In this Friday Night Live X Space on October 3, 2025, philosopher Stefan Molyneux discusses complex historical themes, focusing on the Bengal famine of 1943, its causes, and the broader implications of colonialism. Welcoming listeners, he expresses solidarity with newcomers from South Asia, noting common grievances against colonialism. He emphasizes the shared suffering of both colonizers and the colonized while encouraging a unified viewpoint against elite manipulation that instigates division among people based on historical grievances.
Stefan dives into the tragic events of the Bengal famine, framing it as a significant case study in understanding the consequences of political and economic mismanagement during war. He systematically analyzes the myths surrounding imperial wealth extraction from India, countering the narrative of colonial plunder with a more nuanced understanding of wealth as productivity rather than mere treasure or tangible assets. Illustrating his point, he reflects on how the influx of gold from the New World in the Spanish conquest ultimately harmed the Spanish economy, drawing connections to similar economic challenges faced in colonial India.
Shifting focus, he addresses the political and humanitarian crises leading to the famine, asserting that starvation, often linked with the British government’s actions, must not overlook the impact of wartime dynamics, including Japanese incursions in Southeast Asia and local governance failures. He argues that while the emotional toll of starvation is horrific, understanding the systemic failures—like price controls and trade restrictions imposed by provincial governments—leads to a more comprehensive grasp of the famine's true nature.
Molyneux does not shy away from confronting the harsher realities of human nature and governance, arguing against oversimplified narratives that blame the British for the suffering of the Indian populace, instead suggesting that the structural missteps and pressures were deeply rooted in the circumstances of the war. He emphasizes how humanitarian crises often arise from a breakdown of systems rather than direct malevolent intentions, urging audiences to look critically at historical contexts and resist emotionally charged but potentially misleading narratives.
Engaging with his audience, he also entertains questions that touch upon broader philosophical implications and contemporary parallels, highlighting themes of power, responsibility, and the pitfalls of centralized governance. Through these dialogues, Stefan advocates for a reconsideration of how society organizes itself, proposing that autonomy and voluntary associations may yield more effective governance without the recurring cycles of violence and rebellion traditionally associated with state power.
The lecture concludes with a call for awareness of the historical context behind contemporary tensions, urging listeners to avoid falling into the traps of division stoked by those in power. He asserts that by recognizing shared human experiences rather than succumbing to a victim mentality, it is possible to build a more just and compassionate world. The session encapsulates a profound reflection on the interplay of history, morality, and politics, closing with an invitation for further discourse via audience interactions.
0:06 - Welcome to Philosophy
12:32 - Whipping Up Hatred
20:56 - The Japanese Threat
23:40 - The Quit India Movement
27:40 - Price Controls and Consequences
32:02 - Famine Coverage and Government Response
38:13 - Ideology of Mass Slaughter
44:04 - Famine as Political Control
52:53 - Alternatives to British Rule
56:59 - Questions on Cryptocurrency
1:00:49 - The Value of Money
1:06:36 - Bitcoin vs. Traditional Assets
1:13:22 - The Challenge of Partition
1:14:25 - Freedom vs. Government Control
1:33:09 - Understanding Human Nature
1:51:42 - Rethinking Government Systems
[0:00] Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain, 3rd of October, 2025. Hope you're doing well.
[0:06] And I'd like to welcome all our new friends from South Asia. Welcome to Philosophy. I think you'll actually be surprised how much we have in common and how much I agree with everything that you're saying. You dislike colonialism. I dislike colonialism, both of the effects it had on other countries and the effects that it had on the British people. My ancestors were enslaved to run an empire. Your ancestors were subjugated under that empire. So, yeah. I mean, you know, this is the elites. They get us fighting with each other rather than looking up and seeing who's pulling all the strings and all this kind of stuff. But that is a sort of tragic reality of life as a whole. Now, one of the things that comes up a lot is the Bengal famine, the Bengal famine.
[1:05] So we're going to just touch on it briefly. I did some of this research many years ago. I just kind of refreshed it now. Then I'd be happy to take questions, comments, criticisms, whatever's on your mind. But let's look at the 1943 Bengal famine, because this is often cited, along with this absolutely ludicrous idea is that somewhere between $45 trillion and $65 or $66 trillion, because 67 would be crazy, of wealth was plundered from India. And somehow the belief is that if you take diamonds, you're taking wealth. You're not. Diamonds are not wealth. The only thing that really matters with regards to wealth is increased worker productivity. That's really all that is to do with wealth. I get it. If a thief steals a diamond, then he can sell the diamond and can buy stuff. But simply transferring diamonds is not wealth. And in fact, it can be really bad. If you want to know one of the great tragic stories of human history, It is when the Spanish discovered the New World, went into the Incan and the Mayan civilizations, the Aztec civilizations, and scooped up all the gold, and they sent it back, was it Queen Isabella, they sent it back to Spain.
[2:19] And if you've got a gold-based currency, and you get a huge amount of gold coming, flowing in, that drives up the prices of everything and nobody can afford it. It's like money printing, it's like counterfeiting, it just drives up the prices of everything. And when it becomes difficult to live in a particular political or economic environment, the smart people with the most mobility tend to bug out. I remember being many years ago in work difficulties, in business difficulties, and friends of mine saying, man, it's time to get out of Dodge. Get out of Dodge. And the smart people left Spain because they couldn't really afford to live there with all this crazy inflation going on. In other words, you were being paid in gold or you had stores of gold and your gold could just buy less and less because there was more and more gold, right? If you have $10 and 10 oranges, each orange is going to cost a dollar. If you have 10 oranges and $20, each orange is going to cost, that's right, $2, right? So all of their savings, they had to leave Spain in order for that. They had to take their money, take their gold, leave Spain, so they could actually buy something with it. And this caused a recession in Spain that lasted 400 years.
[3:43] Because IQ, intelligence, G, whatever you want to call it, significantly G for general intelligence, G also for genetic. 80-85% of intelligence or IQ at least is genetic by late teens. So when the smart people go, they take all their smart genes with them.
[4:02] And it took about 400 years for the Spanish economy to recover. So terrible, terrible stuff. This is the kind of stuff that can happen. So, let's look at the Bengal famine, which is cited and listen, let's just be obviously completely clear about the compassion and empathy situation or standard, which is death by starvation is one of the ugliest conceivable ways to die.
[4:34] And of course we've seen it happen in a wide variety of circumstances and situations some of which are political some of which are military some of which are natural disasters some of which is undeveloped infrastructure one of the horrible things that happened throughout most of european history up until like the 18th 19th centuries was that you could have excess food production in one place and literally 10 20 miles away people could be starving to death but there weren't roads. You couldn't get it there in time, because whatever the farmer grows, you know, prior to freezing and refrigeration and so on, whatever the farmer grows rots in the field, and you can't get it. Especially if it's raining heavily, you just can't get it to people. So starvation was a constant issue. It happened with the sort of waves of Black Death that happened in Europe. It happened in places in China, of course, and it happened to sometimes it's politically engineered, which is in Ukraine and other places, primarily Ukraine, in the 1930s.
[5:36] The communist government would give to the local commissars lists and numbers of what they had to produce. And it's like, you either produce that or you're going to a gulag. So they, of course, said, yes, yes, we will produce it. They couldn't produce it for a variety of reasons. And the central Russian government would then say, well, you're just hoarding. And they would come in and take all of the grain, including the seed crop, and 10 million people, sometimes more, starve to death. That's political. So I really want to be clear about this, that what I'm about to talk about in no way diminishes the monstrous suffering of the Indian people in Bengal in 1943. It was monstrous, horrible. I don't have enemies bad enough ever that I would wish starvation upon them. So, I want to be really clear about that, just so nobody thinks that there's anything cold-hearted in what it is that I'm saying. But, you know, to understand the world, we have to put aside some of our sentimentality. Maybe this is a bit more of a dude thing, but we have to put aside some of our sentimentality and look at sort of the facts. So, let's look at...
[6:53] What is going on or what went on. Now, also recognize it's really hard to get the facts about history. I don't know if you've ever had this in the absence of photographs. I've had this a couple of times in my life. This is not a personal anecdote, but I think it's helpful to understand how difficult history is to penetrate. I mean, people can't even agree what happened over COVID. People can't agree what the cause of inflation is. People can't agree.
[7:20] I mean, they couldn't agree whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which of course they turned out not to be. Now, people can't even agree on the origins of World War I or the origins of World War II. World War II was a worldwide fight against communism as a whole. And so there's a lot of disagreement. So I'm also not saying that everything that I'm going to say is any kind of final answer because we weren't there. It wasn't filmed.
[7:48] People have every motive to lie about history because it controls resources in the present and records are destroyed and and so on and of course a lot of people died so let's have a look at what happened and the indian horror which i completely and totally understand and sympathize with the indian horror at this mass starvation estimates are from 1.5 to 3 million people right? So a quarter to half of a Holocaust, primarily from starvation and disease and other related causes between mid-1943 and early 1944, the suffering that went on in India is beyond monstrous. And it's also important to remember that there are some truly sinister, ugly, nasty, and evil people in this world who generate outrage in order to divide humanity. So, of course, there are all of these people who say, and they're leftists in general, communist, socialists, they say, well, the West only became rich because it stole from Africa and it stole from India and they stole $50 trillion and all of your wealth.
[9:01] And they say, well, Churchill deliberately starved to death. Like, this is whipping people up into a frenzy of hostility and hatred. And listen, brothers, all over the world, in India, everywhere that we are broadcasting to brothers. I mean, please try not to fall for these things. Divide and conquer, divide and conquer, divide and conquer. That, ah, the British just hated the Indians and stole from them and slaughtered them by the millions and raped their daughters and like just whipping people into a frenzy.
[9:37] And what that does, of course, is it justifies blowback, karma, revenge, and you can see the revenge fantasies flowing over the timeline. As my tweet goes past 22 million views, you can see this. I still leave this hatred that somehow the tax serfs in England benefited massively from the empire and then the tax serfs in India now can hate the tax serfs in England. And, you know, meanwhile, of course, the people in charge, just fucking laughing at us. They're just laughing at us. You wouldn't want a mob to be whipped into a frenzy and tear your house and family apart. And we have to resist the lure of those who get us to fight each other based upon falsehoods. It's easy to slide into hatred, and it's easy to say, oh, all the sorrows and troubles of my own people are because of these other people over there, and we're all half enslaved to the powers that be, but those slaves are really the enemy, and my slaves aren't slaves, or they're only slaves because of those slaves. And it's like, British people didn't want the empire. We didn't want the empire. We didn't want it. How do you know that? Because we had to be forced to enforce it. We didn't want it.
