text:
Free Domain Radio - Timestamps (Jomyon)
Author: Jomyon
Added: April 18th, 2016
Jomyon on June 28, 2015, 03:04:35 PM: Here's the Mediafire file with timestamps. Sorry I took a while I had to transfer them from my ipod and sorry if there's too much there. Some of the content isn't particularly interesting and I just wanted to take note of it but other stuff is very interesting so I recommend people read through it or at least skim through using the "tags" to help.
I can't remember why I missed out podcasts 1-4, 8, 10, 31, 32, 36 and 51. It was maybe because they were him reading his articles, therefore it was very formal and didn't show his personality. Or maybe there was nothing I thought was worthy timestamping. 31 and 32 were deleted by mistake. 36 and 51 didn't have any content I thought was worth timestamping.
The tags are only a rough guide to tell you what kind of content is featured within the timestamps. It's not meant to describe the podcast as a whole, just the timestamps shown. Press CTRL+F to search for something specific.
Tags Guide
If he is talking about a particular subject (like self-defence in podcast 5) then I will put that but here's other tags I commonly use:
Usually a personal anecdote or anything to do with his personal life, past or present. Or if he is talking about his own personality.
Any kind of philosophical, logical, political, scientific argument or claim.
DEFOO
Anything relating to DEFOOing. This often crosses over with the cult tag.
Any content I think is "cult-like", where Stefan resembles/acts like a cult leader.
Content where Stefan has a high opinion of himself. Content I consider to be egotistical/narcissistic.
FDR 5: USING THE STATE FOR SELF-DEFENSE
FDR 6: morality is not easy - surviving the cynics
FDR 7: the argument from morality(or how we will win)
FDR 9: understanding the stock Market
FDR 11 nagging the state
FDR 12 imbalance of power Washington convention centre
FDR 13: proof disproof and deities
FDR 14: the state and god part 1
FDR 16: dealing with non-libertarians part 1
FDR 18: health care part 1
FDR 19: voodoo economists
FDR 20: the state and sports
FDR 21: they hate us because we're good? Part 1
FDR 25: validating the senses
FDR 26: The Drug Wars part one
FDR 27: the drug wars part 2
FDR 28: the economics of spirituality
FDR 30: why state violence always grows
FDR 31 and 32 were deleted by mistake
FDR 33: arguments against morality - and the welfare state
FDR 34: moral responsibility and social security
FDR 35: race and the state (part 1)
FDR 36: No Timestamps
FDR 37: what is libertarianism?
FDR 38: The Death Cult Of Narnia
FDR 39: The Economics Of Conformity
FDR 40: Fleeing Eden
FDR 41: Power or Virtue? (A Love Story)
FDR 42: Unions (part 1)
FDR 44: Knowledge and Moral Responsibility
FDR 45: Random Drives Through Tangent City
FDR 46: Voting
FDR 47: Emails of the week!
FDR 48: Freedom and the Great Depression
FDR 49: Artists, Capitalism and Intolerance (part 1)
FDR 52: War (part 1)
FDR 54: Economic Choices and 9/11
FDR 55: unnatural spiritualism
FDR 56: Emails of the week - and free will!
FDR 57: Free Will part 2
FDR 58: Poverty part 1
FDR 60: Loving the Lefties
FDR 61: The Fallacy of Left and Right
FDR 62: Capitalism and Profit - Common Misperceptions
FDR 63: War, Profit and the State
FDR 64: Roads (Part 1)
FDR 66: Evil Doing Overtime at Wal Mart
FDR 67: Property Rights
FDR 68: Helping the Poor
FDR 69: Emails of the Week - Jan 25 2006
FDR 70: How to control a human soul
Tags: Self-defence, Personal, Ego
1:15: 'I've always had a mania for intellectual consistency and simplicity and clarity and ocham's razor and all that kind of stuff'
2:47: 'I grew up in a pretty violent family I guess, my mother and my brother, uh my father left when I was very young, my mother and my brother were both emotionally and physically violent people and I never, never raised a hand in self-defense, I mean call me a weeny whatever you like but I just was never able to justify within my own heart and my own soul the idea of fighting back against those that had done me wrong. And I guess part of it was I always had this mania for consistency and was against violence as long as I can remember and the second of course is that I think that deep down in my gut I got a very strong sense that it wasn't going to work. I mean if my mother was gonna hit me and I was let's say I dunno 8 years old well what would hitting back do? All it would is it would escalate right? And of course I wasn't bigger than my mother in those days and by the time I did get to be big enough to hit her back without it escalating I had already gotten a good deal of the theory down about non-violence and no longer really felt that it was a good thing to do I guess morally. Now don't get me wrong I don't forgive my mother and I don't like her and I don't associate with her in any way shape or form because you know, I think she is morally evil and corrupt and a bad person 'cause you know to me beating up on kids, pretty bad, that's about the worst thing you can do'
4:50: 'I guess one other time when I was uh Probably around 13 or 14 i was playing with a friend of mine on our balcony I can't remember exactly what we were doing I think I was forcing him to participate in one of my radio plays I was very big on writing back then and eh, Something slipped and my elbow went into his face I was trying to pull a tape out or something like that and you know he was hurt his eyes stang he started crying and uhh I just felt so terrible even though it was an accident, I just felt absolutely terrible and of course the idea of being violent even through accidental means was just repulsive to me and really those are the only two times that I've ever eh I guess the one extreme being that my childhood was subjected to quite a lot of violence but the other being that one incident that I recall very clearly causing somebody else direct injury with my body and just feeling ugh unbelievably terrible about it so I mean for me at least the theory that if you're bullied you then become a bully is just not valid because I was bullied continually and have just since the very beginning of my life had this absolute horror and hatred of violence both physical violence obviously the whacking and beating but emotional violence too you know the kinda screechy screaming that certain people get into when they don't get their way and so on I consider that to be pretty horrendous behaviour as well. So what does this mean in terms of moral theory. Well I guess I grew up in a pretty bad neighbour I had a violent family, some of my friends I mean they weren't exactly fistycuff kinda guys but they did still continue to, I guys they were a bit more emotionally violent than physically violent although I've never known anybody who has been involved in a fist-fight I knew one guy once who was a network administrator for my company who claimed to have been a bouncer and had to defuse some fights and this and that but I don't know if it was real or I dunno just bravado, so i don't know anybody who's ever used any physical violence again except for my own family and I have never myself used any form of physical violence that was intended, that was not just oops wrong place wrong time you and my elbow. So I guess what I'm saying is that I've never had any need for self-defence and I would bet that most of the people listening to this have also never had any need for self-defence, I mean if someone did come up and I dunno stuck a knife in my back and said 'give me your wallet id be like yeah here's my wallet, want the keys to my car? Here's my wedding ring? I mean anything, that's just stuff that can be replaced who cares? Right?'
'I've never actually seen self-defence in operation'
8:36: 'I just really don't get the idea that self-defence is the way to go... An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, what I would much rather do is set up a society where violence was kind of virtually more or less non-existent. I certainly believe that is possible because it certainly is possible in my life that I'm able to get through the day without using any violence.'
17:57: 'my mother was clever enough to recognise that England was heading towards socialist hell and so we fled England in 1977 shortly before thatcher came into power and of course where did we flee to but to Canada which is, you know, North America's socialist loony-bin corner'
23:48: 'I've never had anybody mug me in my life okay once when I was 11 I guess somebody, you know, said 'give me your lunch money' or whatever.'
24:00: 'I've never been in a fistfight, I've never known anybody who's been in a fistfight, I've never known anybody to hit anybody else I have never known any of this to occur and I don't know anybody with whom this has occurred and it's not like I grew up in some kind of gated community where I just didn't know any bad people of course I did, I mean I grew up in a pretty bad neighbourhood and I had a pretty violent family but none the less I just don't know that many people who use violence. Even the cops that I've talked to don't like using violence, I mean they're full of bizarre illusions about the good that they're doing and the need for their services and the fact that they're not thugs is somehow defined for them in a way that makes them comfortable but they still don't like using violence. so what I'm trying to say is that a world without violence, a world where violence just is not part of peoples social interaction is absolutely and entirely possible and if you doubt me just have a look at your own life and look at how you resolve disputes, look at how you deal with things.'
27:16: 'so to sum up, I don't think that the principle of self-defence is particularly valid. I can't find, except in the most extreme situations that are so unbelievably rare like who cares right? Like yeah I work out even though I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. so you know self-defence I really don't care about as far as the principle goes, and the problem that I have with the principle of self-defence is that it opens up all these possibilities for the use of violence and the institutionalisation of violence in the form of the state'
28:48: 'If you don't have a government that (violence) just doesn't happen'
Tags: Personal, Arguments, DEFOO, Cult, Christina
16:32: 'the idea that we can argue for self-interest is complete nonsense, nobody's self-interest is particularly served by volunteering for an army or being drafted into an army or paying 50% of taxes to increase the national debt to cripple the economy for their children or to follow religious tenants that, you know, cause complete neurosis within the personality or any of these things. Self-interest is absolutely not at the basis of most human decisions, or if it is then the self-interest is entirely concerned around morality'
19:28: 'if you change your moral beliefs fundamentally and start putting them into practice everything in your life is going to fall apart.'
19:36: 'And I mean, I say this from both logical, a logical understanding of the matter and some fairly intense personal experience.'
21:58: 'so what happened was that my um business associates, I was in business with my brother and another gentleman, that completely fell apart um I stopped seeing my family, I stopped seeing my extended family, I broke up with my then girlfriend who I'd been seeing off for, I guess seeing for about 7 years and living with for 2. Most of my friendships in the period since have fallen away and you know the only consolation that I have is a magnificent one or two remaining friendships and you know an unbelievable relationship with my beautiful, beautiful wife and that is you know, more than makes up for all of the nonsense that I got rid of before. Now I'm a pretty diplomatic fellow, I don't raise my voice really, I don't yell at people, I can be emphatic but I'm always open to being contradicted if I mean I'm just trying to find the truth right?'
26:20: 'When you ask people to change their ethical position you are asking them to give up their friends, their family, their community, their, the respect of their children, possibly their marriage.'
27:12: 'the same thing that's happened to me has also happened to my wife, she now no longer sees her sister, she no longer sees her mother and father, she no longer has any contact with her extended family and with one exception, with whom she does not talk about ideas of any kind, all of her friends have rejected her. Why? Because she's curious about the truth and she's not willing to take wrote(?) answers.'
33:15: 'When John is faced with an argument he doesn't know how to respond to it so he, and not knowing how to respond to it is exactly the same as realising that he doesn't have an identity, that he does not have a self, that he does not have a personality, that all he does is just parrot what everybody else says and that is terrifying to stare into that kind of void of identity, to stare into that kind of emptiness and that kind of conformity and to realise that by claiming to be somebody who thinks, you have been a hypocrite your whole life. Because it's fine to not think but you've gotta be honest about not thinking, like if I don't know how to sail a boat i should be honest about it. to stare into that kind of void and to realise that if you accept that you can't think and don't have an identity and start taking steps towards learning how to think and developing an identity that your entire social circle will fall away from you and you will be rejected and scorned and ostracised for the rest of your life, well eh, not to pleasant a prospect. I mean the only consolation is the truth and that your remaining relationships will be rich in a way that you can't imagine right now.'
Tags: Cult, Ego
19:55: 'for too long we have been on the defences crying our truths from lonely peaks and all too often only to each other. It is high time that we took the offensive and began to cross examine those who are so sure of their right to use violence to achieve their ends. It will not be easy and from here I do speak from personal experience but it is essential. It is right and good to ask such questions and if you do decide that you are brave and strong enough to start using the argument from morality well then you will already have joined that tiny group of honest thinkers that have forever saved mankind.'
Tags: Personal (career)
2:08: 'In 1995 I started a software company with my brother'
2:12: 'we first went round with another business partner to doctors and lawyers and people that we knew, accountants and so on who wanted to put in 5K or 10K and we raised about 80K we started the business there and over the next couple of years through a ferocious amount of hard work we grew the business to 4 Million dollars a year in revenue and then we sold it in 2000 and it got sold again in 2001.'
Tags: Parents, DEFOO, Christina
10:56: 'You see people who have mean, abusive or alcoholic or destructive or violent or whatever parents and you know, they'll sit down with them and stage interventions and say 'I'd like it if X or I'd like it if Y'. You know, they'll sit there and complain and say ' I can't believe this person, my parent did this or that', you know, which is also complete nonsense, this, happens with siblings as well by the way, but that's also complete nonsense, I mean, if somebody has shown themselves to be, you know, emotionally abusive or violent or addicted to alcohol or drugs or whatever, unpleasant to deal with and problematic, and, I mean, they're not gonna change. I mean, they're absolutely not gonna change, certainly not if they've done it to their children.'
11:50: Whenever I talk about the government she(wife) says well, you know, what are people's first experience of authority? Tends to be their parents or their teachers and so on, who tend to be, you know, a little on the aggressive side or a little on the bullying side and so on. And so people get their idea of the government from their parents and from their teachers, which, I mean of course, I mean, my wife said it so I believe (laugh) it's right and it's true.'
Tags: Arguments, Violence, Happiness
00:33: 'violence always creates a win/lose environment'
1:45: 'the only thing that creates a win/win situation is investments which improve productivity over time or over energy'
4:25: 'there are two parts to happiness I guess you could say, one is to live a moral life and be a good person and be courageous and be virtuous and all of that good stuff. And that's time consuming and difficult much like getting into shape is time consuming and difficult. The rewards are great, the level of difficulty is not minimal. So the other route to happiness is you can just uh take a nice juicy hit of heroin. Now I my self, never tried any drugs of any kind I was a smoker for a little while and I like a glass of wine from time to time but I've never even tried marijuana or anything like that. I just feel that I have kind of a good racehorse between my ears and I don't want to steroid it up in any way.'
Tags: Religion, Communism, Knowledge
43:40: 'So I think it's fairly safe to say that if we look in the modern world where you have a dominance of theological beliefs within society you have a pretty wretched state of affairs. Now you can also talk about communist societies or heavily socialistic societies especially those based on the sort of 'religion is the opiate of the masses' theologies, sorry oops bit of a slip of the tongue there, well it's not that far off. Economic philosophies and political philosophies of Marx and Engels and so on. Well these societies of course came out of strongly religious societies without going through a separation of church and state, in fact I can't think of a single example of a country that had the separation of church and state and then ended up as a communist entity, it always goes from a heavy theological society to a heavily communistic society, if you look at sort of Mexico at the turn of the 20th century, and you look at Cambodia, and you look at Russia, all the other sort of communist societies such as Cuba you go from heavy religion to heavy communism, and communism is a subset of religion where you have the state in the centre instead of god... But basically both communism and theology are subsets of irrationalities and collectivism'
46:40: 'let's look at how one goes about developing knowledge within reality. Well there's sort of two approaches right? The first approach is to sit down and pray for it like if you wanna discover the nature of reality or whether there's such a thing as atoms and so on, you can either sort of sit down and pray and hope for the answer to be revealed to you in a sort of blinding flash of biblical insight. Or you can create theories, subject them to experiments, reproducible experiments, submit them to peer review, present them at scientific conferences. Basically to use the scientific method of logical construction of theories followed by empirical validation of results.'
Tags: Donations, Ego
0:00: 'hello this is Stefan Molyneux from freedomain radio. Thank you so much for downloading these podcasts. I hope you are enjoying them and getting an enormous amount of value out of them. I do request 50cents a podcast in terms of donations to help defray the costs of dedicated servers, bandwidth and food and shelter for the philosopher.'
31:25: 'when I was a kid I was supposed to cheer for sort of my local football team in England. And you know, they were all Jamaican and had thick accents and had just been bought from some opposing team the year before. So even as a kid I remember thinking like nothing against the Jamaicans but you know, okay so last year I was booing these people, these exact same people, but now because they've changed who's paying them and they've got a different sweater on, I'm supposed to cheer these exact same people.'
Tags: Religion, Personal
8:34: 'Children are bullied into believing in religion. I myself, was, hmm, I wouldn't say bullied. Definitely there was a lot of social pressure to be religious, when I was a child, and I was in a boarding school in England where you know we went to church a couple of times a week and you know we had preachers who, you know, I think were on the most part dull (laugh), I do remember one fairly young guy came through one day and said he sort of, you know, gave the Milton-esk story this way, that God threw the Devil in a pond and put up a big sign saying 'No Fishing', which I thought was cute, you know, I was 6 or 7 years old when I first heard that in boarding school and I guess I thought it was kinda cute I guess I did find it a little weird that we had to dress up so much to go to worship a god who said, you know 'it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven' and you know Christ says 'all he who would follow me cast off your worldly possessions' and blah blah blah.'
28:36: 'I sort of remember the very first day that I was in university at Glendon, which was a campus of York University in Canada. I was sitting in the front row and I was taking a course in Canadian history, god help me, and the professor, she sort of, you know, I had my hand up I was keener, this was before I ran into the rotating blades of mental disintegration that higher academia is for anybody who thinks for themselves. So I was keener sitting up front asking questions, and at one point the teacher turned and hurled her glasses at me and, you know, I guess I've always had fairly good reflexes and so I caught them and then she turned and said to the class as a whole 'what just happened?' and she said that I couldn't answer, right? So that's fine. And man it was amazing you couldn't believe the number of different stories that came out about what happened.'
Tags: Cult, Ego, Personal, Poverty
00:44: 'how do we deal with, let's say, the unenlightened. Which is to say, just about everybody.'
2:10 'I certainly don't expect to see the end of the state in my lifetime, I'm 39 years old. And I don't care, really. I mean it would be nice, but you know what's really a lot more exciting, if I were able to see the end of the state in my lifetime it would be because it was almost upon us. In which case I would have missed out all the excitement and honour of being, you know, around at the beginning of things. Of course I know it's not the beginning of things intellectually, but I would like to think the contributions that I'm trying to add to the debate in terms of the argument from morality and forgetting the argument from effect and, you know, trying to develop a consistent defence of libertarian morality.'
2:56: 'I've studied mostly the history of philosophy through my graduate work, not so much the history of libertarian philosophy.'
Thinks he is 'laying the foundations' of 'where we may end up'
Says 'the effects of truth can't be predicted.'
7:05: Talking about the fight for liberty
'it's an exciting fight, it is the greatest fight, in my mind, in the history of the world. It's the greatest fight in the history of ideas. The idea of establishing a universal morality is something that not even Socrates, Plato or Aristotle were able to achieve. They put forward some great arguments but, you know, they weren't able to finish the case in a way that was provable. So, you know, this is the greatest fight in the history of the world. This is the most noble cause in the history of the world, both past and future. So, you know, to be involved in this to whatever degree is a very exciting thing, and you know, something to tell your grandchildren about no matter what conditions your living in.'
17:50: 'there's absolutely nothing wrong with being poor whatsoever. I mean poor is a perfectly valid choice. You know, there are enormous benefits to being poor. You know, you don't have to, you know, I mean, what is it, yesterday, two days ago I had to spent four hours driving to a meeting, four hours driving back, my wife dropped me off at the airport, I flew in the evening to Washington, I spent the day at a conference, I flew back and got home at 10:30pm. If you're poor you don't have to do that. You know, ehhh, I enjoyed the meeting, I enjoyed the conference but basically it's like a 12/1 ratio of travel/meetings. Yet poor people don't have to do that, they just gotta show up to Tim Hortons. You don't have to work overtime. You don't have to go in on Sundays. You know, if you find a way not to work at all then that's pretty sweet. I mean if somebody gave me the option of a fixed income for free I sure as heck would be doing a lot more podcasts and a lot less managing of the software business. I mean, I enjoy my job but it's not my primary calling.'
31:06: 'A friend of mine who was my roommate in university, when I went to McGill, was a biologist.'
Tags: Ego, Personal, Christina, Cult, DEFOO, Family, Truth
1:08: 'I know I'm British and I know that I was raised, you know, that you get along and your pleasant and your nice and all that. However, I sort of have been handed this lance or this desire and hopefully ability to communicate the ideas of freedom in a way that is compelling for people. So even though my nature is to be conciliatory and to be pleasant and to not ruffle feathers, unfortunately the truth demands a lot more from me in regards to that'
8:24: 'Just about everybody, except maybe you and me and my wife are threatened by truth'
Talking about people's response to 'truth'
8:29: 'and of course because it's truth they can't have any decent arguments against it. And so they're just gonna give you all these social cues like 'oh yeah, he's kinda crazy, oh yeah this is his thing, this is his obsession, he's just really into this I don't know why, maybe, you know, he had a bad teacher who was to authoritarian with him so now he just knee jerk reacts against authority and, you know, he likes to be different and he likes to preach things that are out of the mould, he likes to portray himself as a rebel and act all, you know, 'I'm a freedom lover''
14:58: 'when I finally decided, I guess about 7 or 8 years ago, to really start living these beliefs rather than just reading them and to really not take any crap from these people who, you know, are pretending that they're right and using ad hominem attacks and so on.'
15:14: 'Then when that began to happen my whole life changed, everything, I can't even tell you in the space of my drive home how much everything changed in the course of my life. You know, I broke up with my 7-year long girlfriend, and eh I stopped seeing my brother I was in business with him for 6 years or 7 years, we ran a company together, you know, I had to break that relationship off. I had friends for 20 years that i simply stopped seeing, because I stopped backing down when they would say things that were just nonsense, and I stopped backing down when they insulted me, and I stopped backing down when they would put down the cause of truth and when they would be illogical and when they would insult things that I really value, I just simply stopped backing down.'
16:09: 'And the incredible thing is that those relationships just ended like in about 12 minutes. I mean you had to be there. I'll write about it someday in a novel but, you know, nobody, few people will have the stomach to read this kind of stuff. Not only did those relationships end in about 12 minutes but they've never restarted, not once since then.'
16:30: 'I have kept one friend, one friend. And formerly I had many friends that, you know, I kept around for a long time, who viewed my commitment to libertarianism as, you know, 'it's kind of like a personal quirk', you know, 'we know the guy had a bad childhood and this is obviously how he's doing it', you know, 'he grew up in a violent environment so now he mistakes the government for his parents', and I mean everybody had their pet-theory as to why I was attracted to the truth, right? Nobody even remotely considered the possibility that it might actually be true, what I think and believe. So they, you know, they substituted psycho-analytical nonsense for any sort of philosophical or rational examination of propositions.'
