 Okay, hey, this is Stefan Kinsella, Kinsella on Liberty. This is another one of my episodes where someone asked to talk to me about something and I said, yes, if I can record it in case there's anything of interest to listeners. So this is Kent Wellington, who briefly for me is not exactly a libertarian, but just has some questions. I don't really know what you want to talk about, but Kent, why don't you introduce yourself, however you want to do it, and then we can start. Hey there, my name is Kent Wellington, and I just have been very anti-IP since I was a child really, and when I realized that Mr. Kinsella was the one who wrote one of my favorite books against IP, I was really, yeah, taking it back, and then I was like, wow, you know, I should reach out to him and just try to have a conversation with him because I've sort of been in the, what do you say, I've just been, you know, up in the towers on these topics for a long time, like my whole life, and I've never, I never really get to talk about these topics with anybody one-on-one, and I just saw his, that he puts his email out there, so I was like, I'll just email him, see if he'll, he's wanting to talk to me for even a minute. So yeah, that's what we're doing right now, and I have some very different takes, I guess, what I think are some novel takes, but maybe aren't, and I'd love to, you know, be proven wrong, or I just wanted to throw some things at you regarding contracts, IP, anarchism, a few different things. Mainly, I guess, my my main hypothesis is, so I'm very, I'm very into the quotes from Jesus on oaths, and I believe that without, so I think that oaths are the key social mechanism of the state. Do you, do you, what do you think about that? What are our oaths not the key social mechanism of the state? O-A-T-H? Yes, oaths, yeah. I'm not sure I know what that means, what do you mean? So oaths are, you know, if you want to become a doctor in the U.S., at least a professionally recognized doctor, you have to take the Hippocratic Oath, right? Others, so our whole professional society is filled with oaths, which are really these sort of mystical activities, yet our secular world is filled with these oaths. To become a lawyer, you need to take the bar oath, to become a politician, you know, you need to swear in, you need to take an oath of office. There's a bajillion oaths you need to take in modern society. If you want to partake in modern society. And so Jesus, and I'm not necessarily getting religious here, you could just say that in one of the most popular books in the world, which, you know, the Bible is, well, the most pop, the biggest guy, the most important guy in the book, in the New Testament, Jesus, in his biggest speech, the Sermon on the Mount, he says, take no oaths at all. Instead, just say yes or no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one. So my interpretation of that is that anything beyond you giving your word, like, if I invite you to my birthday party, and, you know, I give you the, I say, Hey, can you come to my birthday party? You can say yes or no. Or you can say maybe two. But anything beyond that, if I say, like, hey, well, will you swear on it? Or hey, will you sign this contract? Or hey, will you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. To me, that's opening the door. That's exactly what Jesus is saying. It's opening the door for bad things to happen. And to me, it's what is the root cause of it's the potential root cause of like all the bad things that happen with the state. Because, like Jesus says, anything beyond this, anything beyond like a verbal yes or no, it basically invokes, as I mentioned to you in an email, I'm also, I, so you have you heard of Parnell's iron law bureaucracy, vaguely, but I don't really remember. So he, so the law states that in any organization, over time, the bureaucracy will overtake the main organizational object or mission. So when you swear an oath, or you have a contract or something, there's always a third party that basically you're acknowledging an elevated third party that is at least on a long enough time span is going to corrupt things. And so to me, IP, so if, so IP is a form of a contract. I mean, it's a contract. If I, if I have, you know, my, I mean, I just see the whole entire concept of IP as BS. But let's say now I have my little idea, whether it's a drawing, let's say it's a drawing, and I just go to the government and we have a contract, you could call it an oath, where they're going to protect my work. They're going to monopolize my work. So to me, to me, Jesus like, I'm like, when I, when I realized that Jesus said this, because I had never heard that in a church, like I grew up in church, I'd never heard that heard that before, heard him say that to me, it's like Jesus is like the ultimate, you know, he's, he's an anarchist in a sense, but he's also, of course, a total status monarchist, because he advocates for the kingdom of heaven and all these, you know, royal terms and things. But I was really blown away that he just like prescribes so clearly this, this way to, well, so I think we would need a definition of oath, I mean, because you're using it by examples, and you're even including, I think it's a stretch to include it to call the IP grant an oath, or even a contract with the government. It seems to me what you're getting at is, and I imagine there's lots of analysis of Jesus's comments there, which I'm familiar with, but I would assume he's against oaths because oath typically show allegiance to some kind of authority, and that gets close to having a false God, right? Like you should only worship God, you should worship the state or the king. So I would imagine that the prohibition on oaths has something to do with that. I don't know, it's just a guess, but I don't really know the clear distinction between making an oath and just saying yes or no. I mean, yes or no could be a contract, contracts are different than oaths, I would think. But