[11:02] Do you think the average farmer in Sussex or Kent or Essex, Northumbria, Worcester, do you think that they woke up and said, oh boy, you know, I've got my lovely wife, I've got my kids here, I've got a great farm, I've got wonderful neighbors, I like having my, pint down at the pub at the end of the day and singing songs, but you know what I really want to do is be put on a boat sent halfway around the world to die of dysentery, enforcing a regime, that steals from me and enslaves me in order to steal from and enslave others. Do you think that that's what the average British person wanted? No, we had to be forced into it.
[11:43] And viewing, it's like, if there's slave owners in the next country and they force their slaves to fight you saying, my enemy are the slaves. No, no. Brothers and sisters, come on. We have to be a little smarter than this. I say this to everyone. So, of course, people are going to say, well, the reason your country is bad, says the government in every country, but the reason your country is bad is because of those other people over there they stole from, and you should watch my documentary on Hong Kong, freedomain.com/documentaries, totally free. I went out there, I took tear gas in the face for the cause of truth, and risked incarceration.
[12:33] And I talked about this is how the communists took over in China, is they went to the peasants, the poorer peasants, and they said, ah, you see that guy up there on the hill, but the big house, the beautiful wife, the savings, the gold, the wealth, you know, he's only wealthy because he stole from your ancestors, boom, stole, and just whip people up into a frenzy.
[13:01] And then once they whip people up into a frenzy, those people go and kill all of the rich people and they shoot everyone in glasses and... And the cycle repeats. And they're a bunch of fucking cowards who whip up these hatreds. A bunch of fucking cowards. They won't do the fighting themselves. They won't. They won't. They just spread vicious rumors to get strong men to fight each other. Their greasy little whispers and their Iago... Finger caresses in the hairy ears of the masculine. You should go fight him. He said something mean about you. He stole from your ancestors. You fight him. You fight him. You fight him. You fight him. Boom! That's how it works. That's how it works. It's kind of feminine. No insult to our dear fairer sex, but those who can't fight themselves get other people to fight each other. It's a vile, greasy occupation, which is never understaffed, sadly, because it's not so much the supply of lies, it's the consumption of lies.
[14:09] You know, it's not, I'm not, I'm not not in the NBA because they hate bald white guys. I'm just not. That's not why I'm not in the NBA. It's not because they just hate bald white guys. Um it's because i barely scratched six feet and i don't like basketball i literally could not live with that squeaking of the shoes it's like the shrieking of the damned i couldn't do it i couldn't do it i don't even like watching sports i love playing sports i like watching sports, the reason that i'm not doing a worldwide singing tour is because people like good singing apparently more than what I do, which is fair and fine. It's not because they hate me.
[14:56] All right, so timeline of key events. We're going to cover the crises and causes leading to the famine, aid requests and deliveries, amounts where documented, reporting of the famine, British responses, Churchill's reported negative statements, where dates and contexts were available, and the factors that ended the famine. 1941, November. The Central British Indian government conferred powers on provincial governments under the defense of India rules to restrict food-grain movement and requisition commodities, setting the stage for later wartime controls that disrupted distribution. So, of course, don't need to tell you all, this is two years, two, two and a half years, in November, two, three years into the Second World War, where.
[15:44] England was arrayed against Japan and Italy and Germany. It was a time of crisis. I mean, if England had wanted to starve India, it would have done so in the hundred years or so previously. But anyway, so in 1942, in January, Punjab banned wheat exports, increasing rice demand in Bengal. Rice prices were already 69% higher than in 1939 due to wartime inflation and population growth.
[16:18] So let me give you a wee two-second primer on economic growth and population growth. If you take additional wealth and use it to produce more and more and more children, it's kind of hard to get wealthy, at least in the short run, because children are a consumption, right? They cost money, and children keep women out of the workforce, and it takes, you know, 15, 17 years for women, for children to become economically productive. And if you have increased wealth without a free market in goods, labor, land, capital, and services, then you have a whole bunch of kids who you're going to have some really talented kids, some kids not so talented, but because there's not a raw meritocracy, which only the free market allows, you have a bunch of kids that aren't able to make a bunch of money. And what happens, of course, is you increase your wealth, but at the same time, you increase the mouths to feed without any continuing increase in productivity because the free market is not allowed to function.
[17:29] More food, more mouths to feed that aren't producing food. So, yeah, there is wartime inflation, of course, and population growth. So in March, Japanese conquest of Rangoon, aka Burma, aka Burma, later Myanmar, began cutting off rice imports. These imports accounted for 15 to 20 percent of Bengal's supply. British authorities implemented denial policies, rice and boat denial, in coastal districts like Bakharganj, Midnepur, and Kulna to prevent resources from falling to invaders, confiscating surplus paddy and about 45,000 boats, disrupting transport, fishing, and trade. Now, there's this meme about Japan, and I don't want to go into big history here, but there's this meme about Japan, which goes something like this. The history of Japan, and it's like deadly Bushido Blade guy, samurai guy, and then a nuke, and then weird anime stuff.
[18:35] And this is deadly samurai guy time. The Japanese forces in the Second World War were staggeringly brutal in ways that can scarcely be conceived of. I mean, just go look up the tortures that they did on the POWs, particularly the Australians, was absolutely monstrous. I mean, they tested biochemical warfare as they did live vivisections, amputations. They just did the most appalling, appalling things. So, it's pretty important to look at this history and say, huh, what would have happened if Japan had taken over, let's say, this part of India, right? What would have happened if Japan had taken over Bengal? Well, we know, to some degree.
[19:30] After the Japanese invaded Burma, they were horribly oppressive and exploitive. If they used Burma as a buffer state, they used it to obtain rubber and oil, they conscripted the population into forced slave labor to build infrastructure, most notoriously the Burma-Thailand Railway, also known as the Death Railway. These workers, alongside allied prisoners of war, endured brutal conditions, beatings, torture, starvation, disease, and insane levels of Sanchenistan overwork. Punishments for minor infractions included savage physical assaults, slapping faces with tools, forcing laborers to kneel on sharp bamboo, often resulting in severe injuries or death. Estimates suggest up to a quarter of a million Burmese civilians died during the occupation from war-related causes, direct violence, famine, and disease. There were no good answers in Burma in 1941. There's the British, or there's the Japanese. There were no good answers.
[20:31] Atrocities against civilians after the Japanese invaded Burma were widespread, particularly against groups perceived as disloyal. In the Atakan region, the invasion triggered intercommunal massacres in 1942 between pro-Japanese Buddhist Rakhina and pro-British Muslim Rohingya communities. Japanese forces exacerbated this by slaughtering, raping, and torturing Rohingya villagers, expelling tens of thousands to British India.
[20:57] Of course, Bengal is, there's lots of refugees.
[21:10] So, in April, Japanese forces sank 100,000 tons of merchant shipping in the Bay of Bengal. At least 500,000 refugees from Burma arrived in Bengal, increasing demand and spreading diseases like malaria and dysentery. It's kind of tough. To get your crops in from the fields if you're bent over with dysentery or half dead from malaria or dead from both, either. So just understand the strains and the stresses. It's wartime. The Japanese are sinking merchant shipping. Half a million refugees from Burma come in Bengal. And food is short. In May, monsoon rains worsened refugee conditions, boat denial policy fully implemented halting river transport of food or supplies. The reason they did that was not to starve Bengal, but to prevent Japan from gaining additional resources. In June, the Bengal government imposed rice price controls below market rates, leading to withholding of stocks and black market growth.
[22:22] All you have to do to create shortages is mess with the prices. I mean, if they said you can only sell your gold for $100 an ounce rather than $3,000 plus whatever it is right now, close to $4,000, I think, if they said, well, you can only sell your gold for $100 an ounce, are you going to sell any gold? No. You're going to hoard it. Or sell it on the black market. July. Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa banned rice exports restricting into provincial trade. The Bengal Chamber of Commerce launched the Foodstuffs Scheme prioritizing rice for urban war industry workers diverting supplies from rural areas. Because normally, the way that you solve a famine is there's a famine area, there's a shortage of food, which means the price of food goes up because there's a higher demand than there is supply, which brings food in from outside. Why not? Well, governments banned the inter-provincial trade. So you were not allowed. If you were in India and you had food that you wanted to deliver or sell to Bengal, you were forbidden from doing it.
[23:40] In August, Indian National Congress launched the Quit India Movement, sparking unrest and British crackdowns, including arrests and shootings of protesters, reducing political will for aid and fueling anti-British sentiment. They wanted to leave. And like it or not, if there's a big leave, England wanted to get the British to quit India, there's going to be a little bit less desire to give food aid.
[24:15] September, Churchill reportedly stated, I hate Indians. This is Churchill. I'm going to put this so nobody memes this. I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. In a conversation with Secretary of State Leo Amory, in the context of frustration over the Quit India Movement and perceived disloyalty during the war, it was primarily Hindus that made up the Quit India Movement as the Muslim League supported the British effort. In October, So you've got war, bans on trade, shipping catastrophes. You've got half a million refugees flooding into the region. It's a shitstorm.
[24:51] It's a shitstorm. And you can't just say, well, it was just the British. Bro, I mean, they were fighting a war. Anyway, so in October, Mother Nature delivers perhaps the final blow. A major cyclone and storm surges hit. Midnapur in southwestern Bengal, killing about 14,500 people and almost 200,000 cattle, destroying crops and spreading brown spot fungal disease on rice, reducing yields by up to 40% in affected areas. Japanese air raids on Calcutta triggered urban exodus and shop closures. This marked the start of the acute food crisis per the 1945 Famine Inquiry Commission. Now, Lord knows I'm not a fan of governments as a whole. However, I think it's fair to say that it was not the British government that caused the cyclone and storm surges. It was not the British government that caused this brown spot fungal disease to spread through rice. And it was not the British government that paid the Japanese to drop massive amounts of bombs on Calcutta.
[25:56] So, December. Viceroy Linlithgow requested food imports, prioritizing military needs. British War Cabinet responded with a small wheat offer for Western India, not Bengal, in exchange for Bengal exporting more rice to Ceylon, which was Sri Lanka. Officials like Governor John Herbert and General Claude Auchenlach echoed aid requests. So, look, the people who ruled India were not indifferent. To Indians.