17:15: 'And so I've kept one friend who is a brilliant guy, named John and, you know, he is not afraid to look at questions and, you know, for a long time he was way further out than I was in terms of examining the truth about society and so on. And he's the, you know, the one (laugh) you know, the one person who, you know, has joined me on this journey and, you know, I love him dearly and I'm very glad he's with me.'
17:44: 'And the other of course is my wife, my beautiful wife, who, I can also tell you (laugh) has gone through exactly the same thing. Now it's not something that I imposed upon her, umm, you know, she is a naturally, she is naturally drawn to sort of truth and integrity, partly due to her training but mostly due to her nature, because lord knows there's a lot of psychologists who are, you know, not exactly drawn to truth shall we say? Uhh but she's gone through exactly the same thing. Her friends, her cousins, her family, umm they simply uh tossed her out the moment she began to uh attempt to uh express her viewpoint. And she is not natively a political type person or an economics type person. She has some real facility, obviously she is brilliant with psychology and she has a real facility with philosophy but her particular approach to truth was not 'this is an abstract truth about society' but more 'this is my take on the perspective'. I'll give you a minor example, I mean, see if it sort of helps explain what this means. I'm not doing a very good job (laugh) myself so I'll give you an example and hope that helps.'
18:53: 'Umm so, uh, one day um my wife and I were sitting with her parents, and her mother was talking about this Greek woman, who, and of course, you know, this is a whole Greek community so right, 'Greeks are best and everybody else should get out of the way and serve us', umm and so my mother-in-law was saying 'well, so and so, this woman, she was married to a uh, a guy who was a compulsive gambler and now, you know, she dumped him and she remarried another guy within a year or so and she's very happy and everything's going great for her'. now, you know, it doesn't take a psychological genius to figure out that somebody who gets married and stays married for quite some time to somebody who's got a mental illness like compulsive gambling and a moral illness like compulsive gambling, is probably not to healthy themselves.'
19:42: 'So all my mother (meant to say wife) did, was you know, somewhat innocuously said, 'well ma I don't think that's really the case, you know, my experience has been, based on sort of my profession and my training, my experience has been that, you know, people who have really dysfunctional relationships like, you know, 'I'm married to a gambler', umm unless they do a lot of work on themselves they just tend to repeat that process, so it seems unlikely to me that she is now married to some guy and everything's happy and hunky dorey and everything's wonderful'
20:07: 'boy oh boy oh boy, I mean my nipples went ping as the air temperature dropped in that room, right? I mean it was just unthinkable on so many levels for my mother-in-law to hear uh my wife, her daughter, say something back to her, it wasn't hostile or anything but it contradicted a number of premises right? For my mother-in-law.'
20:30: 'like for a lot of people right? You know, optimism is considered to be, you know, scrubbing any dark colours in the world until it looks like the inside of a ping-pong ball and you can't see anything right? You just turn that whiteness up until you go blind. And so, you know, to say that there's a little bit more subtlety rather than I believe the best is happening was pretty jarring to my mother-in-law. Of course, saying that there were problems in the Greek community was also pretty jarring right? I think this woman's first husband was not Greek and then she married a Greek so naturally everything was great. And saying that look, the Greek guy she chose is probably as unhealthy as the original guy she was married to, this was also unthinkable.'
21:13: 'And you know, even more fundamentally, just my, her daughter having a different opinion from her was just you know, beyond imagination, so she couldn't, but she couldn't say, you know, 'don't have an opinion' right? She couldn't be honest, my mother-in-law couldn't be honest about what bothered her, she couldn't say 'the Greeks are the best' because I was sitting in the room so, I'm not Greek of course. And uh she couldn't say, 'don't have an opinion' because that's kind of a stupid thing to say to someone. And she couldn't say 'you don't know what you're talking about' because my wife is a very experienced psychologist.'
21:45: 'So what did she do? She just kind of froze up and got hostile and you know, just 'oh let's just drop it and talk about something else' you know, that kind of stuff. And you know, it wasn't like this was it, that's the end of the relationship, but what happened was, you know, my wife and I talked about this quite a bit afterwards and you know, I sort of pointed out that, you know, she and I can give each other opinions that we don't agree with and you know, it's exciting, we chat about it, we love(?), we sit on the couch and talk for 6 hours straight. You think you get an earful, imagine her life.'
22:16: 'and so, you know, I'm just sort of pointing out that that's by no means the norm of human behaviour, that if somebody hears something they don't like that their immediate reaction has to be to freeze you out and refuse to talk to you. I mean that's the actions of a petty and immature, and destructive human being. I didn't quite put it that way the first time that we talked about it but, you know, I sort of said that 'you need to explore this' I suggested, you know, I said 'Honey, you should explore this and let's try, let's put this in the lab of human relations and say, you know, if you feel like you have a different opinion from your mum or your dad well I think you should say it, you know, not in a hostile way but just say 'this is my opinion' and see what happens.'
22:59: 'and so, I think the next time or the time after that we got together, we were getting together for brunch on Sunday and my mother-in-law sort of joined us in the line-up and uh you know, bang bang bang, three things came out of my mother-in-law's mouth. The first was, you know, 'oh Christina I can't believe you haven't cut your hair what's the matter with you it's far too long' right? And then, boom, ' it's Sunday, you should wear lipstick on a Sunday, it shows respect' and then, boom, 'you look cold, why are you cold? Why don't you keep a coat in your car, I always told you to do that and you never do it and you're always cold' and blah blah blah, right?'
23:42: 'so, you know, (laugh) I mean this was to me kind of lunatic, you know. What the hell does it matter to my mother-in-law any of these things about my wife, right? I mean, it's completely ridiculous, to focus your energies on this and to have these boom boom boom criticisms coming out of your mouth the moment she sees someone. I mean, it's just kind of silly in my view, I mean aren't there more important things to talk about than whether you should be wearing lipstick like 'how is your week?' 'How's your life?' 'What's new?' 'What are your thoughts?' 'What are your feelings?' you know, exchange of information that we you know, like to call intimacy.'
24:14: 'so, you know, my wife gave me a glance and said umm you know, 'I really don't like it when you come up and start criticising' right? 'It doesn't feel nice' and she's like 'oh I'm not criticising you at all I'm just making suggestions. What, you can't take any constructive suggestions?'
A little bit more back and forth...
24:42: My wife said 'no it really does feel like a criticism'
Mother-in-law says 'don't be silly' and wants to talk about something else.
25:57: 'I can tell you that within a couple more meetings my wife and my parents (in-law) don't see each other anymore.'
26:07: 'so I you know, I broke up with my girlfriend, I had to right? Because she wasn't listening to anything I was saying as I sort of found out when I actually persisted and tried to talk about what was important to me. You know, I no longer see my brother and I haven't had any regular contact with my brother for probably about 6 years now. Umm, I don't really see my nieces, I kind of wanted to and tried to keep that running, my brothers kids, but I found that to be impossible because he just kept sort of turning them against me so to speak.'
26:34: 'I don't see me mother. That actually occurred before my father. She's just this crazy, violent, evil woman so I mean, that was long overdue. I don't see my father, I mean my father left the family when I was like 6 months old so you know, I never really got much of a sense of him as a father anyway. I mean he's a persistent mother(fucker), I mean, so to speak, he writes me a letter every week and stuff which I never read just because it's full of crazy loony ramblings about religion and meta-physics, which are all just completely incorrect and irrational.'
27:08: 'so you know, most of my friends, save one, you know my then long term girlfriend, you know, mother, father, brother, business partners and you know, extended family for what it was, all vanished right? Because you know, I've sort of found that most human relationships are kind of illusory and just based on everybody sharing the same nonsense opinions. And not ever bringing anything up that's important, and never trying to deal with any conflicts.'
27:50: 'I am as friendly and positive and humorous as possible the first time that I talk with someone and then if their interested of course I will you know gently where appropriate, guide them towards something that is a little bit more true or at least get them into some questions and let them find their own way, but to point out the contradictions of what they believe. However if that person then either continues to mock my beliefs or will not respond to them in any rational manner but would just insult them or roll their eyes or whatever then it's like okay my friend, the gloves are off, and, you wanna rumble? Let's rumble. Let's go for it. Let's get the gloves off and really have it out. And you know the first thing I would do is sort of say something like 'look these are important issues would you agree? Well yes, then why are you rolling your eyes. What you owe these issues if you're going to get involved with them is a reasonable and rational response to the issues that are being raised' right?
Talking about important discussions
29:10: 'it's not a discussion based on personalities and it's not a discussion based on psycho-analysing people you barely know, i.e. Me. And it's certainly not a discussion on ad hominem attacks either on arguments themselves or on me'
Tags: Cult, Personal, Personal (Mother), Christina
15:37: 'I've been very lucky, I've almost never been sick, I've never spent a night in the hospital, I mean, I got some stitches when I was a kid. Never broken a bone, I mean, I've led an active life and I go to the gym four times a week and I (laugh) you know I eat well and so on.'
21:44: 'politicians are thinking about 'who can I award today and punish tomorrow' their not thinking about what the state of society is going to be in 40 years. I mean, who is? Right? Maybe you and me and my wife and that's about it'
26:20: 'I think of my taxes I pay about 9000$ a year towards the healthcare system, and I've used like 50$ of that my whole life'
27:18: 'a friend of mine's father, one of my favourite people in the whole world when I was growing up. Just a wonderful man, was diagnosed, was mis-diagnosed. I mean, he had all the symptoms, they finally figured it out by looking it up on the Internet. Completely mis-diagnosed. And then no longer got treated, or did not get treated until it was too late and he died within about a year. I mean, just absolutely heart-breaking.'
30:28: 'my mother was on disability for mental illness for, I guess a number of years, she has been for about, oh lord, close on two decades now. And they still keep cutting off her checks.'
Tags: Personal
16:05: 'I'm not sure that I'm, you know, a braver human being than others but I will certainly say that I have, you know, nothing to lose. I left the world of academia, you know, because I recognised that I wasn't going to get anywhere, you know, with this constant arguing that I was gonna battle for another 5 years to get a P.H.D and then either get a job on false pre-tenses or not get a job at all because my path to truth took me a little further than saying 'hey, you know Ireland's doing a lot better since they dropped some of their regulations and lowered their taxes isn't that great?'
'What was the last great idea to come out of academia?'
Asks with the assumption that the answer is nothing or nothing great.
Talking about business failing after laws/regulations being changed
24:05: 'I was lucky enough to take a couple years off to write a novel, well actually I wrote 3 or 4 novels but only one has been published. During the great tech boom of the early 21st century. But you know, I'll just speak about one or two other people that I know who dealt with this kind of regulatory mayhem and you know, I would really like to know how an economist would square this with this supposedly rational science of economics. So, a gentleman who is a businessman that I know, was involved in environmental assessments, which is, you send an engineer on site when someone wants to buy a piece of land or property, they don't want to get hit with a lot of environmentally regulatory bills later on'
(Regulations change and his business collapses because of it.)
26:25: 'another example is a woman that I know who ran a, runs a psychological practice, had a pretty flourishing practice, a couple of years ago. She had, you know, I think 18 or 20 people working for her and so on, and a lot of this was due to the fact that lawyers who dealt with people who had gone through motor vehicle accidents could refer those people to this psychological clinic. So she'd you know, spent a lot of time developing relationships with lawyers so she could get fed people who had gone through motor vehicle accidents'
(Law changes and lawyers can no longer refer clients to psychological clinics.)
Tags: Personal, Race, Allegiance
00:25: 'I was born in Ireland, I grew up in England, I spent a little bit of time in Africa with my father'
00:55: 'I myself am lucky enough to be quite athletic. I've enjoyed a wide variety of sports throughout my life and currently *laughs* I'm involved in the manly sport of aerobics and weightlifting. I don't actually play any organised sports at the moment I just don't have time but I did meet my wife playing volleyball and gosh I played tennis and soccer and cricket, I played baseball. I really enjoy exercise and so on'
1:40: 'this happened when I was very very young. 5 years old, it's one of my earliest memories outside of my home.. I was standing on the front steps of the apartment building, I grew up in a sort of project in England, project, I mean that sounds a little bit apocalyptic, it was not that bad a place or anything but it wasn't anything snooty by any stretch. And I'm standing out front of the building.. I grew up on a little street called Hermitage Road which was near Crystal Palace, near a small section of London called Crown Point.. Football mania was rampant.. And so I was standing out front of my apartment building and this kid came up to me, I guess I was as I said 5 years old or so, and he's like 'west ham rules, crystal palace sucks' or something, i think 'sucks' might be a bit modern for I guess something that was occurring in 1971 but it was I think fairly safe to say it was something negative anyway. And I said to him. Now this is paraphrasing, I distinctly remember saying it, I can't remember the words used but it was something like 'but so what? It's an accident. It's an accident' and he's like 'what are you talking about' and I said 'well you're just, I'm born here, you're born here, it's an accident.' I know this sounds alarmingly if not pretentiously precocious but I swear that this occurred. This was my distinct thought that this kid was powerfully invested in a complete accident of circumstance.'
Says he remembers going to a football match
5:40: 'and basically a whole bunch of Jamaican fellows came running out on the pitch and when they were interviewed had these broad thick Rasta accents talking about how 'happy they were mon' to be *laughs* 'representing England man' I apologise for my Rasta accent I'm far too white to have it work *laughs* fairly well. But it did of course strike me as somewhat bizarre that these guys who didn't look anything like me, didn't speak anything like me, came from a completely different part of the world and obviously hadn't exactly been in England for a whole lot of time, I was supposed to identify with'
7:35: 'I literally would try and figure out what I was committing my allegiance to'
8:20: 'so I guess you could say it was sort of innate in me to have this sort of approach to allegiance which was not habitual or not conventional'
9:45: 'that queasy gutted lump in the throat look at especially those little girl gymnasts it's just like ugh man they just look like they're so frail and they're just gonna get hammered in some ugly way on that bar, and I don't find that too pleasant to watch'
10:35: 'what is the adaptive nature of this? Why do people have any sort of interest in this? Why are people interested in watching other people do something athletic when you could be out having a run or going for a swim, why would you watch other people do it? Well it's not because these people are just good at what they do. My accountant is great at what he does but I don't watch him do it. So that's not the criteria at all.'
12:05: 'when I was a student I rented a room in a house with five other people. I was paying 250$, 275$ a month and you can live on 1000$ a month. You can live on even 800$ a month. Even in Toronto, this was like right down town'
13:45: '*laughs* like a lot of my theories I really haven't had a lot of time to test it empirically and I gotta tell ya I'm not even sure that I could'
18:00: 'I Still remember I guess in, 1980 maybe 1981 you know, I was like I don't know, what, 14 years old and I had a summer job and I remember saying to my mum 'gee I don't understand this whole recession thing you know, I don't understand it, I mean everything's the same' and she's like 'well that's because I still have my job' so you know, I didn't care, I didn't know, I mean, I got sort of irritated at the taxes that were taken off but you know, when you're working in a hardware store you know, as I was, it's not like, you know, you're making 2.50$ an hour it's not like you're giving up 50% of your income to the government so you know it doesn't really matter.'
Tags: Personal, Ego, Cult, Christina, DEFOO, Rape
00:00: 'goood morning everybody, this is a shout out to my millions, if not thousands, if not hundreds, if not a listener, at least my wife who is happy to hear my thoughts during the day as we drift off to sleep at night'
00:43: 'the idea that I think is very interesting, that is constantly talked about in particular kinds of regimes, which is something like, you know, 'other people hate us because we are good' and I think that is a fascinating topic. This relationship between good and evil and hatred. Certainly it is, when I was younger it was hard not to fall prey to a hatred of the government, to a sort of anger and frustration at you know, the newspaper articles that were going on and everything that's in the news and all of the blindness you know.'
1:30: 'As my wife and I would talk about it, it really felt as if were in the middle of a plague and in that plague people were falling over and dying and we had a cure, we had a cure and not only, so were we walking around to everyone saying 'we have a cure you don't have to be sick' you know, me philosophically, my wife psychologically. And not only would nobody take our medicine but nobody would even admit that they were sick and not only would nobody admit that they were sick but they all said that WE were sick. We have a sort of interesting personal challenge that's been cooking for about a year, a little longer for myself, in so far as we have no contact with what my wife calls the F.O.O. which is a slightly technical term for 'family of origin'. And what I call the A.B.C. (laugh) which is the 'accidental biological cage'. And gosh I tell you, explaining this away is really not very easy. We face a lot of hostility and tension around you know, when people say 'how's your brother?' and I say 'I don't know I haven't seen him regularly or barely seen him in 6 years'. There was a reunion of the company that my brother and I founded a couple of weeks ago and of course people that hadn't seen me in a while, who knew nothing of the fact that my brother and I, that I had ceased to see my brother for a variety of reasons, I mean pretty much all moral *laughs* but for a variety of reasons and they were just shocked and appalled and stunned. People don't even know that it's an option and they get very tense about. Family mythology is easily embedded into people's psyche. It's one of the things that, I was talking yesterday about sport and this belief, this inculcation of allegiance without ethical considerations... Well I tell you this, anybody who tells you that it's important to believe something without any ethical considerations is not exactly an ethical person. And that's pretty important to kind of get into, under your skin as a concept... Look at everybody who is saying 'family is everything', well family is not everything. Family is not that much. Family is just an accidental grouping through biological history so you know when I see I've not seen or spoken with or had any contact with my mother in 7 or 8 years, some people are like 'but she's your mother!' as if I have allegiance to some concept without any regard to the person who actually inhabits that concept, which is a little bit more relevant. You know, I wasn't given birth to by 'a mother' I wasn't raised by 'a mother I wasn't abused by 'a mother' you know I was abused by one particular woman. Who had you know, what is it that gave her the claim to my undying allegiance? Well you know, she had sex with my father and she had the magical ability which everything reprotozol(?) on up does, to reproduce.'
'you can't have allegiance to a concept'
Talking about two kinds of evil, one is honest like a mugger who doesn't pretend to be good and the other:
9:35: 'now there's another category of evil which is by far by far the majority and that is the category of evil that demands that you treat it as good, that you believe it, that it is good. And of course they tend to band together and they tend to be Collectivists because they want you to worship this collective ideal which you know, we all have some susceptibility to for reasons that I *laughs* can't think of now but maybe will be an interesting topic for another podcast.'
10:44: 'they are the school teachers who tell you that socialism is good, they're the news anchors who report breathlessly on government activities while never mentioning the fact that it's based on violence, these are the academics who are smarmy and cynical and will put anybody down who's interested in any kind of objective morality or has any sort of respect for the free Market. They're the priests who, you know, every time something good happens say you have to praise god, every time something bad happens say you have to praise god because god works in mysterious ways and you know this is the church that despite the fact they failed to act on, you know I don't think the paedophilia problem is just a generation old let's put it that way. I don't think the paedophilia problem was not occurring in the middle ages or the dark ages. I think that's been a pretty permanent category of the catholic religion.'
12:29: 'The problem with the priests by and large is that they are homosexuals. And they're homosexuals who aren't permitted or have put themselves in a situation where they've agreed not to have open sexual relations and are put around a young group of boys who are biologically in their sexual prime. I mean 14, 15, 16 even 13, boys are sexually mature and so, of course paedophilia is one of the most repugnant moral crimes in the world but it's not particularly surprising to me that if you put somebody who's attracted to the people they're in charge of and those people are sexually mature and you don't allow that person to have an adult relationship'
13:14: 'it's what Camille Paglia used to say about woman who got themselves into compromising situations, that you know, well they would say 'I went to this frat party I got really drunk I got separated from my friends, I don't remember what happened but I woke up and you know my genital organs were tender and I have vague memories of bad things happening. And you know Camille Paglia's argument was you know of course it's wrong if something bad happened to you but my god could you be dumber? Similarly if I Leave my wallet on a bench in central park and I come back a day later and my god it's been stolen, well of course whoever stole it is wrong but it's not like I have no responsibility in the matter.'
Tags: Morality, Personal, Resentment, Arguments
4:27: 'Just at a gut calculation level we know that somebody who destroys the bone structure as a whole is worse than somebody who just breaks a healthy bone which can be repaired.'
(Doesn't talk about intent of the person, if they shoot you with intent to kill but just break a bone then that would change their level of morality surely.)
5:49: 'It is paradise to have a society where nobody can take out a gun and tell you what to do and tell you that you have to thank them for doing it.'
8:20: 'almost everybody is enslaved to a devilish and horrible form of empty false morality and this is not natural to human beings at all. Naturally we are like seals in the water when it comes to learning principles from morality. We have to be bullied and threatened and manipulated and punished and beaten and yelled at and put in the corner and mocked and ridiculed for years and years in order to hollow out our moral centre and our natural, benevolent, common humanity with others.'
32:57: 'when I was a kid and my brother would say 'no means yes and yes means no, do you want me to hit you?' you know, no yes no yes I don't know you're gonna get thumped no matter what you say.'
33:52: 'when I was a kid before I sort of had my enlightenment phase, you know when I was about 16 I read the fountainhead and started learning about the free Market, fascinated by Aristotelian philosophy and so on, and before all of that, you know, I did resent, I did resent people. I mean there were a number of categories of people I resented, I'm not gonna go into them all here because it's lost to history and doesn't really matter now'
34:21: 'but thinking back, you know, I did sort of hate the really pretty people, not hate them, hatred and envy and so on. But because I wanted what they had, I wanted to be the pretty person or whatever, and have all of the social cache and sexual success that goes along with that. I had a problem with the rich kids because you know, I remember there was a school trip to Russia in like 1978, and it was 1500$ which was just a staggering sum in those days, certainly for my family, these were the days we were getting eviction notices so it was incomprehensible that I could go but I so much wanted to go to see Russia, always loved the Russian writers. So I resented those people, at sports I was ok so I didn't really resent those, I resented people who had money, good looking, all that kind of stuff. I didn't really resent academic achievement because I didn't really respect what my teachers were saying even before my enlightenment phase... I just kind of resented the fact that people had more than me or were more prettier than me or more handsome than I was or whatever, I guess I sort of resented, I liked to sing and I resented this guy who had a really great singing voice, you know, because he sang better than I did, I envied that. But you know, this was all just sort of transitory stuff, like euggh that kid sings better than me or that guys handsomer than me or that guy makes, has more money than I do. So there was a little bit of that but nothing that made me blow anybody up or anything.'
