Welcome to Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone in the
Libertarian Institute. Here is part 5 of my discussion
with Stefan Molyneux of Free domain.com.
Check out the link in the description below.
Mr. Molyneux, page 43 of your book Universally Preferable
Behavior says this question of avoidance is the key to
differentiating aesthetics from ethics.
Please expand on this. Well, I think it's completely
self-contained, self referential, and there's
absolutely nothing I can repeat it in the Latin.
That's the best I can do so. So this is my book on secular
ethics, which is the great challenge of trying to find a
way to establish morality without either the commandments
of a deity or the coercion of the state, right?
Because if we can't find out what morality is without an
appeal to authority, either the authority of a God or the power
of a state, it's pretty hard to become a free society.
So this question of avoidance is really, really important.
I'm going to just read the little bit that has to do with
that and we'll talk about it in more detail.
So I write, if you and I were standing at the top of a Cliff,
and I turn to you and say stand in front of me so I can push you
off the Cliff, what would your response be?
Well, if you do voluntarily stand in front of me and I then
push you off the Cliff, this would more likely be considered
a form of suicide on your part rather than murder on my part.
The reason for this is that you can very easily avoid being
pushed off the Cliff simply by refusing to stand in front of
me. And a somewhat coarse phrase
came into my mind with regards to, you know, for purely
professional and philosophical reasons, I both read and watched
the movie 50 Shades of Grey. And in 50 Shades of Grey,
there's a man who beats a woman, but she agrees to do it,
apparently because he has ABS, a helicopter and can play the
piano. I really lost some of the
details about all of this. And so and they have these, I
don't know, weirdly sexy contracts, You know, they sit
across from the table. Am I allowed to do this?
What's her safe word? And so I was thinking big
contracts, tiny boobs. And so she's not a victim.
If a man just beats up a woman who doesn't consent and is not
not part of her kink or whatever, then he's not
initiating the use of force any more than a boxer who beats up
another boxer is guilty of assault because they're both in
the ring and they know what it's there for.
So if you agree to something, you know, I don't know if you've
ever watched or played hockey, but there's an old joke in
Canada that I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out,
right? Because it's so central to the
game to have all of this fighting.
So you you accept that you're going to get face mashed up
against the plexiglass from time to time.
Same thing with rugby, other kinds of things, right?
And or the same thing that if you're playing double S tennis,
sometimes when the serve comes fast, it hits you in the back of
the head because you're kind of diagonal to the serving path.
So if you voluntarily choose to participate in something, it
cannot be said to be inflicted upon you.
And so people who are into BDSM or some sort of weird hot wax on
the nipples kind of kink, well, it's not assault because they're
agreeing to it. So then I, I think that's fairly
clear. So then I said in the book,
similarly, if I meet you in a bar and I say I want you to come
back to my place so I can tie you to the bed and starve you to
death. If you do in fact come back to
my place, it is with the reasonable knowledge that your
longevity will not be enhanced by your decision.
On the other hand, if I or someone slips a date break date
rape drug into your drink and you wake up tied to my bed, it's
clear that you there's little you could have done to avoid the
situation. So the difference between ethics
and aesthetics is this question of avoidance.
So you and I have had a date to to meet up and talk.
One of us could have not shown up, but we're not inflicting
that coercively on the other. And so this question of
avoidance, this is the question of politeness or aesthetics
versus morality or good and evil.
So if when I was a kid, you know, beyond time, beyond time
is is important. And being on time is a positive
attribute. It's being polite, it's being
thoughtful of the other person, being considerate and so on.
And it is a kind of virtue, but it's not the same virtue as
don't rape people, don't murder people, don't steal from people
or assault them. It's a different kind of thing.
So if somebody is consistently late, you can simply choose to
start meeting with that person. Your participation in their
lateness is voluntary. They're not enforcing it on you.
They're not inflicting it on you.
They're not kidnapping you or holding a gun to your head or
threatening you or defrauding you, I guess you could say.
You could say, well, they said they'd be there on 7.
But you know, things happen and people make mistakes.
And some people are just chronically late.
Lord knows I've been in that situation once or twice in my
life. So this question of avoidability
is really key to the question of, of ethics because I needed
to find a way to differentiate commonly accepted aesthetic
politeness and moral standards. I'm a big one for something that
Aristotle said, of course, thousands of years ago.
He said, I don't care what your system of ethics is, but if it
can be used to prove that murder is good, then there's something
wrong with it. Like we have these instincts and
we know that it's rude to be late, but you can't shoot
someone for being late, right? Because there's a different
situation there. If somebody's running at you
with a chainsaw saying they're going to cut your head off, yes,
you can shoot them, but you can't shoot them from being
late. You can't shoot them for being
rude. You can't shoot them for
insulting you. You can't shoot them for calling
you fat. You can't shoot them for all the
kinds of abrasiveness that can happen in life, but you can't
shoot them if they're about to kill you or give you grievous
bodily harm, I think is the legal phrase.
So I had to have a way of explaining these moral instincts
that we have because moral instincts, they just can't be
overturned by reason and evidence, right?
Because we have these gut senses and we need to find a way to, to
validate them. Like if I, if I defined love as
revulsion towards someone, I mean, that would just be an
inversion. So trying to find a way to
differentiate aesthetics, which is nice behavior, from ethics,
which is required behavior. It's nice to be on time.
It's nice to be diplomatic and polite.
It's more than not nice to try and choke someone to death,
right? So I really, really wanted to
work with those moral instincts. And the good thing about guiding
myself by that is that in the at least in the personal sphere,
universally preferable behavior doesn't overturn anything we
already know to be true. It validates property rights and
it shows why the big four of evil, the big four of evil doing
are all immoral, which is rape, theft, assault and murder.
And so if it validates property rights, it validates bodily
sanctity and it justifies self-defense and it shows why
you can't shoot someone just for being rude or late or
inconsiderate. Well, that's a pretty good job.
If I do say so, I pat myself on the back, but I don't want to
dislodge my microphone. Like that's a pretty good job.
