In this Friday Night X Space, philosopher Stefan Molyneux dives into a multifaceted conversation steeped in historical reflection and philosophical inquiry. Following an apparent technical glitch that interrupted the start, the host warmly welcomes listeners back, expressing his eagerness to tackle the profound questions and issues plaguing society today.
Stefan opens the discussion by reflecting on the historical aftermath of World War II, sharing personal family anecdotes that intertwine with the collective trauma experienced by a nation. He poignantly recounts his mother's experiences during the war, illustrating the stark realities faced by ordinary Germans as cities were reduced to rubble amidst catastrophic bombings. The narrative takes a somber turn as he contemplates the generational scars of war and the lasting impacts on both victims and perpetrators—as highlighted by his family's duality: the bombers on one side and the victims on the other. This deep historical context sets the stage for exploring the pervasive themes of morality, chaos, and the human condition throughout European history.
As the conversation transitions to the socio-economic landscape, Molyneux juxtaposes the vast wealth generated through the Industrial Revolution with the subsequent destruction wrought by the World Wars. He examines the cyclical nature of governance, claiming that small governments fostering individual success inevitably burgeon into large, oppressive administrations. This evolution, according to him, corrupts societal ethics and leads to a downfall, an iron law he asserts cannot be escaped. Drawing parallels between ancient Rome and contemporary society, Stefan argues that the relentless need for government revenue ultimately compromises the prosperity of its citizens. He critically analyzes how a bloated state apparatus exploits the success of its people, exacerbating societal inequality and fueling instability.
Throughout the episode, Molyneux engages with callers, encouraging them to voice their concerns and questions about personal experiences and broader philosophical issues. One caller inquires about the relationship between historical labor practices and contemporary economic challenges—specifically regarding wage stagnation and technological advancements. This interaction allows Stefan to delve deeper into the implications of migratory labor and technological displacement, exploring how historical patterns can inform current socio-economic dynamics.
Further discussions arise surrounding nationalism and the historical interpretations of World War events. Molyneux discusses a prevalent narrative framing white Christian nationalism as a primary source of conflict, contesting this viewpoint by attributing the roots of world wars to the rise of communism and imperial ambitions instead. The conversational back-and-forth with the caller leads to a nuanced exploration of how historical narratives are shaped and weaponized, revealing the complexities surrounding the legacy of colonialism and its pervasive impact on today's geopolitical landscape.
As the episode progresses, Molyneux acknowledges the historical resentment towards successful Western nations due to their imperial past, suggesting that the very triumph of these societies may have bred animosity globally. He argues that the tendency for governments to expand amidst economic prosperity ultimately leads to collective resentment shaped by the historical context of imperialism and warfare. The episode culminates in a thoughtful meditation on the nature of humanity, civilization, and the philosophical underpinnings that guide societal progress—emphasizing the importance of fostering individual rights and liberties against a backdrop of state interference.
Closing the session, Stefan shares insights on his recent audiobook project and his excitement about the upcoming chapter of his new book. He invites feedback and encourages listeners to engage further with his work, fostering a community where philosophical discourse thrives. As he signs off, Molyneux expresses gratitude for the continued support of his listeners while encouraging ongoing inquiry into the philosophical dilemmas facing modern society. Overall, this episode is an enriching blend of personal narrative, historical analysis, and deep philosophical dialogue that leaves listeners contemplating the interconnectedness of past and present.
0:02 - We are now live, large and in charge
1:17 - Family Stories from the War
3:49 - The Cycle of History
5:45 - Wealth and Power Dynamics
7:32 - The Rise and Fall of Governments
10:24 - The Roman Empire's Lessons
12:07 - Understanding Statism and Collapse
16:27 - The Impact of Modern Labor
20:05 - The Rise of Communism
24:26 - The Legacy of World War II
26:43 - The Nature of Imperialism
30:40 - Perspectives on Western Power
34:24 - The Complexity of Cause and Effect
38:54 - The Role of Religion in Society
48:40 - Equality vs. Outcomes
53:26 - Collective Negativity Towards the West
55:48 - Closing Reflections and Thanks
[0:00] Sorry about that. Not sure what happened, but we were dead to the world.
[0:03] We are now live, large and in charge. And it's Friday night. It's time for philosophy. And love to hear from you. Love to hear what your thoughts, issues, questions, problems are. Happy to chat. Happy to apply my fine-tuned, coming up on a half-century philosophy brain.
[0:28] On your biggest, deepest,
[0:29] And most challenging issues. So, yeah, just raise your hand to speak and let me know what is on your mind. Let me know how philosophy can help you today, tomorrow, and yay, verily, into the very depths of the future itself. I did. It's interesting, yeah, because I posted something, was it yesterday? Somebody had posted about what happened to Germany after the end of the Second World War. And dear God above, did a Thor's hammer come down among and upon even the most innocent of the German population, such as my mother, who was eight or so years old at the end of the war. And she had a wretched time of it. She didn't speak of it much directly. There were stories and scraps that come out. I don't know if you've had people who've gone through, you know, really horrible things like, obviously, an entire war.
[1:17] And she told me that, she told me the story of her own mother, And my family, this.
[1:24] Is sort of my
[1:24] Understanding of it, it's kind of chaotic. A lot of it's been sort of lost in the midst of time, or at least to memory, but I had a step-grandmother who was Jewish. My biological grandparents on my mother's side and her much older brothers and so on, half-brothers, all intellectuals, all sort of freedom lovers. I kind of come from freedom lovers on both sides of the family tree. And one of them, I remember one of my Mother's brother is much older than her. I think he was a half-brother. Won a nationwide prize for his poetry and was a very famous poet. And there was another relative of my sort of immediate family down the road, one or two generations, wrote an acclaimed history of unionism in Germany.
