in the debate, just lies flying around and people with no conscience and so on, right?
[56:34] So you can see the lies being dismantled in real time. And what that means is that when you look back in history, I mean, I was fairly skeptical of the hagiography of history that, you know, it's that old Norm MacDonald quote. It's a great quote. He says, wow, it says right here in this history book that in every single war, the good guys have won every time. What are the odds? You know, and so I was pretty skeptical of history and popular narratives in the past. Popular narratives always serve a purpose. But now, when people can see the lies that are attempting to be built being dismantled in real time, for those who want to know and have eyes to see and a willingness to accept it, But when you can see that happening in real time, man, you see how many lives are trying to being erected and being pulled down in the here and now. And you look back at things 100 years ago or 500 years ago, it's like, man.
[57:27] There's nothing about this that I would accept as axiomatic or true. I mean, I would accept that the events happened. You know, one of my ancestors came over with William the Conqueror in 1066. That's why I have a French last name. Okay, I accept that that happened. So I'll accept that the physical things happened. The reasons behind them, though, almost all pure propaganda and almost all there to serve the needs and purposes and pleasures of those seeking eternal power over our tremulous souls. So I think the biggest lesson of history as a whole, and you can see this even in family history, if there's some significant dysfunction in the family history, like people just lie about it all the time, that history is generally a lie inflicted on the credulous by the powerful in order to advance their own interests. And I believe very little of it at all anymore. And again, being skeptical going in, but also, you know, when you are prominent and you tell the truth and you're lied about yourself and you see how many people believe those lies, it's like, yeah, I don't really think. Things happened, absolutely. The reasons behind them though, I don't accept any particular narrative that I can think of.
[58:36] Do you think there's any justification for noble lies to either tell kids Santa and the Tooth Fairy are real or tell them that George Washington never told a lie and did all these terrific things and never was fallible? Is there any justification for noble lies, either to kids or adults?
[58:55] Well, I mean, tacking on a positive word to a false word, it's like, is there such a thing as benevolent rape? No, of course not, right? And so, saying that something is false and then saying, no, but it has a noble purpose, is just telling you that evil can be good according to some unknown metric. Now, I mean, anyone can invent scenarios wherein I could see it would be a good thing to lie. So, I mean, one that comes to mind is, you know, you're an EMT, right, and.
[59:31] You come across some guy, he's in a terrible car crash, you know, the steering wheel has gone through his chest and he's like five minutes away from dying and his family is dead in the backseat, right? And it's a guy's dying and he says, did my family make it?
[59:51] Right now, I personally, I'd be like, yes, they're fine. They sailed out, they were caught by angels and they're, I'm not going to tell the guy in his last five minutes of life that his family's also dead, right? So, I mean, everyone can come up with scenarios, you know, I mean, the typical one that's referenced is, you know, people burst into your house and say, I want to kill your wife, where is she? And you know, well, I must tell these people where my wife is because I wouldn't want to tell a lie. Now, of course, Immanuel Kant says you tell them where your wife is because lying is without context. So, you can always come up with these scenarios, you know, it's bad to break somebody's window and go into their apartment without their permission but what if you're hanging from a flagpole and you're gonna die and it's like so you can always come up with these particular scenarios but the noble lie, is i mean this goes all the way back to plato and plato was one of the ones who originated this who said but there aren't really gold silver and bronze people but we're going to say that there are in order to stay away from the riffraff and have the intellectuals in charge of everything think and it's if it's a lie then it needs to be exposed as a lie and revealed as a lie you know we've we've tried lying or putting lying at the course of our societies we've tried this all the way back to the witch doctors afraid of the volcano gods you know there are no volcano gods and so we've tried for you know hundreds of thousands of years maybe millions of years i don't.
[1:01:19] Keeps collapsing. It does. I mean, the economy collapses, the fiat currency collapses, there's war, communism killed 100 million people in the 20th century, a democide, there's a quarter of a billion people murdered by their own governments outside of war. I mean, sorry to jump genre so much, but in the movie Aladdin with Robin Williams, the prince is like, he's lied to the princess and And he's like, oh, what am I going to do? How am I going to manipulate this? How am I going to get her to believe this? How am I going to change that? How am I going to keep her love? And the genie's like, I don't know. Here's a wild idea. Why don't you just tell the truth? And this is the big sign, the truth.
[1:02:02] What if we just tried this as a radical experiment in the entire crap storm of human history where people are constantly being slaughtered and maimed and murdered and buried and incarcerated and concentration camped and genocided? It like what if we what if we just tried this thing where we stop lying what if we try this thing where we just tell the truth what if we try this thing where the morals we claim to be universal what if they are just accepted as in fact universal i mean we've tried everything else, we've tried lying we've tried the noble lies we've tried manipulation we've tried debt we've tried war we've tried propaganda what if we just just you know give me one generation half a generation what if we tried to, not lying? What if we tried just looking at the world, building facts and reason up from the ground? What if we tried actual practical empirical philosophy? What if we tried reason rather than lies?
[1:02:57] We've given lies hundreds of thousands of years, and it's a constant crap fest of degradation and war and genocide and destruction and starvation. What if we tried not having the stupid cycle where a little bit of freedom gains a bunch of wealth, a bunch of wealth means that you can bribe everyone into a bill if the economy collapses again? What if counterfeiting is wrong for private individuals, and I don't care if they call themselves the Fed or Thanatos' anal army? I don't care what they call themselves. What if it is just wrong? What if the initiation of force is just wrong and it's not that complicated? What if property theft is wrong? What if signing contracts on other people's behalf is wrong? What if putting unborn children into endless debt to foreign banksters is wrong? Wrong. What if we just try the universal morals? What if we just try the rational thinking? What if we just try telling the truth? Now, I get that's going to harm the professional liars that have evolved to rule humanity. But what if, you know, what if we just try it? I mean, why? Why not? We've tried everything else. We've tried everything else, and it constantly gets worse and worse. Why don't we just try telling the truth? It's just an option. I'd just like to put it out there as a possibility.
[1:04:06] Thanks to everyone for watching Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute, check out freedomain.com. Link will be in the description below. That concludes one of my discussion with Mr. Molyneux. Thank you for your time, sir.
[1:04:20] Thank you. I appreciate the conversation.
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