36:56: 'in my experience I would say that I've become a much better person, certainly before I sort of learned something about truth and morality but I've become a better and better person over the years. And what I find is that I make corrupt people uneasy'
39:33: 'I care about my opinion of myself, my wife's opinion of myself and my boss's I guess to some degree'
40:27: 'who do I hate? I'll tell you who I do hate and I think this is where we sort of get to the heart of the matter right? and I don't think I'm alone in this. What I really hate is pompous moral hypocrisy, I mean that's something that just uhh it just gets my teeth on edge... Uh makes me wanna just fly at someone'
41:24: 'I get this all the time whenever people find out that I don't see my family anymore, well I get a lot of this kinda crap, which is 'well you really should learn to forgive' *laughs*
52:17: 'cultures don't like to deal with other cultures, because culture is just another lie, it's another, it's scar tissue, I have another podcast about that but culture is just scar tissue on the brain from abuse, you know, from falsehood.'
54:21: 'the moment I actually started speaking the truth and being passionate and certain about it, people just shunned me.'
Talking about interfering
55:29: 'I would say the one time that I've done that, this friend of mine who without getting into the whole story was married to a woman who I didn't think was a good choice for him because she was kind of abusive. And this is a guy I've known for, oh lord, coming on for 30 years and so you know, they had a kid and they were gonna have another kid and I sort of sat him down and said you know 'my friend, I don't like at all to get involved in other peoples marriages but in this case I'm gonna make an exception because, look you have one kid with this woman and your marriage is you know, been on the verge of dissolving a number of times. If you have another kid, you face under the current legal system you know, the worst cataclysm that can happen to a man which is you know, you end up getting divorced and your wife has two kids so you pay alimony and you can't have a new family because you can't afford alimony and a new family and you don't get to see your kids very much and your wife is kinda hostile so you get locked in this death embrace with sort of a difficult woman or paying through the nose for a family you don't get to see very much and you can't start a new family you know, twenty years of your life just goes down the tubes, and the core of your happiness is just shot, right? I mean there's a huge huge danger for men.' And what happened? You know, he listened sort of politely and said he'd think about it and a couple weeks later I was talking with him about some unrelated issue and he said 'oh I really thought about what you said' I said 'really?' and he said 'yeah and my wife was nagging or ragging at me the other day, and I said you know who else thinks you're a real bitch?' and my name came up and I. Haven't had anything to do with them since I mean, what do you do? This is what happens when you try to do the right thing and help somebody out on some sort of moral ground... But what happens of course, this friend completely betrayed me and revealed something in confidence to his wife and now I'm not gonna go over there and sit across from his wife and have tea when she knows what I think of her, that would be ridiculous, right? And my friend hasn't sort of called back and said you know, and I said I was pretty appalled at what he did and he's like 'oh really? like the fact I repeated you thought my wife was a bitch is a problem? How?' you know because people don't ever like to admit that they've did anything wrong. People who don't want to grow.'
Tags: Moral absolutes, Personal
00:37: 'I guess I'm a little pumped because I had a very good day at work I have been sort of making this transition from software management, to closing deals in the software arena and I just closed, or at least I do believe that I have closed given I have been told that there are no deal breakers or material objections remaining. A deal for 340,000$ which I think is pretty cool, so I'm a little pumped and I I'm not gonna spend the whole afternoon talking about my deal because I'm not producing a tape to help insomniacs'
Talking about healthcare as a right
22:13: 'if somebody claims a moral absolute then they better be able to defend it because man, moral absolutes are pretty powerful things right? If you're saying that it's a moral absolute then you can't stop at anything. I mean you can't stop the poor from storming the hospitals with guns and saying operate on me or die. If it's a moral absolute then you are bringing out the biggest guns in the human arsenal of compulsion and you can't stop at all. Because it's a moral absolute, it's not like a preference it's not a nice-to-have it's a gotta-have. So you really can't then oppose any methodology which achieves this moral end because you know, it's a moral absolute. Nothing is higher! So it's pretty important if people are gonna start throwing around moral absolutes that they damn well have a clue what they're talking about and they better be consistent because if they're not they're unleashing a terrible terrible evil on the world.'
Tags: Monopolies, Fairness, Personal
Note: Talking about health choices
3:30: 'you can say that 'I'm going to be a slob and eat badly and never get off the couch and sort of waste away in my own skin, and then I'm going to throw myself on the mercy of common humanity. So I'm gonna plead tears of oh I was ignorant I was abused and just cry havoc and let slip the dogs of charity' it's a perfectly valid strategy, it's a tad risky because you know it's a little hard to feel sorry for somebody who's 300 pounds who is complaining of poor knees or bad circulation or whatever but it's a perfectly valid strategy. Who am I to say how somebody else should live their life.'
9:42: 'monopolies are completely immoral. Because a moral law has to apply to all human beings and a monopoly or a cartel by definition is composed of a pretty small minority of people, who want to profit incrementally at the expense of everybody else.'
21:28: 'as far as fairness goes, I just think its emm well its stupid *laughs* to use a sort of technical term. You know, fairness is one of these things that's sort of this religious hangover that just doesn't have any logical basis to it. You know, reality is messy and biological life in particular is messy. Things can happen, bad things can happen. You know, we can all drop dead tomorrow. We all could have an Aneurism forming, a blood clot forming as you listen to this, or as I speak I could be dead now. This could be a voice from the grave because I got deep vein thrombosis, you know, driving to pick up my wife's gift. So the idea that there's some sort of abstract fairness that biological tragedies are a deviation from is you know, very much an idea that the universe is ordered and you know, created by a rational deity. Fairness is sort of the idea, that there's a mysterious kind of fairness that you know, sort of exists. And that you know, is very annoying to me, just logically. Because you know, the idea of fairness is clearly derived from the idea of an omniscient deity. And you know, yet, it would seem to me that if there was an omniscient deity which was so interested in fairness then to interfere would not, to me, make any sense. So if you say well it's not fair for someone's kid to get multiple sclerosis then you've got this sort of fairness thing and that's a deviation from it. The fairness thing can only really come from a, the idea of a god because I mean there's no such thing in reality, in reality as fairness. I mean there's justice which is a recognition of reality but there's no such thing as fairness like we're all born the same height or same level of intelligence or the same quality of singing voices. So the idea that there's some sort of fairness and that it's unfair for a kid to get multiple sclerosis come from a belief in god. Yet if god gave the kid multiple sclerosis surely it's a bad idea to interfere with it... If there is no god there is no such thing as fairness.'
25:14: 'I sure as hell did not get born into a beneficial family situation, as I sort of mentioned before. My family was just horrible and violent and you know, destructive and crazy. My mum was institutionalised, my brother's a sadist, I mean, my father is just ugh, retched, retched human, retched specimen of a human being and you know, we had no money, I was constantly having to work. Started working when I was 11 and you know, uh when my mother was institutionalised my brother was in England, she stayed in bed two weeks before hand I had to go to school, eviction notices.. I guess I railed against it from time to time but I never really got the sense that it was fundamentally unfair because I mean, (sigh), maybe this also sounds precocious you know, I was sort of 13, 14 when this was happening but it was sort of I guess outside of my comprehension that things could be different and I would be me.'
26:37: 'I kinda liked being me, and I kind of always have'
29:34: 'If you are a parent who's expecting a child, it seems to me it would be logical to take out insurance against the possibility of your children getting ill. It's only logical to do that if you are not comfortable with what can result from failing to do that.'
Tags: Morality, Capitalism, Matter
1:15: 'If you want to bully people by applying this hyperinflation of morality to concepts (group > individual, god > man etc.) all of these concepts have to be hyper-inflated and made into these all overarching moral monstrosities in order to erase the moral will of the individual.'
1:45: 'and this is all relatively possible from these, bludgeon the child with these abstract conceptual overlords until the scar tissue that remains is unable to perceive any kid of truth.
2:03: But the one problem you're going to face if you want to put this stuff into practice if you want to become the master illusionists of conceptual moral absolutes, then you're going to face a bit of a problem and all throughout history this problem has been recognised instinctually or not, by those who want to rule through concepts. And the problem is that none of these concepts actually show up in the senses...'
16:50: 'In the middle ages there was no such thing as capitalism, it was absolutely unheard of.'
'All of these physicists working with this dimensional string theories, they're just kinda like, well remember they're bureaucrats'
'matter is fundamentally stable'
29:10: 'We know what people want by what they do'
(this contradicts what he says about self-interest in Podcast 6)
00:00: 'good afternoon it's 1:30 on the 23rd of December 2005. Well, it's been a long day at work, actually it was a pretty good day actually, I just closed a 95000$ so it kinda came out of nowhere, little bit of negotiations this morning and I gotta tell you I do love the free Market it is such an exciting place to be and software in particular.'
Tags: Ayn Rand, Morality, Parents, Personal, Ego, Cult, Personal (Mother)
Responding to a comment saying his voice sounds angry.
He makes reference to 'our enemies'.
Responding to comments about Ayn Rand.
5:35: 'I think I read the fountainhead when I was 16. It came through a good friend of mine who is now a professor in the states and he got it because he was a big Rush fan. And I quite remember he was a big Rush fan and I was a big Pink Floyd fan so we had I guess a slightly different sense of life back in those days. I've since grown to appreciate Rush more and I've seen them I think twice live but I just have a bit of trouble getting past geddy lee's voice. It does sound a little bit like mickey mouse on helium.'
Ayn Rand's theory of morality:
1. That which best furthers human life is the good.
2. Human life requires interaction with empirical reality.
3. Empirical reality is objective and rational.
4.that which is objective and rational is that which best supports the ability of human beings to survive.
5. Rationality and objectivity are the foundation of morality.
7:15: 'I'm certainly fairly familiar with the argument and I've even used it myself on occasion. Actually on more than one occasion. More than probably five dozen occasions in conversing with people about morality. But I've never been satisfied by it emotionally. And by that I mean I've always felt there is a problem at the root of it. And since working on my own theory of morality, the problem I think that I've identified with what is at the root of Ayn Rand's moral theory, we call it the 'value of life' theory or 'that which furthers life' theory. And the problem is that there really are three ways, and I'm certainly not the first to come up with this by any means. There's three ways that you can live, right? You can earn your keep, you can ask other people for charity or you can take from them by force, and I would add as a subset of taking them by force you can bully them when they're children.'
8:10: 'as those who've listened to a couple of these podcasts perhaps know, I don't have a very elevated view of the morality and emotional dynamics of the modern family.'
8:19: 'what I would say is pretty common is that parents treat their children pretty badly when they're young but they bully them quite a bit into what is right and what is appropriate and so on. And then when parents get older they then cash in on all that bullying, even though their children don't really like them very much. They may not be aware of this but they don't go and see their parents out of pleasure but out of obligation. And then the parents cash in on all of that bullying of their children and get lots of money, time, energy and resources supplied to them when they're old. The kids will take care of them. The kids will come when they have to go to hospital. The kids will put them up even or put them in an old age home and so on.'
9:08: 'that's not a survival strategy based on rationality and objective morality but rather is based on bullying children and defining for them the good and release anger, withdrawal, emotional criticism on them if they disobey. One of the problems I have with that. It Is not a survival strategy based on rationality. But it certainly is a valid survival strategy.'
19:28: 'If you can get someone to believe your moral theory or your metaphysical theory without having to go through all the work and effort of proving it then you have just saved an enormous amount of money for the same resource transfer.'
19:45: 'So let's just say my podcasts get picked up tomorrow, broadcast around the world and I become like the I don't know, the 'second coming of morality' or something silly like that and then people start giving me all these gifts and they come to hear me speak by the thousands or tens of thousands and I go through the streets of cities in my own little popemobile and I can get to live in a gold palace and wear funny hats and this and that. Well it's a pretty powerful transfer of income. And there's a couple of ways you could do this'
20:18: 'It could be because I give people real value and help them solve problems. You know, I've sort of slaved away for a couple of decades on developing theories of rationality and so on. And at any time I can be proven wrong. So someone can, I'm like the hero of all moral history and become fabulously wealthy and famous through doing this work. But however I'm always subjecting my moral theories and philosophical theories and my economics theories to empirical verification. So someone can come along and knock me right off my pedestal by proving I have a flaw in my logic or I made a certain prediction or series of predictions and the opposite occurs and so on. It's an enormous amount of work. It's an ocean of mental sweat to produce a new moral or philosophical theory. And you also have to become somewhat decent at being able to explain it in a way that's enjoyable for people.'
21:25: 'so maybe that can get you benefits financially or materially but at the same time you can always be disproven and kicked off your pedestal and someone else can come along who's better at logic or has figured out problems you haven't and then they become the new guru or whatever. So that's one way of giving value to people. Now the other way of giving value to people is to just basically get them while they're children and bully them and manipulate the natural and almost unbreakable biological bond that children have with their parents right? And leverage that biological bond into a twisted loyalty to a false morality.'
22:56: 'we are designed to survive and people will certainly throw rationality to the fore winds if it threatens their survival and that's exactly as it should be. We are not abstract philosophical beings but living biological creatures and if we don't get to pass on our genes it really doesn't matter how rational we are.'
30:34: 'You're never going to have any rich or enjoyable emotional interactions with people in any kind of community. Other than I guess you could say, a community of scientists or philosophers. Or I guess you could say capitalists too.'
32:00: 'I used to have lunch probably up until six or seven years ago I used to have lunch every week with my evil crazy mother. And why did I do that? Well because by doing that I felt like a good son which was sort of a minor positive. I got to tell people that I was, you know, 'yes my mother's difficult but I have lunch with her every week' and I could see that sort of sad little spark of sad admiration in their eyes. The other thing too is that if I didn't go my nasty and sadistic elder brother was going to get very angry at me and say that basically I'm a selfish bad person and my mother was a difficult mother but she's lost and surely I can forgive her and she was doing the best that she could, she herself had a difficult childhood and blah blah blah. And what answer could I have to that? A. I want to be a good son and a good person and B. I don't want to be a selfish cold callous person who doesn't take care of his enfeebled sort of pathetic mother. What is she just like supposed to sit in the streets when the snow comes? And so we gave her money and we gave her time and we gave her resources and we sat and listened to her crazy theories about how all her doctors had poisoned her and she was going to take vengeance on the world and so on. And I did that because I felt like it was the right thing to do, it was a good thing to do and because I was afraid of two things. 1. I was afraid of my brothers hostile and violent opinions against me and 2. I was afraid of the social condemnation or at least intense social disquiet that comes, when people say to me now 'oh how's your mother?' and I say 'I don't know I haven't seen her in 6 years and I hope never to see her again.' it's like 'oh even if she were dying you wouldn't go to her deathbed?' it's like 'no wouldn't that be entirely hypocritical?' either you love people or you don't. Either you find value in their company or you don't. It's not like mother's company suddenly becomes better because she's struck down with some bad illness or something.'
34:50: 'After I stopped seeing my mother but before I stopped seeing my brother, he sat me down, because he was obviously somewhat upset, let's say, that I had stopped seeing my mother and he sat me down and he said 'if you don't see mum you're kinda letting her win because if you don't see her she's then controlling your actions and you're making decisions based on your dislike of her.' and so on, 'you're running away from a problem and she's making you run away and she has control' and all that. And so I just sort of stared at him and I said, and it was scary to say but I did say it because it sort of made sense to me, and I said 'well, so what you're saying is that we should see people we like because we like them and we should see people that we don't like because we don't like them. So basically we should see everyone. There's no one that we could ever not see no matter how badly they treated us or how much we didn't like them.' and of course like all people who rely on false moral arguments he simply got red-faced and changed the topic right? Because these people hate discussing anything of any substance once you're on to them.'
37:10: 'It is much more efficient to sell people something that is false and bully them into believing that it is true than to actually tell them something that is true.'
Makes another reference to 'our enemy'
Tags: Personal, Ego, Academia, Relationships/Marriage, Cult
00:25: 'Like most hyper, and perhaps hyper-threaded intellectuals I am a somewhat light sleeper on occasion, actually more than on occasion. And I was sitting there listening to my own podcast. I used to go to sleep listening to audiobooks now I go to sleep listening to my own podcasts which I'm sure sooner or later will give me weird narcissistic dreams.'
Around 1:50
Apologises for making speech errors and talking too fast
3:55: 'one of which would probably be the subject for another podcast which is just, how astonishingly intellectually useless academics in general are. And how much, how much energy they squander on this inconsequential minutiae and how amazingly they are rewarded for that. I mean it's not amazing that they are. Basically academics are to a large degree civil servants. So they come up with elegant and overcomplicated solutions to inconsequential problems. That's almost the definition of a bureaucrat. But it just astounds me with all of the problems facing, let's just say western society today, the healthcare system's about to crumble. Welfare through the roof... Growing state power... It really is a case of watching Academics Fiddle while Rome burns. And just in case you're going to email me and tell me that is a myth because the fiddle was not invented until 1500 years after deniro's(?) death, I know. But still it's a term of phrase that everybody understands.'
5:15: 'and you know, this was my own experience in academia that I sort of ploughed my way through a masters degree and it took me forever to find a thesis adviser because nobody wanted to touch the thesis I was working on which was basically that people who believe in higher realities must always advocate dictatorship as the ideal political model and people who advocate 'truth is derived from empirical reality' must always end up advocating the free Market as an ideal political model. Fairly ambitious of course. 2000 years of history and I took three major philosophers from either camp. And this is the idea I thought was pretty powerful and well worth working on and OH MY LORD, you would not believe what, well actually if your academics you probably would. But you would not believe the amount of stress and strain and fighting and kicking and screaming I had to go through to get a thesis adviser, you know, who gave me no practical advice of any kind and I had absolutely no way of knowing if I was going to pass or fail. I didn't get my degree until long after everybody else because he couldn't decide whether he was going to pass or fail me. He ended up passing me and saying 'well it's an interesting idea, I don't know if it's true or not but you obviously put a lot of work into it' or something like that *laughs* which is sort of like a pat on the head for the idiot child. After that I thought I've really been beating my head against the wall for the last five years in academia do I want to do it for another five years for a PHD in a field where there's not a lot of demand. Where there's a government edict against hiring whitey-boys like myself. So I ditched academics for the sake of the software world and entrepreneurial world and the business world which was a much better idea. I certainly have more fun in the free Market than I do talking about the free market to people who are hostile to the idea, both colleagues and students. It's not possible to undo the effects of state sanctioned or state run propaganda probably even within the course of a semester with relatively intelligent students'
23:55: 'in the free Market every transaction that occurs benefits both parties. It simply has to otherwise the transaction will not occur. If I give you 200$ for an iPod then we know without having to examine our motivations that we both benefit from that transaction. And we know that we benefit because I'm voluntary willing to give up 200$ to get an iPod. Whereas you are perfectly voluntarily willing to give up your iPod in exchange for 200$ so without a doubt we know that both parties are better off. It's a win/win situation. And they're better off because they have exchanged their goods or services for money voluntarily.'
28:20: 'something I've personally experienced, where I went out with a lady who was, lets just say, a tad on the critical side and whenever there was a conflict, basically one of us had to be right and one of us had to be wrong. There was no way to approach this from a win/win situation... if I was supposed to meet her at 7:00 and I came at 7:30 because I thought it was 7:30, there's no way we could just laugh and say 'what a silly error, let's not worry about it' but it had to be that not only had I mistook the time but I always mistake the time because I'm irresponsible and this and that. Don't ask me why we went out *laughs* that's a whole other question. But you know, and this happens in marriages, you know, where somebody forgets to take out the garbage both parties within the marriage get very tense because somebody has to get blamed. Somebody has to accept the blame and not only for this particular instance but it becomes something added to the mythology of the marriage. You know, let's say it's the husband who gets blamed for not taking out the garbage then the husband now is the guy who doesn't take out the garbage and that's an indication of some much larger fundamental psychological problem that he has around responsibility and not being committed to the family and not being involved in the household and blah blah blah right?'
30:50: 'in relationships, where if there's a problem everybody gets tense because somebody has to get blamed and somebody has to take responsibility and that responsibility then accumulates so that there's this mythology built about them that they're always this or always that. That sort of zero sum game that people are pretty aware of, who've had relationships like that. And eh, if you're in one of those, uh, get out *laugh* hey that's another podcast.'
Tags: Personal, Ego, UPB
Stefan sounds irritated throughout the whole podcast.
Responding to an email that he found irritating.
1:15: 'the reason I find it irritating is that Bob is sort of earnestly lecturing me on things that are so completely in the public domain that he would have to assume that I have come from some other planet not to be exposed to these things before.'
1:32: 'so for instance he will say 'you know lots of people believe lots of different things' as if that's not something that anybody with half a brain is fully aware of.'
1:50: 'the reason I think this is worth chatting about is not because I want to bludgeon this gentleman with my podcast, because unless he has a podcast, he won't have much opportunity to respond except to me'
11:10: 'moral philosophy is not subject to the same rigour as the physical sciences... It's more close to something like biology'
12:10: 'you can still classify things as good and evil but there are certain grey areas. For instance when does somebody's IQ become low enough that they're no longer morally responsible for their actions.'
13:45: 'there's no way to use the scientific method to judge or classify intellectual pursuits, as he puts it, revolving around the logic of choice such as economics or ethics. Well I gotta tell ya that I think that a lot of economists would disagree with you there Bob which is that they absolutely use empirical data they absolutely use choice theory, cause and effect, game theory. They would not call themselves dabblers in the mystic arts..'
16:45: 'Every single time the free Market is put in place it results in a vast increase in wealth and human freedom'
18:00: 'if he argues that there is no preferred behaviour that should be followed by everyone. Then is he not saying that people who have the opposite argument are wrong?'
19:15: 'there's a kind of pomposity like he feels like he's lecturing me in the basics when he hasn't really thought through much at all'
'the reason a thief is wrong that he steals is.. That he is a human being like the person he's stealing from. If he's stealing he assumes he's going to be able to keep the product of what he steals. If he steals my car he's only gonna do it because he's going to keep my car... If the moment he stole my car someone stole it from him, he wouldn't bother.'
25:00: 'I think the argument I've came up with about property rights is pretty original'
In reference to the argument from biology.
Emailer says 'I'm not sure about that argument, however the fact that man evolved with a capacity to think doesn't clearly prove that man ought to seek moral values, why should man continue as the most successful species? Indeed, why should man live?'
34:10: 'I really don't know what to say with these kinds of arguments. They're just so ridiculously hypocritical. I don't even know what, I assume that he had breakfast or lunch before typing me this long email about why should man live. And of course even if that were a debate I was interested in getting into, which I consider to be an intellectual wankjob of the first order, that's not my argument. My argument is not that man ought to do something that's down the road. My argument is that there is such a thing as preferred behaviour. There is such a thing as a choice that human beings prefer over other choices, it doesn't mean that every human being has to choose that, it just means that there is such a thing as preferred choice.'