[2:16] You know, quite the scholars,
[2:18] Quite the artists. And they were never allowed to publish. They were constantly on the move during the time of the National Socialist Regime. And my mother did tell me the story, of course, of her mother was working and had to stay in Dresden on the night of the Thousand Plane Raid. Dresden had been left alone by Churchill because there were so many treasures and so much wealth, cultural wealth, stored there. and it was really just a civilian target. And he urged, of course, Hitler to surrender. And he said, if you don't surrender, we will bomb Dresden. And of course they did. And my mother and her father, my maternal grandfather, of course, they fled and went out into the countryside. They came back, of course, the next day and there was like almost no city left. And they went to search for my grandmother and the only thing they ever found was the clasp of her purse and she must have told me this story half a dozen or a dozen times the clasp of her purse.
[3:30] And that's all that
[3:31] Was left that's all they could find she vaporized and one of my uncles on one of my uncles, was also on the, was a pilot, was a pilot who flew that night. So on one side of the family, they were dropping bombs.
[3:47] On the other side of the family, they were being vaporized by bombs.
[3:50] And that's been
[3:51] The hellscape of European history for the last, you know, 110 years or so, 111 years. It's horrible. What has been done to Europe, what Europe has done to itself, is almost beyond imagination. The incredible wealth that was generated through a significant amount of suffering in the 19th century through the Industrial Revolution. Before that, you had the Agricultural Revolution producing excess of crops with private ownership of land. The excess of crops allow for the survival of an urban workforce. And that's what they got, and they poured heaven and earth and massive amounts of suffering to generate the wealth the 19th century, almost to a dollar, the wealth of the 19th century was destroyed in the First World War. All the suffering of, you know, kids in chimneys and women doing stupendous amounts of labor, abandoning their children in factories and so on, all of that wealth destroyed almost to the last dollar by the First World War. You know, it remains to be seen whether human beings can handle any kind of economic success at all. I mean, I think certainly within a status system or a status environment, and I write about this in my novel, The Future, which I hope you will check out. It's a free book. It's a really good audio book reading, and you can read.
[5:17] My two novels about the future. One is called The Present,
[5:19] And the other one is called The Future. It remains to be seen, and I don't think it's true, that human beings in a statist environment can survive their own success. Because when society becomes wealthy and you have a political class, you have a government, you have a state, a statist society,
[5:38] when society becomes wealthy, then society gets corrupted by political power.
[5:46] Because political power looks at all of that wealth and says, well, we can tax more, we can grow more. We can impose more rules and regulations. And particularly now with computers, the cost of imposing those rules and regulations is very high. After the Revolutionary War, George Washington had to send 10,000 troops to collect the whiskey tax. Is it Tennessee? I can't remember where. And that's a lot of labor. Now, of course, they can just change the computer code or they don't even change the computer code. But that's just a variable that's put in for the tax, and it's all deducted and transferred and wishes itself all over the digital seascape like a bunch of electric eels, shocking the futures of the next generation. It's become so efficient to skim, to take, to tax. And as wealth increases.
[6:35] In society, the government can take more. And of course, because the government can expect, at least for quite some time, significant increases in the future tax base, then the government can use that expected increase in the tax base and the tax revenues as collateral. And then because the government borrows, there's the perception that the government's adding value. And this is why I remember talking about this at a Reason conference many years ago, 13 years ago, or whatever it was, saying that this is why the smallest government known to man, which was the American government bound by the chains, bound down by the chains of the Constitution, as the saying went, turned from the smallest government in the world to the largest government in the world.
[7:18] That's what happens when you have a state of society. A small, small government allows for the creation of wealth because it gets out of the way, let the free market do its thing. A small government begets a large government.
[7:33] And there's no way to stop that cycle. Small governments allow society to create a lot of wealth. That excess wealth is used to feed larger and larger governments until collapse. And so it happened in Rome. In Rome, you had bread and circuses. The welfare state, imperialism, free entertainment for the masses. The YouTube of the time was the Colosseum. I actually would have had a better chance of surviving in the Colosseum, I think. But in Rome, they kept diluting the currency, filling it with more and more trash base metals, taking out the bronze, the silver, the gold. It's a bimetallic standard for most of human history. They'd throw bronze or copper in there sometimes. But it all got debased. It just created more and more money. The fiat currency of the time was just putting more trash metals into your gold and silver. And what happened, of course, was as the costs and necessity of imperialism grew and continued. Oh, and I see someone wants to talk. I'll stop in a second or two and we'll take the call, so I appreciate your patience. But I've got the truth about.
[8:45] The Roman Empire is a presentation. Just do a search for Rome or roman at fdrpodcast.com. You can watch the presentation. But very briefly, as the military requirements went up, more and more young men got conscripted.
[9:02] And as more and more young men got conscripted, men started leaving the cities because it was very hard to conscript men from the country. You go out and try and conscript men from the country, you're probably not going to come back. So more and more young men left the city so that they wouldn't go and be.
[9:19] Hauled away to serve in
[9:21] Some foreign desert for 20 years. The best they could hope for was to come back and be given a small plot of land.
[9:28] So the young men left.
[9:29] And as the young men left, the tax base began to collapse because it's hard to collect taxes from the country. You have to collect them from the city. So the deindustrialization or the de-urbanization of the city really was occurring because young men were trying to escape the draft. And so in Rome, or under the Roman system, you had fewer citizens that you could use as involuntary soldiers, and you had a lower tax base.