I've cast all of the I, I've dotted all of the I's.
I've crossed all of the TS. I've validated our personal or a
sense of morality that occurs in the private sphere.
The radical part about UPB is the universal part, which we
talked about at some point in the past.
So that is the part where you say, OK, so if rape, theft,
assault and murder are universally banned behaviors, in
other words, if universally preferable behavior is to
respect persons and property and not violate persons and property
against their will, how far does that go?
Well, it's the universal part that really messes people up.
It goes all the way to war. It goes all the way to the
state. It goes all the way because it's
universal. And it doesn't matter if you
have a costume on or a hat on or you're doing a funny dance.
The universals apply. And so we all accept it.
Yes, that's what the law should be.
Yes, that's what morality is. Of course rape, theft, assault
and murder are immoral. Of course self-defense should be
justified in situations of in extremity.
Of course you can't shoot people for being let we all understand
that's what we teach our kids. I mean, if our kid said I hit
that kid because he was beating me, right, and your, your kid
has like, I don't know, a black eye and a cut lip and so on,
we'd say, well, I'm sorry that happened, but good job, right?
Whereas if our kid said I beat that other kid because he was
late showing up to the park, we'd say, well, that no, that's
not a fit. Like you can't do that, right?
So validating these morals at the personal level, which we all
understand and want the law to respect as well, but then going
all the way out into society horizontally, vertically to to
parenting, right, the violation of the non aggression principles
such as spanking and so on. That's where people have a tough
time. In other words, it takes what
they accept at a personal level and want enacted at a legal
level and transmits it all the way through human society.
And that's where people get messed up.
It's kind of like, like even dogs know how to catch a ball or
you throw a frisbee. They can catch the Frisbee.
We all know how to throw and catch.
We all understand physics at a personal level, right?
We don't try and levitate, I suppose on this funny video of
this couple who thinks they have telekinesis powers because they
keep pushing their hands at little pieces of thin tinfoil,
and of course the airwaves make the tinfoil move and they think
they have telekinesis. So we all understand physics at
a personal level. It's when you take those same
principles and apply them universally that people get kind
of disoriented. And it's the same thing with
morality. So that's really the issue that
I was trying to deal with in this part of the book.
In your book Art of the Argument, page 65, you say the
rise of the welfare state coincided with the rise of
political correctness. When negative consequences for
bad decisions are removed, information is inevitably
repressed. Please expand on this.
Right, so I'll, I'll try to be concise, I'll fail, but I'm, I'm
just, I'd want everyone to know that I'm, I'm at least trying to
make the effort, however well it might go.
So why do we have negative language?
Let's take some negative language that comes out of,
let's say 19th century Victorian literature.
I took a whole course on this Victorian literature.
It was really eye opening. So in 19th century literature,
prior to the welfare estate, when there was a lot of charity,
Christian charity and so on, but prior to the rise of the welfare
estate, you had terms like a loose woman, a CAD, a rake, a
strumpet. And these were people who had
sex, particularly procreative sex, outside the confines of
marriage. So why did these words exist?
Because women who had sex, particularly procreative sex,
outside the confines of marriage back in the day when they had to
use what a sheep's bladder as a condom.
Not only is that gross, but I assume not massively efficient
or safe. So you'd have a lot of kids out
of wedlock. When a woman had a child out of
wedlock, no man would marry her and thus she would often be
reduced to prostitution. Prostitution caused further
dissolution of the bonds within society.
Because easy access to prostitutes is pretty bad for a
lot of shaky marriages. You would also have the spread
of sexually transmitted diseases, which of course, in
the 19th century prior to the rise of antibiotics were
terrible. I mean, if you there's a sort of
theory that Friedrich Nietzsche died because he had one sexual
encounter with a prostitute and then he got syphilis, which is a
horrifying disease. Henri Gibson writes about it in
in his Plague Ghosts, that the progress of syphilis, a brain
rotting disease, was just appalling.
And so one woman deciding to have, you know, 10 minutes of
pleasure outside of the marital bond, well, she falls into
prostitution. That has a ripple effect on
other marriages. You spread diseases, which also
wrecks marriages. Some guy goes and gets syphilis.
His whole family is destroyed. His finances are destroyed.
And then, of course, you have a child who's being brought up in
a criminal element who himself is probably going to end up
turning out to be a criminal. So the ripple effects of just 10
minutes of sex on society as a whole were absolutely
catastrophic. And so you had, which would be,
at the time, some very strong language to both shame women for
having sex outside of marriage and shame men for pursuing sex
outside of marriage. And of course, there are endless
novels written in the both the 18th and the 19th century really
designed to help women figure out which man wants to marry
them and which man just wants to sleep with them and abandoned
them. And so the rape literature, the
CAD literature, the the harlot, the strumpet, and so on was all
very, very clear. Because the negative
consequences of single motherhood was so destructive
and so corrosive to society as a whole that you had to use some
pretty strong language to prevent people from doing this.
And there had to be a kind of cold hearted, in a way, fairly
relentless punishment of people who stepped out of line in order
to prevent other people from stepping out of line.
Like there was a poster, I actually had it with my
wallpaper many years ago when I was in the business world, which
was there were these motivational posters like the
kittens saying, you know, hang in there, it's only it's only
Wednesday or whatever. And there was a demotivation of
posters, which I thought were very funny.
And one of them was a ship going straight down, like a tanker
just going straight down. And it stood it, it was it could
be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to
others. That really struck me.
And so when people make bad decisions and there are bad
outcomes, the temptation on the male part is to say that's why
you don't do this stuff. The temptation on the female
part is a little bit like, well, she made a mistake, should she
suffer forever? We've got to help her.
You know, that kind of stuff, Which is why when women get
political power, you get the welfare state, as we've sort of
talked about before. So you had this very strong
language. Another word that was used,
which we don't really hear of much anymore, was spinster.
And spinster when I was growing up, a sort of a very sad, tragic
word. And Amanda talks about this in
the Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie, about these
women who they're mousy women. They just hide in attics, in
houses. They get shuffled from place to
place because nobody wants to deal with them.
