0:00 - Welcome to the Interview
9:16 - Philosophy and Practical Morality
14:50 - Intelligence and Wisdom
28:35 - Analyzing Propaganda and Perception
39:22 - Economic Choices and Gender Roles
41:35 - Parenthood and Workforce Dynamics
42:24 - Crime and Gender Perspectives
45:09 - Aggression and Social Dynamics
49:45 - The Free Market Debate
57:00 - Propaganda and Misinformation
1:03:46 - Morality and Human Behavior
1:12:07 - The Nature of Corporations
1:14:55 - Rethinking Systems and Society
In part two of Keith Knight's interview with Stefan Molyneux, they delve into a wide range of philosophical and ethical topics, beginning with the distinction between good and bad philosophers. Molyneux argues that the quality of a philosopher often correlates to their proximity to the prevailing powers and the historical context in which they operated. He critiques well-known philosophers, such as Socrates, whose acceptance by the state may serve to propagate the state’s authority over individual wisdom. Emphasizing the need for philosophers to start from a blank slate, Molyneux outlines a systematic approach where a good philosopher progresses through areas such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, culminating in an understanding of practical morality. He expresses concern that many prominent thinkers don’t adequately apply philosophical principles in a way that offers actionable advice for everyday morality and ethics.
Further, Molyneux discusses the intricacies of applying philosophical principles to address social injustices, specifically situating child abuse as a major violation of the non-aggression principle. He articulates a vision where addressing violence against children could lead to a broader reduction of societal evils. He has undertaken this topic in his latest work, "Peaceful Parenting," and engages in an analysis of how philosophical ideas can resonate within practical human contexts. He contends that one of the core challenges of philosophy is translating abstract ideals into something tangible that people can utilize in their daily lives.
The conversation then shifts towards a discussion about intelligence and wisdom. Molyneux posits that while IQ can serve as a base measure of intelligence, true wisdom can often be cultivated through conscious effort and the willingness to confront one’s biases. He suggests that there are indicators to identify whether individuals are genuinely engaged in seeking truth or whether they are entrenched in ignorance. The ability to articulate and engage with opposing views without resorting to ad hominem attacks is highlighted as a marker of intelligence.
Molyneux also critiques societal narratives propagated by various political ideologies, particularly regarding issues like the gender pay gap and crime statistics. He points out a fundamental misunderstanding in the interpretation of these narratives, emphasizing the importance of scrutinizing data and questioning the underlying assumptions behind public claims. In doing so, he navigates through topics such as the structural inequalities inherent in society, conditions leading to crime, and the intersection of ethnicity and poverty, while placing a significant emphasis on understanding context rather than drawing simplistic conclusions.
As the interview progresses, the notion of the Iron Law of Oligarchy is introduced, prompting a discourse on its implications for political systems, especially against the backdrop of leftist ideals. Molyneux articulates how complex organizations, including governments, inherently gravitate towards oligarchy and how this framework effectively undermines the principles of democracy. He posits that recognizing such patterns can lead to a better understanding of why certain systems fail to deliver on egalitarian promises and suggests that ongoing discussions must focus on incentivizing virtuous behavior rather than merely critiquing structures.
The final segments of the interview address the pitfalls of societal propaganda, particularly in the context of health narratives, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and dietary guidelines like the food pyramid. Molyneux critiques the role of government and expert opinion in shaping public perception and behavior, positing that many of these narratives serve the interests of power rather than genuine health needs. He emphasizes the importance of aligning moral principles with personal actions and advocates for critical thinking in understanding the relationship between authority, information, and individual agency in society.
Molyneux’s dialogue with Knight encapsulates a rich exploration of philosophy as a tool for practical living, the necessity of critical engagement with societal narratives, and the importance of applying ethical principles in genuinely transformative ways. Throughout, Molyneux encourages listeners to challenge their assumptions and seek deeper understanding in a world rife with complexity and recurring fundamental questions about morality, knowledge, and human interaction.
[0:00] Welcome to Keith Knight Don't Tread on Anyone in the Libertarian Institute, part two of my interview with Mr. Molyneux. Check out his work at freedomain.com. Also, if you subscribe to him on Odyssey, you could find his complete collection of videos going back more than a decade. That is where I watch them. Also available on podcast hosting sites as well. Check the link in the description below. Mr. Molyneux, what differentiates a good philosopher from a bad philosopher?
[0:32] Yes, great question. Good? Everyone else, no. So the good philosopher, bad philosopher, it's something I did a whole, it was a 22-part History of Philosophers series for subscribers on the show, and one of the things, which seems like a fairly trivial insight in hindsight, but was kind of mind-blowing to me at the time, is that there is no history of philosophers objectively. subjectively. In other words, there wasn't just this meritocracy of who was really good and who wasn't really good, and they just chose the very best, like everybody runs a race and whoever gets across the finish line. It's like philosophers who were allowed to speak and philosophers who are allowed to be taught and philosophers who, to some degree or another, serve the powers that be. So one of the reasons I think that we know so much about Socrates is that Socrates.
[1:23] Justifies the power of the state by saying hey if the city decides to kill me well that's fine because the city i relied on the laws to survive i relied on the laws to get my food and my protection and the city has protected me from invasion and so if the government decides to kill me well i owe my government the life and therefore my life is for the governments to do as it pleases which i actually think was a complete curse i have a whole series of this from like 15 years ago this is a curse on humanity because socrates says that most men are unwise most men are fools and people were voting for him and so he knew that the vote was not an act of wisdom but an act of prejudice and sophistry which he directly accused meletus of of uh of uh inciting, so he said as his curse kill me fine i'll just tell you to obey the state and everything's It's going to go great for you going forward. So Socrates is allowed because of that. So a good philosopher in general has to start with a completely blank slate and no assumptions whatsoever. You have to return to a state almost of infancy and say, okay.
[2:37] I have a whole bunch of assumptions based upon my empirical experience. I have been told a whole bunch of moral lessons by people who are probably corrupt to the core. So what happens if I completely wipe blank my preconceptions and start building from reason and evidence and first principles, accepting every step and having to validate every step? So the general pattern is a sort of four-part series of dominoes in good philosophy is you start with metaphysics. Metaphysics is what is real what is real what is true what is objective and what exists what doesn't exist how do i and that's sort of what is what is and then you have to go to epistemology.
[3:17] Which is a fancy word for the theory of knowledge so if i know what is real then how do i know that and how do i differentiate what is real from the unreal what is true from the false from there you have to go to ethics because the whole point of philosophy is ethics there is philosophy of science there's philosophy of mathematics, there's philosophy of religion, but the only thing that differentiates philosophy from all the other disciplines is morality. So if you're not doing morality, you're not doing philosophy. And then the big challenge is you have to overcome what Hume called the is-ought distinction, which is to say, and Andrew Wilson was talking about this in a recent podcast, you can't get an ought from an is, you can't get a should from a fact. You know, If a guy pushes a woman off a cliff, she falls to her death. Okay, that's a physical fact. That's a fact of physics and biology.
[4:12] Why should you or should you not do these things? And from there...