[26:30] They weren't Genghis Khan. They weren't the Bolsheviks. They weren't the Japanese. Certainly weren't perfect, but it was not motored by that sort of genocidal hostility that some of the Japanese had during the war. 1943, in January, rice prices nearly doubled amid alarming inflation. Linleth Gow instructed Bengal's premier to prioritize rice exports to sell on, even if Bengal faced shortages, reflecting wartime priorities. I mean, without the troops being fed, the Japanese take over, and I guarantee you it's even worse, hard to imagine worse than what happened in Bengal in this timeframe, but it would have been even worse under the Japanese. Of that, there is absolutely zero historical doubt. There's zero historical doubt that prisoners of war were treated overwhelmingly better and domestic populations were treated overwhelmingly better by allied forces as opposed to Japanese forces. I wouldn't even entertain anything to the opposite. That's just a historical, that's as much of a historical fact as you can possibly get.
[27:41] But there's still all these price controls. So people aren't, even if they want to defy the ban on interprovincial trade of food, they can't bring food in. It's banned to bring food in.
[27:58] And is that all the fault of Churchill? No, Churchill is not running local provincial trade policies.
[28:11] When you get the price controls, it's like your body's pain signals aren't working, right? You lean back and your elbow goes into a fire. It's like, ah, you know, ow, my egg, right? You want to, because it hurts. But if you don't have that, you just leave your elbow in the fire until you smell the cooking flesh. And so price signals are there to tell you when there's an excess and there are shortages. You get rid of those price signals. And I know this sounds all kind of academic and abstract, but no, this is what gets people killed, is price signals. If there's a shortage, the price is going to go up. that causes people to bring the food in. But prices were kept artificially low and the trade was barred.
[29:07] So, in March, price controls were rescinded on March 11th, leading to speculation and prices rising five to six times the pre-1942 levels, right? It's like you hold something underwater, right, when you let go, it pops up really high. Cyclone damage continued, brown spot disease peaked, worsening crop shortfalls.
[29:30] In April, limited government relief in the form of agricultural loans, grain distribution, and test works, which were labor programs offering minimal food and pay to assess famine severity, began but was misdirected towards the wealthy and urban groups. Of course, this is always the problem with government policies, is that they're not applied objectively. It's the aristocracy of pull, as Ayn Rand used to talk about, right? That the wealthy and those in the cities have the most pull. The urban people are largely ignored, which is the people you'd most want to get involved in this kind of issue. So this misdirection was carried out by agents of the provincial government and involved favoritism in distribution, with the black market siphoning off up to half of the supplies and a focus on urban priorities over rural needs. The urban people are politically motivated. They're all concentrated. They're right there where the city offices are, the political offices are. And look, this is, I mean, this is sort of cliche about Indians being kind of scammers and stuff like that. I'm not going to feed into that cliche, but what I will say is that this would be the case with everyone, is that if you are a political official, you get all of this wheat, you get all of this rice, you get all of this food, you're going to give it to your friends and you're going to give it to your family. That's just an evolutionary biological imperative. You're not going to send it out to no one while you watch your sister-in-law starve to death.
[30:56] The central government of India and British authorities provided directives and funding, but the day-to-day distribution remained a provincial, i.e. A local Indian-run matter, until October 1943. I'm not blaming anybody in particular here. There's no like, I mean, I know it's real easy. Churchill's like, he did not make the rot disease. He did not make the cyclones. He did not cause the Japanese to become cruel. He did not force a half a million people the flood into an area already ridiculously short on food. He did not invent the fact that you can't fight a war, right? You know, the army marches on its stomach. You cannot fight a war if your, soldiers are hungry. You just can't. That's just a fact. And in war, horrible decisions have to be made. This is why we try to avoid war as much as humanly possible. Bitcoin fixes that.
[31:55] So it was local Indian distribution government matter.
[31:58] May, first starvation deaths reported in six districts signaling the famine onset.
[32:02] Interprovincial trade barriers were abolished on May 18th to allow food inflows. But it doesn't just, right? Free market distribution networks, of course, supply chains or whatever, they're incredibly complex. I've actually worked in the business field in these areas. It's wild how complex it is. So when you say you can't trade between the provinces people just stop they dismantle they, dismantle their whole supply chain networks because there's no point and so you can't just start it up people are just waiting there oh i wonder if they'll make it legal today or tomorrow or the next day they're not just waiting there right just okay fine the prices will go up right away but it's not like everyone has changed they've set up new supply chains which are just domestic, and they've signed contracts, and they can't just abandon all of that because some, trade situation has opened up between you and another province, which could close again tomorrow. People in the business world hate political uncertainty. They've redirected all of their food as now they've set up their whole new business contracts. The population has changed, food has flowed, and you can't just redirect it.
[33:16] It's not like a river. You dammit and undammit, right? Well, I guess it is a little bit like a river. If you dammit, it creates new channels and paths. And if you undammit, it's still going to use a lot of those old channels and paths. It doesn't just come right back to where it was before. In July, newspapers like The Statesman and Amrita Bazar-Patrika began detailed famine coverage, criticizing responses. Provincial gruel kitchens opened for a minimal caloric aid, though often contaminated. Churchill reportedly remarked, and again, it's probably not on tape. Why hasn't Gandhi died yet? In the context of skepticism about famine severity, using Gandhi's survival during hunger strikes to question aid urgency. In August, the famine peaked. The Statesman published graphic victim photos on August 22nd, raising global awareness. Churchill reportedly said of the Indians that they were breeding like rabbits during a war cabinet week meeting. Horrible. I absolutely get that. I'm not condoning any of that. It was wartime, and he probably wasn't sober, and Churchill had been bailed out by some fairly sinister forces in 1938. Ah, I've written a whole novel about this, so I don't need to get into all of that. But anyway, you should check it out. It's a great book called Almost at freedomain.com/books, also free.
[34:41] This expression, breeding like rabbits, was recorded by Amory in his diary, which was published in 1988, but there's no exact quote. Amory wrote, then he got on to the theme of India breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war. Anyone attributing an exact quote to Churchill is not telling the truth. On August 4th, war crime, sorry, war cabinet, maybe, war cabinet recognized famine severity and approved 150,000 tons of Iraqi barley and Australian wheat. So the British government really did try to get food into the region.
[35:21] Rail repairs allowed supplies into Calcutta. Remember, stuff got bombed. It was really, I mean, it's incredible how close we are to just going back to medieval, we're full, you're starving to death 10 miles over. In September, Churchill stated something must be done on September 24th and approved an additional quarter million tons of grain over four months, noting Indians were not the only people starving in this war. October. Viceroy Wavell replaced Linlithgow. He requested and received military support, including 15,000 troops, lorries, aka trucks, and the RAF, the Royal Air Force, for distribution. Grain was imported from Punjab. Medical resources increased around October 7th to 8th. Churchill urged Wavell to divert shipping for shortages if needed. In December, there was a record rice harvest, the largest ever in Bengal. With lands switched to rice, prices fell. Official relief ended by January 1944. This harvest combined with improved distribution marked the famine's end.
[36:27] In 1944, in January, aid deliveries arrived. 130,000 tons of barley from Iraq, 80,000 tons of wheat from Australia, 10,000 tons from Canada, plus another 100,000 tons from Australia. Total grain sent to Bengal from August 1943 through the end of 1944, over 1 million tons.
[36:52] In February, Churchill called an emergency war cabinet meeting on February the 14th. On 8, he telegraphed Wavell offering help, but noting limits. It was still war. In April, Churchill expressed grave sympathy for Italian-Indian sufferings in an April 24th cabinet, but noted aid would incur grave difficulties elsewhere. where. He requested American shipping from Roosevelt for a million more tons, which was refused due to the priorities, of course, of the D-Day invasion. In July, Churchill remarked positively to Indian delegate Sir Ramaswamy Mudalia about ending notions of Indian inferiority and envisioning a great, shining India. So, did he say harsh things? Yeah, absolutely. But everybody's had harsh things about everybody else throughout human history, and I view it, again, objectively or not, the way I view it, since he said Indians should never feel inferior, and he envisioned a great shining India. He actually personally had great affection for India, which we know from his diaries, but this is the frustration of people in a long marriage occasionally get mad at each other.
[38:10] I don't view it any more seriously.
[38:14] So there wasn't some concerted effort to starve out.
[38:22] The people in Bengal. There was a horrible war. There were the insane cruelties of the Japanese. There was the need to avoid food getting into the Japanese hand, which locked also food from getting to Bengal. There was local Indian corruption and favoritism. And again, I understand it. I would send food to my family as opposed to some stranger's family. So would you too. So this is not any kind of disrespect to the local Indians. That's just natural. But it was not some, like, if you look at sort of concentration camps, the Gulag Archipelago, or you look at, of course, the Holocaust and so on, there's a direct, concentrated, encircled desire to eliminate and destroy. That was not the case. Not the case. It was not the case. You don't send food aid to people you're trying to kill. It was horrible. And the visceral ghastliness of this whole time period, I mean, I'm half a world away and 80 years away, and I find it horrible to even conceive of, you know, this is where people have to eat their pets. And oh my God, it's just unbelievable and and horrifying.
[39:41] And this, of course, is why we should try to reduce the amount of hostility and hatred in the world, because stoking that hostility and hatred leads to war, which leads to exactly these kinds of horrors. So if you think that hating the British is going to solve the problem of famine, you're wrong. You're just falling for the psyop that is put down by the powers that be that we have to hate each other rather than recognize everything we have in common, and perhaps reserve our negative feelings for those running the show rather than those of us trapped in the horror of it all. All right, so that's my statement. I'm very happy to take questions, comments, issues, challenges, or whatever is on your mind. And let's see here, I'm going to try and get people I haven't talked to before. Sorry, got to swap out to my reading glasses, my slightly old and off-kilter reading glasses. If you have any comments, issues, challenges, whatever it is that you want to talk about, I'm happy to hear. Oh, a caramello. Oh, caramello. If there's something you want to talk about, I'm happy to hear. I know there's a little bit of a delay and you will need to unmute.
[41:10] Whoa, I got it.
[41:13] Excellent.
[41:14] Thanks for having me, Stefan. Sorry for my rusty and poor English, but I will try to put it in understandable terms. I'm from Brazil and I'm a Brazilian journalist. My name is Marcos, and I would like to talk about the team.
[41:40] The famine, but as a political measure, as an instrument of control.
[41:49] We see in different periods of time that famine was used to submerge, to put down populations, just like happened the last century in the Olomodoro, the Ukrainian famine, and the Mao's famine, the China's famine after the revolution. So, I would ask you, is this instrument of control, this instrument of subjugation, is always about the sales egoism, a form to impose the will of the little bureaucracy or the will of an empire and how to work through this, just like Gaza's narrative. We don't know the truth about it. So how to get the truth about it? We thought that the millions of lives lost in this process.