But they've got no husband, They've got no savings, They've
got no life of their own. And so Spinster was a warning
for women that particularly because women live longer than
men on average, that you should get a man, you should get some
savings, you should set yourself up for your old age.
And, you know, it's a long way from the heady beauty of youth
to the, you know, 40 to 85 desert of invisibility that
happens to women if they age without a partner.
So we had all of this language that was quite strong now.
And to the welfare state, children have now turned from a
liability to an asset That is one of the biggest reversals in
all of human history. And we're still reeling from the
shock of this because since children are objectively a
liability, they consume time, energy, sleep, money, other
kinds of resources. You need somebody to provide
those resources in a private charity state.
That person who provides those resources is a loving pair of
bonded married husband for for women as a whole.
So the welfare estate, by turning children from
liabilities to assets, meant that a woman could get a good
income by having children and not having the father around.
One of the standards that was brought in fairly quickly with
the welfare estate is you can't have a man in the house.
And I remember many years ago, I was at a park with my daughter
when she was quite little, and I heard these women chatting with
each other. It was a sort of 2:00 in the
afternoon, so the work day for most people.
But I do philosophy on philosophies and inspirations
hours. And these women were like, oh,
yes, you know, well, if you have another kid, you can apply for
this program and this benefit. And then there's this housing
vouchers. You can.
And they knew the whole labyrinth and maze of the
welfare estate. Oh, and then of course, if you
have a kid and he's on disability and that can just be
something that's ADHD, you get an extra $600 a month.
And they were just calmly discussing the best ways to milk
the system by having children without a husband around.
And that is a big problem now. So the reason we have this
negative language is to steer people away from decisions that
are bad for society as a whole. But they can't just be idle and
empty threats. So in the past, before divorce
became normalized through the media, if a woman left a man or
if a man left a woman, they would be kicked out of their
social circle. Because I mean, divorce is
spread, right? And you, you, if a woman is
going through a divorce, all of her friends are going to start
looking at their own husbands in a escance way because the
woman's going to justify it. And usually with regards to male
chauvinist pig ideology paranoia.
So if a woman was getting a divorce or got a divorce, she
would no longer be welcome in her friend's house because she
hadn't stuck it through, she'd chosen a man.
And particularly if there were children involved, because
couples who broke up were doing, but perceived to be in this data
to back this up were perceived to be doing enormously selfish
behaviors that harmed their children.
And they were shunned. And they were shunned because
people didn't want the divorces to spread as a social contagion.
And also because their children were likely to be dysfunctional
both at the time and possibly in the future because of the trauma
and upset of their parents going through a divorce.
So you wouldn't necessarily want your kids playing with a kid who
was going through some horrendous, stressful divorce
from his parents because there may be aggression or dysfunction
involved in that. So there were lots of and so
people stuck together because there were hugely negative
consequences for breaking up. And of course, in the States
prior to the 1940's, the the children went with the husband
went with the father and the mother basically got nothing.
So there was a big incentive to stay together.
Now did that mean some people stayed in abusive relationships?
Well, sure. Well, sure.
And is that good? No, that's really not good.
But what's the alternative? You have a massive, ugly, brutal
divorce. Kids get kicked out of their
social circles. The parents can't socialize.
There's a huge amount of trauma to the kids.
All you're doing is shifting the abuse from parents who chose
each other to children who didn't choose the situation at
all. And that scarcely seems fair.
So political correctness then came about because, I mean, in
parts, this is sort of one of the major factors.
Political correctness came about because shaming language lost
its power because the negative outcomes were buried under money
printing in debt. So there are massive negative
outcomes for the children of single mothers.
And I've got a whole presentation, The Truth about
Single Mothers, which you can peruse at your leisure, but I
won't get into the details here. You can look up these
statistics. They're absolutely appalling,
but they're not immediate. What happens is it has so some
woman becomes a single mother or is is a single mother, which is
not the same as a widow, a widow as a.
A divorcee is a woman who was married.
A widow is a woman whose husband died.
A single mother is unmarried at the time of birth.
So the negative effects of children who grew up in single
mother households, from female promiscuity to male aggression,
are legion. But they're diffused, and they
only happen later, right? The scene versus the unseen.
One of the basic principles of economics.
And so if you criticized single mothers in the past, it made
perfect sense because they were massively dysfunctional.
Their kids were going through hell.
They had often become prostitutes, They weren't
welcoming a polite society and so on.
So you would criticize that and be like, well, yeah, that makes
sense. That's exactly the way things
are playing out. And so you'd warn people away.
But when single mothers get, and I did a show on this many years
ago, it's called the Welfare Cliff, which is a woman with two
children in America at the time, this is many years ago, got the
equivalent of $80,000 worth of benefits.
Both direct subsidies, subsidized housing, free
healthcare, dental care and so on.
So she got the equivalent of $80,000.
And what that meant is that when she worked her, her benefits
would be deducted, right? So she made $10,000.
Her benefits would be reduced by $10,000.
And what that meant was that she effectively faced 100% tax rate
until she made 80,000, right? And if she makes 85,000, it's
like a 98% tax rate. So she would have to make
hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to make up to make more
money than she was getting for free.
And that keeps people trapped in poverty.
And now we have 3 or 4 generations in the West of
people. Their entire clan has basically
never had jobs. They don't know much about the
workplace and they've adapted to that way of living.
And so if you criticize single mothers or loose behavior at a
time when the negative consequence of that behavior is
completely obvious to society, it's a reasonable criticism.
But if everybody seems to be doing fine, then you are just,
you just hate single moms. You're just prejudice.
You're just uneasy, you're just insecure.
You're just a misogynist, right? Because it seems to be OK.
And it seems to be OK because taxation, money printing and
borrowing is wallpapering up the giant holes in the future in
temporarily doesn't make the structure anymore sound.
In fact it weakens it even more. But then what happens is because
the problems are covered up through debt and deferred down
to the future where it becomes more diffuse and hard to figure
out, then it looks like you're just hostile.