I mean, the standard libertarian idea is that the state exists, it's criminal, but the reason it exists is because, you know, it's the rule of the majority by the minority. How does the minority get away with it? They get away with it because they basically have the majority convinced of their authority and their legitimacy. And they do this from a variety of ways, right? They bribe them, they brainwash them, they propagandize them, and, you know, they get them to say the pledge of allegiance, which is like an oath, and lawyers have to take an oath, and everyone has to start treating the Constitution as this thing of, and then even the social contract idea is a little bit sneaks its end, because even if you're not a congressman, or a politician, or a lawyer, or a doctor, they say that you've taken an oath to the Constitution, even though you never did, right? Because by living here, you agreed to live under the Constitution, and they make you say the pledge of allegiance. So they sort of ingrain in everyone this idea that we all have this obligation or duty to the Constitution and thus to the state. So I think that's one way that the government of the state maintains control and keeps the population docile and following their orders. I suppose you could bring in this idea of oaths as part of the description of what goes on there, and maybe Jesus had some wise things to say about the danger of oaths that you could build on in that analysis, but that's all I know about that. Okay. I also want to point out that later on in the book of James, so James is talking about what Jesus has said, and he says, remember, brothers, above all, swear no oaths. So this no oaths commandment is like so central to me. It's basically like the number one commandment of Jesus besides like, you know, the sort of the key sacraments or something, at least the really concrete commandment of Jesus. So swear no oaths. And to me, that's just so political. I mean, I suppose, I mean, I think it seems at least compatible with the libertarian distrust of the state. I mean, we don't think that people should be a legion to the state, and we don't have any allegiance to the state, and we shouldn't treat the state like God, which they want us to do, right? And maybe Jesus was getting something similar. I mean, there are decent libertarian arguments, like you said earlier, that Jesus was a manarchist. There was a guy named James Redford who has an article, Jesus is an unarchical capitalist. And I think the fact that Jesus speaks in monarchist language, and has a theological conception of this hierarchy of power in the spiritual realm, doesn't contradict the possibility that his secular thinking is compatible with private law and anarchy. I mean, even the idea of render under Caesar would not mean taking an oath. It just means hand your money over. If it's his money, right, that's like a yes or no thing. So that would be, you know, saying comply with the state if you have to, but you don't have to recognize it as having any authority. I have a novel take on the render under Caesar. I believe, yeah, like render under Caesar, what is Caesar's basically means you weren't supposed to have the money in the first place because it wasn't yours. It wasn't. That's just, it's not really my only take, but this is just one take. Have you ever heard of this guy called Daniel Suelo? No. He's sort of called the man who lived without money. There's a book about him, but he still lives in Utah and he like lived most of his life without money, but he lived very, as he likes to say, abundantly. And he actually got me rolling on a lot of these ideas. I'm sure you're totally aware that, or I assume you're aware that just from what I've been talking about that like the vast majority of Christians do not interpret that passage the way I'm interpreting it. Oh, sure. Sure. But some libertarians interpret it similarly to what you've said from what I heard. And as for this guy that lived without money, look, either he is living like a hermit, self-sufficient, which I mean, money is only applicable in an advanced beyond post-barter society. And I don't see how you can live abundantly if you live a hand-to-mouth existence on your own. So my guess is he was doing like what the Soviet Union did in the height of the Cold War where they had fake prices, but they could copy the prices of the West to have some semblance of rational economic calculation. So this guy probably was trading and bartering with people from the outside world, which had an abundance of goods to trade with them because of the money system. So it's probably a little hypocritical to run around. It's like these guys that did like, I lived on Bitcoin only for a year. So all that means was they just converted dollars to Bitcoin every time they were going to make a purchase. Yeah, well, yeah, he actually had never touched money for the time while he was Well, did he trade with anyone? No, he also, he also, he is also against all forms of barter. Yeah, he says that. So it's not all money. He's just a hermit. Like I said, he's just living hand-to-mouth on his own reserve somewhere. Yeah, yeah, he mostly lives in caves and stuff. Yeah. But you don't live in, that's not abundance, man. Come on. He calls it a spiritual abundance. So I mean, yeah, well, you could, you know, you can call a horse a chicken, but you can't, you can't call things whatever you want. But if we're speaking in language that has meanings, abundance usually has a meaning. So it's just, it's a way of saying I don't have material abundance, but I have spiritual abundance. Like congratulations, but then that's, it's equivocation because you're trying to tell people they can have abundance, but you're appealing to their common sense understanding of it. And then you do a bait and switch on them and say, well, then they, you know, they're poor and starving. You say, well, but you have material abundance. Like, I mean, spiritual abundance. I don't know. I