[4:18] In the current system that we have, you then have to go to politics, and politics is a study of the morally legitimated institutional use of coercion or violence in society. Now, of course, as a voluntarist or an anarchist, it is my goal in probably about half a millennia to have a society which is free of institutionalized coercion that is justified by the general population out of fear of a lack of safety. But that's not where we are so you kind of have to deal with politics to some degree or another so good philosophers start with the assumption of nothing and this comes straight out of rené descartes meditations which is okay what if i am in fact just a brain and a tank being wired up by a demon to like matrix style right what if everything is is just a fantasy and and nothing is real well that's an important question i mean every night we go to sleep and have these most amazing uh vivid dreams i won't even tell you the costume that you were wearing in my dream last night because it would probably get you banned from uh the planet as a whole but uh although the elephant head does look good on you but so every night we have these wild vivid dreams we wake up and we know for sure that they were dreams that were now awake and the philosophy good philosopher says well how do we know that assume nothing right the good physicist says well the world does look flat as we talked about last time and everything looks like the stars look like they're rotating around us like some inverse halogen colander or something.
[5:46] But what if that's not true? What if everything I perceive is incorrect? And that way you can build a certain edifice of knowledge. And many philosophers have tried this to varying degrees of success, the most notable being, I would say, René Descartes and Immanuel Kant just said, okay, what if nothing is true and I have to build everything up from the ground up? And that's That's really been my process. I think it was about 15 or so, no, more, 17 or so years ago, I did a 17-part introduction to philosophy series where I said, you know, with a whiteboard and, you know, my primitive 240p camera, and I said, what if...
[6:22] What if we don't know anything? What if I don't know if I exist or you exist or the sense data is real or anything? How do we go from there to abstract universal moral philosophy? And it's a big challenge. So the philosophers that I like the most, who respect the most, are the ones who absolutely, like, you have to grit your teeth. It's like when I used to do long-distance running when I was in my teens and my 20s. Like when you start you feel like you're going to die after the first 10 minutes and then after you break through that you can run you know i ran 20 miles once and you could just keep going and you just have to grit your teeth and say i'm not going to stop you know just keep swimming just keep swimming just going to keep going and keep going and not divert now to me the best philosophers are the ones who take that approach i know nothing i'm going to build these principles from the the ground up, and it doesn't matter to me where they lead. I am not invested in the outcome. I am only invested in the process. So philosophers like Ayn Rand started with metaphysics and epistemology. There's a whole great book called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
[7:28] And then she went through to ethics, which I think she failed at, and then she went through to politics.
[7:33] Which she also failed at because she still justified the existence of institutionalized coercion such as statism but having staying on that ride is really tough and then the last thing not only but also you also get this free chamois cloth but not all not only that after you.
[7:52] Go through that process you then have the challenge of saying okay i've gone through metaphysics epistemology ethics politics i have a robust moral system now how does it get applied in people's actual lives that is the to me the biggest challenge of all and i think one of the things that differentiates what i do from what other philosophers do is i've now had over the last i mean close to 20 years now i started in 2005 so yeah it's almost 20 years i've had thousands and thousands of conversations with people about how to take abstract moral principles and apply them to their actual daily practical lives and so it's one thing to build this wonderful cathedral of thought but people also have to come in and get some moral instructions and have their lives improved uh thereby and so a lot of philosophers aim for abstractions and just keep going they don't return to earth with these abstractions and give practical utility to people it's like people who study you know theories of diet and so on but never write any diet books that can actually help people so i've done you know the theoretical work that i think is very important and in terms of practical application.
[9:04] So for instance, the non-aggression principle is very, very simple to defend and universalize.
[9:14] And then the question is, once you've done that, what happens?
[9:16] Well, what happens with most people, and this is particularly true in more liberty-minded circles, is they say, well, you know, the central banking is just counterfeiting. It's like, yes, yes, it is. And what are you going to do about it, right? And the what are you going to do about it is the question. Of course, we don't want to go and, you know, use violence ourselves.
[9:35] So what do you do? or you know foreign aid is is uh taking money from the rich of poor people of rich countries and sending it to the rich people of poor countries and it corrupts other countries and so on it's like yes that's true and and so what are you gonna war is bad yes and so the yes and what do you do about it is the challenge so again i was like blank slating uh because that's my sort of every morning it's like grit your teeth and blank your slate right and so i was blank slating and saying okay so once we accept that the non-aggression principle thou shalt not initiate the use of force once we accept that that's a valid moral principle what are we going to do well i could complain about things i have no control over but that doesn't seem to be like a very good idea at all i mean it is like a lecturing a graveyard on how to take care of their health i mean it's a little bit past uh the the issue at hand and uh you can't really affect the outcome because it's already in the past. So what I said was, okay, so violations of the non-aggression principle, what's the most widespread violation of the non-aggression principle that we can do the most about?
[10:45] What's the most widespread violation of the non-aggression principle that we can do the most about? Now, of course, I worked in a daycare as a kid, as a teenager for many years and so on and saw various negative outcomes. Of course, I had some negative outcomes myself as a child and saw other people with negative outcomes due to violence within the home it's like ah okay so what is the most common violation of the non-aggression principle well spanking i mean 75 80 90 really depends on the ethnicity of parents are still hitting their children so that is the biggest violation and the most widespread violation of the moral of the non-aggression principle that we can do the most about yay philosopher has returned from the heavens with tablets of practical action. Sorry, to put myself in rather illustrious and heavily bearded company. So the idea then that we would say, let's work on.
[11:37] Child abuse let's work on violations of the non-aggression principle against children and so on that was to me the most practical outcome and so i made the case in many many different venues and forums and powerpoints and speeches and debates and all of that and i recently of course finished my magnum opus on this called peaceful parenting which people can get at peacefulparenting.com it's free there's even an ai you can ask parenting questions that will give.
[12:02] You some pretty fantastic answers so i think good philosophers start with a blank slate work their way to the most broad abstractions and then bring them back to earth in practical and actionable manners so that you can become a moral person because if the purpose of morality is to rail at the toenails of the gods you can do nothing about then it's simply an exercise in paralysis and futility but if you can like if you say well the purpose of moral philosophy is to end foreign an aide it's like well good luck with all of that right i.
[12:32] Mean you can talk to people and you could i guess even run for office but of course we can see what's going on right now with people who run for office who aren't part of the elite who actually want to change things they tend to get some fairly pretty ear clippings from time to time and so but what you can do is you can talk within your family and friendships and social circle about not violating the non-aggression principle with regards to helpless and dependent children that's something you can do and that practical aspect is tricky though because you know railing against the federal reserve and and foreign aid and the national debt gives you a certain amount of chest beating satisfaction but it doesn't actually really do much to achieve good in society but if you actually take on something like hitting children then you can achieve some real good but the problem is of course when you when you achieve real good i can tell you this from some fairly vivid personal experience keith when you actually achieve some good uh you get that lovely little thing called blowback you know because you know if if you're yelling about foreign aid and you don't shift where one dollar goes you don't really bother anyone but the moment you actually start to change the disposition of good and evil in society well.
[13:41] It's funny, you know, it's one of my favorite books when I was younger is The Hobbit. And The Hobbit is a fantastic book because most fairy tales end, oh, we've killed the dragon. Everything's fantastic. Yay, look at all this treasure. There's no more danger for Lake Town. And everyone's like dancing and singing. And that's usually the end of the movie. But the genius, one of the many aspects of genius of Tolkien is, well, after you kill the dragon, there's a war. It's a battle of the five armies. Everybody fights over the treasure. And so ending evil often creates a power vacuum, and that's a challenge. If you directly interfere with the intentions of evil people, they will attack you back. And because you're in the right and they're in the wrong, it'll usually be lie, slander, and reputational attack or physical violence. And so to do good means angering evil and they're going to have something to say about what you do and so i think the good philosopher gets people to enact virtue in their daily lives in measurable and objective ways and of course if we can do our part in ending child abuse most of the other evils in society will fall as well.