[43:13] Well, I appreciate that. And I just wanted to give a shout out to the lovely listeners and land of Brazil. Some years ago, I was invited down to give a speech in Sao Paulo. And I met up with some wonderful libertarians down there and had the great honor of socializing with them. and I got to get out to Rio and just what a beautiful country, lovely people. I know that's kind of a cliche, but it really was a wonderful time down there and I did end up talking to politicians directly in my speech to go on about how corrupt they were. So it was a really, it was a good speech and I'll put a link to the speech below. I also had a.
[43:55] Victor Safatle is a professor down there and we had a very good debate and so I really had a wonderful time in Brazil. I would love to come back, and I really appreciate that.
[44:04] So the question is, of course, and it's a great question, famine is used as a tool of political control and subjugation. No question. No question. So the two that I mentioned, of course, is the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s, and then in the 1950s, 1960s, in particular, the Mao was not until a little later, but is a tool of destroying the bourgeoisie, the kulaks in Russia, the bourgeoisie. I don't know what the name for it is in Mandarin, but it is a way of destroying the small landowners. See, the middle class is a problem for totalitarians of the left. The reason it's a problem is that you can bribe the poor, and you can capture the rich, right? So you think of all the big corporations in the West, they're hand in glove with the government. They've got their representatives, they've got their political operatives, they've got their legal departments, they've got their donations to politicians, and so they get their preferential legislation. Big business is pretty easy to capture in a leftist totalitarian system, or I guess even in the right.
[45:19] And the very poor don't have much political energy or effort, and they're relatively easy to bribe with free stuff, free healthcare and old age pensions and stuff like that. But the middle class is a challenge because the middle class wants lower taxes and smaller government. The upper classes, you saw this over COVID when government power expanded immensely, the rich got fantastically richer. The poorer got their stimmy checks and the middle class got completely destroyed. And in In fact, I would argue that government policies in the West in particular were hostile in the greatest extent towards small business owners and the petty bourgeoisie, the shop owners, the small business owners, the bourgeoisie, and so on. And so when you have famine as a weapon of war, it is often used against the independence and resistance that comes out of the middle classes, and it is used against them. So, it's certainly true that a woman who has a black eye might have been punched by her husband, but it's also true there's an old book like The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, right? She's, oh, I just walked into a door. But it also could be the case that she walked into a door. In other words, it could be a conscious infliction of injury, or it could be an accident.
[46:44] And the British as a whole, for a variety of reasons, historical, philosophical, whatever it is. The British as a whole had spent a couple of hundred years killing off the 1% most psychotic and sociopathic and antisocial of their population, at least who weren't already in government. But violent criminals, excuse me, about 1% of the population had been either executed or exiled or put to prison for the rest of their life. So there was a weeding out of the violent in British society, at least the violent who weren't conformist, the ones who were conformist and violent tended as they always have been to go into the military or the police force or something like that. So the level of cruelty, struggle sessions, sadism, torture, and mass slaughter that we saw going on under the communist regimes was not part of the British character. Obviously, I'm not saying that they were perfect. That is a yardstick for which no mortal man can compare outside perhaps Jesus. So, it was not wielded to destroy political opposition. The food was not cruelly withheld in a time of peace as it was in Russia in the 1930s and in China in the 60s.
[48:13] And it wasn't deployed against the political enemies of the existing regime.
[48:19] And as I said before, it was a response to a horrible invasion that was occurring from the Japanese displacing half a million people. There was terrible weather, which of course is not something that you can plan for. I mean, as you know, Ukraine was called the breadbasket of Europe. The soil is so incredibly rich that it can feed, you know, three quarters of Europe if properly managed. So while it certainly is the case, the famine is a weapon of domination used by the upper classes against rebels. The best way you'd look at that is say, okay, well, was the upper classes driven by an ideology that sanctified slaughter? Well, communism is an ideology that sanctifies slaughter. Fascism too, but we're talking about the two great leftist dictatorships, Soviet Russia and communist China of the 20th century. And England did not have an ideology that sanctified mass slaughter. I mean, we can talk about war and so on, but with communism, it sanctifies mass slaughter because you label people as counter-revolutionaries, as reactionaries, as people with sympathies for the bourgeoisie, enemies of the proletariat. You dehumanize them.
[49:37] Catch this fascist is sort of the typical example. You label someone a fascist and you can kill them. And the British did not have an ideology that justified the mass slaughter of innocent civilians, whereas communists do.
[49:56] Communism is really the uncorking of the worst devils of human nature to slaughter whoever gets in their way. It is really, I mean, I would say it's an insult to the mafia because the mafia at least has to survive within the communities in which they live and has to provide some level of justice, sort of that famous opening scene of The Godfather. So they can't just be random and slaughter. They call them civilians, right? The people outside the organized crime. So it is a special kind of uncorking of the devils of the human heart to have an ideology wherein you can dehumanize and label people as enemies and then slaughter them without any conscience, it seems, whatsoever. This is the 100 million plus death count of communism just in the 20th century, which was like, what, 40% of the democide of a quarter of a billion people slaughtered outside of war by governments in the 20th century. So I don't see, and again, I'm obviously happy to be schooled and corrected and instructed. I'm far from an expert in all of this stuff. So again, I'm happy to be corrected. I do have a degree in this sort of stuff, but that doesn't certainly make me infallible, of course, right? But I don't see in the British Empire an ideology of dehumanization and mass slaughter in the same way that you get directly coming out of communism. Does that make any sense?
[51:23] Yeah, it does. And I agree with you. The British Empire didn't have an ideology, an amount of ideas that justified the famine as a political tool, just like the Soviet Union had and China still have. So, we can associate this behavior, this kind of action with the revolutionary behavior of the global societies. And the British Empire, what happened in India, actually looks like way more to me as a circumstantial thing. Because of the contests and the downgrading power of the British Empire that time. Am I wrong?
[52:38] Yeah, I would certainly. So what we can say is, let's say that India had achieved independence, not after the war, but in 1940. For whatever reason, India had achieved full independence. What would have changed?
[52:53] I mean, it was the local governments who were imposing these restrictions on food, transportation, sale, and delivery. The Japanese would still have been in the doorstep. Half a million refugees would still have gone forward, except that they probably would have fallen to the Japanese because they wouldn't have the British troops there to protect them. And the weather would have still been the same. And what would have happened if India had gotten rid of the British a year before the start of the famine? Arguably, it would have been even worse because they would have been ruled over by the Japanese, who would have been infinitely more brutal than nature and the British were. I mean, it's a wild thing. The Japanese are so hated in many places in the Far East or in East Asia.
[53:42] I would compliment the observation because the Japanese empire was hated in Korea, in China. Every place they took last century hated them because of their kind of empire.
[54:05] Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you know about the rape of Nanking and the brutalities that the Japanese army instituted in China. And I'm sure you've heard this, a wild thing to me, that when the film Oppenheimer was being shown in South Korea, when the bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities, the audiences in South Korea would sometimes erupt into cheers.
[54:32] That's how the hatred still maintains itself. And I'm not blaming anybody for this. I'm just pointing out that this is a reality and they have infinitely greater hatred. I mean, I remember there was some Pearl Harbor movie, pretty bad movie with Ben Affleck, but the Americans weren't necessarily cheering every time a Japanese plane went down over Pearl Harbor.
[54:56] But yeah, the cheers on the destruction of Japan were quite, quite vivid and powerful. And so, so yeah, what would have happened to India in the absence of the British? Now, again, we can say, oh, well, but the British had already pillaged and blah, blah, blah. Okay, but let's just say they got their independence earlier. Then they would have simply been taken over by the Japanese or something like it. Because the Japanese, when they came in, they would simply work the local populations to death and then just move on to the next thing and work the local populations to death and move on to the next thing. And anybody who resisted would simply get publicly tortured to death. And that would, you know, unfortunately, well, fortunately, whatever, fortunate or unfortunate, that level of violence just works to subjugate the population. So, I mean, it's the difference between North Korea and South Korea, right? So what would have happened if the British had left India prior to the Japanese skirting around these areas? I mean, just go and ask the Australian POWs. Oh, wait, you can't because, well, I guess most of them are dead by now, but they were tortured and slaughtered by the tens of thousands. So is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
[56:10] I would like to thank you for having me for this privilege. I am a fan for a long time, and I'm very happy to coming back to Twitter and do this kind of space. It's a great pleasure to hear you. Thank you, Stacey.
[56:32] Well, thank you. And of course, I appreciate your very kind words and I wish you and of course Brazil the very best in your quest for freedoms. And we all, I guess, we can thank the world's first half trillioner, Elon Musk, who was kind enough to retweet me, I guess, this week. So, uh, that was, uh, uh, we, we owe him a great debt of free speech gratitude.
[56:55] And now let's go chasing rainbows in the sky.
[57:00] It's my imagination. Bad guys. Everyone thinks of Billie Eilish. I think of one of the worst solo albums in history, which was Freddie Mercury's. Oh no, that was not somebody who was looking for getting in. That's just somebody who's at the top of the list. All right. Oh, the album bad guy. Love Me Like There's No Tomorrow is okay. And... Sometimes I feel I want to break down. I'm living on my own. It's great. I love that beginning. It's just great. Great. All right. So if you have questions, comments, issues, challenges, please flood my ears. I don't want to ramble tangent my way into side quest obscurity. If you have things that you want to question, talk about, doesn't have to be about this topic. You don't have to be any kind of expert on the famine. All right. Good, good, good. Thank you for stepping up. We are, all right, 25th, 25th.
[58:00] Hi, Stefan, how are you?
[58:01] Wow, you got in quick, man. I normally have to vamp for a second or two. Yeah, what's on your mind?
[58:07] I left a question there, but, you know, let me just let you know what I have in mind. I'm glad that I heard you talk about gold earlier. So my question really is about this crypto currencies at the moment. And is this going to grow to the gold that you talked about many years ago and is eventually going to wipe out all the assets? Thank you.
[58:32] Sorry, your question is, will it grow to replace gold? And did you say wipe out all the assets?
[58:38] Well, yeah, wipe out all the middle class, poor people, and only the people who have Bitcoins will eventually, like the people who used to have gold, to create property, I mean.