don't know the story. I'm just guessing. Yeah. Yeah. Some interesting, yeah, takes there, but if Jesus is really that smart, he wouldn't be against money, put it that way. I mean, the idiots in Star Trek universe might say they don't need money, but Jesus would know that we need money in a world of scarcity. No. Oh yeah. I'm very anti money. So like Swallow, he has all these writings. He says that basically all the world religions agree on one thing and it's that they're against usury. And to him money is inherently usurious. And so therefore money is, because money is, is like math beyond what is in the natural world and anything beyond the natural equation is usurious. Any kind of interest. That could be, but there's nothing wrong with usury. I mean, the problem there is, it's just basically some kind of proto-Marxian confused economics. I mean, this guy seems like he's consistent. He's not trading at all, because if you're against money, you should be against all social interaction whatsoever, because you should be against all trade. You should be against barter as well as money. I mean, money doesn't add anything. Money just makes trade more efficient. He advocates for what's called gift economy, whereas you only give away freely and receive freely. I don't want to get into him too much, but yeah, he inspired me on a lot of these topics. And I think he has a lot of good content. If you ever want to look at it, Daniel Swallow, he's like, he's one of the links that like Schizo people like to link up on, on like 4chan. He's like really out there, but I think a lot of it at its core is like super good. But I mean, how are you going to, how are you going to read this guy? Are you going to read a book you wrote? Read his writing on the internet? All these things that came about because of the capitalist monetary system. So if he had his way, no one would read him and no one would know what he's talking about. So it's hypocritical. He only uses freely given things. So he only uses like computers at libraries. And yeah, I mean, he really has his whole, his whole ideology worked out. Sounds like it'll spread, it sounds like it'll spread like wildfire among the youth. So, so I guess, so here's what my sort of main question to you is, so I, so you identify as a libertarian. I more so, at least on this earth, consider myself an anarchist. Well, I think, I think consistent libertarians are anarchists. So I think that in a consistent anarchist is libertarian. So I mean, to me, libertarian just means the opposition to aggression. And if you take that consistently, then you have to recognize all states are criminal. So you oppose all states. So, okay, so to me, libertarian means anarchist. Okay. Sorry, I wasn't, I'm not totally familiar with all of your words. So you may have, Well, it's not just me. This is libertarianism. Libertarians include people that are for radically, radically small government, we call those guys menarchists, they live in the minimal state. And people that think there should be no state like anarchists, and we, I'm an anarchist, and the anarchist libertarians think that the menarchist libertarians are inconsistent and not quite fully perfect libertarians. But they're close enough that we include them in the label. And they would say the opposite. The menarchists would say that anarchists really don't support liberty because their system liberty would be destroyed. So they don't count us as libertarians. So we're kind of fighting over the term. So are you, are you, so to me, what, what But I'm assuming so you're, you're cool with contracts, right? Understood in the Rothbardian sense, yes. Which, which is that contracts are not agreements or binding agreements. They are simply transfers of title or transfers of owned property from one person to another by his expressed consent. So a contract is the transfer of ownership from, especially a trade or the change of ownership from one thing to another. It's not a binding promise or a binding agreement, which is how the law classifies it. But the Rothbardian and the libertarian conception of it, the Austrian libertarian conception of it is, as I just said, as a title transfer theory. Okay. So by the way, and that's just that's because libertarianism essentially is a property theory. It believes that there are private property rights. Every human being is the owner of certain things determined by the homesteading rule, like who had it first and contract, like who transferred it, which did you get it from a previous owner. So contract is just the exercise of ownership by an owner of a thing. It's the decision to transfer it to someone else. So like, if you own something, you can let someone use it, or you can deny them the use of it, like your home, or your car, or your body. So within your conception of contracts or your ideal contract system, are there elevated third parties? Or however you want to call them? Is there a state? Is there an enforcer? Oh, well, you can't have a libertarian system unless the libertarian norms are widely agreed upon in society and respected, which means property rules. So basically, to achieve the society, you have to have a wide agreement on the just basis of ownership. And yeah, so of course, you could have institutional assistance in enforcing your property rights if you need it, which we do now. I mean, I think of today, the Western societies as quasi libertarian because the private law that exists and is enforced, that evolved from the Roman law and then the English common law, is roughly libertarian because it roughly recognizes property based upon those principles, like first use and contract. There's lots of exceptions because the state has mangled it and we've had bad economics informing judges. But roughly, they're roughly libertarian. They're just not perfectly consistent. But yeah, you can have people, like if you have a contract and the contract specifies that you own this thing as opposed to someone else and then they