35:04: 'in general, human beings tend to not be violent unless they're cornered or coerced or paid by the state. Human beings tend in general to respond to incentives in an economic sense. Human beings in general tend to feed their children, doesn't mean there aren't people who don't, just as there are horses born with two heads'
35:45: 'so why should man continue as the most successful species? I really don't know, *laughs* I didn't sort of make up the realm of biology. I didn't sort of, I'm not someone who's gonna try and out-Darwin Darwin and come up with some other theory about there's some moral absolute that the species should survive. They just kind of want to, *laughs* so I don't really know what to say about that. 'Indeed why should man live?' you know, I'm sorry this guy is no longer around because it would be interesting to hear his feedback on this but I guess he gave up eating and breathing because you know, 'why should man live?' and if he didn't then you know, stop pestering me with these stupid questions.'
37:15: 'and then what I often get is the well-meaning and condescending bibliography. You know like, 'well you know, for a confused amateur I wouldn't say that you've done a bad job in general of taking a swing at some of these issues. However you might want to read, you know, Mr. Jones' Philosophy 101, it's in big print therefore it shouldn't be too taxing for you'
37:45: 'so this guy says 'you might want to read this it's not very long, it shouldn't be too difficult for you' that kind of stuff. And that sort of stuff is just insulting. I'm more than happy to read books that people recommend if they've actually addressed my issues. But this guy for instance has completely misconstrued everything that I'm talking about and set up all these strawmen condescending arguments as sat down and patiently explained to me 2 + 2 = 4 and not too quickly so my poor little brain could follow. Then for him to give me a list of basic reading in the field, I gotta tell ya (laughs) it's not the best way to approach somebody intellectually. Especially somebody who, I think you can judge from my articles and my podcasts that I've spent some degree of time thinking about this stuff and arguing about this stuff and you know, I have been a very successful debater in university and I have done some pretty significant and deep work on history. I have a masters degree in history mostly focusing on the history of philosophy. And again, I'm not saying everybody with a Masters degree has the answer for everything and there are doubtless people out there who have PHD's who have studied more than I have, but you know, please don't treat an unfamiliar argument as if it doesn't fit into the mental box and therefore it's just not worthy of any examination and you just need to sort of send someone off to some basic text so they can correct their thinking.'
39:15: 'I mean I sort of face this, people having this sort of shock of my intellectual hubris. 'what? You're taking on the problem of the ages?! Like the proof for universal morality?' it's like well yeah why not? Why not go for the ring? Why not go for the biggest prize in philosophy which is the proof of universal morality. Why play a small game? Why go for something little and petty? I'm sort of reminded that, when I was doing my Masters thesis, which I sort of mentioned before was a 2000 years of intellectual history and I attempted to categorise every major western philosopher. I was sort of sitting down with some of the people I went to do my Masters with and we were talking about our thesis's... And you know, I remember there was this, I can't remember what everyone's thesis was this was 12 years ago now but people were sort of going over what their thesis was and you know one woman was you know 'well I'm studying the spread of a certain kind of sheep in a certain province in France in the 13th century' or something and I just thought 'oh man what evil fairy gave you that curse when you signed up for this program' I mean what a completely useless waste of a year of precious time in your life. And you know, someone else was doing some other you know well 'there's this certain monk in Italy who's works have remained relatively untranslated and I wanted to do an examination of how his belief grew over a two year span' I mean just stuff where it's like oh my god. The minutiae, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna claustrophobically suffocate in these tiny little mental boxes. And so of course eventually they knew that I was a sort of loud mouth intellectual of the group so they turned and said 'what are you working on?' and I said well you know, 'I'm trying to categorise all major western philosophers into two camps. Those who believe what I'm going to call supersensualism which is a belief that there's a reality that exists over and above the senses and I'm going to prove that those people have to argue for dictatorships, and I'm going to prove that empirical philosophers have to argue for limited or democratic capitalism, limited democracy or democratic capitalism.' so you get the usual sort of vaguely offended and resentful silence around the table because you know, people are like 'aw cmon where did you get the stones to do that?' and you know, for me it's like, isn't that sort of more fun? Wouldn't you want to solve the biggest issues? Wouldn't you want to take a swing at the biggest issues you could find?... Go big or go home'
42:10: 'I had a friend of mine who was doing work in the states, he's an economist, I mean I'm sure a very good one and he was doing some work I think as part of his graduate work... And his basic approach was to say well when you have a court case that's going on where damages are put in place. You know, I sue some company for slipping on their sidewalk or whatever. If that company, if their head office is out of state then the awards are generally higher than they are if the company's located in the state... But that is what he spent a considerable amount of time working on. And I didn't say it at the time because I used to be a lot more conciliatory but a part of me was saying 'dude what are you wasting your time on?' what does that conceivably matter. Of course we know that people would rather screw people financially who aren't close and we know a political system is going to award higher damages to out of state companies because it doesn't hurt the voters as much, people aren't going to get laid off in their own state.'
44:15: 'maybe I'm just too grandiose but it just seems to me like why would you waste your time on that? Why wouldn't you just go for the ring? Why wouldn't you do something like come up with a mathematical proof of how state violence grows or the forcible transfer of income grows until the state collapses. Now that would be a tasty topic to work on.'
Tags: Cult, Personal, Debating, Christina, Self-defence, UPB, Evil, Communism
12:35: 'I'm trying to get people to understand that what happened to them if they had religious instruction was difficult, painful, dangerous, humiliating, that it rendered them susceptible to all sorts of irrational manipulations and social pressures, that it was an unpleasant experience.'
12:55: 'and of course people will I'm sure, email me and say 'oh I had a wonderful time in Sunday school and this that and the other' well I'm telling you, you didn't. You absolutely didn't because you were being lied to, and I don't think that any child, deep down, feels real great about being lied to.'
13:15: 'you were lied to because there is no god. And you were lied to because you were told that there was a god. Not only was there a god but there were good reasons to believe in it. You also had a bad time because your questions would be met with scorn, contempt, mocking, hostility but never rationally examined because they can't be rationally examined. All arguments for religions are based on nonsense and foolishness and emotional bullying.'
13:37: 'they can cloak it all in this love, but you try and ask them any real questions you'll see that love evaporate faster than an ice tea in Arizona. So that's really what my goal is. To get people to recognise that what occurred to them through their religious instruction was painful and horrible and destructive and through that they then, once they understand that, or have been exposed to that argument at all, then now that they're fully morally responsible for not inflicting said religious instruction upon their children.'
14:20: 'now of course the question might come back 'What about those who have never been exposed to the idea that religious instruction is painful? And they genuinely think that it's good' well sorry, no dice. These people are still completely morally responsible. Because the literature on atheism is not hard to find. I've read the bible believe it or not. When I was 19 after high school I, as those who've listened to my podcast know I grew up in a desperately poor family and we weren't that poor, I lived in England until I was 11, and we weren't that poor in England. My mother had a job as a secretary but then she moved us to Canada because she was afraid of Socialism, just before Margaret Thatcher got in, kind of ironic isn't it? And then when we came to Canada she was diagnosed, well not diagnosed, she basically had a mental collapse and ended up being institutionalised and so on. So I had no money at all throughout my teenage life. I had, other kids came to live with me because they had bad homes and we all worked jobs and we all struggled through, and, so when I was 18 I wanted to go to university but I had no money so what I did was I took a job as a gold panner, I worked up north and lived in the woods and all that kind of funky stuff, and while I was up there I read the bible. I had time. I worked up there 7 days a week in a little tent somewhere in winter and I'd be out claim-staking and gold panning and all that kind of stuff during the day and then the evenings I had nothing but time with which to read philosophy and biblical texts and so on. So I read the bible. And why have I read the bible? Because I'm not going to start criticising something without having a clue what it's all about.'
16:15: 'I can argue the religious position until I'm blue in the face. I've actually done role-plays a number of times when my wife was, when we were first married she believed in a higher power, sadly it wasn't me so of course I had to get rid of that, and we role-play, so she wanted to know if I understood the religious position so I said ok well you pretend that you're me and I'll pretend that I'm a priest and let's argue it this way. So I'm perfectly conversant with all of the religious theories, not all of them, but most of the religious theories. Most of the major religious premises and theological positions and, I know the bible somewhat well. It's been a while since I read it cover to cover but I'm not ignorant of the bible. And so I'm fully conversant with the opposite position and that's why I take responsibility in the matter of knowing the opposing position if I'm going to claim that something is true.'
19:30: 'I have received a number of emails from people who are heavily critical of my position that yes everybody has a theoretical right to self-defence but what does it matter because it never seems to work anyway. People are saying to me 'you can't be a pacifist' someone said 'read this science fiction book about a group of people who don't believe in evil and what happens to them' an 'you have to defend yourself. There are bad people and there's violence' and so on. Now, again, it's, I would sort of caution people for the sake of their own intellectual integrity, if you're out there and you feel this to be the case, I certainly don't mind if you write in I mean of course, *snorts* putting these ideas out in the public domain I invite and encourage a debate with people. I want to know that I'm right. Being right is very hard and it takes a lot of intellectual rigour. And it's incredibly beneficial. I couldn't be a happier person, I think if I burst into flame with joy. And so I want to retain that and make sure what I'm putting into the public domain is responsible and is logical and is accurate because I can't say that universal morality is the most powerful thing in human consciousness and defines the fates of societies and deploys 10's of thousands of weapons in the armies and the police, I can't say that it's this incredibly radioactive dangerous powerful substance and then sort of casually throw out things that turn out to be false. So please by all means come in and let me know where I've made a mistake as my good friend did who sent me in an email and as other people have done as well but I will caution you that you really need to understand what it is that I'm saying before you criticise me. Don't sort of read the first couple of lines of something and say 'ah he's a pacifist he doesn't believe in self-defence! He doesn't believe in evil he just wants to roll over and let the tanks roll over him' and so on and then fire me off a quick and heated email. I certainly don't mind if you do I mean *laughs* you're free to do whatever you want but you're not going to have any luck changing my mind unless you read all the way through and argue with my premises. And I certainly understand that temptation. *laughs* I once returned an email in the same manner to someone who wrote me, who then quite rightly chastised me for not reading to the end so it's a habit that we all have but, fight it, I guess is what I'm saying.'
22:14: 'But the people who have taken issue with my stance on Self-defence. First of all, I do believe in evil... It is a fact. Murder is evil, theft is evil, rape is evil, assault is evil. I also believe that the dissemination of incorrect universal moral absolutes is evil... People are morally responsible for what they put out into the social sphere, does that mean I think they should be put in jail? Of course not because that would imply the existence of a state and I don't believe that any such thing as a state is morally justifiable. Just a gang of thugs who are using false morality to steal from people... I have no problem calling those who put evil ideas or ideas that advocate the use of evil out into the social atmosphere, I have no problem calling them polluters and corrupt and bad people. This is especially true of course when the evidence comes in and the ideas they have put out are proven to be false.'
23:40: 'I think it was a gentleman named Durante in the 1930's or 40's who was a new York times reporter who actively and knowingly covered up stalin's famines, right?. When Stalin collectivised the farms and 10 million people starved to death, he actively obscured this, he was the guy who came up with the quote 'I have seen the future and it works!' and privately he knew that these famines were going on in fact in private letters to his friends he accurately estimated the number of people who were dying.. I consider that man to be completely evil.'
24:35: 'if you're still a communist or a socialist, then I have no problem labelling you as evil because the evidence is in and you are actively supporting ideas which directly result in the deaths of millions of people.'
25:10: 'I believe that evil is very powerful and evils power is entirely depended upon peoples belief in false morality. Evil has very little power if it cannot hijack universal moral principles and present the evil as the good. That's entirely how evil gets into power.'
25:34: 'the argument for self-defence muddied the waters. Of course life is a value and violence is bad so it's okay to use violence to oppose violence. Yes of course, I absolutely understand that and I admit as much in my podcasts, however I find that it really muddied the waters to say violence is bad, except in self-defence. To always have to throw that caveat in is to me a complete waste of time because it's such a tiny issue that it completely pales next to the real reality of state violence and state power. I really don't have anything to fear from my local thugs. I can move, I can carry a gun, but the state I have no defence against except these podcasts'
26:30: 'the argument for self-defence, I just don't care enough about it, it's a red herring, yes I agree with it in principle but I really don't care about it and I think it muddies the waters and it also makes a sort of thin edge of the wedge(?) for the state to come back in. Because you say everybody has the right to self-defence. There's some little old lady who doesn't know how to defend herself therefore you need to have a social agency which defends her on her behalf and it's gonna be called the police and lo and behold you have the state coming back again to solve a teeny tiny problem and I just don't consider it to be important enough to really spend any time on'
27:15: 'if you want to write to me and tell me that evil exists when *laughs* I've spent most of my time on the web and through these podcasts arguing against evil then you might want to reconsider how much time you want to spend instructing me on something that I'm already advocating.'
29:20: 'if you say there's no such thing as preferred behaviour but if your preferred behaviour is to believe universal morality that all people who believe that are false then you've just created universal morality which is you should not believe in universal morality'
30:00: 'Either preferential behaviour exists or it does not. If it does exist then if you want to claim universality for those behaviours, i.e. Morality, Then you have to prove your moral theory doesn't contradict itself, doesn't force one person to do one thing and another person to do another thing, and doesn't contradict its own nature, and is valid tomorrow as it was yesterday, in this location and that location. You just have to make it a scientific theory, that's all. And it also has to explain the facts of reality, like communism gets people killed and capitalism makes them rich. That's the entire argument for morality.'
50:25: 'evil has very little power in the absence of its capacity to hijack the definition of the good and warp and corrupt everybody's moral sensibilities. Human beings are drawn to obey the good. It is just natural within our natures for reasons that I'm not gonna get into right now but maybe will be an interesting subject for a podcast. Once you get someone to define something as the good they're yours for life. That is an absolute fact. Doesn't mean that it's absolute for everyone because as I mentioned, theories about human beings are biological, need biological accuracy, not the accuracy of blind physics... Human beings cannot resist what they define as the good. They might fight it, they might grumble about it, but they cannot resist it fundamentally because they've defined it as the good and human beings are drawn to obey the good like matter is drawn to a gravity well. And our enemies know this much better than we do, which is why I keep hammering the point. I hope not to the point of complete redundancy. Our enemies understand this which is why the get children when they're young and pound the good into their head like nails into a plank, because then they own them for life, that's why the first thing the government did, get control of the educational system. That's why the first thing religious people do is get control of the children. Because they understand you get someone to believe something is good and you own them body and soul for the rest of their lives.'
Date: 1 Jan 2006
Tags: Donations, Cult, Christina
0:00: 'hello this is Stefan Molyneux from freedomain radio. Thank you so much, for downloading these podcasts. I hope that you are enjoying them and getting an enormous amount of value out of them. I do request 50$ a podcast in terms of donations to help defray the costs of dedicated servers, bandwidth, and food and shelter for the philosopher.'
6:20: 'negative economics is basically something like, a priest will tell you that you're a bad person and because you have original sin, or you haven't accepted Christ or, you know, whatever, you're breathing. And so they'll tell you that you're a bad person which provokes, and they'll do this when you're very young, and that provokes bad feelings, right? I feel guilty, I feel inadequate, I feel small and helpless next to the awesome majesty of god's power and benevolence and so on. So what happens is you provoke negative feelings and then you charge people to alleviate those negative feelings. So a way this has been described for me once many years ago, I can't remember where, was that in order to save you a priest has to damn you first. And that's quite important. If a Christian comes to me and says 'you need to be saved' my sort of response has always been 'from what?' I have a wonderful life and I'm very happy what on earth would I need to be saved from. If you're not damned then you can't be saved, so the fear thing priests need to invest in is to create a need within the marketplace of ones emotional existence. And the way that you do that is to create negative feelings and then pay to alleviate them.'
7:35: 'Parents do this of course quite a bit. Perhaps this could be talked about as having something to do with my wife's parents but we're not entirely going to stand behind that but, because she's in the room *laughs* as I'm doing the podcast but I think she would also say, she says hello to everybody as well. She's doing a sudoku and has kindly allowed me not to participate in this activity because it smacks to much like math and actually objective test of intelligence, and I much prefer to work in the world of metaphors and philosophy. *laughs* but, with parents the way it generally works of course is that they, let's talk about my wife's parents in particular because we might as well start with something that's concrete and absolute. So let's just say theoretically my wife doesn't take a great deal of pleasure out of seeing her parents for a variety of reasons. But for quite sometime after we got married, before and after we got married, we would sort of go over there every 4-6 weeks because my wife would feel guilty about not seeing her parents and so it was sort of like this elastic band that could stretch only a certain amount, except we didn't actually take active pleasure in going over to see her parents. But after a certain amount of time it would be like 'oh I feel too guilty, I feel to exposed let's go and see them' and that's how we would alleviate the guilt of not seeing them. So as we talked about, I've always had the opinion that the withdrawal of a negative is not a positive. If I threaten to cut your toe off and say I'll take 50 bucks not to and you give me the 50 bucks, you're not better off. All you've done is avoid a negative which is not the same thing as having a positive and that is a pretty important distinction. However in the world of negative economics, provoking bad feelings in others and then having them pay you to alleviate those bad feelings, is a perfectly viable economic strategy. I mean, if we take away the morality of it then it's a perfectly valid strategy for gaining economic values just as in biology being a parasite is not a bad thing, it's a perfectly viable strategy for a cellular organism to hang out in somebody's intestines and eat what comes by... It's a perfectly valid strategy from a biological standpoint and from an amoral standpoint it's a perfectly viable economic strategy, to provoke negative feelings in others and then charge them to alleviate those feelings. Of course the reason we know that it's immoral is that it's not universal. If my wife were to try and guilt her parents they would get very angry, so it's a one-sided transaction. They'll be happy to create guilt in others but they won't allow others to create guilt in themselves. And so we know it's not moral because it's not universal, it's just a sort of manipulative one-sided thing.'
11:55: 'as I've sort of found with my own mother, who was more than happy to use violence against me when I was younger, when she started yelling up at me rather than down at me because I grew into a fairly husky lad, and I was able to sort of tower over her, she quickly changed her tune and had not particular interest in aggressing against me violently anymore.'
16:25: 'I had lunch with my mother every week, gave her money and tried to take care of her and tried to support her because I thought that was what was meant by a good son, back when I was enslaved by illusions.'
17:45: 'as I've been accused of at times of my life 'lorded over those who are less intelligent'
Tags: Libertarianism, Cult
00:48: 'what is libertarianism? Well you've probably heard of libertarianism in one form or another. You may have some images about who we are and what we are. Maybe you think of us as crazy cult survivalists from Montana, with beards longer than our hair. No disrespect to Montana libertarians who I'm sure are very nice. But we're really not that. Maybe you think we're like crazy cult anarchists or crazy cult bitter loners, the crazy cult thing is usually mentioned. Or maybe we're like one step above or below the Dungeons and dragons geeks, people who can't seem to get a date or deep relationships because every date we go on we get into massive arguments about the role of the Federal Reserve and don't get any further than that. Maybe you know a libertarian who seems to pick up a newspaper and get all red and foamy because everything in it is something they disagree with. Or maybe you have an image of libertarians as people who've joined some crazy cult that forces them to argue with you every single time you get together with them. Or maybe you have an impression that libertarians believe that all problems, even like acne, can be traced back to the government, well actually the acne one is true. You always wanted maybe a democracy full of people who knew about the constitution just not maybe as much as some libertarians know about the constitution and are more than willing to share with you. Or maybe you have this image of libertarians as people who inhabit or have come from some alternate universe where Lincoln was a bad president and the civil war had nothing to do with slavery and the great depression was not the result of anything to do with business and robber barons were heroes. It's some sort of up is down, black is white alternate universe where everything that you believe is kind of turned upside down and presented to you in a complete negative or a complete positive if you think it's a negative. And you know, I guess all of the above may be true to some degree but I don't think they're a particularly healthy way to look at an intellectual movement that has a good deal of energy and focus and clarity behind it.'
Tags: Fantasy and Imagination, Specialness, Personal, Cult
00:15: 'I had a wonderful time with Christina over the vacation and had some very wonderful chats with some good friends of mine who were kind enough to send me some criticisms and some corrections to my thinking'
1:40: 'you have this standard thing which I swear I have seen in about 8,000 films which is, somebody sees something that's impossible and spends, and is all upset because other people don't believe that what she's seen that is impossible is actually true. And the reason that this scene is played over so many times, my eyeballs were rolling 360 at this point, because Christians or religious people believe in things that just don't make any sense and yet they are absolutely desperate to convince other people that these things are true despite the fact they don't make any sense. Of course you can't get a portal to another world through the back of a closet, and I don't even think it's particularly spectacularly imaginative as a novelist myself to portray this.'
10:05: 'the other thing that bothered me about the film, which I think is particularly true to Christians is this insane and psychotic feeling of specialness. This feeling of specialness I just find so confusing. These kids who go over into this other world, like the moment they get over there, there are these talking beavers, which didn't make me think of anything rude. And the talking beaver says 'oh you're the ones in the prophecy and you're so special and you're gonna become the king and you're here to rule us all and you're here to lead us all' and so on. My question of course in the movie and generally about religion as a whole is, what makes you so special? You know, you're not the wisest among them, you're just a bunch of little kids from finchley. *laughs* you don't know anything about anything. And you're not even particularly nice little children. The littlest girl is kinda cute, but the rest of them are just kinda mean. The oldest girl has like a heart of stone, and the brothers are constantly fighting because in England elder brothers are sort of constitutionally designated as the jerks of the family. And the only thing that's unrealistic I thought *laughs* was that the younger brother yelled at the eldest brother and didn't get punched, because that's how the family dynamics were being set up'
11:25: 'so what makes these kids so special? Well nothing. Like in the real world they're shunted away from a dangerous city and sent out to the country where nobody really cares about them, and so obviously they're going through feelings of humiliation and I fully understand that and sympathise with that. But to then escape into this alternate world where they're kings and noble and heroes and all the warriors in the land kneel down before them. I mean that is a sort of psychotic overreaction to a feeling of humiliation, that indicates severe abuse early in life. If when you are put into a situation which could be considered humiliating like you're sent away from your family to protect you from bombs and you're put into a household where people don't really seem to like children. Well you know, frankly suck it up a little. Deal with it. There are lots of worse things to be humiliated about as children than being sent away from danger to a place that's not entirely friendly but perfectly pleasant.'