You're just negative to to people and you just hate people.
And therefore you can't use this term and you can't use that term
'cause it's offensive and it's upsetting and it's negative.
And so this whole political correctness comes out because
the negative effects of bad decisions are shifted to the
future, right? Shifted to people who are going
to be preyed upon by criminals coming out of the single mother
households, which is of course not 100%, but it sure ain't
zero. It's shifted to the future in
terms of debt and so on. And so we can't say negative
things about negative decisions because those negative decisions
are wallpapered over by debt and money printing theft really and
diffuse down to the future. And so now you're just
prejudiced and you just don't like and this.
So all of this stuff came about in a way to the sort of language
policing is because the language policing was for disastrous that
are now invisible to most people, and therefore the
language appears to be just hostile or prejudicial or
misogynistic or something like that.
It's like, well, no, we're actually desperately trying to
save society from some very bad outcomes, but those bad outcomes
are only visible to the knowledgeable and perceptive,
not to the average person, if that makes sense.
Absolutely. What would you say to a guy who
says I'm lonely? I've never had a girlfriend, I
feel like my life has no purpose, nobody loves me and I
just want to kill myself. Yeah.
You know, I was with you there because I get a lot of these
calls in the call insurance. Just for the record, if somebody
says to me that they're suicidal, I will tell them to
call a hotline to get a therapist to, you know, go to
emerge if they're feeling suicidal.
However, you know, it does sometimes come up over the
course of a conversation that somebody has self-destructive
tendencies. So you know, the usual caveats.
I'll say I'm obviously a mental health professional, not a
psychiatrist, not a psychologist.
So I am a moral philosopher in particular.
So I don't have any subject matter expertise in this.
So these are just my amateur opinions with, you know, some
reinforcement of a lot of conversations I've had over the
years in the show and and privately.
So people don't want to kill themselves.
This is not something that generates spontaneously within
the mind of someone. Can you imagine, evolutionarily
speaking, it's like, well, I I could eat and and exercise and
reproduce and or I could just jump off a Cliff right there.
There isn't really a jump off the Cliff evolutionary pressure
because those who had spontaneously internally
developed suicidal ideation. Well, they wouldn't reproduce,
or if they did reproduce their children, it wouldn't do very
well. So there'd be a downward drag on
that, and that would be weeded out.
So then the question is, OK, if it doesn't evolve in an
evolutionary standpoint, he said somewhat repetitively.
But if it doesn't arise out of evolution, where does it come
from? Now, I remember reading a
psychiatrist many years ago, his anecdotes and so on.
So all the caveats in the world, but he said in his decades of
practicing suicidal people, every single person he met who
was suicidal, who he treated, had internal parental voices
telling them to kill themselves. And you've seen this on the
Internet, Kys, right? I mean, it's one of the things
that people constantly trying to like weird voodoo cast a bad
spell on people. So why is it that somebody would
have in their mind the completely anti evolutionary,
anti happiness thought of killing themselves?
So I'll tell you what I think. Obvious nonsense.
I don't have any proof, just an amateur opinion.
There are a lot of crimes that go on in a family.
There are a lot of crimes that go on in families.
I mean, pedophilia is one in three girls and one in five boys
and the number could be even higher.
Now, this is not one in three families because pedophiles
often have hundreds of victims. So there's pedophilia, There is
what else we got drug use, of course, even drunk driving,
which is criminal. There is violence against
children more so than just the spanking violence and beatings
against spouses. There is theft, there is fraud
and all all kinds of terrible things that happen.
There are children who've witnessed direct violent crimes
such as assault, murder and rape.
So there are crimes in a lot of families.
Now, if we look at the criminal paradigm, let's say that you are
unfortunate enough to witness a crime by an organized crime
gang. So the mafia or something like
that. And they know that you've seen
it, right? They they know that you are a
witness to a crime. So what do they do?
Well, if you are the witness to, I mean, it could be any
criminal, but organized crime is the one we'd probably be most
familiar with. If you're witness to a crime,
the perpetrator will threaten you that if you go to the
police, he'll kill you and your family and whatever, right?
So if you witness a crime, you are threatened with death.
Should you talk? So if we look at the fact that
there are a substantial number of crimes occurring within
families and the children are the witnesses to those crimes
and often, of course, the victims, what are they told?
They're told if you talk, what do they say?
I mean, I've heard this from a number of people, right?
So what are the criminal perpetrators of these crimes?
If they're parents, it could be other people in the family who
just talk about parents from now.
What do they say to the children?
They say, well, if you talk, you're dead.
If you talk, you're going to get taken away and put into foster
care, which for a, a child is the equivalent of, of death in
terms of like their stability and sense of survival and so on
and safety. So there is, or you know, if,
if, if you talk, daddy or mommy's going to go to jail and
then watch, right? And then the child feels that
there's no protection, there's no security, there's no safety.
So there are a lot of threats made against children by
criminals within a family structure.
It could be elsewhere, right? But it most commonly it would be
within the family structure. That doesn't always mean
parents, you know, it could be extended family, cousins,
uncles, aunts, grandparents. But you know, we sort of
understand we don't have to go through all the radiating levels
of genetic proximity. So if there are a lot of crimes
in families and the general methodology of dealing with a
witness to a crime is to threaten them to death if they
talk, then what happens is people get into adulthood and
they want to talk about the pain that they've suffered.
They want to share with others the horrors of their childhood.
But then what happens is when they want to talk.
Because one of the ways that you keep people quiet is you isolate
them, right? This is why you say I'm lonely.
This is the quote you gave, right?
I'm lonely. I've never had a girlfriend.
Well, if you are witness to a crime and your parents are
criminals, they don't want you getting close to anyone, they
don't want you having friends, they don't want you having
sleepovers, they don't want you having a girlfriend because you
might talk. So I view in general by tons of
exceptions, but I view people with this kind of loneliness,
isolation and suicidality. I would assume my first
assumption doesn't mean it's accurate all the time of course,
but my first assumption is they witnessed or were the victims of
genuine crimes that everybody would accept would be illegal
and would deserve jail time. I don't just mean like spanking
and stuff like that, which I consider wrong, but most people
would say or you know, like the genuine like if if it was on
video, the parent would go to jail.