refuse to hand over the money they owe you or the thing or whatever, and they refuse to cooperate, then you could have dispute resolution. That could be an arbitral tribunal or a court or an insurance company, something like that. So to me, you're then, since there's any kind of elevation, you're recreating the state and then according to like Pornell's law over a long enough timeline, basically that bureaucratic mechanism will overtake the entire society. Well, I don't think so. But even if that was true, the alternative would be to have just no law and like everyone always engages self-help and then get rid of obliterate the idea of ownership and property rules and norms and everything just comes down to possession and the strong win and might makes right. And that's a world of not, that's not a world of humanity. That's a world of animals live. In fact, even animals have some norms. If one dog is eating at its bowl, he growls if you approach it. You know, he knows it's his bowl. So I think that, and I don't think it is like the state because the state is specifically, that's why definitions are important like this oath term. You can't just throw it around there. You have to be precise and rigorous about it if you want to include it in any analysis. Like he says, oath is anything above binary yes or no. I know above means and I don't know yes or no means. Do you mean yes or no means consent, a prediction, an agreement? That's just not rigorous is all I'm saying. Maybe you can make it rigorous, but that doesn't seem rigorous to me as you stated it. And the state is an institution or an agency that claims a monopoly on the provision of justice in a given region. That's what the state is. And that's where all its evils come from from that characteristic of having this monopoly. How it gets the monopoly is an interesting and a different question. It gets it because it emerges over time and people get used to it and then the state successfully uses some of its resources to propagandize people nowadays by public schooling and manipulation of, you know, or control of the of the airwaves or the FCC. But its nature is that it has a monopoly. And once it has a monopoly, it's going to be inefficient and it's going to make decisions in its own favor. That's just natural. That means it will become large and powerful and unjust and inefficient. But that doesn't that logic doesn't apply to a decentralized arbitral tribunal that we two parties to a dispute voluntarily call upon. You know, it'd be like if I go to a doctor because I have a broken arm. It doesn't mean that I've caused the state to emerge because I've given a doctor a specialist the role of helping me in a narrow area of my life. He's a specialist. It's the vision of labor. And likewise, if two people have a dispute and they want to solve things peacefully, and they can't come to an agreement on their own, they would go to a mediator third party, just like if a husband and wife have a problem, they might go to a marriage counselor. You know, if a husband and wife go to a marriage counselor, I don't see how that creates a state and sets the portals iron law of bureaucracy in motion. Well, if he is an oath based in an oath based position, potentially. But again, that's why I don't know what he means is that he's an oath based position. But in any case, I don't see how going to an arbitrator is an oath based position. It's simply we both agree to abide by the decision of a neutral third party. And when he makes his decision, then either we agree with it or we don't. And if we don't, either there's an enforcement mechanism to make us comply with it or there's not. And I think there might not be it might just be a totally reputational thing, you know, someone who is known to disregard the edicts of a neutral third party dispute resolution system will tend to find people won't deal with him because they know that he's not trustworthy. So I tend to think ostracism and reputational effects and the inability to get insurance coverage will tend to drive out people that are that are recalcitrant and stubborn and not cooperative and people that don't have a tendency to seek, you know, to compromise and try to find resolution of disputes. But this is the natural way of things. And of course, in a more in a richer and more advanced society, you could expect that to be done more and more efficiently. With a larger society, more wealth, more specialization, like more lawyers, more more dispute tribunals, more reputational agencies and systems, all this would get better and better. Mm hmm. Okay, well, we're past the 30 minutes. Would you do I've got a little bit more, I've got a little bit of time. Go ahead. Great. So I have a couple questions that I wrote, but they're not necessarily that don't necessarily follow exactly with where we were. But so would ideal system necessarily be able to interface with uniform commercial code? I detect something there, but let me let me guess at that. Do you have some kind of do you have some kind of idiosyncratic problem with the UCC? Uh, yeah. Yeah, that's what I thought. I've seen this this before. First of all, I don't have a I'm an anarchist, so I don't have an ideal system. Anarchists are not for this. This is the problem with status. There's a problem with status. They'll they'll say like, well, I don't think your system would work. Like, like, as if I'm proposing a system, I'm not proposing a system. I'm simply opposed to aggression in human affairs, and I recognize that the state that we have now in any state that could possibly exist because of its nature would commit aggression. And therefore it's it's unjust and it's wrong. That's all. And I would be I'd prefer people not to engage in aggression. And if people didn't engage in aggression, we would have a society where there was no aggression, or at least there was no institutionalized aggression, you still might have occasional random private acts of crime or aggression, and they would