[14:51] How can we differentiate smart people from ignorant people?
[14:57] Well, so IQ is obviously an imperfect measure, but it's the best we've got. And it's the one that is by far the most correlated with success in the world. And of course, if people can come up with an intelligence test that better predicts outcomes than IQ does, I would be the first to sort of champion it. So IQ is kind of the best thing that we've got for intelligence at the moment. Now, IQ, and I did like a series of interviews with people.
[15:30] It was, gosh, what was it, 17 world experts in the field of IQ to sort of help understand this because I wanted to know how to be fair and how to be just, right? You want to know how to be fair and be just, so I don't want to blame people for things beyond their control. You don't want to blame people for being short or their eye color or things that are really beyond their control, because that would be unfair and unjust. That would be like blaming a kid for being lazy because he happened to be born into a poor family and he just didn't have much money. Now, if an adult doesn't have much money, maybe they're kind of lazy, but you wouldn't blame a kid for that, right? Right? So I wanted to figure out what was under people's control and what wasn't. And so you want to, as a philosopher, your goal is to increase people's wisdom, because wisdom is somewhat of a choice. Now, in the research, it seems to be fairly clear IQ is about 80% genetic by your late teens. It even goes up somewhere from there, but that, you know, let's sort of take the baseline line of 80%. Now, that still gives you 20% to work with. That's a lot, right? That's more than a standard deviation of intelligence, like 100 to 85 or 100 to 115, give or take, right?
[16:49] So, to determine whether somebody is intelligent or not, there are a couple of tests that I use. And again, just because they're not intelligent doesn't mean they can't become wise. Although though intelligence can help, although the argument is as well that intelligent people can talk themselves in and out of 20 different positions in a day, and I know I've certainly been in that camp as well.
[17:16] So there's a couple of things that I do. So when you make a generalized statement and somebody comes back with a specific statement.
[17:26] Exception uh that generally is somebody who is not not thinking now just if somebody doesn't think there's two reasons either they can't think because they're just not smart or they can think but they've chosen not to which means they lack self-criticism so that's one thing and you know the typical example is uh women uh women are generally shorter than men it's like well i know a guy his girlfriend's taller than he is and it's like hmm i'm afraid the giant addition that you are making to the conversation may be visible only to you or as the old saying wisdom has constantly been chasing you but you've always been slightly faster, so that's one example another example of course which is very common is the response of an ad hominem or a personal attack to a moral statement now this i'm going to introduce this because nobody on the internet has ever seen this before i'm one of those rare travelers who's seen this incredible resurrected dodo bird of the ad hominem so if you say um there's a general statement and you and somebody says well only an a-hole would say that it's like well maybe but but that still doesn't deal with the facts of the issue. So when someone is triggered, intelligence gives you the option to intercept your lizard brain responses, right? So you have...
[18:55] Depends on how you clock it, but generally you have about a quarter second to intercept an aggressive impulse and reason with it and so on. And for most people, whatever their mental reflexes are, it's somewhat longer than a quarter of a second because people just act out, they get aggressive, they get mad and so on, right? I mean, in a perverse way, I was proud of what was voted of mine the worst tweet in the history of Twitter. And in the modern parlance being called the worst guy is you know people we retweet Stalin and Hitler but no my tweet was voted and fairly overwhelmingly as the worst tweet in the history of Twitter which was a little surprising to me it went something like a couple this is five years ago when I said wow Taylor Swift is turning 30 she's so young she looks so young I hope that she'll think about having kids because by the time you're 30 like 90 of your eggs are dead as a woman i hope she'll think about having kids she looks like she'd be a fun mom.
[19:53] Now that was actually very positive i think against taylor swift well except her politics and her radiating childlessness to the npc crowd well okay maybe have a couple of things against taylor swift and her fans wait no let's not get drawn down the taylor swift uh a side side side quest so um uh people went completely nuts it is a scientific fact that 90 of a woman's eggs are dead by the time she's 30 that doesn't mean she can't have kids she's still got five years until it's geriatric pregnancy but people went um they're completely mental about and we're just you know nobody's gonna have sex with you in cell it's like okay i'm happily married for 22 years and but okay uh and and uh what am i gonna do i'm gonna i'm gonna have sex with everyone but you, incel you know like this kind of stuff right it's like oh really bitter angry dangerous sociopathic women might be withholding sex from me oh whatever am i going to do to get through the day um so that's another example of people who are just triggered uh people who.
[21:01] Don't express doubt uh also a certainty is i used to call them the period people because i grew up in sort of a very poor welfare fairly crappy trashy neighborhood and it was full of people who were like you know it's just like this period you know and the the period was like blah blah.
[21:18] Period you know end of discussion it's like really for me the only end of discussion is probably about 15 to 20 minutes after i'm dead i'm sure i'll have some or like hey you know how your fingernails grow after you die and your hair uh well i will continue to have debates and discussions um there'll be some scratching on the coffin uh roof i'll continue going on for a little while so for me the end of discussion is the end of life but for these people it's like boom period end of discussion and it's like uh okay so i just kind of i kind of move on move on from that as a whole uh people who don't expose themselves to contradictory opinions uh you know the echo chamber stuff and this is why like people on the left have you know good and bad points but in general they tend to be less robust because they're exposed to far more echo chambers anybody who's not on the left is just you're just swimming against the current and you just get stronger like you just get stronger swimming against the current so of course i'm a you know very much a free market guy and a reason and evidence guy an objectivity guy and um so i mean in high school it was fairly lefty in in england and canada and other places and uh in university and outright marxist and so on and uh so i've just and then i was in the uh the theater world i went to the national theater school i wrote and directed plays and i mean in canada the man the uh the theater world is uh.
[22:45] I mean it it makes uh uh lennon look like uh ayn rand so because you know dependent on government money and and npcs that kind of way and they're not interested in exploring the human condition which is what good artists should do they're just interested in promoting division uh hatred and resentment so it is a monster so you're sailing against the currents you just end up kind of robust so when you hear people repeat npc talking points uh and they just don't, have any idea that there's another perspective or opinion then they're just not intelligent Because to be intelligent is to be skeptical, right? Because if you haven't noticed that the world is full of pathological liars in power, I don't even know what to tell you. You know, that is the old thing, like one fish turns to the other and says, hey, water's a little chilly today. He's like, water? What water? I just float, right? So if people haven't noticed that there are pathological liars in power, and that there's a massive incentive for people in power to lie to them, and therefore they should have skepticism...
[23:52] You know, it's the old thing about, it's pretty easy for a woman to be attractive to man, just put on a sundress and say you don't trust the government. I mean, you're sad, right? So anybody who hasn't noticed that, like, I really don't know.
[24:02] Hey, mainstream media doesn't always tell the truth, that they're not super objective. And if you haven't noticed that, honestly, I wouldn't even know. Now, it's like there's a cruel meme about the boomers where they say, you know, when you're arguing with a boomer, I can say this because I missed by one year, one year. I know I may look like the Crypt Keeper to your younger audience, but I missed by one year. I'm still pre-boomer by one year. But when you're arguing with the boomer, you're arguing with the television. The television can't hear you and it doesn't care. And so people who don't have inputs and people who get aggressive when contradicted or when counter-information comes up, people who cite specific exemptions to general rules as some intellectual work of achievement and so on. And also honestly i view people who don't read fiction uh as a problem because one of the things that's highly correlated with the development of empathy is the reading of fiction because fiction is your chance to try on another person's life for size especially first person fiction i wrote a novel not too long ago where i switched between first and third person in a way to kind of disorient this is how the person looks from the outside but this is what they're thinking on the the inside and people who don't read fiction generally don't have as much empathy and it's not just my opinion studies have been done that the reading of fiction generally helps foster empathy because you're then curious about how other people think and feel and a lot of.
