Stefan Molyneux takes up a listener's question about why good men failed to stop the state from becoming the default social structure. He explains that human evolution built in empathy for those inside the group and hostility toward those outside it. Tribes got by, he notes, by taking resources from rival groups once their own supplies ran short. Violence, aggression, and resource-taking endured as traits because they helped survival, while peaceful behavior did not.
He carries the same reasoning into courtship, property, and the longer arc of human history. Male aggression and the exploitation of other groups were favored by selection, he says, because they raised the odds of staying alive. Christianity changed the picture by moving away from genetic in-group preference toward a universal idea of the soul and equal human worth. That shift carries moral and practical gains, yet he argues that joining Christianity to the state does real harm because it tries to swap evolved human patterns for an idealized model.
He then responds to a question on the nature of time. He describes time as something that is not real in the way physical objects are, but rather as a sequence that measures change. Anyone who speaks and follows an argument step by step, he points out, already accepts this view of time in practice.
He also takes a question on the link between happiness and morality. Happiness can come from harmful acts, including crime, he observes, but the soundest form pairs happiness with truth. Older generations, he says, often show a detachment from reality, and people resist having their assumptions challenged because those challenges threaten the life they think they have built.
A listener asks whether a sculptor creates a statue or defines it. The carver does not make the statue from nothing, he explains, but reveals what was already in the marble by taking away what does not belong to it.
Another listener asks about how Universally Preferable Behavior prevents crime, and Stefan compares it to how a free society might have dealt with The Black Death. UPB itself gains force through ostracism and restitution, and that peaceful parenting is needed to turn moral theory into daily conduct.
He closes by responding to a question about child abuse and the work of Alice Miller. He recounts claims made by her son about emotional neglect and physical abuse in the family, showing the distance between moral claims and actual practice. War and trauma can deeply harm people, he concludes, and political power tends to attract those who abuse others, so the real risk comes from placing harmful individuals in charge of large systems of power.
0:00:04 - Listener Questions
0:00:52 - Gene Survival and Violence
0:07:00 - Christianity and Human Evolution
0:09:54 - What Makes Time Real
0:11:36 - Happiness Versus Truth
0:17:00 - Waking from Illusions
0:18:50 - The Carver Reveals
0:20:00 - UPB and Enforcement
0:24:42 - Alice Miller and Abuse
0:29:42 - War’s Hidden Damage
0:31:51 - Power Attracts Evil
[0:00:00] All right, a couple more questions from the fine folks on X. Thank you so much for your support. And please don't forget that you can support philosophy at freedomain.com/donate.
[0:00:14] How or why did good men fail to prevent the state from becoming the default way we organize society? Well, the state didn't become the default way. That's where we started from. So the fundamental fact that characterizes human evolution is this. Empathy to the in-group, hatred to the out-group. Empathy to the in-group, hatred to the out-group. That's really all it is. Dolphins hate sharks. Wolves hate other wolves, wolf packs and so on. And so human beings have empathy for the in-group and hatred for the out-group. That's the default setting for humanity.
[0:00:52] And I moderated a debate at World War Debate not too long ago, and there was a woman who was talking about the patriarchy and male violence and so on, and I couldn't really debate with her because I was only moderating, but the reality is, I mean, obviously quite simple, and I'll just touch on it briefly, you'll sort of understand this, but during our evolution, there were tribes all around, and the tribes were all competing for scarce resources. And the scarce resources, of course, by their nature of being scarce, they kept running out. And so tribe A would start running out of resources. It would be unable to hunt game or maybe it lost its crops or whatever, its livestock died. And then they would go, tribe A running out of resources would go over to tribe B and take their resources.
[0:01:44] And we can like this, we can not like this, but it doesn't really matter. Because it's just genes. So let's say that as tribe A, you were running out of resources and you said, well, you know, we really shouldn't make tribe B pay for it because it's not tribe B's fault that we're running out of resources. It was our own failure to plan and then you just gently expire in your own huts, then your genes end. But the genes that say, you know what? Okay, we're running out of stuff, but Tribe B has got a whole bunch of stuff. And if we just go and take stuff from Tribe B and kill them, then we'll survive. And it's true.