be dealt with in the predictable ways, you know, by self defense and by and by justice. Sometimes vigilante justice, sometimes institutional, you know, but uh, so the society I the system I'm in favor of is just a system where there's no institutional aggression, and there's no institutional aggression, because most people recognize that it's wrong. They don't recognize that now, because although they oppose aggression, more or less, they're confused about the nature of the state. They bought into the myth that the state is necessary, and the state is good, and the state is essential. And although it's imperfect, it's better than the alternative, which is anarchy. That's what they've been told, and they believe that. So they're sort of confused. So I think in that kind of system, private law would emerge naturally, and there would be a role for codes, because over time, you know, people are going to want to know in this region, what is the law? And so some, some lawyer or some company might publish a book. This is the private marriage law or family law or contract law or commercial law or property law or criminal law or evidence law or procedural law in this region, and people would buy the book because they want to know what the law is. And then over time, you know, different, different advances of the law would happen because of custom and tradition and practices and contracts, and the law would finally, you know, keep developing, and there would be a need for treatises and codes. Now the Uniform Commercial Code is one of those types of hybrid codes that we have in society now, but it's not exactly the type of code I'm talking about. The type of code I'm talking about would be a compilation of existing law. And hopefully that law would be mostly libertarian and just. So you just codify and compile it so people could understand it. That's what legal scholars would do. The UCC was really a draft at sort of summarizing the existing common law, but then putting it in form of a statute so the legislature could enact it as a statute. In my system, there's no such thing as a statute or legislation for two reasons. Number one, there's no state, so there's no legislature. So it's impossible to have statutes and legislation, which is a good thing because legislation is not a way to make law. Legislation is just a way to implement the will of the ruling authority by making it pass under the banner of law and pretend like it's law. Just like in the U.S. and the federal court system, all these guys that they call judges, the federal judges, the Supreme Court judges, they're not really judges. They're just state agents whose job is to interpret the words written down on paper by other state agents. That's it. Their job is not to do justice, which is what a real judge does. A real judge tries to resolve a dispute between two parties based upon principles of justice and fairness. These federal judges can't do that because their job is to interpret the constitution of federal law, which are just positive enactments written down on paper by a bunch of elected bureaucrats and members of the state. So I don't think they're actual judges. They're not actually doing law. What they're interpreting is not law. And so the UCC is just another example of legislation, although it was based in part on codified common law principles. So its substance is not completely horrible. It's actually kind of beautiful. Now tell me what your concern with the UCC is. The Roman Catholic Church conspiracy and lizards or what? No, I just have sort of this basic. So from what I understand, it came from Babylon. So basically, I'm into this thing of yeah, like the Jews, they went to Babylon, they were exiled, and then they got all these bad habits, like essentially the commercial, the rules of the UCC, and basically it's like an oath-based game with the oath-based thing. What do you mean by oath? What is an oath? So an oath? Is it like a solemn commitment, pledging allegiance to someone? What is an oath? So an oath is an elevation of your word beyond where it like- I'm not that good at legalese, but- It's not legalese. This is just, it's not legalese. I think the problem you're having is this is all metaphorical stuff, and it's just not rigorous and crisp. And you see, when you say it's an elevation of a word beyond something, I think you're thinking in mystical terms. Because you're imagining like words have power, probably with a capital P, right? Sort of. I mean, I'm trying to reconcile what I see here in the Bible and apparently this big important guy called Jesus said something that sounds super anarchic to me, whereas like 99.9% of pastors and church people, they will not acknowledge, they'll actually go the opposite on this first. So actually it means take oaths and take them seriously. Literally everyone thinks that, even though he says take no oaths at all. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because they do. I mean, I think some people, look, common sensically, I think what it is, is most people, yeah, there's probably a mystical religious element to it, but most people, even religious people, believe that honesty is important and your word is important, like just because of your reputation. So if the government asks you to swear to something, you shouldn't lie. And so if it is a lie, you shouldn't do it, right? And I believe, if I understand in some courts, like they don't make you swear on the Bible, like to be a witness, they give you an alternative, like instead of a swear, you can affirm, you can affirm or something. So they do tend to make an exception because apparently some people have a problem with that. But I always thought it was just because it's against people's religious idea where they hold God as their highest authority to put something else above that. And I appreciate that. I think religion, although I think it's in a sense nonsense, is a useful institutional hedge against state power. I mean, you know, but let's