[58:52] Right. So I'm not sure what you mean by wipe out the other assets, because Bitcoin right now, there's two use cases for Bitcoin. And one of them, of course, is as a trading mechanism. Now, Bitcoin, of course, because it's decentralized, it's slow, right? So Visa can process a billion transactions because it's all centralized and all runs in a couple of places. And so it's fast that way. Bitcoin is decentralized, which means you have to update a whole bunch of systems in order for a transaction to work, which slows things down. And people say, well, I can't buy a coffee. Who cares? Honestly, I mean, a huge chunk of the economy is what's called B2B, right? Business to business, 30, 60, 90 day turnarounds for bills. And so you can run, even if you just run it off that, that's a huge and significant advantage. And there'll be lightning network and other layers on top to make it work more at a consumer level. So the two use cases for Bitcoin, which is kind of the same for any currency, is number one, savings, store of value. And number two, transactions, buying and selling stuff with it. Now, we've kind of gotten used to the idea that currency is just about buying and selling stuff.
[1:00:15] Because saving currency ever since 1913, the introduction of central banking, and 1971, the end of the gold standard under Nixon, that we have now got the belief that money ain't for saving. Money is for investing, and money is for spending. And that's because, of course, if you put your money in a bank account and you get.
[1:00:40] You know, 1% interest, half a percent interest, whatever, while inflation is running probably 9% to 12% at least, you're losing money. And you're losing money really freaking quickly.
[1:00:50] So you use it or lose it. Money has become like crops that rot in the field if you don't do something with them. You got to make them into jam or you can't just leave them there because they're going to rot. So money evaporates, money under the bed. Like I did a little thing here. I was just kind of curious. I got my first job in the early 90s, my sort of first professional job as a programmer. I made $40,000 a year, and I'd need almost double that now. Even according to, and I don't think they're even remotely accurate, but even according to general CPI increases, this doesn't count the fact that housing prices have gone through the absolute roof and other of things have just gone way up. So I would probably need, if I wanted to buy a house, you know, that 40,000 back then is probably 10 to 15,000 now.
[1:01:42] And so the idea that money is a store of value that is not itself reinvested, right? So you can go and you can say, well, I want to hang on to my money. So I'm going to invest in some index fund or some ETF or something like out some exchange traded funds. So you take your money and you protect it from the marauding mice that eat away at your money. It's like you store it under your bed and every time you pull it out, rats have eaten more away of your money. It's like you can't store it under the bed, so you've got to do something with it. So the idea that money or value can be passive and increase in value is kind of incomprehensible to us.
[1:02:22] But that's what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is, here's where you can store your value it's not invested it's not at risk other than you know supply and demand and the supply is fairly fixed and the demand is highly variable which is why like it's uh right now it's 177 92 44, as of 8.05 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, October 3rd, 2025. And the idea that you can put your money someplace and it's safe and not evaporating is wild. It's wild. You know, if you have barbecues, what do you do? You get a cooler and you put your ice in there.
[1:03:12] But by the end of the day, because people are always opening, or maybe they leave it open to get their pops or beers or whatever. At the end of the day, the ice is just puddles. It's gone. The ice is gone. And that's our money. It's ice stored in the sun. It's going to go into unpleasant tasting metallic H2O puddles at the end of the day. So the idea that you can put your money someplace where it's not at risk, because everything you invest in can go up and down, right? A store of value that's not at risk that can be transferred around the world. Because, you know, people always say, and this is a debate I had with Peter Schiff many years ago, which is you can easily compare the strengths of one thing against the weaknesses of the other thing. It doesn't really do anything, right? It's like saying, well, you should stay single because, you know, having a girlfriend is really expensive. She might break your heart. You could get an STD. She might cheat on you. She can break up with you. like so you should just stay single and it's like so and if you're single you can have more money you can have more fun you don't have to go with anyone else's schedule blah blah blah so all you're doing is taking all of the positives of being single and comparing them to all the negatives of being in a relationship which is kind of pointless i mean it's a way of programming yourself right so.
[1:04:29] There are pluses to gold, and there are pluses to Bitcoin. I think there are way more pluses to Bitcoin than there are to gold, for reasons I've talked about a bunch of times. And I've got a whole bunch of presentations on Bitcoin. You can find them at fdrpodcasts.com. Just do a search for Bitcoin.
[1:04:50] So it's not that Bitcoin is going to eliminate the value of it. Gold will still have value. I mean, you need it for electronics and jewelry, and gold will always have value, and silver will always have value. You need that bimetallic standard, you know, the old thing that a good steak dinner is a piece of silver, is an ounce of silver all throughout history, and a good suit is an ounce of gold all throughout history. So they'll always have value. There are pluses and minuses to gold, pluses and minuses to Bitcoin, but I view Bitcoin as a superior store of value because the technology is incredible. The value of it has been proven. Bitcoin has been the fastest accumulating value asset in all of human history. It is the, literally to me, and I've characterized this for many years, it is the investment opportunity of not just your lifetime, but of any human lifetime. Now, please understand, I'm not saying buy Bitcoin. I cannot give financial advice. I do not want to give financial advice. I'm not giving financial advice. I'm just telling you my particular personal opinions. Do your own research.
[1:06:00] Buy and sell on your own recognizance. Don't take any advice from me. I have a degree in history, not finance. But for me, it is the greatest store of value in human history. And either we get a Bitcoin future or there is no future because Bitcoin is currently racing with central bank digital currencies. So free coins are currently in a deadly race with slave coins. The slave coins being you get your pay, social credit scores, you don't like what the government does, they'll turn off your ability to buy anything and so on.
[1:06:37] As opposed to Bitcoin, which is truly liberating. You post something that the government doesn't like and you're barred from your money for three days and it's going to AI automatic like the cost of enslaving humans goes down considerably with CDBCs and AI in particular so so it's Bitcoin or bust like we either have a future that's based on Bitcoin, or we have a future that's not worth having so but I don't view it as eliminating other assets because all currency is a reflection of things that actually have value in the real world right tangible goods, tangible services, land, capital, real estate, all those good factories, capital goods, all of those things are things in the real world. And.
[1:07:25] Currency is just a way of trading them, of solving the problem of the mismatch of wants, because then you have something where, you know, if you have eggs and somebody else wants bread, but you don't want to trade with each other, you kind of got to go all over the place trying to figure out how to get these coincidence of wants to work. So Bitcoin is not the economy, but it is the way to organize the scarcity of assets in the world.
[1:07:49] And it is beyond political control. And if there's anything that we need in this world, honestly, if there's one thing that I could change in the short run, it would be removal of currency from political control. Because if you remove currency from political control, you remove interest rates from political control. And then governments actually have to provide value rather than borrowing and printing to provide the illusion of value and enslaving the next generation in return for idiot votes in the here and now. In the long run, I would obviously privatize education completely, but in the short run, it would be to remove currency and interest rates from political control, because that is the greatest thief. That's why the money that I was making 30 plus years ago would be worth 25% or 30% now what it was back then relative to things like real estate. The amount of, it's the greatest single human theft in history, or it's the greatest theft in human history, is money printing and the manipulation of interest rates and borrowing debt, unfunded liabilities, deficits and debt. It's the greatest theft in human history. People are just getting robbed while they sleep. And it tends to be the poorest who get hit the hardest and the rich who benefit the most. It is the most regressive taxation known to man, and inflation.
[1:09:12] Bitcoin solves that, and that would be my answer. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
[1:09:20] All right, I will move on to the aforesung Mr. Bad Guy. If you wanted to mention something, I'm all ears, my friend. What's in your mind?
[1:09:33] Stefan, you can hear me, yeah?
[1:09:35] Yes, sir. Go ahead.
[1:09:36] Great. So you're talking about the British colonization of India. There's one decision I'd like to understand your perspective on. The decision of partition, 1947, so creating Pakistan. So from the administrative point of view was it this this this decision resulted in one of the great migrations of all time i don't know uh but and a lot of people had died and everything like this we we know that so i just wonder that decision there was it a good thing to separate the muslims from from the hindus uh at the expense of i don't know how many people died but What is your perspective on that particular decision?
[1:10:22] Right. I mean, I'm just going to talk about general principles. I wouldn't claim to be an expert on partition. You're right. 1947, the division of India into two independent dominions, Pakistan and India, led to one of the largest mass migrations. 15 million people left their homes. Massive communal violence. you can see this at the end of Ben Kingsley's, or the movie with Ben Kingsley about Gandhi, one to two million deaths. And yeah, it was, it was a horrendous time. It was a horrendous time. And why was it necessary? Well, it was necessary, or it was believed to be necessary because of the incompatibility of religious ideas.
[1:11:10] And philosophy solves that in that we don't have irrational beliefs that we need to enforce through indoctrination and violence. We have reason that we can use to solve conflicts and problems with appeal to logic and evidence. I mean, you don't see this kind of stuff where you say, oh, we've got this physics conference, and we need to get the people who believe in the Big Bang Theory over here. We've got to have a huge wall with armed guards between them because we've got to put the people who believe in the big bang theory here. And we have to have the people who believe in the solid state theory over here and the people with the string theory, people who got to put them separate because otherwise they all kill each other. Like that's just not how science works. The same thing with mathematics. There may be some contentious debates. There may be some haughty.
[1:12:00] Ostracism, but there's not this violence that happens when you get people with beliefs that they can't logically and objectively prove jammed together with very high stakes, right? So it is similar to, of course, to what happened in Europe, 300 years religious war after the reformation under Martin Luther King in the 16th century and onwards. And so, I mean, I don't know what I would do in those kinds of situations. Are there good decisions, bad decisions? There is no experiment in human history where you can run a parallel experiment and an A-B test, so to speak. My preference would have been to not have, I mean, I'm an anarcho-capitalist, right? So I am a voluntarist, which means that a society without a government is the best and most peaceful society. And so for me, I would have said, let's not leave them with the government and they'll work it out themselves. But that's probably why I was not reincarnated to somebody making those decisions in 1947.
[1:13:18] So I hope that, I mean, I hope that helps as a whole.
[1:13:22] Whatever the problem is, the solution is more freedom. The solution is more freedom. So again, I wouldn't claim to be any kind of expert on this, but my understanding it was due to religious tensions and the result was brutal and what i would say is that.
[1:13:49] When we can institute more voluntarism and more freedom in society, in other words, less of a sort of centralized political oligarchy, things are better off. And, but the problem is, is that these kinds of political decisions are made when you have long histories, for whatever reason, we have long histories of a non-focus on things like peaceful parenting, on the non-aggression principle, on reason rather than violence or mysticism as the way to resolve human disputes.
[1:14:25] And again, this would not be a philosophical decision. My philosophical decision would be as little government as humanly possible. But when you have a culture or a country, which, you know, and it's not like the British would be uninvolved in the development of India. Of course, for 150 years, the Raj ruled, and therefore part of the lack of progress in Indian philosophy had to do with the British, in my opinion.