So I think that that is what is probably occurring.
At least that's the first thing that I would go to as a
methodology to try to figure out why.
It's not that you just want to kill yourself, it's that you
have a problem. Your life is horrifying because
you're isolated. But in order to break that
isolation, it brings up death threats in your mind.
And so I think that's a lot of the torture that people are
going through. And again, I don't want to over
caveat this, but this is just my opinion.
I've certainly had some conversations along these lines,
and that would be my first port of call if I was talking to
someone about this just sort of in my personal life.
But that would be my first approach, if that makes sense.
Yes, Sir. So I would like to give Mr.
Molyneux a break and just share some thoughts on Kamala Harris
finally extended the web page that she has and now actually
lists the issues that she would like to talk about.
Now, I'm not going to get into the specifics, but here are the
major takeaways to save the audience some time.
Voluntary contracts are exploitative, but the state
imposing unilateral obligations on millions of people by legal
Fiat is a totally valid social contract.
Force cotton picking is inherently immoral, but force
military conscription for Vladimir Zelensky is totally
good. We want to empower the working
class, but school choice should be illegal.
You might owe reparations for something you never engaged in,
but violent criminals today are really just victims of past
injustice. Riots are the voice of the
unheard, but January 6th was the worst thing since the 30 Years
War. So when you are faced with all
of these contradictions, the best thing that I think people
could do is check out two websites.
One is Libertarian institute.org, 2 is Free
domain.com. I want to give 10 lessons I have
learned from freedomain.com along with these books on truth,
the tyranny of illusion, everyday anarchy, and practical
anarchy. So lesson #1 the importance of
free association, disassociation, and having your
own standards. This applies to friends, family,
commercial interactions, and politics.
Free domain really gave me the confidence to not have double
standards, whether it's for my neighbor or for someone like
Lindsey Graham #2 taking the implications of arguments.
I had this pink haired Bolshevik the other day tell me you
shouldn't tell people what to do.
And I had to just pause and laugh asking her, did you just
tell me not to do something in the form of telling me to tell
other people not what to do and what not to do?
Having this confidence really allowed me to discuss political
issues without a heightened sense of insecurity #3 start
small with what you can control. One of my favorite Molyneux or
ants ever was he goes, If you can't lift a cup of coffee,
please don't pretend to tell me that you can lift a building.
So starting with something small, that which is in your
control is really important. The other really good one he had
was it before you try and change the world and or change the
political system and turn it against its own interests, could
you take a Jane Austen book club and turn that book club against
Jane Austen? Start small, start local.
The next one, use precise language, Nikki Haley said the
other day. I don't agree with the President
on everything. Well, of course no one agrees
with everyone on everything. This was something Mr. Molyneux
would constantly point out to us.
And once you see the imprecise language that morons use to
arouse the passions of the feeble minded and keep them
asleep, now it's just everywhere.
Next one holding people accountable to their face.
There was a guy, well remotely, but in a conversation the
gentleman was asked by Mr. Molyneux, So at this point, what
would it take for you to break up with your girlfriend?
He goes well, if if she ever really violated my trust to
which step on said well, she cheated on you and gave you an
STD, so are you going to break up with her or just move the
goal post? And it was like, oh, I never
thought of someone actually, you know, holding someone
accountable like that. This is something I'd only say a
day later to someone else in the confidence of my own home.
That is really important. Next, the importance of
analogies, isolating variables, allowing people to extract a
principle under circumstances which they don't have emotional
connections to. This is why I use the example of
the Catholic Church doing everything the state does in my
book, Domestic Imperialism. Very important.
Next, the importance of social ostracism and public
declarations of disapproval. It was just amazing hearing
adults that I know say things like, well, you can't say X.
When you say you can't, do you mean the words don't actually
exit your mouth? And they're like, well, you'll
get a lot of eye rolls and and people might raise their voice.
And so that's what I mean by can't.
So they put this on the same level as like you can't flap
your arms and fly and you can't address issues like Hey, you
shouldn't hit your kids to one of your friends who is an
abusive parent. Next the against me argument.
Raising the emotional opportunity cost of holding an
immoral belief decreases the person's confidence in it.
Thus they're less likely to passionately spread it,
decreasing its power of social proof.
This against me argument is very important.
It gets people out of the realm of hypothetically.
Theoretically, I think things like taxation and conscription
are OK. Asking people, you want me to be
enslaved, forced labor to go to Ukraine to keep Zelensky on the
throne, That's what you think should happen and I should be
caged for not doing this. If I like Yanukovych more,
that's what should happen to me. You're advocating that very
powerful stuff. Next, selective anger as a
litmus test. Growing up, I thought there were
two types of people, people who got angry and people who didn't.
freedomain.com really taught me that there was actually a
standard that you should have for things that should make you
angry and things that you should first talk through or just
constantly remain calm on. So the ability to properly
discriminate a good time for when anger should be used,
because if you use it all the time, it's like inflation.
If you print a ton of it, then it's worthless.
If you're always angry, then you never know what's really
important. Finally this.
I had to choose one of my favorite quotes.
This one might be the best. Death is coming.
Either way, living small ain't going to save you from death.
It just makes every day a little more like dying.
That is a number of lessons I've learned as a student of Mr.
Molyneux for these years. Been waiting maybe six years or
so to tell him that. So I thought that today would be
today would be a good day. Next question for Mr. Molyneux.
We're running low on time, so I just want to keep going.
You have the ability to send every person on earth a free
copy of one book. Which book would you choose and
why? Well, first of all, I appreciate
you summing up so beautifully. A lot of great lessons.
Thank you. Thank you.
That's very, very kind. So I was obviously it's going to
be one of my books because if I thought there was another better
book, I wouldn't have written stuff.