[25:31] Debate has to do with empathy and because the opposite of debate is violence and violence is the opposite of empathy right so if you and i are debating we're negotiating to try and find the truth to the mutual benefit, right? If you, you know, if we're driving to Vegas and I'm going the wrong way and you tell me to go the right way, you haven't harmed me, you've helped me. I mean, the purpose is truth. So we empathize with each other with reasoning. The people who use ad hominems and, you know, there's all these terrible stories online at the moment after the second, what seems like an assassination attempt against Trump, you know, there's lots of people saying, you know, I had this friend of like 10 years or 20 years, we were talking about the assassination nation and my friend said i can't it's a damn shame they didn't miss and it's like oh.
[26:18] Ooh, that's, what's that knock-knock at Trump to Harris? Knock-knock, who's there? Owen.
[26:26] Owen who? Owen too, right? So that level of, to me, just straight-up sociopathy. I wish that somebody I disagree with politically got killed. Well, of course, that's most of human history. Most of human history is killing people who disagreed with you, whether it's hitting them on the head with a club or the jawbone of an ass, or it's putting them in concentration camps or sending them to war. I mean, a lot of Republicans in the South, and so the wars wipe out the soldiers and so on. So, way to wipe out your political enemies. So, empathy is that we are going to be happy to reason with each other because we know that the only alternative to reasoning with each other, the only alternative to reasoning with each other is outright violence, and that will destroy society as a whole and so i look for people who are interested in in fiction and not just you know i i have a prejudice more for um 19th century fiction is sort of my favorite time because there was genuine examination of the human condition and you know deep thoughts without the politics creeping in at all times and under all circumstances no matter what and so i look Look for people who are interested in fiction. Poetry as well is a way to enter somebody else's dream state and imagination to have a self and an other. So there's lots of cool things that I use to try and figure out who's worth really talking to.
[27:55] I've already zoomed in your bookshelf to look for fiction in the back to make sure we can talk. Sorry, go ahead.
[28:00] You know what? Fiction is actually on this side. I promise it's here.
[28:05] Wait, it's on your left? Oh, no, it's left-wing fiction. Sorry, go ahead.
[28:09] So my favorite thing to do is to really get a quick idea of where someone stands on a given topic and ask them to steel man the opposition. And if they can't do it without straw manning, when I specifically ask for a steel man, I know that I'm wasting time with a person. So thank you so much for giving me those to add to the ideas of how I can communicate to people and find out who's worth spending time with.
[28:36] One of my favorite contributions you have given the world is your ability to analyze propaganda. I had never seen this before. Mr. Molyneux goes line by line in certain articles and really walks you through the manipulative language that's used. So I want to go through a couple of my favorite examples. In April of 2014, the sitting president and graduate from Harvard University, Barack Obama, said, it's not a myth, it's math, referring to the gender wage gap. Apparently, he actually believed this. So, women earn 77 cents on the dollar for every dollar a man makes. Therefore, there is a gender pay gap. This gap between the genders is proof of sexism. What if anything is wrong with that logic?
[29:27] Right. I'm going to zoom out for just a second about, because there's a couple of threads I want to talk about with regards to propaganda. And apparently, that's just all about me. So I'll do that. And I think it'll make sense. So let me ask you, where are you in the birth order of your family?
[29:44] I am the youngest. My brother is the oldest, my sister's older than I am, and I am the third child. We all share a father. My mother only has me.
[29:57] Okay, got it. Now, what's the age gap? This will make sense. Just bear with me for a sec.
[30:04] He is 37. She is 34. I'm 28.
[30:11] Okay. So when you were a kid, a little kid, and of course, there's quite a substantial age gap. I'm a younger sibling as well. My brother's two and a couple of months older than me. So when you were a kid it was hard to get resources relative to your siblings right so so if they had the toy you couldn't if you had the toy they could get it from you if they had the toy you couldn't get it from them and so when you're a little kid you have to complain when you don't get your fair share right so there's there's older people that the parents get whatever they want the older siblings get whatever they want they have the cool toys they get to stay up later they get more allowance, they get more privileges, they get more freedom, and there's a certain amount of resentment. And it's not unhealthy. It's perfectly how we've evolved. There's nothing wrong with it. But there's a certain amount of resentment that comes from.
[31:06] Being a younger sibling and mothers have to be very sensitive to this and equalize things and they have to equalize things sometimes using force right they have to literally if if the older kid snatches the toy from the younger kid the mother has to take it some pry it out of the hands maybe and and give it back and of course we don't say to kids well there's a whole bunch of food there and and you've got a one-year-old a five-year-old and a ten-year-old well you'll just go and get as much food as you want and we'll just let it be a meritocracy it's like no no You have to take food and make sure that the youngest kid gets it and so on, right? So forced redistribution, resentment of people who are doing better than you, complaining and appealing to authority to get resources from the more competent and successful and give them to you is a childhood experience. So propaganda, you won't believe how I'm going to bring this in for a landing. Nobody knows what the heck I'm talking about. Trust me or don't, but I will bring it in for a landing, right? So what is it that politicians are continually saying to people? The rich aren't paying their fair share.
[32:09] Corporations don't pay enough in taxes. You're being ripped off. And what they're doing is they're trying to appeal to a childhood mindset where things are unfair. Through no fault of your own, you're not getting enough. It's not your fault that you happen to to be born last and there are all of these older siblings who are getting more and it's unfair and you need to appeal to authority to take from people who are more successful and more competent in your childhood it would be your older siblings and give to you and without that you just can't survive so what they're doing this is so common in propaganda it's one of the reasons why leftism and classism and this kind of division stuff works is they're trying to get you to regress to a state of childhood which is envy, resentment, and helplessness.
[33:01] I mean, maybe I'm alone in this pettiness. I don't think I am, but I very clearly remember as a kid, my brother had the right to stay up five minutes later.
[33:16] I mean, this is sad. I'm not proud of this, but it's just the way that I was, and I've dealt with it completely. But I remember sitting in my bed, and I knew I was probably about, I don't know, four or five years old and i knew that five minutes was me counting to 300 right this is how sad but you have to be this way as a younger sibling you have to because otherwise you don't get enough resources and so oh five minutes is it fine one two i won't do the whole 300 for you but i would i would sit there and i you know i'd have my covers off my toes to make sure i didn't miscount.
[33:56] And it would be like it's been five minutes it's bedtime and like this is how petty and right oh my gosh it's it's now as a kid you have to guide your interest that way you have to say look there are people doing better through no fault of my own and no you know it bothered me that the older kids you know oh you're just a little kid it's like oh wow you did the amazing moral task of having to drop out of mums for JJ slightly earlier than I did. Wow, what a thing to be achieved, right? So as a kid, this resentment of people who are doing better and taking more, and the appeal to authority to make things equal, is how younger siblings survive. Now, I've only done a cursory examination of this, and you, of course, would be an exception here, but a lot of people on the left are younger siblings.
[34:52] And when the government comes to you and says, injustices are being done against you, those with more power are taking more, and we're here to make it equal. Well, why is that such a common experience for people? We all go through childhood, right? We all go through childhood. And all younger siblings have to fight like heck to make sure we get our fair share. Through no fault of our own, we happen to be smaller and weaker and younger and so on, right? And so... When the government comes along and says, there are people who are unjustly taking from you, and we're here to make it right.