[1:14:49] But there were also advancements in law and so on, as I pointed out in my last stream. It was in the, I think, of the 1850s or the 1860s that the opposition, that rape was criminalized, although marital rape, I think, still remains non-criminal in India as a whole. But the more that we can promote peaceful parenting, non-aggression principle, reason and evidence, the less we end up backed into these kind of corners where there aren't any good decisions to be made, if that helps.
[1:15:20] Well, not really. But I can appreciate that I've helped you. I think that issue in particular, you should look into. It's quite fascinating how they determined the boundary between Pakistan and India. But nevertheless, just a question here, Stefan. Your philosophy, do you think— No.
[1:15:43] No, no, no, no, not doing that. Not doing that. No, I'm not doing that. Well, first of all, it was a little bit rude after I put effort into answering things from a philosophical perspective to say that it was unhelpful and needed to study more. That's just a little rude, but that's not the end of the world.
[1:15:59] Oh, yeah, I know. Sorry, buddy. It's clear. I respect your intelligence, So I know when you know, and I know when you don't know, right? It's okay. It's fine. But I don't need to go- No.
[1:16:11] No, no, I wasn't finished my point.
[1:16:13] Okay, go ahead.
[1:16:13] And if you admit to being rude, laughing at it is also kind of rude, but that's all right. So, but what I would say is you don't get to refer to it as my philosophy. Philosophy is either true or false, valid or invalid. It's not personal. There's no such thing as my philosophy any more than there would be my physics or my math or my logic.
[1:16:40] Okay.
[1:16:42] Sorry, is that confusing to you? You seem to be confused.
[1:16:45] No. Stefan, you've come up with a philosophical principle.
[1:16:54] Oh, more than one. What do you mean a philosophical principle? I've come up with dozens of philosophical arguments.
[1:17:01] Okay. You're universal. UPB. That's you.
[1:17:05] Right. But it's not my philosophy. It's either valid or invalid. It's either true or false. It's not mine.
[1:17:12] Okay, fine.
[1:17:15] Boy, you do sound kind of bitchy. You know that, right? Okay, fine. It's important. It's important because if you refer to it as my philosophy, you're saying there's an element of subjectivism to it or subjectivity to it. And that's not the purpose of philosophy is to create sort of universal proofs. So you can say, Stef, your proposition, your argument, but not my philosophy because I don't own philosophy and it's not subjective.
[1:17:38] Okay. I always credit you for creating that, okay, when I'm talking to people. So should I stop doing that or?
[1:17:47] Do you not understand what I'm saying?
[1:17:50] Yeah, I know. You don't own it.
[1:17:53] Own what? It's universal.
[1:17:54] You don't own it. You don't own universally preferred behavior. It's an objective.
[1:18:01] No, no, no. See, this is what you're not understanding. And I'm sorry if I'm being unclear. I'll try once more. Otherwise, I'll move on to somebody else. But, uh, if you'd have said to me, Stef, your theory of universally preferable behavior, totally valid, but that's not what you said. Do you remember what you said?
[1:18:18] Your philosophy.
[1:18:19] Right. Philosophy is a generic term that is obviously much larger than me. Yes, universally preferable behavior is a philosophical proof of secular ethics that I generated, for sure, but it's not my philosophy. It would be a particular theorem, right? So if you were talking to, let's take a silly example, put myself in some elevated company here, but if you were talking to Einstein, you wouldn't say, you're physics, right? And it's an important, I mean, it may sound pedantic, but it is really important. I wouldn't say to Einstein, you're physics. I would say, you're proof of the general theory of relativity, let's say. But I wouldn't say, you're physics, because that would be to indicate that he somehow owned physics as a whole, not a particular theory within it.
[1:19:06] Okay, I accept your correction. But remember, you said that we weren't going to do that. I never got to ask you, if your theory of universal preferable behavior would be more receptive to a Muslim or a Hindu?
[1:19:27] Honestly, I have no particular opinion about that. I have no thoughts about it. It's interesting, though. I would say, what I will say is this. I will say that people who believe in universal ethics already, which, of course, for most religious people, but by definition would have a theological origin, a God-commanded origin.
[1:19:48] People who believe in universal ethics are more receptive to UPB than atheists are, which I find I would never have guessed that, honestly. And this was a great deal of instruction for me in the world as a whole. And because I've been around atheists who've been very interested in universal ethics and virtues and morals and so on. And so that's sort of my particular group. I have never really spent any time around this sort of fedora wearing nihilist atheists who just seem to want to escape any moral rules at all. So I would say, you know, if I had to sort of guess between Hindu and Islam or a Muslim or a Hindu, I wouldn't hazard a guess not being an expert in either religion. I wouldn't hazard a guess as to which one of them would be more likely. But I would say that religious people who believe in universal ethics, which is not the case for all religions. Religious people who believe in universal ethics are much more interested in UPB than atheists, which again, I find quite fascinating. And I've had many more productive conversations regarding UPB with religious people than I have with atheists who seem to be studiously avoiding the topic as a whole, even though they're the ones who need it the most, which I just find quite interesting. But it's an interesting question, but I would not count myself having enough expertise on either religion to be able to gauge which one would be more or less likely to accept or be interested in UPB?
[1:21:13] Without belaboring it and we can move on to somebody else, it seems to me the answer is clear. It would be a monotheistic religion, and that is the case for Islam. So based on what you said there, I think UPB would be more receptive to the Islamists if If the Islamist does believe in universal ethics, which they ought to...
[1:21:37] I'm sorry, dude. As far as I understand it, again, I'm no expert. As far as I understand it, the Muslim believes that he has slightly higher moral obligations to his fellow Muslim as opposed to non-Muslims.
[1:21:55] I would think so. To a believer, yeah. I'm not an expert either.
[1:21:59] I mean, they have attacks on non-believers, right? it's called the Jizya, right? They have a tax on people who don't accept, like you either convert or you pay the Jizya. So I would assume that that's not foundationally UPB in the way that I would formulate it. And it seems to be different from the Christian ethics. So, because I think Christians have moral responsibilities to Christians and non-Christians alike. And I think for most religions, there seems to be more of an in-group preference. So again, I can't really speak to the Hindu religion, but that would be my understanding of Islam.
[1:22:31] Yeah, I think Islam, it varies. What your understanding of Islam may be or what you're citing there may not actually be the case. There's a lot of hadith and interpretations of the Quran that even Muslims themselves disagree on. So it's very checkered. But if we go to the point of it being monotheistic, it being monotheistic, I think, lends itself to UPB more based on what you had said earlier. About someone being inclined to universals as opposed to subjectivity or the opposite of universal, whatever that may be.
[1:23:13] Well, but it wouldn't depend so much upon monotheism. It would be depending upon whether you accept that the morals that your religion proposes are universal. In other words, that they apply equally to believers and non-believers alike, which would be the case with Christianity and other religions. I'm of course not quite so sure about, but they seem to have a fairly strong in-group preference. So to me, the deciding factor would be the universality of the ethics, not whether it's monotheistic or polytheistic. Although I can, I think I see your point if I can be so bold as to take a stab at it is that if it's polytheistic, then you have more than one set of ethics, depending on which God is being focused upon and the gods themselves. This is sort of an old argument that comes out of Plato, which is... Is, do we know what good is because it's what the gods do, or do we know what good is because the gods themselves conform to a standard of good that is even higher than them? And one of the arguments, of course, is that the gods disagree with each other, and therefore we don't know what the good is because even the gods disagree. So if there's a polytheistic religion where the gods disagree, then if I understand your point correctly, and sorry if I'm mischaracterizing it, But I think if it's a polytheistic religion where the gods disagree, then I think universality would be harder. Is that sort of what you mean?
[1:24:37] Yeah, absolutely. If we had the ability to create a Hadith and say that UPB was actually endorsed by Muhammad, there's a framework within Islam that would allow UPB to take root. But I don't know if there's a framework. In fact, I would say there is not a framework within Hinduism that would allow UPB to sort of, take root flourish be receptive to to a diverse range of people because there's so many different gods and so many different uh interpretations but i'm i'm belaboring the point and i do have to go here Stefan it's been an excellent uh chat with you god bless i love your work great job thank.
[1:25:26] You very much all right doctor i'm not going to say that second name but if you wanted to instruct me in the ways of your thinking. I'm happy to hear Dr. P. Going once, going twice. All right, we will go instead with Don. Don, if you wanted to unmute, I'm happy to hear what's on your mind. It's so funny, you know, because I remember when I used to listen to the radio and actually, believe it or not, I still have this memory from decades and decades ago, calling into a radio station, identifying the song. Oh, it's by the Eagles. One of the last going to find your little find your inner child and kick his little ass or something like that. Get over it. Get over it by the Eagles. I identified that song from the opening guitar riff and I won a live Eagles concert that I'd actually never went down to collect. And they called me once or twice like, Hey man, and your prize is here. And I'm like, yeah, I don't really care about the Eagles that much and I don't have a VCR. So anyway, I used to hang on to call in and win stuff. And all right, going once, done, going twice.
[1:26:43] Yeah, no, no, I'm very sorry, but I, Stefan.
[1:26:46] Yes.
[1:26:46] Question, question I asked you, what you're seeing today, let's say that there's, the United States, you, you said, you essentially said you're a narco capitalist at heart. If you were to go back and say that this experiment in the United States of America and being a constitutional republic, would you say, if you were at the table sitting with the founding fathers, what type of questions would you be asking, say, to guide to how we should be, the type of governments that we would want?
[1:27:23] Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I mean, the American experiment, of course, was to try to create the smallest government the world has ever known, and it has since morphed into the largest government the world has ever known. I mean, if you look at the war.
[1:27:37] But that was something they warned about, right? Jefferson said you probably would have to trim the tree of liberty every 20 years due to human nature. So where is the problem that you just mentioned? You went from the founding fathers to now we have the largest government, but the founding fathers were trying to essentially warn the people that you need to study history We study human nature because we will become wolves if left to our own devices.
[1:28:05] I'm completely aware of that. That was what I was trying to answer. So I think you have a lot that you want to say. So I think you should say it because if I start to give an answer that's quite complex, I get like eight seconds in. Now you're interrupting me again, right? So listen, I'm not trying to be a nag. I'm not trying to be mean. But if there's stuff that you want to say, you should say it because I don't particularly enjoy. I'm just my personal thing. I'm not trying to be a nag. I don't particularly enjoy starting to answer a complex question and being interrupted with what I was about to say. So again, if there's stuff that you want to say, get it off your chest, let's get it out. And then I'll give you my answer.
[1:28:40] Yeah, I apologize. I think I was trying to, because it's a complex, because I'm trying to ask a question a way that understanding at the same time to understand your philosophical, your framework, I'm trying to ask the question a way that I probably get the best answer from you, but I don't think I can. So I'm going to let you answer it. So I apologize.