So I was like, oh, it should be UPB, universally preferable
behaviour, a ration of proof of secular ethics.
But instead I ended up settling on my book, Real time
relationships, the Logic of love.
Because real time relationships is about how to be honest and
direct and clear in relationships in real time,
right? So if you get angry with
someone, you don't say, well, you're just an A hole and you
just did bad things and you're just terrible.
And right, you say I feel angry at you.
I'm not saying I know why I don't maybe don't know why, but
I have this experience of emotion towards you.
I'm angry at you because people always jump into I'm angry at
you, therefore you did something wrong, Therefore you did
something bad or rude or immoral in in the same way people to
say, well, I'm offended, therefore you're offensive.
And it's like, no, that's not, that's not logically what
follows. Your emotions are not mind
reading omniscient scans of other people.
There are people who annoy me and sometimes it's because they
have a bad habit that I have and I'm actually annoyed at my own
bad habit, right? So there are people who annoy me
or anger me because they remind me of someone in the past who
did something negative and therefore I'm doing it to do
with that, right? Somebody could annoy me because
they have been annoying me for a while.
And I haven't said anything about it.
In other words, I've lied by omission.
And therefore they do 1 little thing and I just blow up, you
know? And that's the result of prior
dishonesty. So being honest with people in
real time, really honest, which is to not jump to conclusions,
not jumping to conclusions is really, really key in
relationships. So if something my daughter is
doing bothers me, I'll say what you're doing is bothering me.
I don't know you're doing anything wrong.
But I actually do feel kind of bothered.
I wonder why, right? And that that's important,
right? That's important.
So honesty and humility, honesty and accuracy, honesty and not
jumping to conclusions. Jumping to conclusions is
demanding that other people manage your own emotions.
So people who get triggered or offended or upset, they're
openly saying I can't manage my emotions therefore it's your job
to change your behaviour, right? I don't like this argument, it
makes me feel anxious and uncomfortable.
So you need to stop making this argument.
This data bothers me deeply. So stop bothering me with your
data and shut up. But this is censorship.
So if you can't manage your own emotions, which means have them,
but don't expect them to be tyrant demands on other people's
behaviors. If you can't manage your own
emotions, you end up having to be tyrannical to everyone around
you, and that is really terrible.
Where does the real tyranny come from?
And the real tyranny doesn't usually come down from the state
to the individual, at least on a free speech sense.
The most tyranny comes from not wanting to upset those around
you. And it's not that we are too
bothered by upsetting people around us.
It's because the people around us, often, if we upset them,
they will absolutely demand that we change our behavior.
And as we can see from censorship, that is a pattern
that grows and grows and grows until it eclipses the very
heavens itself and turns their entire social discourse into
silent darkness. Because it doesn't stop.
If somebody says, well, it bothers me when you make this
argument, so you better stop making this argument.
You're like, OK, I'll stop making this argument.
You've weakened them. You haven't strengthened them.
You haven't taught them anything about how to deal with their own
emotions. All you've done is you've taught
them that if anybody makes them uncomfortable, it's not their
job to deal with their own discomfort.
It's the other person's job to change their behavior.
That never, it's never going to end it.
It always, always, always escalates because people who
don't have power over themselves desperately want power over
others. And the more they get to
exercise power over others, the more their lust for power
increases. Like power is an addiction.
It's not like food, it's like bulimia, right?
It's not like exercise. It's like anorexia and there is
no particular limit to an addiction other than death
absolutely hitting bottom or having some kind of self
knowledge journey where you get to the root of the issue.
So I would say to people, the real time relationships tells
you how to be honest with your own thoughts and feelings, how
to genuinely connect with other people without being aggressive
towards them. And in this way, you lose the
desire to control other people because you actually have
management over yourself. So you know how it works in
relationships. We can go a little bit over, I
know I'm talking a lot, but you know how it works in
relationships. You know, the wife says to the
husband, oh, well, why, why don't you ever put away the
dishes from the dishwasher, right?
She gets really, really angry. We, we know it's not about the
dishwasher, but she's pretending that it is.
And the level of emotional upset is way too high because of the
dishwasher. And so they end up arguing about
the dishwasher. She has to escalate to hide the
fact that it's crazy to argue this much about the dishwasher.
And they end up arguing about something that's not the real
issue. What is the real issue?
I've been, it could be any number of things, but it, it
ain't the dishwasher. So Real Time Relationships is a
book that again, it's free, a free demand.com/books Real Time
Relationships will teach you how to be honest.
When I open the dishwasher and the dishes are full, it bothers
me. I'm angry.
I'm angry at you. And then everyone normally
interprets I'm angry at you as I did something wrong or you're
being irrationally angry at me, right?
So you either apologize, which doesn't solve the problem 'cause
it's not about the dishwasher, or you get mad back 'cause it's
like, well, come on, I did this. I mowed the lawn yesterday and
you didn't do this the other day, right?
I mean, you've probably seen these videos of a, a woman
complaining about a man's clutter somewhere in the house
and then he goes up to the sink where there's like 6,000,000
voodoo bottles of eternal youth and so on.
So just to get people to talk about the actual issues, I'm,
I'm upset you did this and then I got upset.
Not even I'm upset with you. You did this and it bothered me.
You got, you did this and I felt angry.
You did this and I got anxious. I don't know why.
And then you can explore it together without blame, without
attack, and you can actually build that bond because that's
where trust is. Trust exists where you're not
blamed for other people's moods. Maybe you just need a Snickers
bar. I don't know.
It could be any number of things.
So I think when you have honesty in that kind of relationship,
and this is particularly true parents to children, when you
have honesty in your relationships and you lose the
thirst to control, dominate, bully and blame others for your
emotional states, then you begin to undo the sort of tightly
wound, escalating tyranny that goes on in people's hearts when
they blame other people for what they themselves feel and and
believe genuinely that the best way to manage their own feelings
is to order other people around, like the Vermacht.
And that's just escalating tyranny, which happens at a
personal level and then people accept it more at a social and
political level. That is such a great lesson,
initiating humility. This is bothering me.