take a typical marriage between a man and a woman. I view that as a commitment, a committed relationship. Now, if you have a Lucy, Goosey, vague concept of oath, you could call that an oath. You know, it took an oath to my wife. But that's because most people just use the word as a synonym for promise. I know, I love, I love this. I love how weddings work into this because, yeah, it's not an oath, at least the traditional ceremony. The oath is when you go to the courthouse afterwards. But at the actual wedding ceremony, they ask you, do you blah, blah, blah, take blah, blah, and you just say yes or no, it's within the binding. But you're saying you're making a promise. You're making a commitment. You're, you're, you're promising to be committed to this person to the end of your life. That's what you're promising. You're making an effort. You're making a commitment. I, it depends on the wording of the, but that's what a marriage, I don't care about the wording. It's what a marriage is. A marriage is a committed relationship. No, there's a difference. A woman doesn't want to have babies with a man that she thinks is going to run off. She needs to have someone who promises to stick with her. She believes it. So, so, so like I consider myself a Christian. So like, so in terms of Jesus's words there, I do not want to make any promises because it's anything beyond a binary is, you can call it a promise, but to me it's not a promise. Like if I say yes, well, even where promise to me promises. So people use the word promise to mean a contract. And I, like I said, I don't, I don't agree contract should be viewed as binding promises. They might come from a promise like I might say I promise to deliver these goods to you tomorrow and we take the underlying meaning of that to mean I'm transferring these goods to you tomorrow. But it's not really a binding promise. It's just the way we interpret language. Likewise, you know, are you saying you've never told your significant other? Look, I promise I'll never do that again. You've never said the word promise before. Is the word promise now anathema? Right. Totally. Yeah, once I realized what these passages say. You do promise it. You, you promise thing as an oath. Absolutely. Exactly. So, so if your wife says, do you promise not to, not to do the following and you say yes, that's okay. Cause you just said yes. I mean, you say it's a cheat because you're saying yes to the person about a promise. No, I don't promise, but I'll give my word because the word, what's the difference between word and promise? So, you know, works word. I mean, in, you know, in the Bible says in the beginning, there was the word. Well, that's God. The word means the Holy Spirit. That means the logos of God, right? It means some supernatural spiritual thing. You're not, you're not, you're not comparing your utterances to your wife to the Holy Divinity of God. Are you? Well, our words are in a sense divine. So, going beyond our word, it's, it's like a, beyond your promise you mean. Say you mean your promise. Are you, are you just saying be honest? Is that what you mean? Yeah. I mean, absolutely be honest. Okay. So these be honest about your intentions. So if you say, honey, I have not cheated on you, and I don't intend to, and I don't think I ever will. And I, I, I give you my oath to, to never try. It's like you're trying to skirt around by semantics saying some magic bad words. Yeah, you just don't elevate beyond your word. Just yes or no. I mean, just, uh, so it's your wife says, will you ever cheat on me? What would you say? Well, I mean, depends on if I'm going to say yes or no, I guess, but I'm just going to say yes or no. I mean, I, okay, let's say, say no and then say, say no, and then you cheat on her the next month. What does that mean? What does that mean? What have you violated? My word. But your word was just a prediction because you don't want to make a promise. No, it wasn't a promise. If it's not a promise that you didn't violate it. It's about congruence. Um, which also I find is a very like mystical concept, like that the alpha needs to be congruent. Have you ever seen, have you ever seen, do you know much about math? No, I'm not, I'm not a math. Well, what do you, what do you get if you divide one by zero in your calculator? It explodes. Yeah. And you know why? Why? Because it's undefined. And do you know why? Because, because you can't divide by zero. Right, right, right. And you have an equation with a bunch of x's and y's and there might be like, if you have x plus y at the bottom, and if x and y are the same, that's a zero, but you might not know it, you might not notice it, right? So you're doing this equation, all of a sudden you get these crazy results. And if you trace it back, you find out, oh, the reason I'm getting this crazy result is because I made a mistake. And the mistake was I did it divide by zero on accident, right? Because at this point in the equation, the x and the y were actually the same. That meant the denominator was zero. So, and I didn't realize it, whatever. Well, I see an analogy to that to speaking in vague, slippery, metaphorical, mystical language. Like, if you don't, if you're not rigorous and careful and precise with your language and have clear definitions and make sure you're not using things in multiple ways, which leads to equivocation, then you can prove anything. I mean, you know, you could say that, well, the word is this, and therefore, you know, I mean, it's just, it's just not, it's not rational, rigorous analysis. You basically can use that kind of mumbo jumbo. No, I might be critical. You know, I'm just, I'm giving you my kind of anti, my, my own prejudice against. Slippery language, what language that is not clear and solid and rigorous. Yes, because it just leads to the opposite. The legalese language is slippery and there's so many ways you could look at it. Whereas the word based just simple, I'm talking more philosophy and rigorous thought