12:25: 'but the psychotic overreaction to feelings of shame which produces these grandiose fantasies where you can't just say 'man they've kind of not treated me well here, that's not nice, I don't like that, that feels bad.' you have to sort of say 'ok I'm going to create and escape into this alternate world where I am a king and there's these massive battles of good and evil that hinge entirely upon my decision and the greatest warrior leader in the history of Narnia put me in charge of his army although I am in fact a 14 year old boy *laughs* it's just lunatic.'
13:00: 'And there is imagination. I'm a novelist, and I was an actor and I understand the power of imagination and imagination is wonderful and a lot of these podcasts as you probably know, in fact almost all of them except a few at the beginning, I do on the fly while I'm driving often. And so, there's a lot of imagination going at work here. I'm picking twenty threads of where to go next and keeping all these balls in the air as I'm driving. So I do understand the power of imagination but imagination that is not grounded in reality is fantasy. And fantasy is very different from imagination. Imagination takes what is and pictures new things which can be achieved, right? Fantasy is what takes things which are impossible and makes them real and destroys cause and effect and destroys rationality, and it's not a healthy aspect of the human mind. It's a sort of sub-species of psychoses. And that is not really where you want to be, right? So imagination is, I see this girl, I smiled at her she smiled at me, wouldn't it be nice if we got together blah blah blah blah blah, that's sort of, imagination and that's wonderful because it helps pave the way for you to get what you want, right?... And it's a wonderful thing. It's an essential part of the human mind and a very healthy and productive part of the human mind. But fantasy is, being a grungy, over-weight bachelor who thinks, who watches fashion television and says 'man I gotta get me one of those supermodels' I mean that is fantasy and that is quite the opposite of imagination because it actually paralyses you, it means that you're gonna look at every other woman and compare them to supermodels and my wife of course. *laughs* and you're not going to get what you want, in fact it's gonna block you from getting what you want. So fantasy is a sort of sub-species of psychoses that is the opposite of imagination and I view this film much more as fantasy. Fantasy will always produce conflict. Fantasy will always produce violence of some kind or another, whether it's emotional or physical.'
15:35: 'let's say that you listen to these podcasts and you think 'you know this guy with the sort of pan-European accent may have some things of value to say' I mean that's great, I'm sort of unimportant in the equation. The communication of what's true which I work at to provide to you is important. And if you find no good reasons to disagree with me and empirically you verify what I'm saying then by all means believe the truth. I mean, you're not believing me. I am absolutely unimportant *laughs* in the equation, right? I am a vessel of truth, or whatever. Your relationship to what I'm saying doesn't have anything to do with me, it has to do with the truth, right? These don't make me smart or special or great or anything like that, they're just things which I'm good at which I've spent a lot of time thinking about that I want to share because I believe that truth is the most important thing in life and I want to help people. I don't mean this in any kind of paternalistic way, I'm sure you're doing great but if there's a little thing that I've discovered that can be of clarification or help to you, wouldn't it be kind of stingy not to share it? Wouldn't it be kind of mean? Let's say that I have some cure for some ailment of mankind. Well I care about mankind and I want to help that. But I would never say that this makes you beholden to me, or that you should listen to me or that everything I say is true, that would be crazy and narcissistic and dangerous, right? I don't want anybody to have allegiance to me, I want people to have allegiance to the truth, and to the methodology that I put forward, right? I mean we don't give all praise to Francis Bacon every time the scientific method is used to prove something true. We may say 'hey it's great the guy came up with it' but he's dead and gone and doesn't really matter. And that's exactly how I feel about myself. Not that I'm Francis Bacon *laughs* of course but that it doesn't matter to me that I come up with these ideas and it shouldn't matter to you, just look at the ideas and see if they're valid.'
19:50: 'I really do dislike this idea of specialness. I think it's very dangerous. Because the world in fact does not agree with you.'
20:25: 'It doesn't really matter what you say to your kids, if you're not a good parent and not a good person, they are not gonna respect you. They might fake it but they're really not gonna respect you.'
21:48: 'if I think that I'm special and I'm great and I'm gifted and everybody owes me allegiance, although I don't do anything to achieve that, I don't put out anything that's great, or work to become the wisest person.. or even start a business to create jobs for people.. People are just not gonna agree with me, they're not gonna care and that's gonna provoke narcissistic rage because I've founded my entire sense of identity on this fantasy of specialness'
24:25: 'if you're just some guy and you haven't put in the work, taken the risks and had the emotional stamina to put work out there that can be criticised and rejected, and worked at whatever it is that you're gonna work at, it takes at least 10 years, unless you're a child actor, to become any good at anything. So if you put that time in and you start to put your work out and people like it then maybe there's a sense of specialness that you can enjoy, but in the real world if you don't do that, nobody cares about you, really.'
Tags: Debating, Christian Parents, Personal, Ego
Part about multiple personalities is said jokingly
2:55: 'I can take position in just about any argument and argue it fairly convincingly just because, uh, I'm inhabited by multiple personalities'
6:10: 'it would probably seem abusive to a Christian to raise their children to be non-Christians even if that Christian has doubts about the veracity of Christianity.'
7:10: 'if you teach your kids there is no god, what's gonna happen to them?... They're gonna alienate their friends, they're not gonna be invited over to other peoples families. When they get to university they're going to, you know, have a couple of crazy cooky libertarian anarchist atheist friends *laughs* but they're gonna be very much outside the pale.'
7:38: 'you're kind of setting them up for a lifetime of hiding their true beliefs in social situations and facing that agonising choice that libertarians or truth-seekers always face, which is when you hear someone who's just spouting off the most pompous and wind-blown nonsense, what do you do? Do you interrupt every dinner party forty times to say 'well that's you know really not true' or 'have you really thought about this, or really thought about that' and all of the *laughs* social discomfort that that can produce often resulting in being labelled a crazy fringe lunatic obsessive cult nut-job.'
12:23: 'on many many objectively verifiable levels they are doing the right thing by their children to teach them that Christianity is true. Even if, they don't believe that it is true.'
12:45: 'I have an enormous amount of respect for the mental structure of Christianity and other types of religions, and I think that if you don't then you may have very different criteria *laughs* for that than I do.'
13:00: 'But as far as an intellectual virus goes and a low labor tool for transferring resources, it's done pretty well *laughs*. If you include the old testament we've got like four or five thousand years of income transfer with almost no effort. Some Jewish friends of mine were kind of left alone and allowed to not be very Jewish before they had children, and then it was like off with the foreskin and into the synagogue. Because you're allowed to play around with not being part of the tribe and not paying for the tribe, as long as you don't refrain or keep your child away from the tribe when they're very young. The cold claws of the tribe want to close over your child's neck very early on in life before they get the chance to think about anything because you can't program something which can think, right?'
Hypothetical conversation of a synagogue-goer and a rabbi
14:15: 'when they sat down with the rabbi, the rabbi was like 'well you gotta pay, I don't know 1500$ or 2000$ to belong to the synagogue' and they're like 'well that's quite a bit of money' and he's like 'well it's like a gym membership, right?' and all that kinda stuff, right? Except *laughs* with a gym you get equipment and health, with a synagogue or a church you just get conformity and tall-tales'
14:35: 'but let's give respect where respect is due. Right? If I were a perfectly amoral human being looking to maximise my resources without a doubt you wanna be a thundering, well-gelled with a blonde wife guy, from a pulpit. It's a little labor. Highly reproducible. You get kids young, you program them, they're yours for life. You get payed huge amounts of money for making thrilling speeches. And as far as a perfectly amoral transfer of wealth goes, it's about the most effective that there is, right?.. Let's give respect where it's due. They've come up with a pretty air-tight set of syllogisms and beliefs and defences that have lasted the test of time.'
18:05: 'there's a very strong argument to be made that children are better off in many many ways by being taught Christianity. However... I don't see any particular line between teaching your children about Christianity, and in Nazi Germany encouraging your children to become good Nazi's.'
Around 28:00
Stefan had a friend whose wife was unfaithful and she only admitted it two years later.
31:25: 'the purpose of the mind is either to gain resources by conforming to the social norms, or the purpose of the mind is to gain valid resources by conforming to objective and empirical reality'
32:45: 'if you can find one person who agrees with you that you can chat with and enjoy your time with, I would say that that plus being in conformity with the truth is a greater happiness than having a bunch of people and stewing in falsehood together.'
38:10: 'many generations came before us and we've inherited all of their wisdom in this area and whatever we can add as we pass along will be more than appreciated by those who come after us.'
Tags: Personal, Myths
2:50: 'I was put in boarding school when I was six years old. My brother went a year ahead of me... My mother was a secretary when I was young and we had no money, well not much money. No car or anything like that. My dad had gone to boarding school and since boarding school had turned my dad into such a paragon of rationality (sarcasm) he felt it was important to send Hugh and I to the same warm and cuddly embrace of a sort of cold water British boarding school. I went when I was six and I had a lot of religious instruction. We went to church all the time, and I dosed off quite a bit, when someone's up there droning about so and so begat so and so. And every now and then we had this real sleepy-voiced preacher and every now and then he would sort of stab(?) up about 'Mr Molyneux!' and my head would jerk up and this spindle of drool *laughs* from my chin to the pew. Because I was in the choir, I've always enjoyed singing... So I was sort of front and centre to some degree and that's sort of where I got the idea that if you're prominent to even a tiny degree within a movement you're kind of a little more disciplined than everyone else..'
4:50: 'I remember reading when I was in graduate school I read a lot of Luther... who translated the bible into the vernacular, founded Protestantism, split off from Christianity, didn't like indulgences so much and plunged Europe into religious wars for about 150 years. Luther was an absolute evil genius of the first order, in terms of his intellectual life. That man could just do amazing things with logic, which he despised, but he could do amazing things with logic to further justify the power of the state.'
Talking about Eve in the Garden of Eden
16:00: 'and then she goes and uses her evil feminine wiles. Ahh those evil feminine wiles, aren't they wonderful.'
16:50: 'the best myths are those which psychologically approximate the truth while obscuring it in its narrative.'
17:00: 'if you wanna make a great myth what you wanna do is include the truth about the lie that you're telling but you wanna put it in such an outlandish fashion that people don't suspect it. And what happens then, it has a deep resonance for them because the part of every human being that recognises the truth, the reality processing that we all have... grabs onto the truth that's buried in the metaphor and yet our defences focus upon the metaphor and forget about, so you get a deep emotional appeal but it's so outlandish that nobody ever thinks of applying it to what it's describing.'
Tags: Women, Christina, Parents, Personal
7:35: 'this is the really clingy woman who is so clingy that you get like a five-page email after your first date with all of your personality quirks delved into in detail and you can sort of feel that claustrophobic net of obsessive femininity closing over your face.'
Talking about Christina
9:00: 'on every level she's just a delight to be around and enriches my life in ways that I would go hoarse trying to describe. And the reason that I married her was, of the couple of dozen women I went out with she was the one who made my life better.'
16:22: 'a hypocritical parent, or you know *laughs* in my view, a parent'
17:00: 'my mother was very violent when I was growing up and was just this complete harridan(?) and when I got older and began to tower over her, if I ever got angry at her she would be shocked. I was about 13 or 14 and she came to hit me and I just grabbed her arm and said 'don't you dare ever raise your hand to me again, that's over and done with, and if you do I'm gonna belt you back. Because you can dish it out but can't take it, I've got no respect for you' something like that. And of course she was shocked and appalled 'aw don't you dare raise your hand against me' got kinda shrieky and silly'
18:15: 'Christina's parents, their trick was withdrawal. So if Christina did something which displeased her parents, which was always kinda tricky to figure out, then they would withdraw from her and not talk to her... Parents who are bad always find the thing you hate the most and that's how they get you. And I'm not gonna say this is true of all parents because not all parents are sadists but if you do have the misfortune to be born to one of these devils then for me the worst thing has always been physical violence, like I don't mind social humiliation that much, I don't mind being teased, I'm not that big on status, I don't really mind if I don't have any money, public humiliation isn't really that big a deal for me. But the one thing that is unbearable to me is physical violence and that's not a result of my mother beating me but that's why she beat me, because what she did with my brother was much more social humiliation which is something that he can't stand, so less beating and more being yelled at in public. And for christina the worst thing for her is withdrawal so that's what her parents did and then when she decided against seeing them for some time for a variety of reasons, they were unbelievably angry and upset and so on'
In reference to the above quote
21:50: 'this is the kind of stuff you see in families all the time. It's kind of natural abuse that parents get into, right?'
21:00: 'I wrote once in a novel, parents dominate their young with the lazy rot(?) of absolutes and then when their children get older they defend their own actions with the lazy fog of relativism'
25:20: 'this is many many years ago, I knew a gentleman, when I was first in the business world, and he was an accountant, and I did some work for him in his office and then he asked me to set up a whole computer system for him so I did, so we drove to his house. I was still dead broke at this point, I had just left university and so I was sort of casting about for my next step. And he had a big house, like six bedrooms or something like that, and we came in through the parking lot and I've always appreciated and admired nice things. I don't think anybody's stolen them from me and I'm glad I have them now myself because I worked very hard to be able to afford them and achieve them so I said to him 'wow this is a nice place' and he turned to me and said with a kind of insufferable smugness that I can still recall so vividly now, he turned to me and said 'yes, the lord has been good to us' and my, oh my, oh my, didn't I just want to blow up at him. Oh my lord I still remember that course of adrenaline that went through my body. My heavens, can you imagine that saccharin vanity and pompousness behind that statement.'
9:12: 'I myself took a pretty significant pay cut from my (?) high as a Chief Technical Officer at a very fast growing start-up. I took a significant pay cut, I left the workforce in 2001 for about a year and a half and I sort of wrote books and thought and came up with all the stuff that I am communicating now, and then I went back to work. And it was very hard for me to find a job and I took a pay cut of about 25% from where I was previously and in my current job I have no stock options or any ownership, I'm simply an employee. But that was the best that I could do given the Market situation and I have no complaints with my employer because it would be economically foolish for that person to pay higher than the going rate.'
21:50: 'I've done manual labour in my life, the work is not that bad. You can sort of wile away brain dead time by thinking about other things. But that forced socialising and 'let's pull on a couple of beers after work' that kinda stuff is a bit exhausting. I don't have much in common with the people I worked with in the realm of manual labour.'
Tags: Ego, Personal, Integrity, Cult
0:00: 'good evening my brothers and sisters'
2:14: 'the disturbance that you're feeling is not so much in the realm of abstract moral philosophy, as it is pretty specifically in the realm of how do you deal socially with people if you accept the fact that what they're doing is morally wrong and they have no idea and most of society has no idea and everyone supports them what are you gonna do? Are you gonna confront them?... And call them child abusers? These are all significant questions... If it's true what we have been discussing and Christianity is a form of child abuse... Then we are sort of on the frontier of discovering a new moral in society. A new ethical reality. We are not inventing it we are simply discovering it. And we're not the first... This frontier has been crossed by many minds before us. For instance for many years slavery was considered to be moral... Infanticide was considered to be perfectly acceptable... There was really no such thing as property rights... Women could be treated as chattel. There are many many moral frontiers that get crossed in the development or progress of society that if we are the next explorers to cross a new one, it's not the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last.'
25:35: 'I live in this house with my gorgeous bride and she has some social sensibilities that I as a wolf-boy jungle child was never exposed to when I was growing up. So when I'm going downstairs, let's say I'm going to bed and I'm in my skivvy's and I come down stairs. I'm going down stairs and my wife will say 'put a robe on' 'put some pants on' and I do. Because downstairs maybe the neighbours can see... But I'll put it on because I don't want my wife to feel uncomfortable and how tough is it for me to put on a robe, right?'
28:30: 'when I have kids I fully expect them after a certain age, for me that would be 16, my wife a little younger, to wear pants when they leave the house. Even if it's summer. Even if they shave(?) a little. Even if it would be gloriously free to waddle out into the sunshine with your *laughs* twinks and berries hanging wherever. That would be fantastic. But it's sort of frowned on, even if it wasn't illegal. I can understand that it might be disturbing to some. But I'm not going to say to my son, 'son of mine, you have to put pants on because it shows respect for the highest virtue in the land.' I'm just gonna say 'look this is our custom. We're not the African Nudist Colony Tribe. This is sort of how we do things here.' and if my kids going to a job interview I'll say 'put a suit on' and he'll say 'well is that rational and objective and true?' because he's gonna be my son, and I'm gonna say 'well no, but you put a suit on because that's what's expected'
31:50: 'I'm not gonna tell you what you should do because everbody's integrity is to some degree subjective. I don't say that I live this John Galtian existence of perfect integrity with all of my beliefs all the time. First of all I think that would be impossible because I can't hold all my beliefs in my head at the same time.'
32:05: 'Not three and a half years ago I thought war was a good thing. Not two years ago I thought there was a role for the state. Not six months ago I didn't really have a strong opinion about whether Christianity was, I mean I knew it was bad for children, but whether it was actually abusive and so on I didn't have a strong opinion, it was only when I really began to explore the idea... So integrity is kind of a rolling target is what I'm saying. And I don't believe there's any objective or outside way that you can say this is integrity and this is not because knowledge is constantly growing and here are certainly times when I don't act with integrity and I think that's productive for me. I had a boss who was completely crazy, I didn't quit my job because I needed the money, I wanted the money. I had lunch with my mother for years, though I never liked her. I knew I never liked her. I knew I didn't like her. But I did it because I was afraid of my brothers disapproval or social disapproval or I thought 'this is what a good son does. Aren't I a good son.' so I don't always act with perfect integrity in my life.'
33:40: 'it is a difficult problem when you see a great moral evil in the world that nobody else sees and which you will be condemned and rejected for identifying. It has felled many great minds in the past and it will probably fell many great minds in the future. So I don't have a simple answer. But I will tell you this. You can't snap your fingers and save the world. When a new moral sun rises over the world everything looks black. The whole world looks like it's in darkness. And there's a period, for me at least, of just feeling like you're kinda crazy, right? Like you're just making up moral horrors that don't exist for whatever reason you have, but then you keep plugging away at it and reasoning it out and talking to people and checking with your experience and checking with empirical facts and eventually you have to come to the conclusion. You can't doubt your sanity forever.'
35:00: 'when I was working at my current job I had a student who enjoyed talking about religion, and he was Christian. And in conversation with myself about, it started off about capitalism and then it moved onto theology and what happened? Well I blew his mind, he dropped out of school and I don't know where the heck he went after that.'
36:05: 'I want to help the world as best as I can and as much as I can because I think I've been granted a few iotas of truth that maybe some other people don't have. I do want to help the world. I do want to push back some of the evil I see in the world. And I see some great good as well but in the areas where there is a great evil that's invisible to people such as the topic at hand. I do want to help, but I also wanna enjoy my life. I am not her to be some cartoon superhero warrior of light that is going to do nothing but spend his days racing around chasing down people who are doing bad things and trying to stop them. I don't fly over with food to places where there's starvation going on. I don't fly out to areas where the tsunamis have hit. I don't fly down to New Orleans because I have a life to live and I want to be happy. It makes me happy to tell the truth, it makes me happy to debate the truth with people and I enjoy it. It makes me happy, very happy to do these podcasts and enjoy these very much but I am not here to.. oppose and save every evil decision in the world. That would be grandiosity. That would be megalomania and obviously impossible. To take on the impossible is irrational.'
37:15: 'so as far as if you can face up to this sort of moral truth that we've been discussing over the last couple of weeks, I absolutely applaud you. And I welcome you into this small but widening circle of light of people who've understood something more about morality than has been understood previously and something more about integrity and the truth than has been understood previously. And we are the people who move the species forward. So everybody hates us and, you know, nobody wants to spend any time with us and all of that phase that goes through your life, all of those horrible ripples that go through your life when you start speaking about the truth. So what? There's six billion people on the world who conform and who nod and who agree with everybody else and who live as second-handers and never think for themselves. Does it really end the whole world if there's not six billion and one or six billion and two or six billion and three. *laughs* I don't think so. I think the world can survive a few questions. I think the world can survive a little scepticism. I think the world can survive a little rationality. And that's where we stand. We few. We lonely, far-seeing high-walking few. And it's a great place to be. It's a wonderful place to be. I wouldn't want to trade this clarity for anything in the world. No amount of money. No amount of social acceptance. No amount of fame. No amount of anything can replace the joy of this kind of clarity because it gives me creativity. It gives me joy and most importantly it gives me a beautiful marriage. And that's what counts the most.'
Tags: Personal, Art and Artists, Christina, Novel by Stefan and Christina
00:25: 'I used to ski quite a bit but my wife has this Mediterranean aversion to the cold so I can't really do that as much anymore'
1:35: 'some place as important as where you live is accidental. We don't choose it. If you did who on earth would choose to live in Canada? What a lunatic place to come to live. My wife and I have sort of been talking about that and saying 'well we really don't have much to do with our families anymore we have a few close friends but that's not a reason to stay in a particular place and I don't get to spend enough time around Christians, that's really what I think' so we're thinking of moving to the states. The trick is to find some place warm where we can afford it and where people are willing to sponsor the owners process of moving and getting the legal ability to work in the states.'
5:30: 'I lived in Quebec for four years when I was an undergraduate. I went to the national theatre school for two years and I went to McGill to finish my undergraduate for two years. Sorry that doesn't make much sense. I started doing an English Literature degree and I started acting and I enjoyed it and then I started writing plays and I enjoyed it. So I applied to the national theatre school and I got in and I went for two years but for a variety of reasons found it just wasn't for me. The art that they were working on, and I didn't know this consciously at the time, the art that they were working on was such to me horrible gutter art. All these horrible dysfunctional people and their horrible dysfunctional lives and I never clicked with it. Later on I had an opportunity to do some speeches from a play called Luther by John Osborne, the guy who wrote 'Look Back In Anger' and I clicked with that stuff because it was intelligently written but a lot of the stuff that you see of course in movies is just like dumb people behaving badly, or evil people behaving badly and if there are good people then they are the hill street blues kinda weary holding back the tide of evil good people and it just never clicked with me emotionally because I guess I had a grander vision of life and it's possibilities. And I just found that the art world wasn't for me and of course the art world is all well and good but you have to spend your time with other artists and here in Canada you can't survive without direct state sponsorship because people are so highly taxed that they can't consume art and so the state ends up subsidising it and I just found it a horrible pretentious world where everybody's just trying to pretend that they are doing better than they are and after a childhood of rejection I guess you could say, I wasn't that keen on getting involved in a field where there's so much rejection. Like 99% of the money goes to 1% of the people. And it's also sort of struck me... I watched a film last week called 'Beijing bicycle' which is a foreign film about, a little bit like 'The Bicycle Thief' which is an old Italian film... It was an interesting movie. Like all movies or books that I read it starts off with, to me, nicely etched details. What I'm interested in when I read a book or see a movie these days is the nice details of people's lives.'