[0:02:27] They will survive. They will survive. They will survive. So, tribe A goes and takes stuff from tribe B, and tribe A has enough to live on, right? And so, tribe B will also do the same thing. And again, we can like it, we cannot like it, it doesn't really matter. It's like liking or disliking gravity. This is just how the genes survive. If you can't survive with your stuff, you take other people's stuff.
[0:02:57] That's all. because those genes that refused to take other people's stuff when its own stuff was running out or was out didn't survive. That's it. That's all she wrote. That's all that's going down. That's all that matters. The genes that were violent, the genes that took things, the genes that stole things, the genes that put people to the sword, the Genghis Khan genes, they survived. The peaceful, let's do everything the nice way and respect everybody's property rights and so on, those genes, well, obviously, did not survive. They expired in a blinding gene-ending halo of their own moral superiority. That's all that happened. Nothing too complicated, nothing too problematic. It's the same way with courtship, for the most part, right? So, men who very, very much deferred to women in the past.
[0:04:03] Those genes had a less likely chance of survival than those genes that were aggressive and took, and again, we can say it's horrible, and morally it is, but it's just a fact of nature, those genes that were aggressive with regards to women, survived and flourished, and we can even think of some examples in the modern world about this. So, these are just facts. Violence works. If violence didn't work, it wouldn't have evolved, and all nature is characterized, by violence, by aggression. I mean, even the rabbit is aggressive towards the grass. It's just that the grass can't cry out, write books, or defend itself.
[0:04:48] So, we start from a position of violence, and again, we can complain about that, but if we're complaining about that, all we're doing is devoutly wishing for our own non-existence. Genes work by preferring those who are similar and exploiting those who are dissimilar. That's how genes work. You want to shovel continually resources towards your own gene pool, including those who are closely related to you, and you want to take resources away or exploit those genes that are more distant from you. That's how human beings evolved. And again, we can like this, we cannot like this, we can prefer it, we cannot prefer it, doesn't matter. It is what it is. And of course, if you and I were to go back to our ancestors, and we were to say, you should not use violence. If you are starving to death, you should not go and take anybody else's stuff, then we would simply be counseling for or counseling in regards to the genetic destruction of our lineage. That's all.
[0:06:00] I'm sorry to repeat it, but this is the idea of patriarchy or male violence and so on. If the women chose men who were pacifists, the women would die out. The women's lineage would die out. So human history is characterized, as is animal history, we arose out of the animals, right? So human history is characterized by endless violence and taking resources. Now, of course, it's all short-term stuff, and it's better to respect property rights and personal autonomy and the non-aggression principle. I get it, and that's where you get real flourishing and so on, because if everybody's constantly stealing from each other, then there's no chance to build up capital. There's no chance to have a free market. So, I get all of that. But I'm just talking about how we evolved. We evolved through violence, exploitation, and resource, physical, and sexual aggression.
[0:06:56] And those who want it otherwise don't want to exist.
[0:07:01] And one of the problems with Christianity, of course, is that Christianity takes away genetic proximity and replaces it with the soul. I mean, it was one thing to love your neighbor when your neighbor was pretty much like yourself, but Christianity takes away genetic in-group preference, which characterizes all animal evolution. I mean, birds feed their own. They don't feed other birds. I mean, cuckoo except it's just a sneak attack. So Christianity replaces genetic in-group preference with we're all made in the image of God, we are all possessed of souls, and any physical differences are utterly inconsequential. And that's not how evolution works. Now, the plus of Christianity is we've got the concept of universal human rights, ended slavery, created the modern world, and of course there are great pluses to do with that. Of course. And not just practical, but moral also.
[0:08:06] But, well, we can see the outcomes of it in the long run. Christianity plus the state is self-destruction.