[1:29:02] No, but if you knew what the best answer was for me, there'd be no point asking, right?
[1:29:04] No, no. I should say that the, the, uh, an answer from you that I, that the, based on the question that I'm looking to be answered. So I apologize because I've not properly thought through it because it is a complex question I'm trying to ask.
[1:29:21] Yes, I know. Okay. So can I take a swing at it?
[1:29:26] Yep i apologize again.
[1:29:28] No that's fine okay so i would say uh sitting across from jefferson or adams or whoever and they would say well the the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants on a regular basis it's like why why would you set up a system where people have to try and kill and die and rebel just to try maybe somehow to keep it free i mean how well did the American experiment go? You've got George Washington writing down on the farmers for the risky tax. Within 80 years, it's broken the bounds of the constitution. You've got civil war, lying the population in the World War I, fiat currency, Great Depression, well, you got the massive stimulus of the 1920s, the 14-year Great Depression resulting in World War II, and then you got Korea, and then you got Vietnam, and on and on, right? What a mess. Congress last declared war, what, World War II? It was some... Russia left the seat of the table at the UN, which is what resulted in the declaration of Korean War. When have they declared war? Arming, Ukraine, whatever you think of that. It's an act of war, isn't it? Nothing's declared. So why? Why would people need to go up against this Leviathan on a regular basis? Every 20 years? Are you critting me? What kind of system is that?
[1:30:51] Well, I'm going to give you this job. See, I'm going to give you this job. It's a good job. But if you want to keep this job, you have to defeat all challengers in mortal fucking combat that every three years. Would you want that job? No, that's an insane job to get. Well, it's good that you want to be a doctor. You know, society needs doctors, but in order to become a doctor, you got to kill the doctor who's ahead of you. And then the guy behind you is going to kill you too. Like what kind of system would you set up?
[1:31:24] Wherein- Can I stop you there? I don't think that's a valid metaphor.
[1:31:31] Okay, go ahead.
[1:31:34] I was with you until you brought up doctors trying to get ahead. I think what they were saying again, I think you went off task there, was on human nature, that we all have the capacity to sin. And because government is force, if you elected these people who are susceptible to sin, then they could be corrupted and then use the force against their own people who elected them. Because in the end, it is a social construct that is based upon human nature. So I'm saying the thing that they were saying, much like Jung would argue, is that you have to basically constantly do the shadow work to understand your capacity for evil. So you could say, what is good? Well, I say a lot of good people, again, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But those intentions, those people have, might be based on feist. What you are arguing for is perhaps based on false ideology that goes against this universal basic behavior system you're talking about. But they forget it because why? The media has steered them away in some type of falsely constructed narrative that applies upon emotion, not logic. And we have to remember.
[1:32:39] We have to remember, again, that we are capable of evil and that the evil that we're being led upon because of our susceptibility to bad behavior, that we can have bad outcomes. And if we're not reminded constantly of that, about the unreliability of our human emotions and that they can overrule reason, yes, we will be in this endless loop of constantly trying to find the best alternative to a flawed system or an agreed-upon best alternative of limited government.
[1:33:10] But we have to constantly do the psychological training to understand we are capable of sin, all of us.
[1:33:29] I can say many good people have made, you could say, got caught up in using the Constitution or whatever, or using lawfare, judicial system to be weaponized, to think to go for causes like whether it's climate change, which you could argue that have restricted people's behavior, which would go against your narco-capitalist, say, intention or rules or heuristics. So those are good people thinking that you're harming the environment, but it leads to perhaps bad outcomes.
[1:34:14] Sorry, are you done your speech?
[1:34:19] Yeah, I just, when you went off doctors I wasn't following your logic there No.
[1:34:25] That's not what you said though Well.
[1:34:28] You went with doctors And I didn't understand why I would become a doctor If they killed the next doctor I didn't understand where you were going with that No.
[1:34:35] But you said that I was wrong or off base.
[1:34:38] I felt you were going off base And using that metaphor I didn't understand where you were going with it Well.
[1:34:43] Why wouldn't you ask me to explain it then?
[1:34:47] Okay. Well, you did. You were trying to explain it and I didn't, I don't understand.
[1:34:51] I was trying to explain it. And you interrupted and told me that I was wrong and then gave a speech. What was the thing that I asked you? Hang on. What was the thing I asked you to do when I started explaining this complex topic?
[1:35:13] I apologize again. I'm sorry. I will be quiet.
[1:35:17] No, no. I mean, honestly, I'm just, I'm curious. I mean, this is not, I'm not, I'm not trying to nag you or anything like that. It's just wild to me. Like you gave me a note saying, no, you're interrupting again. Can you stop? Can you stop? What's the matter with you? Like, seriously, this is crazy. It's yammering in my ear when I'm trying to talk to a worldwide audience here. I mean, you gave me 10 seconds the first time and maybe two minutes a second time. And I said to you correctly, I said to you directly, if there's something that you want to explain, I have a feeling you got a lot of words, please get it out of your system so I can have some room to explain. And I'm starting to explain and you're in my ear again. I'm just trying to follow this because listen, the reason I'm saying this is like, I'll survive. I don't particularly care. But this is one of the few instances where you're going to get direct feedback about how you communicate, right? Because it's a little annoying. Can you understand that?
[1:36:12] No and again i i realize it so i apologize.
[1:36:15] No and i'm not trying to grind you into an apology i'm just no.
[1:36:18] No i know you're not i say let me.
[1:36:19] But then like why i mean if this one thing i ask you to do is give me some room to explain a complex thing and then when i'm in the middle of trying to explain it i think my frustration okay you just can you can you not interrupt when i'm talking is that even remotely fucking possible because i keep trying to explain things and you keep talking in my ear. And I'm just telling you, listen, you and I will pass by, like we'll probably never talk again. Not that I would have any particular objection to it, but I'm trying to give you this feedback to be honest with you, because if you can't listen and keep interrupting people, even when I very generously gave you the entire platform to have your speech before I started to explain, you're just going to annoy people in your life. You're going to annoy bosses, co-workers, dates, children, wives, whatever it is, right? You're just going to annoy people. And I'd rather you don't annoy people because you're, you know, a smart guy, you care about things, you have great language skills. And I'd rather you go through life not annoying people as a whole. And you're probably not going to get this kind of feedback because people will just stop interacting with you if you keep interrupting them. If you keep asking for a complex explanation, interrupt people when you don't understand something and just tell them that they're wrong.
[1:37:38] And again, I'm not trying to bust your balls or grind your gears. I'm just trying to give you that feedback so that you can hopefully kind of get more success in your life as a whole. That if you're asking somebody, I have a good expertise in this. And if you're asking somebody for an explanation who's got good expertise, and then you keep interrupting them and tell them that they're wrong, then what you should do is you should write a blog post, you should explain it yourself. And I tried to give you that room to do that on the show here and to say, like, listen, you've got a lot of words. I don't want you to interrupt me because I've got a complex explanation to get across. And so get your words out now. And then you gave me like 90 seconds or two minutes and then interrupted me again, telling me I was wrong.
[1:38:19] So I'm not sure what's going on and we don't really have to get into it. I'm just saying that people who know stuff and are good communicators aren't going to want to deal with that as a whole. So what I'll do is I'll take another caller and I appreciate your conversation and I appreciate a question. Maybe I'll do a solo show about it, but I'm not going to, you know, when you've interrupted me for the fifth time, when I'm trying to explain something complex, I'm not going to fall down that hole again because you just, you don't have the ability right now to not interrupt, which is, you know, I don't want to take, you know, this out of my ear because then you might be talking over me and I can't hear it, which is going to interfere with the recording. So what I'll, maybe I'll just do a solo show on this. It's a great topic. Like, what would I say? To the founding fathers to get them to take a different path than what they took. That's a great topic, but it's not something I will talk about with you in my ear. So I appreciate that. All right, let's go with Monsieur, I think it's Monsieur Ash H. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H.
[1:39:21] Hey, Stefan.
[1:39:22] You want to talk with me? Yes, go ahead.
[1:39:25] I wanted to ask, do you remember that guy? His YouTube channel was called Alternative Hypothesis. He got canceled around the time you did.
[1:39:33] Oh, yeah, I vaguely remember the name, but I couldn't tell you smack about the contents.
[1:39:38] Yeah, I mean, I think it was really great. He went back and did a bunch of statistical analyses and just super in-depth reviews of population distribution pre-colonialization in America, and just with other narratives like that. And I don't know, you were talking about the famine. It just reminded me of that, and I thought that might provide some more context.
[1:40:12] Did he ever come back? I know Man, Women, Myth didn't come back. I'm not sure what happened to Black Pigeon Speaks or other veterans of the meme wars of the mid-20-teens, but did he ever come back?
[1:40:23] I don't remember, but I think there's some archives and some re-uploads on YouTube.
[1:40:28] Okay.
[1:40:30] But yeah, it kind of went along pretty well with the Imperial agenda. But yeah, I didn't get to listen to all the... All of your overview on that.
[1:40:47] Oh, you mean on the famine stuff that I was talking about earlier?
[1:40:51] Yeah, yeah. So like, was it like just kind of a...
[1:40:55] No, no, no. I'm not doing the show again. You can go listen to the beginning. So is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
[1:41:03] No, that's it.
[1:41:04] All right. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. But yeah, I'm not... Hey, I missed the class. Can you start again? All right. Milk. M-I-L-K. L is for the only one you see. V is very, very extraordinary. Milk jokes, if you've got. That's what my wife and I dance to at our wedding. L-O-V-E by Nat King Cole. Just a lovely song. What's in your mind, my friend? Going once, going twice. Nothing nothing nothing all right jeff jeffy jeff if you want to unmute i'm happy to hear, happy to hear don't make me end the show on dead air.
[1:41:56] All right. Well, it looks like they are not. So I'm just going to remove them in case they start talking. So I will do a sort of very brief thing. Tingy ting. I will do a brief tingy ting about what I would have said to the founding fathers as the ostrich headed uncle from speakers. All right. So the idea that people need to rebel against a government, I mean, my God, the founding fathers and the revolutionary warriors had a tough enough time rebelling against a government that was on the other side of a six-week voyage ocean.