9:25: 'I was in China for about three weeks to do business in 2000 and I found it quite a fascinating culture'
10:00: 'my wife and I have written a novel together called 'Public Lives' which is about the day in the life of a psychologist who works in a state-run hospital. And it is one of these novels of small details. There's no fist-fights. There's no car chases. There's no blow-ups. What there is, is a number of subtle but telling details about the corruption and the waste and the inefficiency and the emotional brutality that goes on. But it's all subtle... The way it is in life. When we're children a lot of us are subject to a lot more overbearing authority let's say, because we're helpless, we don't know any better. Well in our hearts we know better but we can't do anything about it. But when we get older, I mean I've never been involved in a car chase. I've never really seen anything blow up. I've never exchanged gunfire. I think I've only seen one body, one dead body in my life. So my life is little details, all of which add up to happiness and unhappiness, right?'
11:30: 'we wrote this book with that in mind and I kept all of my normal juicy metaphors and desire for drama, I kept all of that out of the novel. And it's a very short novel. I based the idea on Solzhenitsyn's 'A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich'.'
12:10: 'so this woman in the hospital, she treats all her patients and all of her patients are depressed or angry or bitter or corrupt or whatever and the subtle part of the novel is that they are all state employees, they are all public servants. That's why the novel is called Public Lives, right? Because everybody who works in the hospital is there and everybody who gets treated is a civil servant and has all of the stagnation and frustration and politicising and hostility that goes along with working for a corrupt criminal organisation. So that's sort of the big subtlety and at the very end of it she meets a libertarian guy who lays it all bare for her. In a subtle and I think well-written manner. So that's sort of the idea. She has all these little hints during the day that are very hard to pick up on, at least consciously, and then at the end somebody lays the whole system bare for her. Somebody that she thinks she's treating and ends up sort of healing her. That's the big, reversal.'
13:22: 'when a friend of Christina's read it, she has a live-in boyfriend, and so her live-in boyfriend read it and he came back and we sort of had something to eat and asked them what they thought of the book and Christina's friend actually studied English and knows, she's a teacher and so on. So we were hoping to get a lot from her but unfortunately her boyfriend was the one who gave us almost all of his opinions. And like most people other than me who want to give you a lot of their opinions, they're not very well thought out. So what he said was 'it needs to be more like Silkwood, it's needs to be more dramatic, it needs to be more like Erin Brochovich where people are dying, it needs to be, you need to pump up the drama.'.. and he said also 'the woman, she needs to fight the corruption more. She needs to make a stand. She needs to get up there and do stuff' and so I said 'oh that's interesting'... And then a few minutes later, and I had this in my head, not as a gotcha, just as a 'help me understand' thing I asked him if he'd ever been at his work exposed to anybody who was doing something wrong in the basic sense. For instance, one of the therapists in the novel is an alcoholic which is not as uncommon as you might hope and pray, right? And he said 'oh yeah, one of the guys at the plant he used to come down and he was a drinker and we had to cover for him' and all this and that. And I said 'well I assume he was around some dangerous machinery, right?' and he's sort of 'yeah you know haha kinda cool we used to keep a third eye on the back of our heads to see if this guy was barrelling down on us with a forklift' and blah blah blah. He worked there for a couple of years while this guy was working at a factory and then he left or retired or something... And I said 'well, help me understand because I don't mean this in any critical way but I really just wanna understand the connection, right? Because you're saying that this woman in the novel that Christina and I wrote should take a real stand, more of a stand against this colleague who's a drunk, right' The woman in the novel does go and report it and has an excruciating interview with the woman who runs the employee services health and safety services there and in the real world of course nothing happens. But I said, 'this woman in the novel, she does act to do something about it but you don't feel that it's dramatic enough or she should take a really dramatic stand' or some sort of public yelling confrontation or whatever, and I said 'help me understand why you feel that should happen in a book but in your life you didn't lift a finger to report or deal with this drunken colleague that you had.' and of course he turns kind of red, because he's caught, right? And he gets a little hostile and I have to sort of manage that situation. And I wasn't really trying to get him, I was genuinely curious... The novel that I write before this, well ok I wrote a novel before this that was sort of like the discovery of a new island and it turns into a libertarian society but that's gonna take a while to finish. But the novel I wrote before that was this sort of trilogy where it's sort of two brothers from 1916-1940 and one of them works for the foreign office and joins the appeasers and the other one becomes a fighter pilot and you know, it's the story of the hostilities of two brothers which I know a little bit about.. It's a huge novel. It's grand and it's got Churchill and Daladier and Von Ribbontop and they're all in the novel, because I'm trying to trace as much as possible the causes of World War 2. So it's a big ambitious project and I really liked the idea of working on a detailed piece with Christina but I was sort of shocked a little bit that this guy would be so unconnected to any of his own moral choices that he would say, like he would have the complete opposite morals for a character in a book than he would for himself'
23:05: 'I've not had uh I've not had any, body even remotely, any woman has remotely come onto me since I've got married because I'm obviously happily married and can't do anything but talk about how wonderful my wife is.'
Tags: Beauty of Evil, Manipulation
Note: Stefan sings a Queen song
1:50: 'voting is in my mind one of the absolute strokes of genius of the predatory classes. It is, uh absolutely brilliant... You just have to stand back and admire it as a shining edifice of evil. It is just beautiful. We can admire a black panther even though it is very dangerous because it has a lifeness and a leanness and a grace to it, perhaps not when it's mowing down on us... Democracy... Is an absolutely beautiful predator.'
10:50: 'I don't know about you but when I was younger I never had much luck, I still don't have much luck at manipulating anybody *laughs*'
Tags: Personal, Agreement
5:20: 'my mother was institutionalised, my father was institutionalised, went through electro-shock therapy, my brother is sort of crazy and sadistic... There is this strong history that goes back a number of generations of mental instability in my family'
7:10: 'there's nobody who's gonna believe what you believe down to the last degree. Everybody has constantly formulating and growing and changing opinions and sometimes decaying opinions. So there's absolutely nobody in the world who's going to believe everything that you believe at the same time. I'm not sure I believe exactly what I believe from one day to the next because I'm growing and changing with my thinking... There is no perfect concordance with ideas, even within one individual from one day to the next... You cannot place your intellectual agreement with people with them having to agree with you about everything. That's kind of dictatorial and unrealistic... However it really does matter in fundamental areas that you both have the same beliefs.'
9:14: 'I do publish on Lewrockwell.com and through that I hope to get people who have similar ideas about the argument from morality, the argument for the free Market and the other things I've published on Lewrockwell.com that I hope then to lead them to my podcasts and to help them to understand that what we call rationality, empiricism, the truth is a whole package deal.'
11:15: 'in order to get someone to change their minds to join you on the lonely but vital planet of rationality to have to really offer them the full package, at least that's my view. And the degree to which you allow contradictions into your thinking is the degree to which it's really not worth having the ideas at all.'
12:20: 'my email inbox has gone interestingly quiet over the last couple of days and I think it has something to do with the quite personal nature... Not in terms of me, but personal in terms of you. The personal nature of the podcasts that I've been putting out lately about religion and ones relationship to those who practice Christianity and the possibility of moral problems or crimes they may be committing through their practice of Christianity. So in order not to *laughs* I'm not chickening out of the topic trust me we'll come back to it but in order to give my listeners a break from something that may be making them feel uncomfortable'
23:12: 'I used to make just under 130,000$ a year when I worked at my last job, when I ran the company. That not counting any stock options, that was my direct pay. And I was a contractor, doing some other stuff on the side and so on. So my take home pay was good but this was in the 90's, 2000, before the tech crash. And then after I took my, almost two years off, then what I did was, I started looking around for work and the only job I could get was one that paid me 100,000$ a year and I had to be a salaried employee. So I didn't get the tax benefits of being a contractor. And I took it.'
Tags: Personal, Women
7:38: 'I produced a film that I wrote, a number of years ago and it was a finalist at the Hollywood Film Festival'
15:45: 'I had jobs where I was just working spreadsheets and.. I worked on a union contract for the ministry of education when I was a temp'
16:45: 'I'm only now after ten years in the software industry getting the right to go and work and close deals on my own and put together partnerships on my own. It's highly risky stuff and if it goes wrong you can lose millions, or tens of millions of dollars... The first couple of deals I was working on I was in my boss's office like every twenty minutes saying 'should I do this should I do that?'.'
27:55: 'any woman who's in a relationship where she gets beaten up is without a doubt a dysfunctional person and is 99.99% likely to be abusive to her own children simply because if you accept abuse in another person you accept abusive behaviour in yourself'
28:25: 'My father was pretty mean to my mother and my mother was pretty mean to us. And I'm not trying to mistake the world for myself and say that that's the case with all women. But it's certainly the case psychologically that whatever we accept as behaviour we reproduce in our relationship with others'
8:00: 'I left [my company] for a variety of reasons. I took a year and a half off, or a year and 3/4 off and I worked on books and reading and writing and so on and I was, negative income, I was broke. I mean, I wasn't broke but my income was non-existent.'
16:55: 'I had waitering jobs before I was in university and then early on in my university but then later on I couldn't get jobs even though I was a great waiter and went back to the people I'd, worked with me before. They wouldn't give me any jobs because they knew I was out for two months then I was going away again.'
19:15: 'As a theorist Karl Marx was just stone evil, right? He advocated sheer dictatorships and his systems resulted in murder'
26:25: 'and I agree grudgingly, *laughs* she's (Christina) wiser than me in so many areas'
Tags: Personal, Christina, Personal (Mother)
0:00: 'it is December the 10th 2005. One day before my very third wedding anniversary'
00:48: 'we met on a volleyball league about four years ago, we dated ten months before we got married. And pretty much after our second date we've never spent, other than business trips where she'll join me if she can, we've almost never spent any time apart and I gotta tell you it's the easiest and most wonderful thing in the world'
Talking about a military guy who emailed him
3:05: 'he was generally quite polite but I could tell by the sort of stiff language and very formal address, A. That he was a military man and B. That he was trying to be polite when he wasn't feeling in his heart too polite.'
3:30: 'as of 2 years ago, actually 3 years ago I felt there was a place for the government... for the military, the police and so on. And I felt there was a case for war. I was raised on an enormous amount of British propaganda about the Second World War'
15:10: 'don't get me wrong I'm no fan of Germans. My mother's a German.'
19:30: 'I remember being very very young and asking my mother about the Second World War. She said 'it lasted for four years and it was started by Germany.' and then I asked her 'well what about the first world war?' and she said 'it lasted for four years and it was started by Germany.'... I just remember thinking 'hah there's gotta be some kinda pattern. That can't just be a coincidence.'
20:00: 'the other thing I remember as a kid, I read these comic books about the heroic British troops and so on... And the question for me was 'ok you kill a guy in private life you go to jail. You kill a guy in war you get a medal' it just never made sense to me at a basic level.'
22:35: 'my mother... She was born in 1937 in Germany. Not the best place to be especially when you come from a Jewish heritage... She was put in orphanages, she spent days searching for water because of course all of the plumbing gets destroyed, she bid farewell to her mother when her mother was staying in town in Dresden which was a city that had not been bombed because it was purely civilian, had all these art treasures and so on. And Dresden had not been bombed and then one night, I think it was 1944 there was a thousand plane raid that created a fire storm in Dresden. The RAF sent over a thousand planes and one of my uncles was flying one of them, on my father's side. And my grandmother was just vaporised.'
24:32: 'I apologise in advance for any offended this may cause you but trust me it's not been easy for me, to look at this stuff either. I mean, three of my fathers close male relatives were killed in the First World War. Entire sections of my family were wiped out in the Second World War on both sides of the channel so it's not been easy for me to look at this topic objectively but I've done my best.'
31:30: 'it was kind of shocking to me in my, my education about people in the military started about three and a half years ago when I took a job at a company where there was a sort of military wing. There was a group of people, and I was reporting to one of them, who had come out of the military model and it was quite an education. This is the Canadian Military, I don't even know if these people saw action but this is the Canadian Military which is not exactly the most brutal military in the world, so these are probably the nicest examples of the military personalities. But these people were absolutely sociopathic. They were just, you don't get into the military if you're interested in negotiation... So that comes from a pretty destructive personality streak and I would absolutely guarantee you that anybody who was raised in that way and who is that way as a human being had an abusive childhood, and probably not an inconsequentially abusive childhood but probably a really terrible childhood, and they were just bullied and yelled at and hit and beaten, possibly violated in other ways and that's why they've grown up with a complete inability to navigate win/win situations because they're nothing but a massive scar tissue, rage and compulsive.'
Tags: Correction, Personal, Passion, Cult
00:15: 'this is my second stab at war part 2. The first stab that I took at it was more of a sort of wild swing than a stab. I lost my temper *laughs* and began biting my microphone in two as I began talking about the evils and predations of war... My own personal family has suffered grievously through war and I guess that sort of hit me pretty hard when I was doing my podcast'
1:15: 'I wanted to correct something I talked about in war part 1 wherein I said 'when have the Americans ever taken on an enemy who could fight back?' And of course I'm sure you on listening to that you probably thought 'well the japanese could fight back, the Germans could fight back' but what I meant by that, and I apologise for my poor communication on that matter. What I meant by that was that American politicians, politicians in general, never take anyone who can strike them back personally, almost never let's say. And so America is not so keen on taking on nuclear armed powers.'
3:00: 'I remember as a teenager during the days of brain squeezing nuclear terror in the 70's and 80's. I do remember being sort of baffled by the fact that these countries like Russia and China, Russia in particular. Were our enemies and yet all we could do is give them wheat and foreign aid and technology. It seemed very strange to me, why would you be doing that? *laughs*.'
6:15: 'I've experienced... domestic violence at the hands of my mother and brother'
10:25: 'all I'm trying to get people to do is to say 'well forget about what you're told, forget about what people say' that used to pretty common human language, right? Actions speak louder than words'
10:45: 'our blindness to hypocrisy has made us fall prey, has given us a weakness for those who are eloquent, to those who are passionate. And not reminded us that eloquence and passion are a dime a dozen... It's completely irrelevant how passionate someone is about something.'
11:30: 'one of my mother's dementias includes paranoia and oh my heavens is she passionate about what is her theories of things'
45:30: 'I hope that this is clear what the stakes that we are playing for and what it is we need to get done in life and why I am so passionate about the free Market and the end of the state. This place we call the Earth can be a paradise, it can be heaven on earth but we have to strike at the core of what is evil in the world these days and that means striking at the heart of the state. That means using the argument from morality and that means putting those who prey on honest citizens finally finally in the defensive. Because once they're on the defensive it won't be long before the whole thing comes down'
Tags: Personal, Christina
00:30: 'The company that I work at is, *laughs* she is going down like the Titanic and I am sticking around. And I've sort of known this, from a business perspective this was easier to see for the last 6-9 months but I'm sticking around for a variety of reasons. There is an enormous amount of value to be gained from the dissolution of a company. This is where you can get great ownership potential because the customer base is still solid and it has good support revenue and would be a good basis to build a new company out of, but you kind of have to stick around and go through the fire and since I'm the lead technical, manager or director of, actually I'm the chief technology officer, I got a promotion *laughs* which is great, you know. As the captain heads for the lifeboat its like 'hey you're the captain now', 'excellent I now run the titanic'. Anyway, there's a lot of excitement that's going on in my career at the moment and I'm sort of tossing around with the chief marketing officer who I have an enormous amount of respect for and thoroughly enjoy his company. We're tossing around ideas about how to excavate some value from this smoking ruin of bad management that this company has sort of manifested over the past little while, so that's my level of excitement.'
1:45: 'had a lovely dinner last night. It's interesting for me to see how people make bad economic decisions. So for instance even on a minor level, Christina's a vegetarian and lactose intolerant which makes her sound pretty hypochondriacal but that's not the case at all *laughs* she's very robust. But, so I've become mostly vegetarian now I just haven't quite figured out how to be a vegetarian and lift weights at the same time *laughs*'
At a restaurant with Christina and she's a vegetarian, she asks for no meat but gets served something with meat in it
2:55: 'so we're sort of silent and say, and I say, no Christina said, she's perfectly *laughs* able to speak for herself, she said 'I'm sorry I can't eat this. I mentioned that I was vegetarian' and the guys pausing, now this is an entrée that's 16$ right? So let's just assume 50% mark up because it's a restaurant. So he's looking at 8$ of profit that could go down the tubes, in other words the meal as a whole is a net, sort of break even for him. He gets paid 8$ which costs him 8$ to produce so it's a net even but he still gets the profit on everything else, right? And for a 7$ salad which I assume is more than 50% mark up then he's still up ahead on the meal and of course the wine is very expensive so he is going to lose 6$ or 7$ but make still 20$ if he replaces the meal. But he's pausing and he's hesitating and Christina says to me 'well why don't you eat the nyoki(?) and I'll have your salad' because I ordered a non-beef(?) salad so she could eat that. And that seemed fine. We didn't want to get into a big fuss and fight on our anniversary and I was fine with it, she was fine with it and so that's what we did. And so... I think if the guy... insisted, 'no no no you absolutely I will make you a new meal' and so on. Well the reason we went to this restaurant is because it's where we met, or where we went for our very first dinner together but of course we're not going back now which is the wonderful thing about the free-Market.'
Tags: Free Will, Personal, Regret
3:30: 'humanity contains what seems like contradictory characteristic. We are entirely part of reality and yet we have free will... The Buddhists go through this scientific analysis of human life and then claim that because we are entirely material we don't have free will. And that is very silly, simply because it's so obvious that we do have free will and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is appealing to your free will... One of the basic facts of humanity is that we are entirely composed of matter. And yet we have a characteristic which is unique to human beings which is that we possess free will and a rational capacity to analyse the world rationally.'
22:22: 'once you get rid of free will nobody's responsible for anything. Everything is based on predetermined factors, genetics, environment and so on and therefore you can't judge anybody and therefore everybody should be loved equally. This is just, it's a form of mental illness to say that there is no difference between human beings. I went out with a couple dozen women before I married my wife'
23:35: 'if you feel that my mother is absolutely not responsible for any of her own actions, that she's simply a product of circumstances then I invite you to spend a day with my mother and a day with my wife and then see if you don't notice any difference between the two people. And if you feel it's all based on circumstances and genetics then I invite you to spend a day with myself and then with my brother because we have perfectly opposing world views and I believe my brother is morally corrupt. I know that he is morally corrupt and exploitive and perfectly willing to take people's money and time based on lying to them. So we're as far apart as moral human beings can be, and yet, same environment, very similar genetics, my wife and I, completely different gene pool almost identical values.'
Stefan reads Buddhist text in sarcastic, condescending tone: 'the best guidance is to the best of our ability consider the most likely consequences of the various courses of actions available to us and choose those which we believe will cause the least suffering and promote the most overall happiness for ourselves and others'
And then he comments on it
25:35: 'so of course we're back to rank pragmatism, which is that we should simply attempt to maximise happiness and minimise suffering which is impossible. You cannot choose the right thing to do based on the effects you perceive it's going to have. It's not rational, it's not objective, it's not certain, it's certainly not scientific because you can't predict what's going to happen based on your actions to other people.'
44:10: 'I'm very fortunate to have lived a life wherein I have few regrets. Which is not to say I have no regrets but I have made a few. I've made errors of course, and some pretty significant ones, but I certainly did believe that I was operating with the best information at the time and where I have made errors in judgement, I have, which I could be, in hindsight I was sort of swallowed up by greed when I was an entrepreneur and participated in some business schemes which I convinced myself were good at the time but I had enough information to know that it wasn't and I've paid penance for those. I have done the right thing, returned money and so on.'
46:10: 'I got a call from my brother the other day where *sighs* guy phoned up and he basically had to leave his current job because he was asked to do something illegal and he said 'but it was a good thing even though I never got anything out of the job.' and I said 'what do you mean?' and turned out he'd worked for three years with no pay *laughs* because he had some ownership in some company but it was never in writing and now he didn't have any recourse'
Tags: Free Will, Existence/Reality
1:00: Guy emails about podcast 55. Talking about free will in Buddhist teachings guy says 'of course there is free will, if there were no free will why bother with religion at all? It would be pointless. So Stef your entire 50 minute podcast was based on nonsense. Throughout your podcast you rambled, made points based on nothing and with a little hocus pocus you close it up with the statement 'the individual definitely exists' where the hell did that come from? You sound like a Christian trying to prove the existence of god by making a bunch of lame assertions to confuse the issue and at the end of the day say 'and therefore god exists' if the 'individual' truly exists then you should be able to prove it scientifically and with objective reasoning that there lies an inherent entity that is independent of the individuals component parts. Prove it. It does not and your whole line of reasoning relies on it and must crumble in the light of day.'
2:00: Stefan responds:
'well certainly I understand his frustration and if I were to be making blind assertions... then I can understand his frustration, because that certainly frustrates me in other people so maybe I can be a little bit more clear about what it is I was talking about'
2:30: 'the question of free will is one of the central questions in philosophy and I'm not sure exactly why it's such a big question because it just seems to me self-evident'
Goes on until 12:00 talking about free will, existence and sensual reality
next email
Talks about free will
36:12: 'the amount of energy that people pour into changing other people's minds or influencing their decisions is just so staggering that, nobody acts as if things are fore-ordained, except a minority of people who do.'
Tags: Personal, Ego, Christina, Free Will, Cult
12:25: 'I can choose to be a professor at the university of Toronto but I can't choose the steps that are necessary to achieve that. (says jokingly) Unless, wait a minute, these podcasts turn out to be just so startlingly brilliant that I get an honorary doctorate and they make me the lord almighty of U of T, yeah, okay let's put that one on the back-burner we'll come back to that later and see if that works out for me or not *laughs*.'