[0:08:14] So what happened is the tribe, which was originally genetic similarity, right? The founding of America was for white people of good character, right? So the nation was originally genetic proximity to a large degree.
[0:08:33] And then it became a piece of paper that could be handed out by the government, like citizenship and so on. And so the attempt is to change all of human evolution. It is as revolutionary as expecting under communism that people aren't motivated by profit and will work just as hard if they make the same or less money, and that people don't respond to incentives. And it's just an attempt to substitute an otherworldly platonic ideal for, you know, actual human beings who evolved from brute nature and live in the real world. So, we just have to outgrow it, but that's going to take philosophical principles rather than platonic idealism regarding what human beings are capable of and what we are. Because if there is a sort of universality within us an equidistance from God that characterizes human existence. I mean, all human beings, it's like a big perfect circle around God. All human beings are equidistant from God, and from God's perspective, there is no difference among various groups. Because it's like if you order a car in a different color, right? You order a black car, you order a red car, you order a white car.
[0:09:46] Well, it's the same car, but just a different paint job. And that's the way that Christianity views humanity. That's not the way evolution generally tends to work though.
[0:09:54] All right. Is time real or is it just a difference in magnitudes? Is time real? So you have to define what the word real means. I know that sounds kind of pedantic, but time is not real in the way that a rock or a tree or a ball is real or a person or a microphone. Time is not real in a tangible way. Time is a sequence. Time is also a magazine, or was. So, that's probably. But time is how we measure change.
[0:10:30] So, is time real or just a difference in magnitudes? I don't know what that means. But I will say that you accept the reality of time because you put your words in a sequence that is logical. Like, if you did a word jumble, but this, magnitude's real, just difference, time real is a, right, then it would make no sense, right? So, you recognize that I'm going to read left to right, and that the words need to fall into my brain, in order for me to even have a chance of understanding the sentence. The words need to fall into my brain in a sequence through time, right? Is has to be first, time, real, right, all have to follow in sequence one after the other. So you are relying on the validity of time in order to communicate your argument, which means that you certainly accept that it is valid. As to whether it's real or not, I mean, it's not an object. Gravity is not an object. It's not a thing. There's no ball of gravity that you can move around and change gravity, right? But it's a phenomenon. All right.
[0:11:37] Socrates can be credited with reason equals virtue equals happiness. Yeah, I mean, that's the formulation that Nietzsche has regarding Socrates, which has always struck me as quite powerful. Socrates can be credited with reason equals virtue equals happiness. Happiness is the end goal, but there are shortcuts to get there. Boomers going on cruises feel happy, which achieves the goal. Well, yes. Nobody is saying that you cannot be happy doing foolish things. If happiness were always only and forever associated with virtue, we would not need the discipline of moral philosophy. Moral philosophy says, although it feels good in the moment, it's going to feel bad in the long run. Just like sitting on the couch generally feels better than going to exercise, just like eating cheesecake generally feels better than eating a steak or a salad. And so, yes, happiness can come from bad things. If you are a bad man and you commit a horrible crime and some poor person gets arrested, charged, and tried and convicted for your crime and goes to jail, then you feel a giddy sense of relief. You feel happiness or joy. It's obviously corrupt and immoral and all of that to let somebody else be punished for your crime, but it gets you off the hook and nobody's going to investigate further and it's considered solved and all of that.
[0:13:03] If you commit a horrible crime and you leave DNA at the site, and then you find out that the police have lost the DNA sample, you are giddy with relief. Oh, thank God, right? You're happy. You probably go out and celebrate. You dance a jig and buy the bar a round of drinks. And so you feel happy. The question is, what is the price of that happiness? Now, happiness plus truth, is the best combination. Because happiness plus truth means that you're not constantly battling dealing with reality. So, boomers are the most detached from reality of any generation in human history. They live almost entirely trapped inside an soulless, airless bubble of pure platonic propaganda, and therefore, they view the truth as a form of assault. They view the truth. if you inherit 10 million dollars, and you know you you spend it and you're happy with it and so on and then it turns out that it was not your money it was you were mistaken for someone else and you have to give all the money back you would consider that or you would emotionally experience that as a loss and a theft, and so once you have the money you acclimatize the money the money is yours you get used to that that's your lifestyle and if that all goes away and then you're actually led left with a loss.