[35:33] Well, that is men are stealing from you women, and we are here to make them give you back what they've taken from you. We're here to make sure you get your fair share, which through no fault of your own is being taken from you. Why is that so believable to everyone? Well, because it's an essential part of how siblings survive. And most people grow up with siblings, and there are a lot of younger siblings. So you see this all the time in election years, where it's like, the rich aren't paying their fair share. Well, why does that seem believable to people? Because one cursory look at the data is like, no, no, no.
[36:09] The rich aren't paying their fair share. They're paying way too much. You know, when the top 5% of earners are paying 50% of the income tax, that's ridiculously unfair. Fair but why is it that people are like there is a greedy part which is like oh i can resent people and get stuff uh for free i get all of that but why is it that it's so believable for for people when the government comes along and says and you know this is from as relatively mild the case as the gender pay gap to something is completely egregious which we talked about in the last conversation which is you know the communist coming along and saying uh that factory was stolen from your ancestors we're going to go kill the factory owners and give it back to you well that's appealing to a parent in a sibling dynamic on massive you know hyper ideological steroids but i think that when we have a an incredibly common experience like resentment of the successful and the appeal of authority to equalize why is it because that's how most of us survive you know In human evolution, when people had no birth control and the same sex drives as we have now, well, what happened? Well, you had 5, 8, 10, 12 kids.
[37:24] And so the vast majority of us are younger siblings. Not youngest, but younger siblings. The vast majority of us are younger siblings. And younger siblings, we have to appeal to authority, complain, be resentful, look for equalization, and be perfectly happy when force is used to get us resources.
[37:46] Because we don't survive. Otherwise, you think, of course, of limited food. There was limited food throughout most of our evolution. Things were touch and go for a lot of kids. And you really had to fight like hell. And you had to appeal to authority to take things away from the more powerful and give them to you. So, to me, a lot of propaganda is having people, through the language of parenting, regress into a helpless, resentful, and dependent upon authority state of mind. To get people to regress to childhood, and it's very tempting, because that is the mindset, particularly for young people. You know, there's this idea that people become more free-market and conservative as they age, but that's because we get further away from childhood, whereas when you're young, getting you to regress to a childhood state of mind is pretty easy. So when you go to women and you say, well, men are taking stuff from you, and it's unequal, and you're underpaid, and so on there's a certain amount of greed for the unearned for sure but there's a lot of girls who had older brothers who did who just took stuff from them and got more time attention who had more privileges because they were older and there's just this resentment and i think it's pretty easy to strip mine the numbers of course are are easy to debunk right i mean we can just touch on them briefly here women with the same amount of education who've been in the workforce for the same amount of time as men actually earn more than men.
[39:06] Women take less high paying degrees and careers. The student loan debt crisis is largely women taking economically unproductive degrees. If you look at the highest paid professions, like oil engineering, petroleum engineering is like the highest paid profession. There's almost no women.
[39:23] Computer science for a long time there before AI was highly paid, very few.
[39:27] Women and so women tend to go for lower paying occupations and it's not because of the patriarchy because when women get more economic and political freedom they tend to go even more for traditionally female based occupations and if you look at the top 20 female occupations from 100 years ago it's pretty much what women in a free society are going into now women prefer dealing with people and men prefer dealing with things and dealing with things tends to be more economically productive active than dealing with people which tends to be hourly whereas if you deal with things and you manufacture stuff you tend to get economies of scale which you don't get for women men work longer hours we have higher testosterone we have generally more uh drive and and uh we can ignore our feelings in pursuit of a an objective a little bit more than women and of course the other thing too is well you can get male and female economic equality for one generation and one generation only and then there's no people left yay equality followed by the extinction event isn't and we've seen this a couple of times before right because the only way that you can get men and women outside of just ordering women to do economically productive things and maybe hitting them with massive doses of testosterone is to give up on childbirth because childbirth and raising children i mean not only did i work at a daycare but my daughter is almost 16 i've been a stay-at-home dad for 16 years and that's just one kid.
[40:53] And she's great and easy to get along with uh and not a boy so i get that's.
[40:58] A little different too so uh childbirth and raising kids.
[41:02] Takes you out of the workforce i mean if you want to raise kids well you gotta keep them out of government schools you gotta you know spend all your day with them and uh so you just can't be out there working and building some feminist empire if you want to raise kids. So you know, that's another factor too, that when women get pregnant and have kids.
[41:26] They have to take time off to give birth. We want the kids breastfed because that's the best for their health, particularly their immune system. It's also better for the mothers.
[41:35] I mean, the fetus leaves behind stem cells that help repair a damage and injury to the mother decades later, so it's better for everyone's health. And a lot of women don't go back to their workforce because they want to stay home or they prefer staying home. And so we can get, I guess, men and women to parity, but only if we stop having kids. And, uh, you know, I mean, I guess I'm somewhat of a fan of equality of opportunity, equality of outcome leading to the end of the human race so that one set of women gets to taste pure economic equality and then there's no more people. You know, seems like a bit of a high price to pay.
[42:14] Next propaganda analysis. Men commit a disproportionate amount of crime because the patriarchy has entitled them to take whatever they want.
[42:24] Blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime because institutionalized racism has forced them into poverty and forced them to commit crimes. What if anything is wrong with that statement?
[42:36] Right. Well, I mean, I do think that men commit a disproportionate amount of crimes that are violent and obvious out there in society. But the big question is, if you include things like abortion as a crime, if you include abuse against children as a crime. And now, it's not just physical abuse. I mean, maybe this is slightly contentious to your audience, and I fully accept that and slightly contentious to myself if that helps at all. But verbal abuse against children is a violation of the non-aggression principle. In other words, if you keep telling a child you're stupid and selfish and an a-hole and a jerk and you just keep putting them down, well, verbal abuse against adults is not a violation of the non-aggression principle because you're talking to an already formed personality that's perfectly free to leave.
[43:31] But if you were to kidnap someone and brainwash them, the brainwashing would be part, like you kept them up, you know, for three days straight and bombarded them with propaganda and so on. Well, that would not be violent abuse except for the confinement, but children are confined by the state of nature, by the fact that they're children. So verbal abuse against children is a violation of the non-aggression principle. So if you include spanking, if you include other forms of coercive discipline such as confining to the room or even timeouts or using physical size and strength to confine children, if you include verbal abuse, then women commit more aggression than men. I mean, certainly in domestic violence cases, it's 50-50, even with the bias against men reporting against women. But if you include abortion and child abuse, women outstrip men with regards to violence, by far. Like, it's not even close. It's not even close. The vast majority of men will go through their life without committing a violent crime.
[44:27] But the significant majority of women will commit a violent crime against their children. And it's only by ignoring children that we can pretend that men are just more abusive. If you look at coercive transfers of resources, well, women pay about half into the state that they get in benefits. So that's a coercive redistribution of resources from men to women. Men pay about half into the state as they get out in terms of benefits. And so that's another if you if you look at some of the family court systems and issues where women coercively transfer resources through the power of politics from.