[10:00] So what happened?
[10:02] Well, Rome, in order to maintain its imperial power, had to hire more and more soldiers.
[10:09] Mercenaries. And yet, at the
[10:12] Time that it was hiring more and more soldiers, there were fewer and fewer taxes that were able to be collected, because again, the industrious young men were all leaving the city, going out to the country.
[10:24] So what happened was the inevitable, right? You have lower, fewer and fewer taxes you can collect, and more and more expense because you have.
[10:33] To pay mercenaries.
[10:35] Then eventually you just can't pay your mercenaries. And then what do your mercenaries do? Well, they come and sack Rome, get their gold, get their food, get their art, get their treasures. And Rome went from a million plus people down to 18,000 extremely rapidly. And I have a whole speech from a guy named, it's very unsubtly named Roman in my novel, The Future, where he talks about like all these people with soft hands and weak bodies, used to lounging around in togas, chewing on grapes and discussing the big news and ideas of the day.
[11:10] Were suddenly driven out into the woods.
[11:13] What happened? By the hundreds of thousands, they almost certainly just starved, died, were hunted, killed by animals, people.
[11:23] The suffering will never be known. It was not really recorded. And if it was written down, then it was burned for heat, the writings. things. So the success of a society is also its failure in a statist environment. There's no way to change this. It's an iron law. It's a pendulum. Small governments lead to big governments. Big governments lead to collapse. Collapse leads to smaller governments, which then allows the wealth to be created again. And then it leads to bigger government. And I know people are saying, well, we need this. We need to solve this. But there is no solution to the problem of statism because it is such an amoral or immoral premise upon which to run a society that you just can't fix it.
[12:08] It's like trying to navigate the world thinking it's banana-shaped.
[12:13] Or trying to figure out the
[12:15] Retrograde motion of Mars without knowing that the sun is the center of the solar system. I mean, you could figure it out eventually, but it's just so cumbersome that it's impossible to do with any efficiency, and you just can't have a status-based society that is sustainable.
[12:31] Hello?
[12:32] Yes, sir, go ahead.
[12:34] Oh, hi. Not everywhere has slavery, and the agricultural revolution preceded the industrial revolution. The cities needed that amount of food, and it was a level of mechanism.
[12:50] Yes, that's a point I've already made. So, what do you mean when you say not everywhere had slavery?
[12:56] I was, in England, we had our industrial revolution without going through the path of slavery. And I was-
[13:06] Right,
[13:06] That's right. But I understand. I understand that. But that's why I also included serfdom.
[13:10] When do you think serfdom ended in England?
[13:14] Well, I mean, in general, there was a process of privatizing land ownership. So in England, I mean, you could really argue that this started with the Black Death, 13th century, 14th century, because with the Black Death, you had a great loss of agricultural labor, and therefore those laborers were able to get out of some of the chains of serfdom, and that sort of process began to grow and spread. Of course, as you had kids, you would divide your land among the kids, and things got really convoluted, very difficult to plow, because you ended up with sort of land ownership, not in any kind of rational squares, but they became these sort of sliced and diced stained glass mirror layouts of land. And so So there was a process of, it's called the Enclosure Movement. I'm sure you know about it, right? So I'm just telling, not for you, but for the others, right? So the Enclosure Movement.
[14:15] Some of this is familiar.
[14:16] Sorry, go ahead.
[14:17] Yeah, some of this is familiar. It's quite, we went through, we made a lot of errors on our path, and lots of things went wrong. And some of these things sounded good, and the externalities were really bad, and destroyed communities in the end. Yeah.
[14:36] Yeah, so there was a process of rationalizing the land because originally you were sort of bought and sold with the land. You were kind of like livestock, although you weren't exactly a slave, but you certainly didn't have a free market in labor and land. And you started with more of a free market in land, which meant that the best farmers or the best lords could buy up the most land. And they kicked a whole bunch of people off. And then those people made it to the cities. And because land use was being rationalized and better farming techniques were being implemented, you ended up with the excess food that could support an urban industrial, I don't say proletariat, because that's a sort of Marxist term, but industrial workers. And because you had a pool of urban labor, you could start factories and so on. And so, yeah, of course, it was a brutal process. But I mean, all of history is a brutal process. At least that brutal process ended up with a better system down the road.
[15:29] Yeah, I agree. I just think that mechanization came into industry. We have this problem now, this is why I'm asking you, okay? I'm not meant to be difficult with you. People have brought in large amounts of labor, and it has caused wage stagnation and productivity stagnation. And with the AI changes coming it's going to lead to a lot of unemployment so I reckon it will lead to more productivity from other people as well and there will be some disenfranchised people who won't be very active about this and there's this question between the link between keep labor and not investing in technology and what you
[16:13] Brought up about
[16:14] History was making me wonder about these links historical links which I've not really been doing I've been looking at contemporary issues and wondering if there are lessons there that we can learn to
[16:27] Try and predict what's going to happen.
[16:28] Next and especially
[16:30] Because I'm concerned about the migrant labor whose homes this is not their homeland and we don't want to burn it down and they might not feel quite the same way. And I'm wondering where all that's going, you see. So I wasn't trying to catch you out or something.
[16:44] I'm just wondering.
[16:45] I didn't take it personally.
[16:47] It's just that link between deep labor and industrialization and productivity and waste stagnation and productivity stagnation and whatever you want to call what's coming next, the AI robot, right? Whatever that's going to do to the jobs, which is, who knows? Yeah, that was all. Thank you.