34:20: 'lets say Christina lives and dies to run marathons. Ok it's a stretch but let's go there. So Christina loves getting up at 5am and going out and pounding the pavement in her bathrobe to train herself to become an expert long distance runner. Ok my mind's still blown, but let's just say that this is the case. I still have bite marks on my arm from when I first tried to get Christina to come to the gym, she certainly does seem to exercise not wanting to exercise'
38:40: 'I'm free to choose to be a libertarian philosopher but I'm not free to choose to be a very popular media figure who everybody looks to for advice'
39:50: 'we're like the people who are figuring out smoking is bad for you and we've figured that out through our analyse of politics and economics and philosophy. And therefore we're trying to communicate to people that smoking is bad for them so they have a real choice to quit'
47:10: 'what I want to do is to bring the pain of hypocrisy to bare on people immediately. And that is a very powerful pain to bring to bare on people and it's not because I'm sadistic, right? It's just because I enjoy people suffering, (joking) no wait that would be, hang on, let me pause and come up with the right way to justify my sadism, my desire to help people.'
48:10: 'you need to bring the contradictions that they are maybe not aware of to the surface so they can panic and change. I know it sounds a little bit like radical shock therapy but I'm allowed to do that because I'm a philosopher and I'm not a psychologist like my wife so I don't have to be that nice to people *laughs*.'
52:25: 'when I talk about the argument from morality and the need to approach people in that way, I'm absolutely talking about inflicting pain on them in the short run but it's a very real pain and it's a pain they are feeling anyway they're just drugging themselves with some abstract morality that doesn't make any sense. And so you need to expose the pain they're going through. I've known psychologists who do exactly this with their patients, right? Their patients come in thinking 'ah yeah I think I'm pretty good with my family I'm just kinda depressed and I don't know why' and then the psychologist will start pulling apart the threads and find that their home life is a complete nightmare and they justify everything and they feel like hell. They just feel like hell. They're sobbing, they're agonised. It's a nightmare for them. And the therapist just sort of rub their hands and go 'ka-ching' no wait, it's not quite exactly that.'
Tags: Personal, Personal (Mother)
2:50: 'there's absolutely nothing wrong with being poor'
3:20: 'I've had lots of emails from people who assume I'm some sort of born with a silver spoon, aristocratic rich guy because I've got an accent and an education and I guess some verbal abilities. And let me put that notion to rest *laughs*, I have probably more exposure to poverty than most people who are listening to this. And I don't say that with any sense of pride or benefit or 'that makes me an expert' or anything like that but if you want to talk about a particular sub-culture or particular group in society of course it does help if you've spent 15-20 years living among them'
4:00: 'my parents separated when I was very very young. Like six months old or something like that. And my father was, is a geologist and he moved back to Africa because he'd done his PHD there... He also moved to Africa because my mother was threatening to sue him and full of rage and so on, right? Because of course my mother being irrational and crazy is very much like 'oh this man, the degree to which he abuses poor me' and she stoked the fires of her rage like somebody kneeling in front of a fire with a pair of bellows. She had this whole thing about how she had supported him through his PHD and now he was leaving her behind and he was going off to make a fortune and she was gonna be left in poverty with two children after supporting him, the typical thing that crazy divorcees do, probably on both sides of the gender line. She just created a story where she could stoke her rage at any time because her rage seemed to enjoy being stoked *laughs* I guess you could say.
5:30: 'and we didn't live too bad a life financially in England, my mother was a secretary and we lived on a subsidised housing estate but don't get me wrong it was no hole-in-the-wall, we had a pretty nice apartment with a great view of London and we had nice stuff and we weren't rich, we didn't have a car, but we didn't have significant poverty in our family. And then my mother had this fear that socialism was getting worse and worse so she decided to abscond to Canada. This was in 1977 so three years before thatcher got in, right?.. I do remember pressing her even as a child saying 'well why would we move, why would we move?' and my mother was somewhat evasive but seemed to be quite passionate about the need for the family to make a 'new start', 'we're gonna go to the new world to make a new start' and as I grew older and understood parental abuse a little bit more what I realised of course was that we had friends and relatives in England that we visited and the abuse my mother was perpetrating on my brother and I.. As we entered into puberty she wanted to move us away from people who we could talk to, who we could communicate with... So we would not say anything about the abuse.'
7:30: 'I went to like six or seven schools by the age of like thirteen'
7:40: 'so then when we came to Canada my mother who is a classic hypochondriac decided to go in for a little bit more recreational surgery and she flew back to Germany where she had, I believe as a German citizen she had access to the Healthcare system and she went back and got some operations done for her. And my brother then went to England and I went to stay with a friend of mines grandparents that I barely knew for a summer and then, my brother stayed in England, my mother came back from Germany and within a month or two of coming back she fell into a catastrophic depression and destruction of personality which to me is the result of accumulated years of just being a bad person. And she couldn't get out of bed and so on and so I got as many jobs as I could, paper route, I worked in a book store, soon became a waiter and just put as much as possible together to keep us going, but it was a pretty desperate time, we had eviction notices and I remember I was on a swim team for one summer and I just could not come up with seven dollars to join the swim team so I had to keep going and saying 'oh I forgot it'. All of the standard stuff that happens when you're absolutely and completely broke. Like there's stuff you need for school trips, you just can't pay it, so you just struggle through. And that's not a particular emotional issue for me, the poverty wasn't the problem. I didn't really like it of course and it was pretty humiliating but the poverty wasn't the problem insomuch as it could be survived. I think what was the problem for me was just the degree to which, my mother got institutionalised, right? She dragged herself to a doctor, who, I don't think the best doctor in the world but he at least had the sense to get her committed because she was just unable to function and so she was in an asylum for quite some time.. The problem for me was that the entire infrastructure of supposed help for people just did not occur. I went to visit my mother in the asylum and nobody ever said, they knew she was divorced, they knew she was pretty new to the country, they would of done some sort of history and they knew she had a child and hadn't worked for I don't know, months and months at this time. But no social network sprang into action and this is true with the school. This is true through social services and so on. And I think if I look back into my history I think this is where I sort of became somewhat sceptical about the proactivity and desire to help of those in the social services and the welfare state, because there was a whole cluster of wolf children living in my apartment relatively, in our early to mid-teens. These were people who had been kicked out of home or left home voluntarily because the situations were unbearable and we weren't on welfare, we all had jobs, we just sort of scraped by and made it work and we went to school, did our laundry, you could say we were growing up a little too early but I think that wasn't the problem really, I think teenagers are much more competent than people think, we baby people far too long.'
11:30: 'but the issue is that no social community stepped in. This sort of reminds me as well, my mother went, later on in my teens, she began wanting to get dates through personal ads so she went on a two week date to a guy in Houston and left my brother and I with 30$. So *laughs* of course we ate for the first couple of days and then we couldn't eat because we didn't have any money and so we'd sort of hang around friends places to try and get food and, you'd kinda think that maybe somebody, somebody along the whole line would have asked 'what's going on with this family?'. And I understand why in hindsight that people have their own lives to live and also it's pretty complicated and messy getting involved in someone else's family life, right? Especially with somebody as volatile and aggressive and legally pugilistic as my mother, so you don't wanna tangle with the crazy paranoid aggressive woman who's suing three doctors and all that, but a word of comfort would of gone a long way but this social heart of stone that I experienced, and not just in an isolated sense but for many many years, to me was just quite remarkable. Nobody sort of asked and said 'you know there seems to be a lot of children living at your place? *laughs* or people in their early to mid-teens, what's up with that?' or 'well son, your mums been institutionalised, how are you getting by at home?' all this kind of stuff. Just nothing. Not a whisper, not a word for the entire seven year period or six year period that I was going to school and working and getting by, and then my brother came back a couple of years later and we worked, and we worked in the summers to make things happen.'
14:30: 'I was just showing up in the same clothes everyday with minor variations'
14:40: 'I do remember, I guess one friends father, who was a doctor, and this was a guy I went over to his house after school and he took me into his office one day and said 'you're in puberty now and your body's emitting smells and you need to use deodorant and shower everyday' and so on.. And I certainly appreciate that gentleman's gesture but at the same time wouldn't you sort of have some questions about the level of home care you were receiving.'
16:20: 'I was ridiculously poor throughout my teenage years and then I got a job gold-panning and claim-staking which was great, finally finally enough to eat, right?.. Worked for a year and a held off and on, seven days a week and then take some time off. And I was living in a tent, they bought all my groceries so I had enough eat and it was outdoors and it was exercise and it was just great. And then I went to school, then you enter into the poverty pit of school where the money I saved from working up north, I had managed to get me through a year or two of school and then I worked again and I did take some government student loans and student grants, after struggling. I was sort of forming the ideas, my ideas about the government and the free Market back then but I took the money, after struggling with it and conversing with some friends about the morality of it and I'm certainly glad I did because of course having founded a company, I've returned much more than I ever will, contributed much more than I will ever receive from the state, and using the term contribution very loosely. So I went through that then I ran out of money at the end of my undergrad so I took a year and a half off and I temped, and made money and so on, and then I put myself through my masters without any help at this point, and then I got a job, and I was really broke at the end of my masters, like I just couldn't make, I was paying 270$ in rent because I was living in one room in a big house and I just couldn't make, I had to call and beg for jobs and fortunately I did get a job as a computer programmer, I'd never taken any computer training but I've sort of loved computers since I was twelve so I knew a fair amount about how to work them and programme them. And then it all took off after that, I had good money and then I started a company and now of course financially I'm pretty comfortable.'
19:05: 'when I got older my brother and I had a company, we gave my mother money. And we gave my mother money to sort of help her. To get her to do things that would be a little bit less, poverty stricken. She lived in a nice little apartment that she turned into an obsessive compulsive crap heap by just obsessively getting books, photocopying books, highlighting things because she was involved in a big lawsuit against her doctors, which every time it came to a hearing or a trial she just would vanish and never show up. So she was comfortable, right? But we thought the money would help and all she did was turn around and give the money to her lawyers, a bunch of sleaze-bag lawyers'
31:50: 'if it's true and I think it is true that my mother had a mental collapse because of the accumulated evil of her actions, then it's not true that money would help her, and money didn't help her. When my brother and I gave her money it didn't do her any good whatsoever. And the reason for that is you can't, you simply can't undo peoples histories, you can't turn her into somebody who'd never been abusive, the facts are the facts and everything we do is sort of recorded in our conscience, is sort of my perspective, and that's why it's important to be a good person, right?'
00:10: 'I just had a fascinating meeting that I can't tell you about just now but probably one of the more interesting meetings I've ever had in my career. And until the dust is settled I really can't talk about it, so you'll have to wait'
1:30: 'it was a huge gain for me to go to university not because of anything in particular I got from university other than fights and headaches and problems with professors *laughs* but in terms of what it means to have a graduate degree gives you the shortchange intellectual credibility that has served me well in my career.'
2:55: 'even as a kid I suggested she get help, because it wasn't too subtle'
9:00: 'We're not trying to judge everyone here or come up a final solution to all things related to poverty'
13:05: 'I worked in a day care when I was in my teens and I've spent quite a bit of time around children and babies and you know, they can be some work. Wonderfully rewarding little munchkins but they can be some work.'
15:05: 'we were talking about the desire for people who are undeserving of charity to portray themselves as those who are deserving of charity... And one other way they do that is say 'well look I got pregnant and the guy left me' right? That's one way they do it, or 'I got pregnant, I got married to this guy and he drinks and he beats me' right?'
15:28: 'and something that Christina is endlessly, I'm sure, telling her patients is 'well, did he display any of these signs while you were dating?' and there like 'oh no he was a total sweetheart, he never touched a drop' blah blah blah and you start to dig in and you find, yes he was a drunken, beating lush(?) before you got married. So the fact that you chose to get married and have children with this guy is terrible for the children, who are always the innocent agents in this situation. But the woman is totally responsible for that fact, I mean, I don't care if her own father beat her or whatever, right? I mean, I rose in a situation of violence and I'm one of the most gentle creatures you can imagine *laughs* I've never been in a fight in my life and I plan to never do that.'
Hypothetical situation
21:50: 'if you lent a woman money and she just sort of has enough, she gets it from a bunch of different people and she just kinda puts off looking for work, 'somethings gonna turn up I sent an email off a couple of days ago' there's no real urgency or panic in her situation. Well that's not really a good thing that you're doing because she's going to not put the effort out that is required to get a job. It's kinda tough to get a job and so she's not really gonna put that effort out. And then months are gonna go by and she then has even more gaps in her resume and she has that much more to explain in an interview, she gets more lethargic and she kinda gets sorta comfortable, right? It's like 'okay it's kinda diminished and I could probably be doing better but I'm kinda getting by, something gonna happen' and so on.'
23:25: 'pain is a good thing. Pain helps people to change. The pleasure pain principle is very important'
26:20: 'I remember once I was um, a roommate of someones and I bounced a check on them which was ridiculous because I was making a fortune *laughs* at the time. But I bounced a check, and so what did I do? Well I apologised 8000 times, I went out that very afternoon and got a certified check, I, you know, offered to drive it to his bank and deposit it that very day and all these things, right?'
27:00: 'I've borrowed money in my life when I was younger... I borrowed money then I would continually keep track of that money that I had borrowed and I would say 'look I still owe you this, I still owe you that, we've still got a deal with this, would you like any interest?' and you know I tried to be as responsible as possible for the money I had borrowed, that's fairly important. But of course you don't tend to have to keep borrowing money if you have that kind of mindset, that kind of responsible mindset. It's a temporary thing, right? I think I borrowed money maximum for like one month or two months. Whereas I remember lending money to a girlfriend in university and she took me like a year, a year and a half to pay'
32:50: 'my mother, sorry my brother was talking about, after I stopped seeing my mother, my brother was saying 'well you should see her you know Stef because if you don't see her then she has total control over your choices. You're choosing not to see her, you're not allowed to see her and so you know, you're surrendering control to her' which is brain bendingly baffling, right? So I said 'ok so what you're saying is that we should see people we like because we like them and we should also see people that we hate as well. So basically we should just see everyone and there's absolutely no way that you can figure out who you should or shouldn't see, everybody has a right to your time' and of course he suddenly changed the subject and started talking about something else.'
43:40: 'I think I did the best thing to help the poor, I started a company *laughs* right? I mean, I hired thirty(?) people for eight years and you know, a good chunk of those people are still employed by the company and you know, I created jobs I mean, isn't that sort of the best thing you can do for the poor is to create opportunity for them? And you know, it's not like everybody who worked for me was poor but most of them were coming out of school with significant debts because that's long before they know good employment practices and labor laws and health and safety and so on, so you wanna get them when they don't have any idea of their legal rights, of course, otherwise it's tough to exploit them'
(joking at the end)
Tags: Marxism, Corporations
Note: Talks about speaking with Reggie on 'the infidel guy radio show' at infidelguy.com
Stefan listened to an infidel guy radio show with a Marxist and an objectivist.
3:25: 'it really struck me that boy oh boy do I have a heck of a lot more in common with the Marxist than I thought way back in my libertarian/objectivist days, now that I'm more anaesthetic in my approach to social organisation I really, I listen to the Marxist and to some degree, like don't get me wrong *laughs* communism is a fettered and revolting moral and intellectual system and of course communism is just a human slaughterhouse but in terms of his critique of American foreign policy, it's like 'yo bro, right on!' I can't help but want to applaud. Because one of the things I think could be said about socialists and marxists is, yeah they're nutty and they don't understand the free Market to save their lives and so on, but there's a reason why people are drawn to that philosophy. And I think that marxists in particular, and socialists are very very keen on looking at things from the vantage point of the helpless. This is sort of my take on psychological Marxism so please *laughs* feel free to take it with a grain of salt the size of a Utah salt lake.'
4:45: 'When you have sympathy with the downtrodden and you have sympathy with the sort of surface image of things then you are really going to have a pretty strong sympathy for Marxism... When you take this emotional approach to understanding social phenomenon, you really don't understand very much at all... Marxists can be real allies to the libertarians. I'm not saying that we'll be able to swing them over to 'International Friends of Capitalism Brotherhood' but I am saying that no matter who you talk to there's always something that you have in common that you dislike, about the government or state programs or whatever. And what I'm suggesting is, it's important to find those areas you have in common with people before you start bludgeoning them with a big sack full of books about libertarianism and the free-market. It's important to find things you have in common... If you want to find common cause and common humanity with those who aren't libertarians or even with those who are libertarians but don't share your ideas all the way, then what you wanna do to get by in school and high school and university, and I'm not saying this in any way to suggest that you compromise your values, but you simply cannot argue with everybody all the time, it's exhausting, it's alienating, it's no fun, life's too short. But what you can do is find the areas that you agree with and then try to extrapolate those into universal moral principles.'
11:30: 'the problem is not the corporations, the problem is the government'
14:45: 'the problem with the third world is that they're so heavily supported by corporate bribes to the government, by foreign aid'
15:45: 'the truth of human society is that unless you change the incentives in some fundamental way, you will never achieve any kind of permanent change'
20:15: 'why are these peoples wages not going up over time as happened in the 19th century throughout the industrialising nations of the west.'
37:45: 'it doesn't do the cause any good to say 'well the socialists are way over there, the marxists are way over there, and we're way over here, the complete opposite' it's just not true. They recognise a lot of the problems in the mixed economy and they call it capitalism because that's the term that they use but they recognise a lot of the problems in the mixed economy and a lot of the problems in the foreign policies of governments. And we should really try and build bridges to them and find common cause with them, because they're not just necessarily evil trolls who are out to destroy all the vestiges of human freedom'
Tags: Agnosticism, Personal, Absolutes
4:55: 'I certainly have almost never received any benefits from the tribal system of belief. From capitalism and the free Market and my interactions with others, that's all wonderful, but from tribal systems of belief I just get pomposity and falsehood and so on.'
5:45: 'if you go to cheesy sales courses, and I don't think I've ever been to one'
8:48: 'I'm not gonna get into the abortion debate... I'm still working out a coherent position on that'
13:20: 'I do believe the system has no more than a decade or two left, if that. I'm only saying that *laughs* so that I'm not proven wrong tomorrow but I actually do think it's shorter than that.'
Talks about how religious people see atheism as a bad thing because Atheists are absolutely certain there is no god and the bible is full of nonsense
21:40: 'sorry that's not for the agnostic, who's just a coward, but for the atheist who's actually got some courage and is willing to take a stand on the truth that's what they'd say. For the agnostic, nobody bothers dealing with agnostics because they're just so patently mealy-mouthed and spineless and weak-kneed that they won't even make a basic decision about one of the most important questions in the world that's not too hard to answer, you know, they're just sort of craven compromisers and appeasers so I don't bother too much with agnostics.'
24:20: 'I know this from some pretty significant experience doing my masters in particular. If you produce something that is logical and original you will get marked down for not using enough primary sources and for not backing up your argument with enough detail and so on. So for instance in my masters, I sort of found this out pretty quickly, if all you do is use primary sources then you're just considered to be a sort of collator of information, and you don't actually get any good marks, you get like pretty bad marks because they say 'well this is a good synopsis of what other people think but there's no opinion of your own in there' but if you don't use many primary sources because you're kinda thinking for yourself then they'll say 'well this is not enough evidence for your opinion. You haven't used enough primary sources' and they will sort of vaguely accuse you of not going to the library and dashing something off just because you happen to be clever. So that kinda false dichotomy is also very prevalent in education, and particularly in higher education. So these sort of lose/lose or play the middle situation are just so common in manipulative situations.'
34:00: 'there's absolutely no false dichotomies in the world, because the world is non-contradictory, reality and, empirical material reality is non-contradictory. There is no middle ground that is, truth is not a bell curve, right? *laughs* Truth is a binary proposition. Truth is a yes/no and absolutes absolutely exist. There's just no *laughs* question about that because anybody who claims that they don't is of course positing an absolute and 'absolutes absolutely don't exist' so they've already admitted at least one and where there's one there may be more.'
36:08: 'if other people want to compromise and live these wishy-washy lives where they sit in the middle and claim to be good that's there issue and basically have a chat or two with them and then just leave them aside because they're just gonna drag you down. But in the core of what it is you're aiming to do with your life I would suggest, go for everything that you can get a hold of. All the philosophical truth, all the morality, all the love, all the money, everything, be as greedy as you want because in those kind of absolutes everybody wins. I think that the fact that I'm so much in love with my wife is perfectly delightful to her. And the fact that she is so much in love with me is perfectly delightful to me'
Tags: Economics, Personal, Ego
00:24: 'I think there was a very common misperception in the emails that I got'
1:00: 'this is one of the standard responses you will get as you start to talk about how freedom and the problem of poverty intersect. Basically it's that in the free Market, the most efficient use of capital, it's a very sort of mechanistic view, a little cold-blooded and I'll get into why I think that's the case, but it says if you're the most efficient at using capital you will end up with the most capital... And therefore there is this tendency within capitalism for any sort of charity to be squeezed out as economically inefficient and therefore that's just not going to be a possibility for capitalism. So people would rather accumulate capital than give it away and those who do give it away are gonna end up with much less capital than those who are ruthlessly efficient and therefore capital is going to tend to accumulate to the most selfish among us and this that and the other... And I think it's actually a, uh, okay I won't be gentle, and I know this gentleman who writes me is a smart guy and so on so I apologise in advance for any offence I may give him. But I find this view slightly, and I'm not saying this guy is one! But I find this view slightly sociopathic... Because it does not take into account all of the complex motivations of human beings... There is nothing in economics and nothing in the free Market that says that you have to ruthlessly be efficient and accumulate capital'
4:55: 'the choices that people make are in no way solely determined by economic value. It would be insane to imagine that it was the case because human beings are very complicated creatures. Everybody's different, everybody has different desires'
16:25: 'I spent a whole bunch of time in school before I got into the workforce. I really didn't start working full time with a career in mind until I was in my, 27 or 28. So out of high school, I would work for a bit then go back to school and then work while I was at school and sort of limping my way through this low rent student existence because I wanted to get my degrees. So from the age of 18 when I got out of high school to the age of let's just say 28, I gave up ten years of income and let's say I would have an average income of 30-35K (canadian dollars) during that time then right off the bat I gave up 300-350K of income... I gave that up in order to be able to make more money later... I think I was [in university for] five years for me... I spent two years in theatre school just in case anybody's *laughs* concerned about the math and I took a year off after high school to work up north as a gold panner and then I took a year off to um, gather money together for my masters'
19:55: 'I'm sort of 39 and I'm like, well I'm, in my second year of paying off a 20 year mortgage'
25:50: 'people take a great deal of pleasure out of helping others. I can speak from personal experience. Why do you think I do these podcasts? Because I love the sound of my own voice? Okay, well I'm not gonna answer that one right now because that might incriminate me, but, also because I think that I have some things of value to say, that some people find interesting or helpful in their own thinking, as I've been helped by those who have *laughs* gone before me and those who will come after me and we all do our bit to add as much truth and integrity to the world as possible, why? Because we care about people.'