[45:09] Um men to women the aforementioned student loan crisis where women are forcing largely men to pay if you look at the fact that like 90 to 95 percent of the infrastructure maintenance is men which is a far more dangerous occupation than um taking complaints about racism in an hr department nice and air-conditioned slightly more i mean i've done you know difficult and dangerous physical labor over the course of my youth and uh that there weren't any women out there at all right so So letting men, men are like, what, 95% of workplace deaths are men and so on, right? So letting men take on all of that burden is not particularly great as well. So, and of course, the other thing too, is that when men talk about this kind of stuff, they just get attacked and laughed down and aggressed against and so on. So I think in particular, modern society has tempted women into a fair amount of aggression and corruption under the guise of, you know, once you can teach people to be resentful, their use of violence then becomes legitimate. With regards to blacks and violent crime, I would sort of refer you to the IQ interviews that I have done. It is common throughout black communities across the world, tragically, blacks have a very high incidence of child abuse.
[46:23] I actually was talking to a black woman about this on a show recently, and And she actually was so preyed upon by the black men in her community when she was a girl and a teenager that she actually starved herself, became anorexic in order to become less attractive. And according to the reports that I've read and interviews that I've perused, half of black women report being raped by black men before the age of 18. Now saying that white people or other people are all responsible for that is bizarre to the point where i i don't even know what to say right because you can say people have agency right so uh blaming everyone else is not great so uh you know fixing uh the the black family experience uh fixing uh the uh three quarters of black children who are born uh and raised or raised without a father around or without married parents would do a lot and that used to be way better back in the the days of Jim Crow and genuine segregated racism institutionalized racism government program called racism blacks were married at a rate of 80 percent and blacks were getting out of the poor and into the middle class at very very high rates and then the government comes along to help which is to create a dependent underclass and uh and of course you know I think there's some fairly sinister people involved in pushing rap and nihilism and so on on the black community and so on so So it's not just white racism.
[47:49] And with regards to the pay gap, you know, it's a fairly traditional argument, but if women are just as productive as men, but you can get them for 77 cents on the dollar, then just build an entire corporation of women, and you'll completely win in the marketplace. So all women need to do is...
[48:08] Just hire other women and they'll be fine. And the last thing that I would sort of say, just in terms of credibility, is that I really don't generally take much advice from people on economics who've never created a single job. You know, I've interviewed a thousand people over the course of my career. I've hired over a hundred people and negotiated raises for people who work for me. And so I've actually gone out and created jobs and had to work with young, old, male, female, all racist and and so on and for the people who are complaining i would just be like okay well how many women have you hired how many jobs have you created and you know not counting a government grant and i hired some people uh in a non-profit like they're actually in the free market right and and if they haven't it's like you know it's it's cute it's it's nice it's like telling it's like a you know when my daughter was little she would talk about the restaurant she wanted to make i actually incorporated this into one of my novels you know wouldn't it be great to have a restaurant in a tree with birds flying around and so on. And it's like dinosaurs. And yes, it would be. I completely agree with you. And it's a sort of fun fantasy to talk about. And so, but you wouldn't go build that restaurant. You know, when I got older, I'd say, yeah, but the birds would poop on the food. I mean, we have ducks. I know what that's all about. So for most people, when they're talking about this stuff, it's a childhood regression stuff. They don't have any actual experience creating jobs and managing people.
[49:33] And they have no skin in the game, and it's all just theoretical. They've never actually done it. Honestly, it's like my daughter talking about her fantasy restaurant. It's fun, and it's cute, but nothing to do with reality.
[49:46] Next, the free market is inefficient and exploitative. We need to focus on people, not profit.
[49:55] Yeah, inefficient. Well, I mean, it is inefficient for thieves. It is inefficient for people who want something for nothing. So I get that. It is more efficient for people to steal a factory than to build a factory. So I get that it's inefficient for corrupt people who want something for nothing. But, you know, again, to me, this is all just incomplete childhood stuff because it's not reachable by reason. So when you're a baby and a toddler, people should be providing you resources. You should not have to provide any value or earn anything. Right. I mean, nobody says to an 18-month-year-old baby, well, you can have your lunch, but first you have to mow the lawn or you have to wash the dishes or like there's no so so this idea that there are these benevolent entities that just give you stuff and you don't have to provide value that's how we all start out in life and it's our first a couple of years you know arguably you could say up until the age of you know five or six so our first half decade and you know first impressions count for quite a lot in life for a first half decade we do live in a socialist paradise like why is it that the old marxist statement from each according to their ability to each according to their needs. Why is it that that resonates so much with people? Because that's our childhood.
[51:15] From each according to their ability is the parents hunt and grow food. To each according to their need is the babies need resources, the toddlers need resources that they cannot earn themselves and should not try. I mean you don't take a two-year-old hunting and give him a bow and arrow because he's going to shoot himself or you in the leg, right? So.
[51:35] I just look back to people, and this is why I talk to people about their childhoods, because until you can resolve childhood trauma, you can't really reason. Your brain is too scarred and avoidant and tense and stressed, and you're in PTSD and so on, right? I mean, it's like trying to give someone a complex mathematical proof while they're running from a bear. Like, they just can't concentrate on it. They can't think in it. Or they're just, shut up, I'm running from the bear. Like, there's just this panic and stress and so on, right? right so as far as efficiency goes i mean i don't particularly care about efficiency i care about virtue and virtue is not very efficient at times right i mean so i i focus more on on virtue than efficiency but well for sure the free market is efficient and we touched on this last conversation the people best able to maximize resources end up with most of the resources the people who can put the best use of capital to increasing wealth tend to have the most capital people want to invest in them and lend them money and so on so efficiency is important exploitive well that's one of these subjective things you know i mean i guess everybody would like to be paid a million dollars an hour i suppose and and everybody would like to have all the hot men and women in the universe throw themselves at their feet and you know what does it mean if that doesn't happen right the idea that that there is an abstract value that exists outside of what you can negotiate is completely bizarre to me.
[53:01] Like, what am I worth? I'm worth what I can get people to pay me. I mean, there's no, yes, but in my mind, I, you know, I should be a movie star and the lead singer of the Rolling Stones. Well, I guess if I can get the Rolling Stones to put me up front as a lead singer, because they want to commit career suicide, I guess, you know, that I could be very, very briefly for the Rolling Stones. Maybe I could do that opening part if you can't always get what you want with the Alto Children's Choir. So, you get what you negotiate. That's all. You know, I don't have a right to your time. I don't have a right to be on your show. You don't have a right, but we talk about it, we negotiate, and here we are. So, it's called entitlement. It's a a psychological huge psychological problem entitlement is the belief that you are worth what you estimate yourself to be worth rather than what other people accept you to be worth.
[53:58] Right so you know like the obese women who say men should find me sexy it's like no that's not your call that's not your call at all right i mean it's what you can negotiate when i was in the free market uh i mean i'm still in the free market but when i was a corporate executive in the software field yeah we would try to get uh investment we would try to get people to buy our product we would hire people and it was all about what we could negotiate i mean i wanted to to sell my software for $10 million a pop, but I could only get $1 million. Do I say, I've been ripped off for $9 million? It's like, no, the $10 million is a fantasy. What you think you're worth is a fantasy. Everybody's the main star in their own production, and we should be. But how many eyeballs do I deserve? As many as I earn. How many donations am I worth? As many as I can earn. And this idea that there's this abstract value that you have that exists only in your own mind, and people are ripping you off if they don't take it. Well, that's what rapists think. I'm not calling everyone who believes this a rapist, but the rapist is like, I deserve sex.