[17:07] No, I appreciate that. And I mean, there is a general, I think there's a general idea in the world, because I mean, the first and second world war were just wretched for not obviously not just Europe, but for the world as a whole. And I think there was generally an argument or an idea that's been put forward, that the causes of these wars were white nationalism, that if whites have their own countries, they'll just start these terrible wars. I don't particularly subscribe to that view. And I think it's generally developed by communists to obscure what, in my view, certainly for the Second World War, what, in my view, was the proximate cause of the Second World War, which was the spread of communism. And communism spread in large part because of the First World War. I'm sure, as you know, America was not involved in the First World or until 1917, and because...
[18:04] The American, fresh American troops and resources piled into the Western Front starting 1917. The Germans freaked out, panicked, understandably so, given that if they had lost the war, the leadership would have had a very hard time of it as a whole. And so they funded the Russian revolutionaries, sent them up through Finland with lots of money and weaponry and so on, because the Germans helped foment the Russian Revolution in 1917, to take Russia out of the Eastern Front, because Germany could not fight that two-front war and expect to survive after the entrance of America. If America hadn't come into the First World War, I mean, obviously, history would have been vastly different as a whole, because they would have just fought to a standstill, and eventually everybody would have just gone home. But they would have realized they just can't win. And then there would have been quite the revolution and people would have said, well, what the hell did we fight all that 10 million people dead and four plus years of trench warfare and completely shattered and destroyed generations and so on. And because America entered the war, Germany fomented the revolution in Russia.
[19:21] Which then became a bastion for the spread of communism. And then communists and Christians tend to be sort of natural foes, although the venom really seems to go from the communists to the Christians. And so the communists were murdering Christians, the Holodomor and other things to the Gulag archipelago. As Solzhenitsyn wrote about, the communists were slaughtering the Christians by the millions.
[19:48] And that was extremely alarming.
[19:51] Germany in particular and Russia have been very closely, I wouldn't say exactly allied or united, because Lord knows they've had their wars,
[20:00] but there is in particular a lot of Germans who go to Russia.
[20:06] There was quite a diaspora of Germans in Russia who then fled and brought reports back.
[20:12] Of the slaughter of the Christians by the communists in Soviet Russia. And the Germans were terrified that the communists were going to take over in the 1930s. And it looked like, I mean, it was really, really getting close. And that's part of the whole horror of national socialism is the pendulum that swung and how far it went from fear of communism to embracing The Nazis was appalling. And so, yeah, the whole history would have been different. So, in general, the idea is, well, the Second World War started, or maybe the First World War started, because of a white Christian nationalism, which is, to me, that's an interpretation of history that is not, it doesn't explain very much. And I think it, in fact, is a barrier to understanding. because, of course, in the 19th century, there were nationalistic Christian countries all over Europe, and yet there were not world wars. So the question of sort of, well, why were there all these ghastly, terrible world wars in the 20th century, I think it has a lot to do with, I mean, the First World War was half
[21:25] accidental, and I don't think it was entirely accidental that the First World War started a generation after governments took over education, programmed people to love the state and be more nationalists in terms of they think of the country as the government. And the country is despite the government in many ways. So I think there's this sort of argument that white Christian nationalism starts world wars and therefore it's bad for sort of white Christians to have their own countries because it's just going to start these terrible wars. And again, I think that's revisionist history put forward by the communists to hide the effects that communism had on the provocations and the pendulum swing from hard left communists to hard right fascists, and that fascism is more of a reaction that grows for fear of incipient communism. And so I think that has a lot to do with what's going on in the world at the moment and just to me goes to show how historical interpretations can just be enormously powerful in shaping, perceptions and policies really all around the world.
[22:41] Can I come back to that?
[22:42] Yeah, yeah.
[22:43] Oh, super. Um, that's interesting to hear you frame it the way you do.
[22:48] Um, yeah. Year or so ago,
[22:51] When I was beginning to realize this, I was framing it as, everything's always never again, isn't, or do the opposite of what Adolf would do. And I was looking at architecture and seeing how all the architecture lacks soul or simos or rootedness, tradition, heritage. It doesn't echo your past. It's open society architecture. And I didn't know about the open society. And then I found out, did you know about R. Reno's strong gods?
[23:21] I'm sorry, what was that?
[23:23] R. Reno?
[23:26] Yeah, I don't know him, but go ahead.
[23:28] Okay, in that case, the 1930s Germans, their ideologies spoke very deeply to sole ancestry, heritage, royal family, condition,
[23:45] Blood, power, all that stuff.
[23:47] These are the strong things that have tied nations together forever. Nations in the true sense that you understand, meaning the people as opposed to the country that's the land and the state that is the government. And these are tied nations together forever. This is what ultimately people fight for. Even Soviet Russia with their global Marxism became nationalistic in order to be able to tie the people together. You know, people don't really fight for global things or diversity. They fight for their blood and their kin and their nation and things like that.
[24:23] And these are the strong gods that tie us together.
[24:26] And since the diagnosis of World War II that you give, that the Marxist and the leftist academics give,
[24:38] And is encouraged is
[24:41] That essentially white man bad and if white people feel to their instincts, the deep, the strong gods that tie them together, their religion, their family, their blood, whatever. Um,
[24:55] We'll get another
[24:56] Hitler and everything since it's been like the Marshall plan, it wasn't just money. It was also a load of psychological
[25:04] Techniques and de-Nazification.