26:25: 'to wanna help people through ideas is probably the most thankless job in the history of humanity, right? You get nothing but negativity and abuse and even those who agree with you turn on you quite a bit as I *laughs* can tell you from my inbox from time to time. So you know, it's a pretty thankless position, right? I mean, you do it for free, you're in opposition to people all the time, everybody disagrees with you and they view you as kinda crazy at best and possibly a bad guy at worst. But we do it because we wanna help people. We wanna help the world become a better place or at least to avoid some of the fiscal and social disasters that we see looming under the current system. So I love helping people. My wife loves helping people. She went into a helping people kind of profession and she doesn't just do it when she's paid. She'll do it with me whenever I disagree with her, she'll slap(?) me with some medication and suddenly everything just feels better, you know, more relaxed. *laughs*'
27:50: 'some people really do get off on giving money to charity. I'm not one of them. I prefer to do other things to help the poor. I like starting companies, I like hiring people, I like being a, uh, a good boss. I like making sure that people who work for me are well taken care of and feel comfortable and happy to come to work. As happy as possible, right? They're coders so they're a pretty dour bunch but they are free to express themselves, that they can disagree with me, that we can have a good laugh. That's the way that I like to help people... I prefer to help people through podcasts. I prefer to help people through conversation and through my capacities as an entrepreneur and a business manager and so on. And that gives me pleasure, that makes me feel good. I like to be a good guy, I like to do the right thing.'
33:05: 'It really is mono-dimensional and kind of cold and I think a little inhumane to simply look at the marketplace and say 'well all people are gonna do is robotically maximise capital'.'
3:20: 'war can never be said to be an accident and is never part of the free Market and yet is commonly believed to be good for the economy and must be for at least some people, since it is pursued so often.'
Tags: Parents, Cult, DEFOO, Personal, Corporations, Roads
00:35: 'I had an interesting email from a gentleman who was taking the approach of talking about a stateless society with his father. Now this, is, a, *laughs* this is a conversation that is fraught with emotional overtones just so you know. If you start to talk to your parents about a stateless society, they will, unless they are very mature, which is to say unless they don't exist, they will absolutely take this as an unconscious criticism of their parenting.'
1:40: 'getting rid of the state completely is a very volatile topic for people. And the reason is because of their own parenting, usually. I don't wanna sound overly psychological but you are going to have some very interesting chats with your family if you start to talk about the fact that people can get by without a coercive and overbearing authority *laughs*. And I have known parents like this, I really have. There was a gentleman that I grew up with and I was best man at his wedding and for many years we were very close and his father was just wonderful. His father taught engineering, actually he was the head of the engineering department at U of T. He was very kind, a Persian fellow, as he always corrected people who thought he was Iranian and just a wonderful man, just a wonderful family, they had great discussions around the dinner table like 'should you tell your children about Santa Claus?' and the pros and cons of that and of course I came down on the no side even when I was in my teens *laughs* not just to be contrarian but I think that it is a kind of kiss and hug sadism to tell your children about Santa Claus.'
3:20: 'I remember discussing with his wife, the British Empire back when I was pro-empire, for a variety of *laughs* silly reasons we won't get into here. And there was never a strong offence catalyst that you see so much with people'
3:50: 'I was on an interview show (infidel guy show) and a gentleman called in who was a paraplegic now of course nobody likes anybody more than the person who picks on the paraplegics so that was quite an exciting challenge from a communication standpoint. So I had to tread that one rather delicately.'
4:35: 'if my theory is correct and we've all been raised really badly then we all have a lot of problems because we've been raised really badly and it's not all our parents fault because there just simply weren't the tools around to raise children rationally and of course *laughs* there really aren't that many around now but at least there's a possibility'
A young guy emails Stefan about his religious parents
6:45: 'he was in his teens, I put a lot of time into replying to him because of course the young are the future. We wanna talk to as many young people as we can and in any choice between talking to somebody who's older and somebody who's younger I would always pick the younger person because they can still, they still have enough, uh, proximity to their own dominance as children to remember that the state is not some abstract lovely entity and also they haven't, invested themselves in one man or another in a kind of false authority so, being a parent or boss or teacher themselves where they're gonna feel guilty if something comes up like that'
7:58: 'it makes me happy doing my tiny bit to try to save the world'
8:38: 'as soon as you have become clear about what is right and wrong and other people fall into the category of not so much with the rightness, then you're gonna face the hollowing out of that relationship. It's inevitable. I for one *laughs* think it's worth it and it's not because I enjoy rejecting people but you can't be happy if you're mired in moral error or intellectual error. Intellectual error is somewhat survivable but moral error you simply can't be happy'
16:15: 'what is it with these people and the roads? *laughs* it's just amazing. Corporations can put up satellites to handle phone conversations world to world. Private corporations can put together the next generation of the Intel processor with I don't know how many billion transistors. It can use the Internet to deliver email fully verified packet by packet from one end of the world to another and the free Market can do the most amazingly mind-bendingly mind-blowingly wonderful things but somehow rolling Tarmac over sand is just completely beyond the free Market and there's just no conceivable way that it can work (sarcasm). And that's just kind of funny, it's kind of funny and it's just part of the propaganda that people have.'
Stefan thinks if corporations do something good it's because of the free Market... If corporations do something bad it's because they are created/corrupted/subsidised by the state and isn't because of the free Market apparently.
17:20: 'we have no idea if roads are the optimal solution, but we're pretty much guaranteed that they're not. There's no reason to believe that roads as they stand in just about every country in the world, that they are optimum solutions. So asking the free Market how they would reproduce a non-optimal solution is silly, right? Because the free Market generally does not produce, or at least doesn't produce for very long, non-optimal solutions. And the reason that we don't know whether it's an optimal solution is that it's coerced and it's free. If horses and carriages were free, then there would never be invented such thing as a car... When things are free and coerced there's absolutely no way to know whether they're the optimal solutions.'
21:05: 'the [private] road that I take costs me about 150-160$ a month to drive on it for I don't know 35KM each way and it's fantastic. There's never any slowdowns, very rarely, when there are accidents. People drive better, right? They have more expensive cars, they're generally more professional, they're generally older people and, better drivers.'
Talks about New York subway system constructed by private sector around 1910-1930.
Tags: Voting, Personal
0:15: 'I'm heading to the gym, before heading to vote'
Talks about voting
0:40: 'My opinion is, whatever you feel is going to make you the most credible in the eyes and ears of those you are talking with. That's what I would say you should do... I spoil my ballot actually, I just go out and say none of these idiots can represent me and that's mostly because Christina likes to go out and vote and say that she went and voted and spoiled her ballot. It doesn't really matter much to me but I enjoy spending time with Christina so *laughs* off we go.'
11:35: 'we have a government about to collapse like a reversal of Krakatoa and bring the entire structure of western society down upon our heads'
26:20: 'one summer, gosh, I graduated from my undergraduate degree, oh gosh, 1991, 1992, something like that. There was just a terrible recession and this was before I moved into White collar office work and I tried to get waitering jobs, I tried to get office jobs, all this kind of stuff and boy there was just nothing. I couldn't get anything. So what did I do? Well I sort of went off the grid, right? I got jobs paid cash. And to our friends in the IRS of course I did pay all the taxes you can imagine on this money, just as I did when I was a waiter... I did weeding of gardens, I actually spent two weeks taking somebody's grandmother around town because they didn't have any time to spend with her. I just did anything you could think of, right? And I ended up getting a little bit of a better job later on that summer but that was pretty desperate times, right? I wasn't desperate because I still had some money and I knew it was gonna pass, but it was a tough time to be looking for work and a lot of pounding the pavement, a lot of sleazy people out their offering you work which is just nonsense, right? Like 100% commission on stuff that will never sell.'
Tags: Personal, Ego, Work
17:15: 'when I sold my company, I stayed on for a little while, didn't like the new management, and I quit. I didn't quit to do anything, I just wanted to take a break from working and from software and from being an entrepreneur... The management were in the process of selling the company to another group and they sort of begged me not to quit but I was like you know 'well I'll talk to this new group but I don't really feel that we have the same business philosophy' which was the nicest way I could put it at the time. So I quit and then this new company came on board and they offered me, gosh, 150,000$ a year for three days a week of labor and I ended up not taking the job because I did not like the way they did business and I really felt that it was actually a bad business proposition to pay that much for that little labor which meant I was gonna get involved in, once more covering up for the incompetencies of my superiors'
26:05: 'I didn't sort of wake up one morning and say 'ah! I'm gonna do podcasts! And I'm gonna have all this stuff to say.' it's all the result of pretty careful preparation until I felt that I was free of error and could begin talking. It wasn't *laughs* easy to wait but I didn't want to put out things that were going to be false. Any more than just accidental things. I think I've got the basics down pretty well and I'm always open to correction but I'm not doing things like saying the Iraq war is great which a couple of years ago I would of been saying.'
Stefan responds to people who say 'being fired is exactly the same as being forced'
31:15: 'no it's not! It's not even remotely the same. You have no right to a job. You have no right for other people to provide you with a livelihood. You have no right to other people's money or time or energy... To cease acting, is not violence. What's happening with these people at Walmart? Well their boss is saying 'I'm going to stop paying you. I am ceasing my action of putting money in your payroll.'... All he's doing is ceasing to do that. How on earth is that violent? It boggles my mind how people can come up with this kind of nonsense with a straight face. It's got nothing to do with violence, to cease acting.'
37:00: 'I've been working on selling stuff for three months and I've sold 800,000$ worth of software. So I don't have any particular fear about my job.'
41:35: 'marriage is a voluntary relationship. It should be based on mutual advantage.'
Tags: Property, Exceptions
2:05: 'the way that you would argue property from the argument of morality is to say ok do people have the right to use property? Do you have the right to eat food? If you eat it, no one else is gonna get to eat it... Obviously by eating something you are exercising a pretty fundamental property right which is you're absorbing it into your body, to the exclusion of anybody else being able to absorb it into their body so obviously that is an exercise of property rights. If you have that right, then of course everybody has that right. Not to that sandwich, but everybody has the right to use property. And if everybody has the right to use property then property rights exist as a logical consequence, right?'
3:28: 'property as a characteristic habit or state of humanity, the concept property does not exist but the fact that human beings use property. They use external material objects to their own ends, is a fact.'
3:40: 'if nobody has the right to property then that's fine. That's a perfectly logical, if insane approach to the problem of property rights. If nobody has the right to property then everybody dies, pretty rapidly. Because if I drink water, you can't drink water, if I eat food, you can't eat food. And since the use of property that is exclusive to oneself is the basis of property rights, then you don't really have to worry about people who argue that there is no such thing as property rights because, give them two days and they'll be stone dead because they'll dehydrate and fall over. So obviously there is a right of property that human beings have to have otherwise we simply can't exist as a species. So that's the way you would start using the argument from morality to establish that if it's a required preferential behaviour to be able to utilise property for ones own benefit, then property rights certainly do exist and the only question then is, do they exist to a greater or lesser degree between different people?'
5:40: 'human beings do possess physical characteristics to a greater or lesser degree (height, intelligence, hair etc.). which I'm sure we can all get behind and agree on. So the question is, is the right to property one of these rights that human beings possess to a greater or lesser degree, or is property one of these characteristics that human beings possess like being a human being (no degrees of humanness).'
9:40: 'I have a body which I am more or less in control of except when I'm snowboarding and no one else can move my arm, no one can take over my mind and make me do this that and the other. And yes there are cattle prods that will make my legs shake and yes I can sit there and a doctor can tap my knee and so on, but that's not really what we're talking about here. We're talking about in general, in 99.9999% of my life, I am the one who's making my accelerator foot push down and swinging wildly from side to side and getting lots of car horns because I'm so focused on my podcast. And nobody else is doing that. Nobody else can possibly control my body at the same time I am controlling it because nobody else has the neurological structure within my physical frame to be able to control and manipulate my body.'
11:00: 'you can absolutely be sure and can verify empirically that each human being is the master of his body. And no other human being has the capacity to control and override and take over somebody else's body.'
12:15: 'every human being is the owner of his body because nobody else can utilise that physical structure at all.'
15:28: 'we know people have ownership of their bodies. We know that they are responsible for the effects of their bodies and then we can deduce that they own what it is that they produce. Because there is no possible way that such a thing could come into existence without them producing it.'
Talking about pavaroti's singing voice. Or any voice in general.
21:40: 'given that it's a finite resource someone has to be in control of it.'
31:50: 'these anal little people who are like 'well everything has to be perfectly consistent at all times otherwise the whole theory fails!' it's like, cmon, have you ever studied biology? I'm no biologist but even I know animals don't all have to be the same size for there to be such thing as species. So just let that stuff go, let's focus on the bigger issues.'
Tags: Personal, Gov Debt, Christina
15:05: 'I've fired people for being mean, in my career. Just because I know what effect it has on morale and you need morale for everyone to enjoy working there so you'll get them to work late when needed. And of course as a good capitalist I always give them time off when they need it in return for their flexibility when we're working'
17:50: 'I've been in the department of public works literally at year end where there's people running down the hall way saying 'I've got 500,000$ to spend, does anyone have a use for it'.'
22:40: 'just look at the numbers. Forget about what people say. 99.999% of what anybody ever says is just self-serving, self-aggrandising, hypocritical nonsense designed to obscure their own motives from themselves and others.'
23:15: 'I was on the phone with Christina the other day for something or other and I said something that made her laugh and she hangs up her phone and she's like 'Aww man Stef's just killed me, he's so funny', and em, this other woman who's, you know, we've seen her and her husband together and it doesn't look very pretty. They don't treat each other very well. And she says of course 'oh you guys are just like us' Christina's sort of eyes widen, and we're still working out how best to respond to this kinda stuff socially, right? *laughs* we don't have a big answer to that yet but it's just one tiny example of just, everybody just says stuff to prop up their own fragile false-self and it's all just nonsense. So whatever people say, forget about what they say, and forget about what I say, of course. Look for the logic and look for the facts. My opinions, as I've mentioned before are completely unimportant and irrelevant.'
24:45: 'so let's say all of this is true... That the bureaucrats are just these loving saintly people and all they wanna do is help the poor... And the welfare state is great... Let's say all of that is true. I don't care *laughs* it's fine with me if you say that it's true. Well, what happens when the state collapses? *laughs* It doesn't really matter if people are helping the poor or not right now, the fact of the matter is that all western countries have debts that are usually hovering around an entire GDP of the entire economy. Even as calculated by the corrupt and state serving economists in the public departments. We know that the true debt is nothing close to what's actually told. It's probably like at least double. They're not gonna tell us about any of that stuff. You can't ever get the truth out of government and all they do is shred documents and get rid of stuff, and then hopefully provoke people into running around with conspiracy theories rather than dealing with the morals of the situation.'
Talks about 'the poor'. Compassion for the poor. How government doesn't help the poor.
Tags: 9/11, Parents, Definition of Human, Cult
Talking about 9/11 until 22:50
22:50 talks about negative economics
25:40: 'most of us are sort of forced to obey our parents irrational prejudices and bigotries in order to receive parental affection and love. And not even so much that because you can't get love with bullying but to at least receive parental comfort and food and shelter and so on.'
26:15 guy asks about the nature of man. What makes a human a human.
28:00: 'the criteria of proof or categorisation within the realm of morality and all things related to organic life does not require definition or abstraction or absolutism to the degree that the physical sciences such as physics and chemistry do.'
28:25: 'so there are grey areas, absolutely. And we know the extremes. And in the grey areas there is some interesting sort of technical questions but they're pretty irrelevant to life as a whole. It's obviously important for a parent... if they have a mentally handicapped child, to figure out the degree to which that child is capable of acting in a rational manner and so on. But for as society as a whole it's almost completely irrelevant. And not to say because it's irrelevant it's not important. There's some aspect of that at least in my book but I think this is a kind of approach to truth that you're just trying to slice and dice things far too much, to far too fine a degree.'
29:45: 'there are two definitions of human beings, right? Biological and philosophical. The biological one is the DNA, one head, two arms, two feet... From a philosophical or human rights stand point we define a human being as a rational animal. An animal capable of reasoning and deferring gratification and weighing short term gain, long term pain and so on. And that's how we have morality, right? Because human beings can choose to do X, Y or Z and therefore they're responsible for those choices and therefore we have such a thing as morality and personal responsibility... And that would include the sort of non-biologically human creatures that would have the capacity for this kind of reasoning. As far as the great apes and dolphins go, No. They do not have the intelligence that would categorise them as human in any way, shape or form. You can't have a social contract... A contract with an animal because an animal has as far as we can see it pretty much no free will. No capacity to reason. No capacity to significantly balance short term gains from long term pains therefore no moral responsibility and so on.'
Another guy asking if government could dissolve voluntarily from the inside.
34:50: 'is it possible for the government to purposely dissolve itself? No. It's absolutely impossible for the government to purposely dissolve itself. There's absolutely no possibility that everybody is going to wake up and put themselves out of a job and destroy their careers and everything they spent their whole lives working towards and go out and get jobs in the private sector. There's simply no chance of that happening. It's never happened in history. It's never going to happen. Economic self-interest is pretty much an iron law.'
Emailer says 'Do we simply wait for the government to get too big to support it's self?'
35:45: 'No... What you do if you're interested in expanding the cause of freedom and providing a better world for our children is that you get out there and talk to as many people as possible and if you don't like talking to them feel free to refer them to my blog *laughs* or podcast. Or somebody else who's opinions you find valuable and logical. You get out there and talk to people as much as possible and you put up with the stony stares and resentment and all of that because the world is in a terribly bad shape and we do have to do something if we're interested in this and we have the capacity to do it and it's enjoyable for us. We have the responsibility to get out there and talk to people so they understand what's coming, why it's coming, what's gone wrong and how we're gonna fix it when it comes.'
37:05: 'we are a bunch of doctors running around, in a sense, saying there's a plague coming along and nobody even knows they're sick. Actually the plague is already here. Nobody even knows they're sick so it's a very difficult conversation to have and a very challenging communication to have with people but you wanna get your words out there into people's ears so when the government does collapse they'll have some idea as to why because the people who predicted it and described the causes most consistently will have the most chance of having a voice in what comes next.'
37:55: 'I think we really can be very proud every morning that we look in the mirror that we are doing our part to try and save the world from some pretty corrupt ideas that have been floating around since the Dawn of time and who's time, in my view, has absolutely come.'
Tags: Cult, Personal, Ego
1:05: 'the topic I'd like to chat about today is the question of exercising power. How do you exercise power over another human being. How do you corrupt them. How do you take our natural integrity, intelligence and all the wonder that is the human mind and turn it against itself and get it to eat itself. And get it to be a snake consuming it's own tail. How do you wrap people up in neuroses and how do you make them obedient. And how do you get them to subjugate themselves to your will without you even having to lift a finger, barely even an eyebrow.'
1:50: 'and the reason that I want to talk about this is that I'm very interested in starting a cult. No actually, *laughs* I think that you've gotta know the weapons of your enemies'
3:45: 'I myself make no claims to being perfectly sane by any stretch of the imagination. I had, in a sense, my intellectual foot-binding just like everybody else but what I have done is sort of explored the aches and creaks of my mental joints to the point where I think I have some pretty good idea or fairly good idea of how straightening out could occur and what it might look like.'
4:10: 'how do you get children to detach themselves from... Sensual evidence and simple fact?'
7:40: 'the first thing you need to do to begin the process of destroying a Childs mind is you need to set up empty categories which are moral absolutes... with great reverence you describe and are enormously passionate about things which the child cannot see.'
Gives example of everyone at a dinner table. Everyone pretends there's apples on the table and pretends to eat these invisible apples with reverence.
11:30: 'the child of course is completely bewildered. The youngest child is completely baffled.'
14:05: 'this kind of behaviour at the dinner table is just so astoundingly corrupting and destructive of the Childs mind.'
Stefan thinks either the kid can't trust his own senses or he is being lied to.
16:00: 'this is worse than a direct assault on the body which at least reaffirms the evidence of the senses in a brutal kind of manner. This is a direct assault on ones capacity to trust ones own senses and ones own mind to perceive reality and we can't survive without a successful or accurate perception of reality at the material level so it's, it's a death sentence that the family is passing upon this young mind that is opening to all the wonders of the physical world when they're miming eating things and saying ummm... And if they're not eating and they're lying, ugh it's unbelievably destructive. It's the worst kind of abuse to tell a child their entire brain has ceased to function correctly.'
45:20: 'I went through a lot of years of figuring out 'my lord this doesn't work in my head and that doesn't work in my head' *laughs* I had silly ideas about this that and the other. And I may have silly ideas at the moment which I'm gonna need to correct but now I have a great methodology and lots of people who help me so that's wonderful.'
56:45: 'if we can affirm the truth. If we can simply state the facts that have been so long obscured to us in our own hearts because of the corruption we all faced as children, the lies we were all force fed as children, the terrible and horrible choices we all faced as children. If we have the strength to face up to that and to speak the truth and to stay in the conversation about what is real and true and what exists in reality rather than what exists as sick exploitive fantasies in peoples minds, then by god we can free the world. By god we can wake humanity up from this nightmarish thousand thousand year slumber of the damned. We can end war! We can end poverty! We can end hunger! We can end violence! We can end murder and theft and rape! Because all of these sicknesses can be traced back to that awful crossroads early in life where we are forced to choose loyalty to lies and corruption over the truth. And if we can reach back to that part of us that could never believe in such sickness. That could never believe the world is an asylum peopled by those who have power over us who are insane. If we can reach back to that part of us that never believed, and reach into that part of us that never believed that, then we really can remake the world. We really can bring a new light to humanity. A new light? The first light! The enlightenment came a little close but it all backed away because they couldn't get rid of the state and god, and they all became deists and just let it trundle along and so the cancer grew back. But we can make a new world that will be as unrecognisable to us now as we are to people in the fifteenth century and we made that leap in the past because we started to recognise things like property rights and the common humanity of all and we began to question authority and remove the intertwining of state and religion and there's absolutely no reason why we can't continue to do it but we have to continue to tell the truth at all times.'