[55:07] No, you don't at all, right? You deserve what you... If you can get a woman to have sex with you voluntarily, fantastic. If you can't, leave them alone. So this idea that capitalism is exploitive and it underpays people, and it's like, you are what you negotiate. You're worth what you negotiate. Now, as a kid, that's a different matter, right? You don't negotiate as a kid. You're just given resources. So again, it's all of this incomplete childhood stuff and this resentment. And I should get more than I am contributing, which is exploitive, right? I mean, if you can contribute a million dollars to a business, you can ask for some portion of that in salary. But if you only give $50 worth of value to a business, you can't really ask for anything because they, right? So you have to provide value, and you have to negotiate for it, and other people have to agree voluntarily with your assessment of your value, and you generally will meet somewhere in the middle. You want more, they want to pay you less, you meet somewhere in the middle, and that's all you're worth. And this is not anything specific to me. This is sort of a Misean argument that there's no such thing as subjective value. Value is always subjective. So when people say, I'm exploited, and I'm underpaid, and women should get paid more, and these people should be paid this, and these people... It's like there's this abstract... Standard of fairness that exists independent of what people can negotiate, and there just isn't. It's just a fantasy, and it's just a complaining bludgeon to try and get resources by nagging.
[56:37] Two of the biggest propaganda, I guess you could say, operations that I have come across in my life are, one, the COVID narrative. Turns out that there was no correlation between states that had severe lockdown policies and mask mandates with states that had either no policy or those policies to a much lesser degree. So that COVID narrative was complete propaganda.
[57:01] Second is the food pyramid. in class i uh this would be elementary school in arizona you always had the constitution on the wall the american flag on the wall the president's on the wall and the food pyramid which said the primary thing that your diet should be surrounded on is bread pasta and grains of course uh since this has been embraced american obesity rates have skyrocketed check out the carnivore diet it. Help me lose 110 pounds. So the question is, it's not that. Well, maybe the majorities are all wrong, but we don't have to worry about the majority. They're ignorant. The experts, the majority of the experts in these fields, at least the ones that we loudly heard from, were wrong on these issues primarily. How is it that so many experts could be so blatantly wrong about something?
[57:52] Yeah, I mean, I think in the future, they'll look back in our time and say all the gravestones should have been pyramid shaped, because that's what's killing most people. It's absolutely appalling. And I mean, there's a lot of politics involved, as you know, in the, in the food pyramid. I mean, there were a bunch of heart attacks in, in the 50s, and in among people in political power, and they kind of freaked out. And they said oh it's uh you know the fats that are the problem and so they started stripping fat out of food but then it tasted like cardboard so they started adding sugar and uh of course women went to the workforce which meant that you couldn't make meals from scratch so processed food became.
[58:34] More uh valid and you know if you ever had one of those pizzas maybe before your carnivore thing you know those frozen pizzas that come on the cardboard it's like you might as well just leave the cardboard on it tastes about the same i mean just a little bit extra roughage so yeah food has become significantly poisoned in the modern realm. Of course, the sugar industry paid some scientists to say sugar is not the culprit and so on. So it's all completely corrupt. Of course, most of it has to do with government money and bad incentives. The whole COVID situation was a fiat currency situation. It was a debt and government money situation. COVID had nothing to do with medicine or health as far as that goes, because if you were to go to people and you were to say, like, how much money did they spend developing the COVID vaccines or the mRNA technology over the past, you know, it's been 20 years or whatever, right? Well, I mean, it's hundreds of billions of dollars or I don't know, whatever it was, right? So if you were to go to people and you were to say, okay, there's this virus that's around, even if we kind of ignore the virus. Bio weapons lab origins of it which to me is an open and shut case and i made this case.
[59:40] Years and years ago called the case against china so even if we were to just say oh it just it did come from bats it did come from a pangolin or whatever it is so we've got this virus, here's the problem and the cure uh is going to cost you 150 000 or the the um uh the the shot right the the vaccine is going to cost you 150 000 which you know per person with all the debt and you know and so on because not many people would would pay that amount of money right they'd say okay are there any other alternative treatments right now of course as you know they had to suppress alternative treatments to get the emergency youth or use authorization but they'd say is there anything cheaper well there's this ivermectin that won a nobel prize and it's really only pennies a dose and blah blah they'd look for alternatives right so how is it that they gave away way this incredibly complicated and expensive technology for free?
[1:00:32] Government money, government spending. So, and what was the incentive to suppress alternative treatments or natural immunity or all the other things, right? Well, the incentive was that you didn't get access to hundreds of billions of dollars of, quote, free government money if there were alternative treatments. And of course, as we all know, the absolute horror shows that went on inside hospitals where hospitals were paid tens of thousands of dollars per COVID patient and COVID death, where hospitals were even further incentivized in some places to put people on ventilators and so on, with the idea of overcoming the cost, but it does create the ultimate perverse incentive, which is hospitals were, in many cases, paid for bad outcomes. And we all know that people respond to incentives. Of course, there were a lot of honorable and decent doctors who did the right thing. We also know, of course, that doctors were massively incentivized to have people take the vaccines, and not just all vaccines, but in particular the mRNA vaccine, to the tune of tens or sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, where's that money coming from? It's coming from the government.
[1:01:44] So the funding for these labs came from the government, which is, of course, where I'm fairly certain that the virus came from. So the money that came from these things only exists because of the government, and the money for the medicines or the COVID shots came from the government, and then the government handed blanket immunity to the manufacturers, and then the government, at least until they were sued for the documents, allowed for some pharmaceutical companies to hide the data for 75 years. And that to me was like, come on. I mean, I hate to say IQ test, but you know, it's novel technology. They're not releasing the source data. And the manufacturers are demanding immunity, and they're saying they know that it's safe and effective with no long-term data.
[1:02:39] I mean, that to me, I don't even know what to say. I genuinely am baffled as to why people fell for this stuff so hard, but obviously they did. But then they also got, hey, you can feel like a really good person by obeying those in charge and hating your fellow citizen. And sadly, that is just a thing that human beings are very susceptible to. We're going to give you a gold sticker for obeying those in charge, and you get the moral joy of hating your fellow citizens who are not conforming. And sadly, that's just over and over. That's a copy-paste in history, which goes back to early childhood stuff, I think. So, the experts, I mean, people respond to incentives, and people who are not, you know, my moral tradition, of course, is Christianity, and so a lot of scientists are anti-theistic, right? And we'll just talk about Christianity as sort of the foundation of Western morals, the combo of Socrates and Jesus. So, why would people tell the truth when they're punished for it and they're rewarded for lying?
[1:03:46] Well, the only reason you would tell the truth when you're punished for telling the truth and rewarded for lying is you have an abstract moral principle that surmounts the hedonism of immediate material incentives.
[1:03:58] I mean, Jesus was offered the entire world under his dominion if he just worshipped Satan, and he's like, nope, not going to do it, right? So, in the absence of Christianity or in the absence of universal moral objective values and rules, people just respond to base mammal material immediate incentives. Oh, I get approval, dopamine oh i get money dopamine oh i'm gonna have disapproval and punishments for not doing what people say well when you take away people's abstract morals they just become basically frightened lemmings that are running from the dinosaurs and running towards the food they become like uh you know when you're out in the in nature and you're walking through this lovely forest you come across this beautiful meadow and it's like well it's just full of animals trying to eat each other not get eaten and reproduce in often violent ways it just becomes a a hedonistic treadmill. And so the experts were responding to all of the incentives, and I assume absent any overarching moral rules, well, they just pretend to be moral and.