[25:06] There's been like a soft version of the Marshall plan done to the whole of Western Europe. And it's been there in the media, in the Hollywood, uh, it's in everything in the way we talk. Because ultimately there were two devils in World War II, and we sided with one of them, and kind of spent the time since justifying why we picked the devil we did in Stalin. And everything's, I mean, I should be clear, because this is the internet, I'm not making apologies. I'm not an apologist for anything that Adolf did, but obviously he was bad. But the other side we sided with was bad as well. And there's not a lot of films about the holodomor, is there? And there's a reason for that. And they've pushed us away from these strong gods. And now we've got deracinated, atomized population. It suited the globalist agenda of global homogenization to have us with a weakened people and weakened culture so that it's easier for them to come in, I suppose, and make their utopia.
[26:13] Well, also, I would say that the Western countries, and this is, you know, we're painting with a very wide brush, and, you know, just to echo what you said, this is analysis. This is not picking sides. I mean, it goes without saying, at least for me, that the National Socialists were monstrous and evil, and it goes without saying that the Communists were monstrous and evil.
[26:38] So we are simply, or at least I am, looking at an analysis. Just analysis.
[26:43] Yeah, not any kind of advocation of either of these terrible systems, these evil systems, But...
[26:51] But they've damaged us.
[26:52] Though, Stefan.
[26:53] They've damaged us.
[26:54] They've damaged us. By the overreaction to what was a great evil,
[27:01] The never-againism, it has been
[27:04] Better to destroy the soul that unites these Western peoples in their nations together than have one of them rise up again.
[27:15] Okay, sorry, you sort of mentioned that already. So let me just throw a little something in here as well. So, of course, it's important to remember as well that if you look at what's going on in sort of Western nations where they're saying, gee, you know, our sovereignty seems to be shaky and so on. Well, I mean, let's look at what happened, particularly late 18th, 19th century. Look at what happened when the Western nations went around coloring in all the maps in the known universe with their own imperialistic colors. And this is, of course, what a lot of people say. If you talk to people in India and they look back at the Raj, so 150 years of British rule. And they felt that their sovereignty, and rightly so, they felt that their domestic sovereignty was taken over and compromised and so on.
[28:12] Right?
[28:12] So when you have Germany and France and England and other countries going around taking over various countries in this sort of race to get resources and color the map according
[28:27] to your country's flag, well, that was terrible for the world as a whole. Now, again, you can make the argument, and I've sort of made some of these cases as well, that there was new technology and better rights and free markets and railways and, you know, democracy. And, you know, all kinds of things were brought forward. But, you know, there's a sort of argument that if you like curry, well, we all have the, as a comedian, I think, makes these jokes. If you like curry, we have the recipe. And the way that Western ideals and ideas should have been spread morally is through argument, through writing, through debate, through language, not through the sword, not through cannon fire, and not through violence. And so, again, trying to look at the world from outside the West, they say, well, gee, when the West is strong, you get world wars and you get imperialism covering most of the planet. Most of the planet.
[29:33] Right?
[29:33] The sun never set on the British Empire. It was a literal truth. And so from outside the West, when you look at the West and you look at history, you say, when these guys are strong, they start world wars. And of course, given the previous history of imperialism, it wasn't like India or Canada or Australia or other countries, South Africa or other countries in Africa, it wasn't like they were immune to these wars going on in Europe because they got conscripted and, you know, there were Canadian regiments, there were Indian regiments, Australian regiments, we sort of know how this all works. So the view is, And again, this is not a moral argument. I'll make that in a sec. This is simply an analysis argument of how it looks to the world. When European countries are very strong, well, you get a lot of pollution. That was a sort of satanic mills. You get a lot of war. You get a lot of imperialism. So strong European countries, and this is a case that you could make very strongly.
[30:41] Strong European countries are bad for the world as a whole. And so this idea that, well, geez, we've got to keep the European countries strong.
[30:50] It doesn't... It doesn't hold water for a lot of the world, and there's not a lot of mourning. And my argument, of course, is that, look, imperialism was not the choice of the British people or the French people or the German people or whoever, right? It wasn't the choice. Imperialism, colonialism, was terrible for the average British man, woman, and child.
[31:18] Taxes went way up.
[31:20] The press gangs, particularly for the Navy, went up. I'm sure you've seen these tankards in England with their glass bottoms, and that's because, you had to look at the glass bottom to see if somebody had dropped a coin in there, because if they dropped a coin in your beer and then you took a sip of the beer, you were considered to have taken the king's coin and you could be yanked off to die of scurvy over the next couple of years in some flotilla floating around the Cape of Good Hope. So for the average person in England, France, Germany, colonialism was a disaster. It was the leaders who were painting the maps with the bloods of their citizens. And you don't want to look at the actions of governments and say they reflect the will of the people. Now, the other problem, of course, is that if it is a sheer tyranny, then it is very hard to make the case that what the government is doing is the will of the people. It's not like what goes on in North Korea or Cuba or wherever. It's not like we look at those countries and say, ah, well, what the leaders are doing reflects the will of the people.
[32:31] That's not what we would understand from that situation. We would say, these leaders have the people in thrall, in slaves, in chains, and so on, right? However, when there's a democracy, when, I mean, I know it was the males and so on, and sometimes just the males who were landowners, but when there is a democracy, I mean, sort of very interesting phenomenon happens from outside the country.