[0:14:29] You actually maybe owe a million dollars because you fought it or something, well then you go from having 10 million dollars to owing a million dollars, you will be miserable. Or even if you don't end up owing any money, you get given 10 million dollars, you spend some of it, they take the rest back as well as all of the things that you bought and sell them to repay the person who was supposed to get the money and all of that, then you start with zero dollars, you think you have $10 million for a year or two, and then you go back to $0, you will feel wretched. Even though you're back where you started, you will feel wretched. And the boomers have been given, in a sense, $10 million worth of propaganda. And then people are coming along and saying, no, no, it's not real. It's not your money. It belongs to someone else. And they fight tooth the nail to hang on to their inheritance. And when you have governments printing money and handing money out like water, then you can't have any reality. Like you just can't have reality.
[0:15:32] Like asking for somebody who just legitimately inherited $10 million to get up and go and work in a sewage factory at five o'clock in the morning. They won't do it. In fact, they probably won't get a job. I mean, how many people who get $10 million, win $10 million, just keep working difficult or unpleasant jobs? Well, the truth is a difficult and unpleasant job. And propaganda works with bribery, with threats and bribery.
[0:16:02] So yeah, boomers can go on cruises and feel happy, but it's the happiness of foolish children.
[0:16:10] It is the happiness that comes with getting away with a crime, because they have, criminally undermined their societies. And if you ever try to bring truth to the boomers, they just freak out. There's a panic. There's a soul panic. They view you as taking away all their money, because they consider themselves good people, because they follow propaganda. And the moment don't you point out that following propaganda, that is false, obviously, makes you a bad person, that they are fiat national socialists in a way, they're just following the rules and they are praising themselves for being good when the good is defined by evil people.
[0:16:53] Propagandists, well, to wake up and imagine your whole life is a lie. There's a funny little episode in a show called Scrubs where John C. McGinley, and is it Brendan Fraser or something like that. Brendan Fraser is his brother, and he wakes up and realizes his brother was never real, sort of the fight club thing, and so on. And, you know, every now and then, I'm sure this crosses everybody's mind. You think, well, gee, maybe I half died in my sleep, you know, five years ago or ten years ago. I'm in a coma and fantasizing all of this, and...
[0:17:33] My wife and my daughter are not here, they never existed maybe, or they're dead or something like that. And if they wake me out of the coma, like the Matrix style, right? If they wake me out of the coma, I would go from thinking I have a pretty great life to being miserable and unhappy because it was all an illusion. And if this is an illusion, which of course it's not, but if it were.
[0:17:55] It's a very pleasant and positive and powerful and valuable illusion, would I want to be woken up from it. Let's say that I was woken up in some dingy Eastern European curing Jordan Peterson of benzodiazepine addiction kind of hospital, and the world was at war and I was going to get drafted. I'd be like, why did you wake me up? I had a pretty good life in that dream, had a great life in that dream. Now you've woken me up and I'm in hell. So they don't want to be woken up. And yeah, they're happy in their delusions. But deep down, of course, they know, which is why they tend to get very touchy and aggressive. People who get touchy and aggressive when asked difficult questions, assuming the difficult questions aren't like just trollish and manipulative, which is constantly redefining everything, but people who are touchy and aggressive, when provided counterfactuals are never to be trusted and they just live the life of an idiot toddler for the most part.
[0:18:51] All right, next question. Does the carver create the statue or does he define it? What was it, Michelangelo? I don't know, someone. How did you create such a beautiful statue of a lion. Well, I took a cube of marble and I chipped away everything that wasn't the lion.