[1:42:34] How much tougher is it when it's actually in the country? The calls are coming from inside the house. The statism is coming from inside the country. It's not overseas. And of course, the British had a whole empire to run, and they had conflicts with France, and France was going to be funding, or did fund the revolutionary warriors and so on. And that's not the case when you've got a government inside the house and that whole empire to run doesn't have all of this conflict going over on there in Europe. It's got to manage. So I would say, how about not a system where the population has to regularly run into cannon fire in order to maintain any kind of freedoms? Because most people ain't going to do that. And you guys had a tough enough time. I mean, look at what happened. I talked about this some months ago. Look what happened to all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Hunted down, lived in caves, families killed, died in penury, thrown in jail.
[1:43:34] You are a rare group of people who want to do that. Not many people do, and you had a tough enough time for the government thousands of miles away. What about one right inside the country? How about, wouldn't it be better if you had a system where people didn't have to regularly run into cannons and musket fire in order to maintain their freedoms? Just possibly. So you got one scenario, well, I'm going to give you a house, you see, but in order to maintain the house, you're going to have to repel grappling hook, swarthy, greasy Spaniard invasions. I don't know why I make up Spaniard. It doesn't really matter. You're going to have to repel every 10 to 20 years. You're going to have to repel a bloody invasion in order to keep your house or not have to do that.
[1:44:26] What if you just didn't have a government? What if people just self-regulated? What if they self-organized? You know, out on the frontier, did this whole, the truth about the wild west, did a whole presentation on this. What if people could just self-organize? You know, when I was a kid, we went out and we just organized our own games. No servers, no umpires, no vampires. We just went out and organized our own games. And if kids cheated, we just didn't invite them along. We just went and played somewhere else. And say, hey, man, why don't you invite me? Because you cheat. Okay, I'll stop cheating. Okay, fine, come back. Enforced it all. Complex rules. I wrote about this in the Battle of the Garden scene in my novel, Almost. Incredibly complex games of war and invasion and all kinds of wild stuff. No written rules. No external enforcers. And it all worked beautifully. What if? Well, Well...
[1:45:25] I want to organize some kids' games. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get an umpire with a BB gun who's going to wing kids who don't obey the rules. Like, okay, or, just hear me out, or don't. Let the kids organize things themselves, and that way nobody has to get shot with a BB gun. Less violence is better. You want a small government? Good. Less violence is better. Now, if you know ahead of time that your system is going to require revolutionary civil wars every decade or two, maybe, just maybe, it's not the very best system that could be conceived of in this or any of the universe. Maybe there's a little bit of a tweak that could happen that might make the system not have to require the wholesale slaughter and rebellion of citizens on a regular basis as the government gets stronger and powerful and disarms the citizens, which is what's happened in Europe. Maybe, hear me out, maybe we can have a system which doesn't require bodies strewn all across the landscape every couple of years in the vague hope of maintaining freedom? A republic, if you can keep it, how about a system which we don't have to die to keep or kill to keep? Because governments are pretty big, bad, and strong, and revolutionary wars are bitter and bloody.
[1:46:49] And of course, if the people in charge know that there's a system wherein there's going to be this guaranteed rebellion in order to keep people free. They're going to move against that system. And this guy who was like, well, you got to do the guy who was talking here. You got to do the Jungian shadow work to blah, blah, blah. Come on. Jesus Christ, man. Sorry. So...
[1:47:12] People who are sociopaths, I'm just rereading Cohen's book, The Science of Evil. I interviewed him many years ago. It's been sitting on my bookshelf. I've been meaning to pick it up for a while. I've been rereading that. So people who don't have the physical brain structure to process empathy, they don't understand other people. They view them as objects, as NPCs to be manipulated and used to serve the narcissist's end. You've got sociopaths, psychopaths, antisocial personality disorders, borderline personality disorders, sadists, dark triad Machiavellian people, and, you know, garden variety sociopaths, they're going to want to seek power, and they're going to have no problem unleashing cannon fire, Napoleon style, whiff of grapeshot stuff on anybody who dares question their rule. How about we have a system which doesn't automatically guarantee massive power to the most cold-hearted and sociopathic among us? How about we don't give the most power to those who want the most power? How about we don't give the most power to those who are the most evil? Just a possibility. How about we don't have a system where people get regularly enslaved and have to find some way to shoot themselves out on a regular basis? That does not seem like if you have a system that says, well, the tree of liberty has to be watered by the blood of patriots and tyrants on a regular basis. Maybe, just maybe, that's a shitty fucking system.
[1:48:34] And maybe we just let people be free. And maybe we let people self-organize. That maybe we recognize the fact that human nature is so constituted that we did not get to be the apex predators on top of the food chain by not loving power and dominion. Human beings cannot handle power and dominion. It is a drug addiction. It is a drug addiction of the worst kind because it is celebrated and reinforced and bribed and wins against resources. Look at Nancy Pelosi's assets, for God's sakes, on a less than $200,000 a year salary. She's got hundreds of millions of dollars. Human beings can't handle power. It doesn't matter. You put little pieces of paper in the way. It doesn't matter if you try and train people. It doesn't matter if you just say, hey, man, hey, listen, you tyrant, just do the Jungian shadow work and the system will be free. Well, gee, what if they don't want to do the Jungian shadow work? Which they don't, because they love power, and they love dominance, and they love control.
[1:49:35] And there were examples in history of stateless societies. What about that as a possibility? Why not just take away the endless, blood-soaked, cannon fire of hierarchical political power and just let people self-organize? What if we recognize that?
[1:50:01] That there is no virtue in the human soul that could survive the kind of power that politics brings. And just accept that as a basic fact. If you tried to design a medical system over the principles that human beings were both invulnerable and immortal, you would not have a successful or medical system.
[1:50:28] If you tried to design war on the premise that human beings could flap their arms and fly, if you tried to design a military strategy based upon that false assumption, would not work. If you tried to navigate around the world in the 18th century, thinking that the world was a tabletop flat thing, not a sphere, you would not get to the right place. If you tried to send a probe to Jupiter, or your anus, based upon the idea that the Earth was the center of the solar system and the entire universe revolved around the Earth, well, you wouldn't get it. You wouldn't get it even close. If the false premise is it doesn't really matter what you do after that. Okay, starting with the assumption that two and two make five, I'm going to build this whole complex system. It's like, no, no, I think we're stepping over the first bit here, which seems kind of important. Well, I'm going to say that two and two make five, but don't worry, people can just adjust the living shit out of these calculations later. We'll put the earth at the center of the solar system. Then we just need 1500 pages of calculations to figure out where Mars is, as opposed to one calculation. If we put the sun at the center and the earth going around third from the sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, sorry, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars.
[1:51:43] If you enshrine at the center of your system that the initiation of the use of force and staggering levels of violent power are somehow compatible with human nature, your system is going to fuck up forever and ever, well, until it runs out of math. Everything that you're going to put in place to protect people will end up being used to enslave them. Oh, look, let's have a currency. Oh, oh, sorry, the government took it over, and now you have eternal inflation and unsustainable debt. Oh, I know, I've got a good idea. Go with me here. Let's get the government to take over the education to make sure that America stays free. Oh, sorry, the enemies of America have taken over the educational system and now are using it to program children into self-destruction, their entire society.
[1:52:30] Oh, how about this? Let's get the government in control of nutrition and healthcare. Yeah, that's going to be great. And that way, everyone will get great nutrition advice and people will just get healthier and healthier over time. Oh, sorry, morbid obesity and now a falling death rate. Oh, okay, let's get the government. Okay, what if there are these weird pathogens that somehow spontaneously emerge able to perfectly infect human beings from the very beginning, even though that's biologically impossible? Let's just say, well, let's develop a whole bunch of those in order to protect humanity from stuff that's never going to emerge. Oh, sorry. We funded that stuff. It kind of got out and now you have to inject mystery DNA goop as a therapeutic. Oh, sorry. We didn't really test that for transmission. Oh, sorry. We didn't really test that on pregnant women and we're confusing relative versus absolute risk to make you believe that it's somehow magically safe and effective. Oh, sorry. It's just never going to work.
[1:53:32] It's never going to work. It has never worked consistently throughout human history. It never works anywhere across the world. It is a failed experiment to design a society with a state at the center. Now, peaceful parenting, promotion of reason and evidence, that's all the good stuff. That leads us to the better place. I know it's a race, but I can't do it alone. That's up to everyone listening to this to promote the virtues and values of reason and evidence. But it's a terrible system. If people have to regularly walk into withering machine gun fire in order to try and beg the rulers to grant them a few scraps of liberty, it's no good.
[1:54:16] It's no good. It's like, I'm going to open a mall and it's going to have a moat around it. The moat is going to have alligators and occasionally we'll take out the alligators, just surprisingly. We'll have a whole set of machinery to do this and we'll decode it in oil and set it on fire. It's going to be great. Like, how about we have a mall, possibly, just spitballing here, how about we have a mall without the flaming fucking alligator moat from hell?
[1:54:45] No here's my other idea like okay maybe the alligator flaming moat circle okay get it it's too far okay it's too far okay how about this how about this okay it's a deep canyon okay okay okay this is deep canyon there's one drawbridge like one right goes up and down but and this would be randomized a certain number of times a day, it flips up so fast, it shoots people half three quarters of a mile through the air. Wouldn't that be fun? I mean, it comes down, people walk across, but as they're walking across, just randomly, it trebuchets them into the lower stratosphere. What do you think? Would you have any place for them to land? No, they just land wherever. I don't know it's like okay okay possibility again brainstorm spitball who knows right maybe we'll come up with something good maybe we'll come up with the blue man group i don't know but what if we had just a parking lot you go to the mall no flaming alligators no moats no giant canyons no, flip people half a mile whatever the hell's going on with that drawbridge just maybe a parking lot.
[1:55:58] Easy access to the road, the highway, and people could just park their cars and walk to the mall.
[1:56:04] Snipers? No, no snipers. Just not violence. Just people going to the mall. Okay, landmines. No, no landmines. Stop it. Why do you want to be in some John Cleese sketch, which is a combination of an apartment building and an abattoir? Okay, random cracks. Bengal tiger traps no none of that no poison gas in the hvac system no exploding tiles, no guillotines that come down randomly through the storefronts how about you just have a system with no violence at least no initiation of violence yeah maybe you can have some own guards if there are some shoplifters but it's private just a possibility anyway i thank you guys for your attention tonight. We will talk donors, donors, donors, donors, Sunday morning, 11 a.m. And I really thank everyone this afternoon. We had a lovely little donor chat because I had a no show for a call-in show. It happens. But yeah, I hope you will check out freedomain.com. Lots of great resources there. And I hope you'll subscribe to me on X. Don't forget to follow me on YouTube @freedomain1, number one, freedomain1. And I love you guys for these great conversations tonight. Take care my friends I will talk to you soon and thank you for tonight.
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