[33:01] Because if there's a democracy, as has been the case in most Western countries for many, many, many decades, when there's a democracy, you can make a pretty strong case that what the government is doing does reflect the will of the people, because if it didn't, they'd vote for something different. And so from outside the West, looking at something like colonialism and world wars, well, it is easy to blame the citizens as a whole, because the perception is, well, the citizens, or at least the men, were voting and supported it and cheered it. And, you know, when there'd be a conquest, there'd be a celebration, there'd be ticker tape parades, and people would be out there cheering. So there is a perception, and, you know, it's arguable how right that perception is, but we can certainly understand the reasoning behind some of it. That if the citizens are relatively free, then what the government does reflects what the citizens want. And again, looking from outside the West. Well, the citizens were kind of bloodthirsty, and they wanted these wars, and they wanted these conquests, and they wanted imperialism, and they wanted colonialism. And again, we can chip away at some of the cause and effect here for sure.
[34:25] It's important to understand the view from outside the West at what happens when European countries are strong. And, you know, look at the Monroe Doctrine and, again, the sort of race for resources in Africa and Asia and China and other places where it's like, man, they just grab everything. It's not nailed down. And then, of course, the cause and effect gets reversed in many ways. Colonialism and imperialism were the result of the material and financial successes of the Industrial Revolution. And so there was wealth. And because of wealth and technology, education, and expertise, because there was all of that, then you could have imperialism.
[35:11] But of course, what often happens is.
[35:12] People in other countries,
[35:14] Because they have their sophists, just like we have our sophists. And they have their sophists who say, well, England, for instance, this is a common view in Africa. This is a common view in India. And I mean, I've traveled to a small degree in Africa and talked to people. And I've, for various reasons, I don't have to get into here. I've talked to quite a lot of Indians over the course of my youth.
[35:40] And the perception, of course, is that it wasn't that England became wealthy through free trade, and then the free trade was scooped up, as I talked about at the beginning of this show, the free trade was scooped up by the government and then used for imperialism. No, no, no. The argument is that imperialism stole the resources from Africa, from not quite so much from China, because it was never quite conquered, Hong Kong, right? Not China, but particularly from India and from Africa that the resources were taken. And that's why the European countries became rich, that it was a massive theft and stealing. And again, we can argue about the cause and effect. And I mean, in my view, cause and effect is pretty clear. Agricultural revolution produces excess food, excess food, produces the urban proletariat. Urban proletariat and a free market in labor introduces investments in capital machinery and efficiencies, and this produces a lot of wealth and machinery. That wealth and machinery is scooped up by the state to go on international adventures of conquest and subjugation, which then creates blowback, which we're currently, I think, really going through at the moment. So.
[37:02] It's a lot of complicated deep history. And it is, of course, the sophists in every country try to turn the people against each other rather than saying, look, we're all controlled by this politics.
[37:16] This statist apparatus.
[37:18] And, of course, I generally have much more in common with my brother in subjugation in India or Africa than I do with those doing the subjugation, subjugating all over the world. But because the West is perceived as democratic and is more so than most societies and countries, then it is perceived that the average person really was very happy and loved colonialism and took great pride in the German Empire and the French Empires and in the British Empire because there's all these stamps and commemorative plates and ticket tape parades and so on. So it's perceived to be a joyous thing. And part of it, of course, was trying to paint the world red to match your flag or to use the blood of your citizens and the victims of other cultures and countries and continents to paint various countries the color of your flag. And that certainly was a big thing. But there also was, I mentioned this on Twitter the other day, there is the whole christian mission as well and the christian mission is something like this that.
[38:32] God created all human beings in his image and this is sort of the blank slate theory the blank slate theory is shared by both the right and the left and is at least you know that that everyone can be everything and i can be freddie mercury and and you can be natalie portman
[38:51] and whatever we just need the right circumstances and encouragement or whatever.
[38:55] And so, on the right, particularly sort of conservative Christian right.
[39:02] Argument is, or the perception, really the foundation of belief, is that everyone can be like you. You just have to teach them the same as you were taught. Everyone can be like you. Now, the sort of reasons as to why there are questions about that and challenges about that I've talked about in the past. I don't really need to get into here. But of course, the idea was that proselytizing the gospel of Jesus to all of the seven continents and the four corners of the world was a Christian mission. And if the local government interfered in that, then you simply would replace the local government with something more friendly to your interests and usually with quite a bit of bloodshed. And that way, you could bring the Christian gospel to the world and everyone would be better and peace would reign supreme and so on. And it doesn't work. It doesn't work. What you force on people, they resist, right? We can look at the residential schools in Canada, right? For many decades, the residential schools were trying to turn the indigenous population into good little white European clones. And it doesn't work. Whatever you forcefully and forcibly impose upon a population, they will resist, and sometimes unto the death.
[40:28] And so the left says, well, there's no difference between the bosses and the workers, right? The bosses are just meaner. The bosses are just nastier. The bosses are just willing to steal. And so if you take the means of production from the bosses and you give it to the workers, then you get paradise because everyone's just the same the idea that there might be people who have, a sort of staggering singular brilliance in the allocation of capital and labor and can just produce like like like i mean elon musk would be a perfect example right like the man is just a productive.
[41:09] Genius uh he is
[41:11] I mean that there's tons of examples of of this throughout history but they're extremely rare in any given epoch. I mean, the guy's created, what, half a dozen, multi-billion dollar companies and, you know, casually transforms not just the business environment, but free speech with X and casually transforms politics with his trying to, I mean, he spent a huge amount of money to try and get Donald Trump, or I guess to get Donald Trump re-elected. And that was kind of matching what was found out through, data borrowers through the NGO funding system that was set up. I mean, to some degree by the left, but to a smaller degree by the right, where you got this huge amount of money being funneled through USAID to various left-wing causes. So he kind of matched that. I mean, just an absolute productive genius with more companies. I think the only thing he has more often companies is children.