[0:19:06] So the carver with the block of marble is not creating the statue. Somebody who creates a drawing, like there's no drawing there, there's no image there, and then there is. So the statue of marble is where you start, and everything that remains was already within the marble. So he does not create the statue he reveals the statue, so to speak in that I guess in a giant block of marble there's just about every kind of statue you could imagine and he reveals the statue based upon his choice and it also is amazing if you look at some of these statues from, the renaissance and so on and you see, incredible like little dimples where somebody's holding a thigh and these cloths, and these guys are in their early 20s. They're just amazing! Amazing.
[0:20:00] All right. With UPB, with universally preferable behavior, how do we get to enforceability? How do we get from theft, not being able to be UPB, to respecting property rights, being able to be UPB, to property rights being enforceable? Well, of course, UPB prevents crime. UPB prevents crime. If you think about the Black Death, you know, when between a quarter and a third of people were dying in horrible ways in various demesne... demesnes? Regions.
[0:20:29] And you said, my gosh, how would a free market society deal with the Black Death? And then you had certain knowledge in some magical way. You had certain knowledge, that within a year of implementing a free market, almost all instances of the Black Death would disappear. And my God, people are dropping around like flies. And the priests, of course, died the most, did not exactly fuel religious fervor. Priests died the most because they'd go from deathbed to deathbed. Not only getting the disease themselves, but also doing a fine, fine job of spreading it. So when you're looking at a kind of universal disaster like this and you say, my God, how could the free market possibly deal with a quarter or a third of people dying in these horrible ways, in waves and waves, decade after decade, century after century?
[0:21:19] And if you were to say, well, if we have a free market, then we develop a vaccine, that prevents the black death from hitting people. Or, you know, within a year, we have water treatment and we have cleanliness and hand washing and so whatever it is, right? And then there's virtually no instances. It's instead of being 25 to 33 people out of 100, it's one person in 50,000. Then it wouldn't be as much of an issue, right? So with UPB, you don't just suddenly take UPB and you apply it to the world that is. And if you did, it would still be effective in preventing or punishing crime, because as I've sort of talked about, that if you steal from someone, then you will be ostracized until you make restitution, submit to some kind of punishment, and so on. So ostracism means you can't use anybody's roads, you can't get groceries, nobody delivers electricity to you, you can't survive in society. Because if you live in a city or town or whatever it is, and, or anywhere really, and nobody wants to have any economic dealings with you, you can't survive in society.
[0:22:34] So even now, you could simply ostracize people until they perform restitution or submit to punishment or something like that.
[0:22:42] But the reality is, is that we don't get UPB in the world until we apply UPB first in the home. So the most important thing about UPB is peaceful parenting. Peaceful parenting is the application of moral theories of the non-aggression principle and so on property rights. UPB can only grow out of the application of UPB to parenting, which is why I've constantly been talking about parenting since the very beginning, and why I really made this effort to get libertarians to prove that they believe in their theories by applying them in the home. Libertarians quite demurely said, no, not so much. I mean, even Hans-Hermann Hoppe was talking about hitting children. I think it was, was it Steph Kinsella and Jeffrey Tucker who just sat there and didn't say anything? And that's a shame. That's a shame. But libertarians don't really talk about parenting because it's much more fun to waffle on about foreign policy and the Fed than it is to actually confront immoral people in your own community who are producing all the kinds of evil that, you wish to battle.
[0:23:49] So, if UPB begins to grow and really spread within the home, which through peaceful parenting, it's definitely starting to do and has been for close to 20 years now, then you end up with people who don't want to steal, who don't want to rob, who aren't traumatized, who aren't broken, who aren't screwed up by child abuse, who aren't violent, who aren't cold, who aren't unempathetic, who aren't hostile and cruel and sadistic and manipulative, right?
[0:24:15] Human beings who have a broad physical and emotional foundation for empathy, strength, courage, morality, and virtue. So philosophy is about preventing violence. Now philosophy in the form of UPB and a stateless society, philosophy can certainly, deal with violence, but the purpose of philosophy is to prevent violence and the way that you prevent violence as you enact UPB in the home.