than legalese. I mean, I'm not, I'm talking about just when you have rational discourse, you need to, especially when the terms matter a lot. Like when you start talking about like this oath, a lot in your theory hinges upon whether something's an oath or not. So it's important to be clear about what you mean by it. And I guess, I guess my original assumption was right, you do mean a broad thing by it. So you mean promises too. Totally. So I don't see how that makes you hate the UCC, but except this guy's something to do with Babylon. But I mean, you know, the original code was the code of Hammurabi is one of the oldest ones we know of. And then you had, you know, you had the 12, the 12 tables and you had, you had the decalogue, you know, the 10 commandments, you've had lots of codes. You then you had the corpus teris sabilis of, you had the institutes of Justinian Roman law, Blackstone's codes. I mean, I think that my, I'll put it this way. The Rothbard, Kinsella, whatever you want to call it, theory of contract is probably compatible with your hostility to oaths and promising because it doesn't involve promising. It's only a yes or no. Do you transfer ownership of this thing that you own to someone else? Yes. You know, that's basically what contracts are in my view. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. But I don't see what you would have against codes in general, because it's just a way of setting down in an organized form. Oh, no, not a body of principles. Yeah, I'm actually not, I mean, I'm not against it itself. I'm against adhering to it in the form of it in the way that you must conform with it for other people to be able to conform with to it with you. So if you want to do business with another country like Nigeria that conforms to UCC, you need to do all these, you need to sign all these things. I mean, signing something to me is a no. It's a beyond a, it's beyond a yes or no. Actually, I'm not totally sure on, I'm not totally sure yet on the simple signings, whether I consider that beyond. Well, yeah, because signing is just a way of documenting things and getting proof later. So it's proof of people's consent. Consent is not always an oath. Yeah. Let's say you're gonna have surgery and the doctor's gonna, you know, knock you out and cut you open. He doesn't want you to wake up and sue him for assault and battery. Right? You could say, oh, you cut me open. You're a butcher and his defense would be, no, you consented to it. And you say, I didn't consent. So how do you get proof that you consented? He says, oh, well, well, you signed a piece of paper right before I put you to sleep that says I consent. So I have evidence. Yeah. So, so see, so I think it's, it's all, you shouldn't have entered into the oath based system at all. I mean, you're probably dealing with the oath based doctor, a doctor who's, you know, taking an oath who's like I'm submitting himself to this bureaucracy and this bureaucracy changes like crazy. I mean, nothing, nothing in my hypothetical requires the doctor to be, this could be a private free market doctor where there's no such thing as the AMA. No such thing as medical licensing. I mean, in an anarchist private society, they would still have doctors and they don't want to get sued. Ah, sued assumes that there's a system that allows for such a thing. Well, it's not, there would be, but even if there wasn't, the doctor doesn't want to get a reputation for running around butchering people and operating on them without their consent. He wants to have a good reputation. So he doesn't want someone to be able to make an unsubstantiated claim that he performed a surgery without consent of the patient. So it would be natural for him to get the sign on the dotted line giving him permission to do the operation. I mean, surely God can't be against using ink to put markings on paper. No. I mean, the Bible itself is written down, wasn't it? Yeah. So you can put information on paper. That's all. For sure. Signatures information. The information is that I read this and I was aware of what it says. Yeah. And here's proof of that. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out, I mean, for the past like fucking, or like five, 10 years, I've been trying to figure out exactly what is an oath and what's beyond the yes or the no. And it's tricky. And I'm having a tough time as you can understand. You could be doing what I did when I tried to prove an ultra property or when I tried to prove that there was a God. I mean, you could be butting your head against the wall because it's just, I mean, you chose a battle that's just, basically, you think Jesus had some some deep words about oaths in one of his brief statements. And you think you need to unpack it and apply it to life in general or something. Because I realized, because my life was not, is not as a millennial in my life, in many ways, is not as good as it was portrayed to me that it was going to be. And I'm like, holy shit, every, holy shit, the book that they gave me that they were like, okay, well, whatever you do, follow this guy and what he says. And I looked at what that guy said, and he said, no oaths. And then I realized the whole world is totally replete with oaths. So it's those everywhere, every day. Yeah, but don't you think, I mean, if you really want to put so much importance on the word oath in the English version of some Protestant translation of an ancient text that you would actually want to study, like what were the actual words in the original Aramaic or Greek or whatever it was in that in that actual chapter? What was the, maybe it's not even the word oath, maybe it's the word, I don't know, maybe some other word, maybe that's just the way the translator did it. Have you, have you looked at other translations and they all use the word oath? Yes, I, yes, I look at, I've, I've read quite a lot on this subject. I mean, not everything, but quite a bit. Yeah. And also, I mean, getting more into crazy