[42:12] With various baby
[42:13] Mamas. But the idea that there's an X factor that's fundamentally different with these sort of productive geniuses, and people aren't just interchangeable. They're not just these blobs. They're just clay that can be molded into anything that anyone wants. The idea that there are very hard limits and possibilities to people that you You can't just take, I mean, this was a movie called Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, wherein Eddie Murphy, who was kind of a street hustler and con man, became a brilliant stock trader. And the brilliant stock trader ended up being down and out. It's actually quite a funny movie. Eddie Murphy, of course, a brilliant, brilliant comedian. And that's the general idea that you just can put people wherever you want in life, and the bomb is going to flourish in the corner office. And the guy who's in the corner office, gee, he just has to have a series of misfortunes or bad luck. And the next thing you know, he's a street hustler just trying to get by and get his next meal and so on. And that is just, it's all circumstances. And again, it's quite a good comedy, but the argument is very sort of deep and powerful that it is only environment, that shapes us as people. There's nothing innate.
[43:37] On the left. On the right, it's that we're all created in God's image, and therefore, we are all fundamentally interchangeable.
[43:46] And those arguments, I wish they were. I mean, I deeply, deeply, deeply wish that science supported these arguments. And none of this has to do with anything to do with morality or human rights. I mean, everybody must and should be equal before the law and everybody has the same rights and everybody should be accorded the same deep respect for our humanity as a whole. So that sort of goes without saying, but saying that everyone has the equal right of opportunity doesn't mean that everyone has the equal right of outcome. I mean, there's a singer, Colm Wilkinson, absolutely staggeringly great a Broadway singer. He originated, if I remember rightly, he originated the role of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables. And I unfortunately, I don't think I got to see him live, but I listened to the soundtrack or the recording of Les Miserables many, many times. And an absolutely fantastic singer. He did some, I wouldn't say solo work, but he did some work, his own album of Broadway tunes, Summertime and other, it ain't necessarily so. So, he's an incredible vocalist. He actually, in the movie, he played the priest, the older priest, to Hugh Jackman's Jean Valjean. The absolutely terrible movie, by the way. Should have been infinitely better, but they ended up not recording things in a studio.
[45:11] Which is not what you want or need.
[45:13] And so... Let's say it's an open audition. Oh, there's Les Miserables is starting up, and it's an open audition for the role of Jean Valjean. And, you know, let's say there's me. I like to warble from time to time, but I'm not particularly good at it.
[45:31] Let's say there's me, and there's Colm Wilkinson, you know, up for Jean Valjean. Well, who's going to get the role? Well, we both have the right, and should have the rights, if it's an open audition, to go and sing and audition and so on. But he's going to get the role, and he should get the role. Because if I get the role, nobody's going to hear of Les Mis, because they're going to be like, well, that guy, I don't really think he can pull it off, because I don't have the falsetto, I don't have the tenor. And he also is a very good actor as well. Or Michael Crawford, who originated the role of the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera, who was actually originally a comedic actor from my youth. I didn't even know the guy could sing, but he can belt it out like nobody's business. And I remember when I was in theater school, I put up a student who was coming in the next year. I put him up for a week or so because he wanted to come and see the theater school and sort of understand how it works. And I remember he was a really good singer, and he was singing softly, deftly, music's just around you. And he's just like, like the soul take you where you long to be. And he was just like belting it out. And I was like, I can do that falsetto, but I can't do it with a belt. I have a deeper baritone. And he was like, no, no, no, just come in like, you're just coming in slightly above the note. And I'm like, bro, my voice does not work like that.
[46:55] It doesn't do that. It is not just a matter of tweaking or a certain particular approach. Well, use a little bit more of your chest voice and a little bit less of your head voice. Like, no, no, no, I don't have the voice for that. It doesn't really matter what magical aspect of things. So, I mean, again, just looking at something like, I mean, most people will at one point say, hey, I wonder if I can sing. I remember when I was working up north, and I was driving around, and I was like, I tried belting out the song Home by the Sea, where we relive our lives in what we tell you. I was like trying to belt it out, and I'm like, no, I can't really, I mean, I can't really do what Phil Collins can do. He's actually got a surprisingly good voice when you really listen to it. So, and even Genesis, after Peter Gabriel left, they had 400 singers audition. They couldn't find the guy with the right voice, and that's when Phil Collins stepped up and said, oh, fine, I'll do it. And everyone should be available. Everyone should have the same rights, property rights, the rights of non-aggression.
[47:58] And the requirements for peace, reason, and keeping your contracts. All of these things should be available to all human beings, unless, of course, there's some very specific, particularly cognitive defect. You know, somebody has, you know, they didn't get enough oxygen when they were being born, or they got their brain half eaten away with meningitis or something, and they really can't function independently. That's sort of a different matter. But that's a damaged, normal human being, not an average human being. But yeah, human beings as a whole, we are all equal before the law, and we all have the same rights of dignity and so on. And.
[48:41] Equality in the market leads to inequality in outcomes. And that's difficult, and that's uncomfortable for people. I get that, and I think we all understand that. I mean, I'm sure there were lots of people out there who'd love to be, I don't know, a supermodel. What was that woman who said, I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day? I can't remember her name, but she was some model. I mean, you'd like to be Claudia Schiffer in her prime or or Eva Longeria. She was more of an actress, but very pretty.