[0:24:42] So, all right. Somebody says, I read Alice Miller and found her work in child abuse insightful. Then I came across her son's account of what happened in their home. And honestly, it shocked me. How do you make sense of someone who can analyze child abuse with such clarity while allowing it to happen to her own child and even perpetuating it herself? In some ways, that feels even more disturbing to me. From what I understand, she listened while her son screamed as his father beat him, among other horrible things. Alice Miller's son, Martin Miller, publicly complained of emotional neglect and abuse from his mother, along with physical and sexual abuse by his father, which she failed to stop. So, a little bit of detail here. So, This is the drama of the gifted child. Just about everybody who's been in therapy has read that. I certainly did.
[0:25:25] So Martin Miller, the son, he's a psychotherapist. He wrote a memoir in 2013, the drama of the gifted, the true drama of the gifted child and interviews and the 2020 documentary, Who's Afraid of Alice Miller, which I guess is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It's an old play. He highlighted the irony. His mother became famous for advocating against child abuse and emotional neglect, yet he experienced the very things she warned against.
[0:25:51] How can someone understand the damage of child abuse so deeply in theory and, still fail their own childhood completely in reality? So Key complains from Martin Miller, emotional neglect by Alice Miller. She was cold, unresponsive, and unavailable. He felt rejected and lacked maternal warmth or protection. She was traumatized by her own wartime experiences, Holocaust survival, and couldn't emotionally connect with or support him. Father's abuse, routine beatings, humiliation, torment, and sexual abuse, invasive control over his body and his privacy, this happened in his mother's presence.
[0:26:26] Failure to intervene, Alice watched the abuse without defending or protecting him due to her own fears and dynamics from the war. She had married his anti-Semitic father under duress as a survival strategy. I assume that's by her report, so who knows what the truth is. Broader family dynamics, early separation, placed with relatives or in care as an infant, exclusion, silence about the past, and transgenerational trauma. He felt like an outsider in his own family and carried feelings of persecution. Martin acknowledged his mother's groundbreaking theories on childhood trauma, but argued she couldn't apply them to her own family due to unprocessed war trauma. He describes this as a profound betrayal and a tragedy. This revelation shocked many fans of Miller's work and sparked discussions about whether even trauma experts can repeat patterns from their own unresolved pain. Yeah, it's really, it's really sad. I remember desolate was the word I used at the time when I read Judgment Day, Barbara Brandon's story about what happened with objectivism. And it really was just appalling and horrible because you think that there's this sort of rational society that is being built by, Nathaniel Brandon and Ayn Rand, and it turns out to be a bunch of raunchy, gross, sexually exploitive cheatings and.
[0:27:45] Just gross, just gross and bad all around. And of course, it is way easy to lecture other people than to be good yourself, for sure. So, with regards to Alice Miller, of course, can't read her mind, don't know what was going on in her head, but I certainly will say that all theories are distorted by a lack of application. All theories are distorted by a lack of application. And this is particularly true of moral theories. The drama of the gifted child is about empathy and morality to some degree in child raising.
[0:28:26] Now, of course, it's not like Albert Einstein needed to build an atomic bomb. But if you are a moralist, then you should put into practice your own theories in order to test them. Like that guy who was convinced that ulcers were caused not by stress, but by a particular bacteria. And he drank that bacteria, got the ulcer, and then drank the antibacterial, elements, the antibiotics, and then cured himself. I mean, obviously kind of extreme, but of course, we should put our own moral theories into practice and so on. And I'm sure that as you've heard my daughter dip into shows from time to time, you realize it's a good relationship, it's peaceful parenting, it's all happened. I mean, it's not been ideal, of course, it's not been perfect because we still live in a dangerous, violent world full of people who want to exploit others, particularly children who attack those who stand up for children and so on.
[0:29:17] So, when it comes to morality, I would have to read the drama of the gifted child again, with the knowledge of the abuse that, her poor son has suffered, which all sounds very bad, very bad, like if he was a call-in, to this show, if he was a call-in caller, if he was a caller into this show, I would go over that in great detail, and it would be appropriately horrified at what was going on.