[1:05:00] Lie and take benefits and avoid punishments. When you get people to abandon morality, they become very easy to control, which is why the powers that be have a great hostility these days for Christianity and moral philosophers to some degree, because it's easy to control people without abstract moral values, because all you do is threaten them with punishment and bribe them with rewards. Oh, you get 90% of people to comply without moral rules. So, I assume that that's, They were experts in maximizing benefits and minimizing discomfort. So that's their expertise. And I take all of their statements through that filter.
[1:05:35] Do you have time for two more or should I push these for tomorrow?
[1:05:39] Let's do one more, if that's all right.
[1:05:42] Absolutely.
[1:05:43] Oh, no. So no, wait, there's one other option. I could be concise. No, no, let's be real. Okay, you know what? I will try to be concise because it's not your fault. I have my daughter has this yapping. She's just yapping, right? Yap, yap, yap. And I disagree with her. Yap, yap, yap. I get this little Pac-Man thing come through. So you know what? You had great questions. I have been fairly yappy. So, you know, I'll take on the challenge. Let's do two and I'll be concise.
[1:06:14] What criteria can we use to differentiate evil people from people who genuinely just have a different view of the world?
[1:06:22] Right. Are they villains or are they victims? This is a big question in life. So people who succumb to propaganda, are they driving propaganda because propaganda lets them do bad things, like hate their fellow citizens for private medical decisions, or are they victims in that they've been lied to and don't know about it? Well, there is a test, and we talked about this briefly, so I can talk about it even more briefly, which is people go from victimhood to villainy when they're given accurate information.
[1:06:57] So when I talked to people about the COVID shots, I said, well, they can't possibly know the long-term effects because it's only been a couple of months, and they're not releasing the source data, and they want to hide the documents for 75 years, and they've demanded immunity from liability. ability. Now, if people are like, yeah, you know what, that is interesting. I hadn't, you know, then that's fine. Then there are people who are looking for information. They don't have the information yet. And they are good actors who lack information, which is true for all of us. We all lack information about, I mean, I know nothing about virtually anything because, you know, the sum total of human knowledge is virtually infinite. And what I have is a tiny spot or slice of that. Hopefully the principles are overarching, but so for me, it's like when somebody lacks information, they are in a morally neutral place. But when you give them that information and they react with hostility, then they're revealed not as victims of a lack of information, which we all are to a large degree, but they're revealed as villains. And there's this eerie, stunning silence in Canada at the moment about the vaccines and what happened and the stripping of rights and and travel, and income, and so on, right? And so, if people were like, wow, you know, I really, I went, I fell for this stuff, and you know, there was some stuff that was kind of doubtful about it, and so on, right?
[1:08:26] But if they don't talk about it afterwards, and they don't circle back and reflect, and say, okay, well, what happened there? Was I a good guy? Was I a bad guy? At least have a conversation about it, right? Because certainly what people were told at the beginning is not what has played out. And so people who don't circle back and people who resist the topic, people who resist knowledge or in the possession of knowledge still believe things that are false and wrong, that to me is when they go from victim to villain.
[1:08:55] The Iron Law of Oligarchy states, All complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy. Power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise. Does the existence of the Iron Law of Oligarchy basically refute all of leftism that all of us can be uh equally uh participants in society.
[1:09:28] So you know this old meme in minecraft i don't know if you know this this old meme where you say something that could get you in trouble with the authorities and then you say in minecraft right and there's this meme you know like we should do x y and z terrible thing in minecraft right and and this the meme of the fbi agent ripping off his oh come on he said in minecraft right and so to me like all of these rules and these laws it's like in statism you know it's like if somebody's like oh i'm an expert biologist i study all these animals and then you look and i studied all these animals and learn their nature and their properties and what they do and what they don't do what they like and don't like and their habits and then he never mentions to you that he only ever studies animals in a zoo.
[1:10:13] It's like that's not animals in their natural state that's animals in a zoo do.
[1:10:18] And so the iron law of oligarchy is like, that's in statism. Things get more and more complex and you have less and less impact and things get in statism. So it is certainly true that organizations get bigger and bigger and more complex and then become unwieldy. And then in a free market, they collapse into their constituent elements and the whole process starts again. In statism you can prop these companies up with preferential laws hiring policies government grants loans protection from foreign competition tariffs you name it right so i mean everybody knows in japan for like the last 40 years there have been these zombie corporations that are kept alive through government spending right i mean they have what the highest per capita national debt in the world right and so in statism yes oh gosh you know things get really complicated and corrupt and and bad and wrong and this and that and the other it's like yes in statism but that's like looking at animals in a zoo and think you understand something about the nature of animals human beings are in a human zoo we are in tax livestock farms called countries and we are constantly prodded and pushed and bullied and threatened and coerced and lied to. And we are in a state of anxiety and existential coercion and sometimes direct coercion, right?
[1:11:46] So whatever we look at, when we are looking at human nature, or we are looking at social organization, or we are looking at corporations, corporations are legal fictions invented by the state so that rich people can pillage organizations for all the profits while accruing none of the liabilities, right? Because the corporation takes the liability.
[1:12:07] So if you are a bad guy and the corporation does some bad things, the corporation gets sued. You get to keep usually all the money. Occasionally, if there's criminal things, that wouldn't be the case. But the corporation is a big magical shield wherein you say, oh, no, it's my invisible friend who committed all the crimes, so you can just throw him in jail. Oh, my invisible friend has been dissolved. Therefore, there's no wrongdoing. I mean, corporations are horrible legal fictions invented to bribe the elites to be enslaved and dependent upon and therefore praising our political power as a whole. So whenever people say, well, human beings are like this, and there's this inevitable cycle of civilization, and there's this corruption, and these organizations are too big to, and the corruption and politics gets in, it's like, in statism! Why is art so much crap? Because lying to people through art is incredibly profitable because every election in most Western democracies is responsible for the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of resources and people love political power. They're addicted to it, right? So when we say, well, you know, art inevitably becomes politicized in statism and corporations inevitably become corrupt in statism. Well, there's regulatory capture in that the people, the government agencies that are supposed to regulate these industries always end up being controlled by those industries in statism.
[1:13:24] So, yeah, there's all these national debts. In statism, you can't have a national debt without a statist society. So, as long as people say in statism, right? I mean, it's sort of like saying, you know, all of the manual laborers are demotivated. And you're saying that in ancient Greece, right? It's like, well...
[1:13:46] Yes but it's it's slavery right so the problem with manual labor is that they're just unmotivated and they just you have to keep prodding and pushing them and they don't want to work and this is a the problem of human nature and it's like no it's a problem of slavery now once you free the slaves then you get some pretty hard workers who are kind of entrepreneurial sometimes and they don't resent as much and productivity goes up you get labor-saving devices all you get the modern world so when slavery was foundational to all civilizations as it was throughout all of human history until relatively recently, then you would say, well, I mean, of course, you have to whip your slaves. They have no motivation. They don't do anything unless you force them to. And it's like, in slavery! And so taking as axiomatic what organizations and human beings do in statism and saying that this is some sort of foundational existential thing, it's like, no, these are all just shadows cast by the system we choose to accept. And if we start to think of a different system, then we can have different outcomes. So I would not accept that as anything other than describing the actions of human beings trapped in a fairly hellish zoo, which we kind of are.
[1:14:55] And so when we start thinking outside the system, we don't have to look at these as iron laws, but simply the shadows cast by the coercion we accept in society.
[1:15:06] Thank you to everyone for watching. Keith and I don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Check out freedomain.com in the description below. Mr. Molyneux, thank you so much for your time.
[1:15:16] Thank you. I appreciate it. And thank you for access to your audience. We'll talk soon.
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