[49:12] And yeah, it'd be kind of cool to be six foot four, six packs, six figures. You know, it'd be kind of nice, right? But that's just not the way that the great, giant, delightful spread of genetics works on this planet. So, this idea that equality of opportunity leads to inequality of outcome is very uncomfortable for a lot of people. And that's in part because we can't see inside the mind.
[49:38] I mean, it's not like Elon Musk.
[49:39] I mean, he makes thousands and thousands and thousands of times more than the average person. But he's not thousands and thousands of times taller or stronger or anything like that. He just looks like, because we can't see the dimensions of the brain from the outside. It's still three pounds of wetware in this little skull prison. That's all we've got to see.
[50:00] And it's hard. And of course, if somebody's singing, we can hear how well or how poorly they sing. If somebody's going to be a hair model you can see how good or not good their hair is even if somebody's going to be an actor you can give them an audition and see how well they act um, but and if somebody's going to be a drummer you can have them drum for you and see how good they are but this sort of mystical magical productivity stuff is really tough for people to process it's not obvious it's not obvious like why is it that the ceo gets paid 300 times more than and i think the ratio is only continuing to increase but why is it that they get paid so much it's hard for people to process he's not you know like he's not 300 times better at the job than i am he's not 300 and it's really hard to know and even economists have trouble explaining it sometimes really hard to know why does someone get paid 300 times more why does brad pitt get paid you know a thousand times more than the the extra per minute or whatever it is right i mean they're both the same height say well he's good looking but he's not a thousand times better good looking or whatever right and the sort of x factor but even even with brad pitt you can see him do his acting stuff and like it's interesting and compelling and all of that he's willing to get hit in the ear by ed norton in fight club rather than in the shoulder so um so the idea that.
[51:28] Of opportunity leads to very wide disparities in outcome, it's very uncomfortable for people. And it's very hard for, again, just sort of basic genetic sexual market value. You know, if somebody wants to take a woman on a cool date, you know, I guess what Mark Zuckerberg had this $100 million yacht or something like that. It's like, well, you know, I watched this documentary. It was a documentary. It was kind of like a day in the life of it. It was these Toronto real estate brokers, some Iranian couple who were very cool, and then this sort of white guy. And the white guy was taking some girl out on a date. And he had the helicopter pick her up and flew her down to Niagara where they went on wine tasting. And, you know, okay, that's a cool expensive date, probably a couple of thousand dollars. And if you're just saying, hey, you know, I'd really like to take you out to to get your coffee and a piece of pie at the local diner it's a little hard feels hard to compete and this sort of resentment sexual resentment genetic resentment uh um.
[52:35] Competition resentment it's really tough you know everybody wants to be the singer on the stage because the singer gets the girls or whatever it is or the boys if you're a female, So there's a lot of resentment. And Christianity used to deal with this resentment by saying that those who are first in the earth will be last in the future. And they sort of dealt with the resentment that the less able have towards the more competent. But it's really, it's hard tension. And because of this hard tension, like we just, politics just messes things up because politics is just too big a weapon for the less successful than the resentful to use against the successful and to strip them of resources and to take their stuff. To try and equalize things, that is, it's too tempting and too powerful a weapon. It's kind of why we just have to have a free market and let the chips fall where
[53:25] they may. So, sorry, long speech.
[53:26] Long speech. I appreciate everyone's patience as I sort of work through this stuff, but I think we need to recognize that the world as a whole has some hostility towards, you know, nationalistic white Christian societies for reasons of world wars, which dragged them in, for reasons of imperialism, and for reasons of, quote, excess wealth or excess success.
[53:55] And we can
[53:56] Reason with people. We can say, well, you know, it certainly wasn't me. I didn't do any imperialism. In fact, my father was Irish, and Southern Irish, and Southern Ireland didn't participate in all in imperialism, or even in the Second World War. It was neutral, so. So, but, you know, there's just this general collective negativity and that is the price I think that the West pays are paid by not continuing the march or progress towards smaller and smaller governments, but allowing our wealth to swell the spread of government around the world, which has created a lot of resentment and frustration and anger, which I can certainly understand some of it for sure.
[54:35] All right, Lorraine, are you back? Are you back? No, I don't think so. All right. Is there anything else that people wanted to? This is an error adding you as a guest. Anything else that people wanted to ask or say or talk about or question or criticize or comment on? Again, freedomain.com/donate. And remember, if you're a donor, a subscriber at freedomain.locals.com or subscribestar.com/freedomain. And I have just put out the, I did today, the audiobook reading of the first chapter of my new book, which I'm ridiculously pleased with. I am just ridiculously pleased with this new book, and I'm quite thrilled to have it out there. And I hope that other people like it. And certainly, it's just a, it's sort of a draft reading. I think that the text is pretty solid, but I'm still trying to figure out the best way because it's a book, like I've never written a book like this before. And so this is trying to figure out how to read this book is a real challenge. So I hope that you'll check it out. Again, you can get that at freedomain.locals.com or subscribestar.com/freedomain. I really do appreciate everyone's support at freedomain.com/locals.
[55:48] All right. Well, I think I have stunned everyone with deep and revelatory truths about the world as a whole. And I really do thank you all for giving me the liberty and the platform to be able to make these kinds of connections and these kinds of speeches. It is a great and humble honor.
[56:06] And I hope that I do you proud.
[56:08] And if there's anything I can do to improve what it is that I'm doing, I would absolutely love to hear from you. You can always email me, host, H-O-S-T, host at freedomain.com. I'd love to get your thoughts. Have a wonderful weekend. We will speak to donors Sunday, 11 a.m. Lots of love from up here, my friends. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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