I don't know why can we talk about it versus you're wrong and
I'm right that is? You're the reason I feel this
way. You have to change your behavior
because you what you're doing is upsetting and offensive to me.
And it's like, whoa, I thought we were supposed to be in love.
Why are you blaming me for feeling bad?
Next topic, people who advocate the government coercively
running every aspect of everyone's life will frequently
tell me it's wrong to just walk up to people and tell them about
the keto diet or the non aggression principle.
Why do you think so many people blatantly hold this specific
contradiction? It's good for authorities to
have violently imposed standards, and they shame other
people for having voluntary standards.
Well, I think it's related to the thing we talked about
before. So if you go up to talk to
people about the keto diet, then they assume that you're calling
them fat, They get upset, they call you rude and maybe they do
eat badly, maybe they don't exercise, maybe they are
overweight, but they don't want to feel bad about it and so you
are making them feel bad. So they have to tell you to stop
doing that. If you talk about the non
aggression principle, most parents, 80 percent, 90% depends
on the ethnicity, 70 to 90% of parents hit their children.
So when you start talking about the non aggression principle,
you know, there's this very uneasy relationship in people's
minds, most people's minds, between their own conscience and
an external truth because the conscience is buried down by
lies, justifications, propaganda.
This is how you have to raise kids.
They turn into brats if you don't hit them or whatever,
right? So the conscience gets buried.
But the conscience is like a little Gopher.
It's always sticking its head up and sniffing the wind and
looking for other Gophers. Is there anything out there that
I can use to gain some authority back in in the mind?
So the number of people who are floating around or storming
around, stomping around with a bad conscience can scarcely be
overestimated. And so when you start talking
about the keto diet, people who've been neglecting their
health, their conscience is like, oh, wait, wait, somebody's
helping. Oh my gosh, can I, can I get, is
somebody out there? Can I get an Amen?
Is somebody out there talking about this?
Maybe I can get some traction. And they're like, oh, oh,
conscience rising, Shut up. Right.
And the non aggression principle.
Well, people have been abusive in their relationships.
They've yelled and called each other, you know, like one of the
things when couples call me and they've got problems with their
marriage, I'm like, well, what words have you used against each
other? And some of the words are pretty
horrific, right? So people have been really
aggressive. They've hit their children,
they've bullied their employees, they've bullied people around
them. They've called people terrible
names, maybe even their children as well.
So when you start talking about the non aggression principle,
their conscience is like, whoa, hey, there's a way out of this
rubble that I've been buried under, this rubble of
justifications and habits and history.
I could get up, there's somebody out there talking about it.
And they, their conscience begins to rise into them because
it senses an external ally which they can join hands with to
rescue the personality from evil.
And So what happens is when you start talking about truth,
virtue, better behaviour, any kind of thing.
The same thing happens when I talk about universally
preferable behaviour. Universally preferable behaviour
is just another name for the conscience, and people's
relationship to my theory of ethics is always their
relationship to their own conscience.
And so people have terrible things they've done.
They've buried it under justifications.
You start talking about better principles, higher standards,
the conscience gets roused and they freak out.
It feels like an assault. You know, if there was some
remote control thing that could you, you pushed a button and
people got like some crazy adrenaline dump or or something,
you just, you got to dial, you crank it up and they just freak
out and they have a panic attack, right?
I mean, that would be assault. Like if you wired up someone's
brain and you had a remote control anxiety and you just
dialed up their anxiety, that would be considered assault.
But that's how people experience it when you talk about virtues
and values that make them feel bad, they view you as assaulting
them. They don't say, well, Gee, I
guess I've been ignoring this issue.
I've done some bad things. I should probably listen to this
guy and become a better person. Oh, they experience it as
assault. You're making me feel terrible.
You're a bad person. Shut up.
And so that is, I think one of the things that's happening.
And so they feel anxiety when you talk about the non
aggression principle. But then if you start talking
about, I mean, just to circle back on the welfare state, if
you say, you know, the welfare state is is toxic and bad.
And listen, man, I mean, I'm not sure where you grew up.
I certainly grew up in what I called the matriarchal manners,
which was a single mother, rent controlled apartments of
cockroaches everywhere, violence, screaming, you know,
we were going to, I remember we moved into one place and we were
going to go meet with the neighbors, but then we couldn't
because the guy got arrested because he he shot a bullet into
a wall during a fight with his wife.
He was actually a cop. So this is the kind of
hellscape, you know, screaming violence, like just just awful,
awful stuff. And so, and this is all the
welfare state. Now I'm not saying it's 100% of
their behavior was defined by the welfare state, but there are
a lot of people who were on quote disability while still
able to move their own furniture and they just didn't have to go
out in the world and deal with people and suffer any negative
consequences for bad behavior. So they tended to rot on the
inside and decay in terms of their standards.
So if I say, well, the welfare state is coercive, the welfare
state is debt based, the welfare state makes people worse and we
need private charity where we actually go in and help people
with usually emotional issues or maybe mental health issues, but
don't just give the money and leave them to rot in their own
little apartments. So then what happens is people
then feel anxious because I'm bringing up the immorality and
dysfunction of the welfare state.
So the both are the same things. If if someone says, oh, you're
calling me fat because you're talking about the keto diet,
they feel anxious. If you start talking about the
immorality of the welfare state, then they feel anxious.
And so it's the both, I think both the principles are
following the same pattern is that if you start talking about,
you know, less government coercion, less government
control, voluntary charity and private education and so on,
then people get really anxious. And, you know, now I understand
it. Like, now we're in a situation
where the welfare state has gone on for so long that it's really,
really hard. You know, outside of some
massive extremity, like some crazy military thing, it's
really hard to think how the welfare state can be wound down
without a lot of rioting or violence.
So people just, oh, we can't talk about the welfare state.
And they may know people on the welfare state.
They may themselves be on the welfare state and so on.
Or if you start talking about, you know, Social Security, I
mean, people are taking out way more than they ever paid in.
And that's literally stealing from the younger generation.