[0:29:42] The war destroyed destroyed people. And the people it destroyed the most, in many ways, were the people who survived. My mother was abused, and I assume assaulted by the incoming communists in horrendous ways. My mother was abused into atoms. She was just a whirling cloud of manipulation, contradiction, and violence. And there was no putting herself back together again, whether that's physical or moral. Of course, I'll never know. I can't read people's minds. But the war destroyed people. And this is why, in particular, sexual trauma is so devastating. This is, of course, what's happening across Europe as we speak, that it is a particular form of cultural destruction because these particular, the girls, the little girls who are assaulted in these just, I mean, absolutely satanic and evil kinds of ways, they become a giant burden on society through no fault of their own. They're just victims.
[0:30:45] You know, they cause lots of trouble. They have children outside of wedlock, they spread STDs, they require significant medical and mental health care resources, which drains the public treasury, they get sick a whole lot more, which drains again the public treasury. It is a sort of rolling attack. It sort of reminded me of the French resistance in World War II, like they say in France, in Paris, against the Germans. If they had the choice, they would not kill a German guard or a German soldier, they would wound him. Because if they wound him, then he's kept alive, he's a constant drain upon, the society, healthcare, and pensions, and rehabilitation, and prosthetics, or whatever it is, right? So, it's hard to judge, you know, obviously, somebody who went through the Holocaust as a child, and what my mother went through, it's so appalling that the mind quails at the edge of that kind of evil and if you put it in a movie people just wouldn't even remotely be able to process it or understand it would be just appalling... so...
[0:31:51] How do we keep malevolent insane people out of power? Oh you can't. You can't. It's like saying how do we stop people who continually cut themselves and jump into shark infested waters from being bitten by sharks? Well, you can't. People will say, oh this group or that group or the other group are doing terrible things with power, and we blame that group. And it's like, yeah, but if you build the power structures, then evil people will take them over. And the problem is not the evil people, or at least the problem is not the evil people alone. The problem is the evil people plus power. As long as you have that power in society, people will take it over. As long as you have the government centralizing education, whether it's at the state, provincial, or federal level, when you have the government in control of education, propagandists will flock to control the education.
[0:32:45] Because it's not then responding to the needs of parents, it is serving the needs of propagandists and unions and political parties who want forced union dues to go into their coffers and so on. So when you have that level of power, people will abuse it. It's sort of like, if we keep dumping $100 bills in random poor neighborhoods, how do we stop people from stealing money. It's like, well, I mean, once you start, you know, dropping from a low-flying plane or start dropping $100 bills in neighborhoods, people are going to grab them and steal them, and take them. So, you know, maybe don't drop all of this money into poor neighborhoods on a repeated basis. It's too much temptation. It's too much temptation.
[0:33:36] So the problem is not the evildoers. Society can handle a minority of evildoers pretty easily. The problem is when you allow evil to metastasize through political power, and political power will always be drawn, will always be an endless draw to evildoers. Of course, right? If you want to be a counterfeiter, you want to join the Federal Reserve Bank. You don't want to be a private counterfeiter, it's going to get you in trouble.
[0:34:02] So if you want to be a thief, you want to be in the recipient of political power, because then it's legal and it's way greater. So yeah, as a whole, trying to blame individual evildoers for the effects of the, political power that you want, because a lot of people want political power because it allows them to avoid the consequences of their own bad decisions and never have to apologize and never have to reform and never have to do better. So you get this angry, bitter, resentful will that takes over people. And normally that's worn down or ground down by reality, by people's non-cooperation, right? But if you just continue to allow people to get away with doing terrible things because the government would just give them money, then people would keep on doing terrible things and so on and so on. If you want the free stuff, you lose the soul of your society.
[0:34:58] Freedomain.com/donate to help out the show. Thank you, of course, so much, my friends. Have a wonderful, wonderful day. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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