They're like eternal boomer vampires who on the jugular of
the younger generation. The younger generation can't get
their start because of all of this money going to the elderly.
And then people are like, oh, but if let's say that there's
some diminishment in, in benefits for old age pensions
because we can't afford them. And then people are like, oh,
that meant that might mean that my mom comes to live with me and
they don't. So they feel anxious about that.
So people are just managing their own anxieties by having
people not say things. And language is just for a lot
of people, it's just dial up feels like assault.
And so people freak out because of that stuff.
And I think that's the general pattern that we see this sort of
triggered thing. Definitely.
I love the line by Antonin Scalia.
I think he said the welfare state has created donors without
love and recipients without gratitude.
I once found out that this guy who would never tell me what he
does for a living, turns out he was a welfare recipient making
quite a bit of money. I said, you know, every day in
the private sector, I'm thanked for the little bit of money I
give. Even to Starbucks, Planet
Fitness, any of these places. I've never been thanked by a
welfare recipient for all the taxes I've paid.
I go, would would you like to thank me?
Oh, I've never seen him so angry.
It is just unbelievable. Talk about burying something
deep within your conscience and flipping out when the slightest
thing. Speaking of why people, I'm
sorry, did you want to comment? No.
No, go ahead. I I think you made the point.
Why are so many people, myself included, so terrified of the
smallest amount of disapproval? As I said earlier, I was talking
to grown adults who were saying you can't say X insert something
that was on their mind that they wanted to get off their chest
that they thought would be met with some social disapproval by
either maybe customers or bosses.
But even just at a dinner party, why are so many people so
terrified of the smallest amount of disapproval?
I think there's an evolutionary reason behind this.
And this is not an answer in terms of a moral sense.
But my question is always why is it this way?
Like why is it that boys in particular who are beaten grow
up to be violent? There's nothing in physics that
that says this, right? So that has to be some
evolutionary adaptation. So we are a social species.
We are a tribal species. We can't survive on our own
amid. There are lots of creatures out
there. They just get together to mate.
They go off on the way. A lot of the big cats are kind
of like that. But we are social tribal
animals. And that's why we have got these
giant brains is because we have this sort of, we outsource a lot
of our survival to to others. So because our children develop
so slowly, they need a huge amount of resources and pair
bonding and commitment and time. And what that means is that
people have to care about us. They have to approve of us.
Our tribe has to approve of us. If our tribe does not approve of
us, a couple of things are going to happen.
We might get ostracized, in which case we're banished from
the tribe and our genes don't reproduce and we die alone in
the wilderness at some point. Or maybe we stay in the tribe,
but the women won't mate with us.
Right? Which is why there tends to be a
bit of a hive mind among women about bad things in the
withholding of sex is very powerful.
And it is because that is genetic death.
You have no offspring. Or let's say that we somehow do
manage to not get ostracized, not get kicked out, and we find
a woman who will sleep with us and we have kids.
But then if we lose approval, then then we lose status.
Our kids lose status. Nobody wants to hang with us,
and our kids are less likely to survive because the other tribal
members are not as diligent in feeding them or taking care of
them. Because again, we're sort of
raised in this somewhat collective situation.
So if we think of the mindset that happened to be born, I'm
sure it was born countless times.
I've written an entire novel about this called Just Bore the
mindset of somebody who Grows up who just doesn't give a rat's
behind about other people's opinions.
They think for themselves, they go with reason and evidence as
best they can, and they just don't care about the opinions of
others. OK, does that gene set get
selected for survival? And the answer is no.
So we are the descendants of people who were terrified of
disapproval because if they weren't tested, terrified of
disapproval, they wouldn't have made it.
We wouldn't be descended from them.
So I think that is really important.
It's hard for us to think now. Now we have all of this
independence, right? Like I can disagree with
society. You and I can have this
conversation and you know, our kids will flourish and and we
can have a good life and all of that, but that's not how we
evolved. We evolved in time of massive
predation, right? The, the predators are wolves
and lions and jackals and you name it, right?
There were predators everywhere and food was scarce and disease
was rampant. And if you were starving and you
got sick, your body might not have the energy to fight off the
infection and so on. And so survival was like razor
thin. You know, back in the day of the
last Ice Age, humanity was down to like 10,000 people.
I mean, that's a small town that that's all that were.
So survival was like a razor edge margin and anything that
got you over that line was hugely positively selected for.
And the tribe, the women, the men, the elders, the witch
doctors, they just did not like people who were immune to
disapproval because you couldn't get people in line and their
kids would not survive. So we've evolved this way, which
doesn't make as much sense now, because we can be independent,
we can go against social approval, we can disregard to
some degree the opinions of others, and we can do well.
But throughout most of human history and our certainly during
the course of our evolution, that was not at all the case.
You needed every tiny scrap of survivability and positive
reproductive selection that you could get.
So we've evolved that way because there was no other way
for us to survive. And so now we have the challenge
in that our environment is something where we can have more
free thought and free speech, but our emotional apparatus was
evolved to be uncomfortable with that.
And that's a challenge, I think, that most free thinkers have had
to face throughout human history.
And we are in a situation now in the modern world where, you
know, I have an ancestor, William Molyneux, who's best
friends with John Locke, the philosopher.
And they, they criticized the king and they ended up being
chased by the King's soldiers through Ireland and, you know,
sleeping in barns and, and drinking from ditches and, you
know, so there's a lot of challenges to, to having
creative, rational thought and going with the evidence and so
on. We are in a situation where it
is more a matter of emotional management than actual physical
danger. Like we're not getting chased by
the King's soldiers, usually through the Irish countryside
and having a lay down with the goats.
So our emotional nature is developed for scarcity where
disapproval meant death. But we can actually do well in
society by telling the truth, which goes against our emotional
instincts, if that makes sense. Yes Sir.
Thank you so much to everyone for watching Keith Knight.
Don't tread on anyone. Please visit
libertarianinstitute.org and free domain dot com.
Mr. Molyneux, thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate the conversation.