stuff, I realized that wait, like all my family members are the male ones, they were all Freemasons and that's an oath based system. It's an oath based system, right? Yeah. Yeah. So what, why the heck, all these people who I feel freak me over because people, they're all like oath nuts. They fucking love oaths. They'll take any oath you give them, oath, oath, oath. And then I'm like, well, this guy says, Jesus says no oaths. And I'm like, okay, there's something to this. And then I have like, my brain has been stuck on it for like years. So like oath, oath keepers drives you insane. In a sense, in a sense, but I mean, Stuart Rhodes apparently was like a FBI informant, so I don't know how real that organization even was. But they shouldn't have taken the oath in the first place is my, is my argument right now, at least. So like one of your favorite songs would be that one, I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden. I don't know this song, but I beg your pardon. Put your music there. Yeah. Yeah. So, so your whole thesis would be stop, stop making promises. Yeah, just stop, stop, everyone stop making promises. Yeah, stop making these elevated. Let's just keep things simple on our word. And so, so, so I think the Amish interpreted this way, the way I, the way I do, they think that he's literally says no oaths. But here's the weird thing they have in like their whole society. So like, they don't sign from what I understand. I'm not okay. I'm not sure if they sign simple contracts for things like building someone a building or something. But I should know that. But the problem, the main problem with the Amish is they swear an oath to their church, which I think is like, yeah, it's where they, where they messed up there. So what do you think, did you know that some of these libertarian groups, like I think the libertarian party and maybe, well, let's take the libertarian party. I think that you have to, you have to agree to this non-aggression oath or principle. Like you have to, you have to say something like, I hear, boy, you first swear the use of aggression in human affairs or something like that to become a good member. And kind of like, kind of like in Ain Ranz, Atlas shrugged before you enter, before you enter the building where his magic electricity machine was housed, it had a past, it had a special electronic sort of password system where you had to state this oath to get in. Like I promise I will not live my life for someone else or me. I guess you're against all that too. Yeah, yeah. Well, what if you want to join the libertarian party and they say, well, we only accept libertarians. Are you a libertarian? If it's a yes or no, is that okay? Yeah, I mean, yeah, yes. But I don't think it would be because, yeah, all these organizations, they all want you, they don't like, they don't like the simple language, the yes or the no. They all want things to be super official and they all want things to conform with the UCC and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just want to live a simple life, almost like Daniel Swallow. Yeah, I can tell. I mean, so you're for simplicity. I don't see why simplicity is, per se, a good thing. By the way, we're using Zoom right now. I assume you had to sign the terms of conditions to get the software. As you may assume, I pay extra careful attention to things like that and no, I didn't see it anywhere. But I'm sure it was tucked in somewhere or it is tucked in somewhere. Yeah, so I mean, I understand being disillusioned with the world that the millennial generation is faced with in some ways. But I just don't, I mean, unless you link it in closely with the theory of the state, I don't see how oaths themselves are the root source of the problem. Although I can see how it is like a widespread phenomena of people being basically coerced or induced or forced to give some kind of allegiance to different institutions that are all linked up with the state. I could agree with that to some extent. Yeah. But I don't think it's really the root cause of it. I think that's just, that's the way that people are brainwashed to believe the state is good. That's the way it manifests itself. Yeah. And the oaths, they open the door for the bad things to happen without that opening then so much. Basically, you need oaths for things to scale. You can't, and the thing is scaling, scaling naturally, I think is fine. Like if you're Amish or whatever Mormon and you have to make a big family naturally, and that's cool. But what they want, what most people want to do is they want to like commit usury in the sense that they want like a, what the curve, what's it called? The curve that just like goes straight up hockey stick. They want a hockey stick. And the way, the only way you get, you get hockey sticks is if you include oaths and things. At least, at least painably. Well, you know, like there's, there's a cool, you might like this article, it's by Alfred Cousin. It was like in the first issue of the journal Libertarian Studies. It's called, Do We Ever Really Gotta Get Out of Anarchy? And his argument is that even in today's world, we still have anarchy of a type because like even if the state itself is internally in a type of anarchy because the leaders of that state, like the president, you don't have direct control and coercive power over all your underlings. They just obey your orders because it's part of the hierarchy, part of their order. Yeah, and maybe oaths play a role in that, like because they're expected to do it, right? It could be that you couldn't get someone to go bomb innocent, you know, innocent people in Cambodia on your orders if they didn't have an oath that they felt they had to abide by. Like maybe, you know, maybe you wouldn't have the, I was just following orders. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I think oaths are a powerful psychological mechanism that get people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't. But this, this, this, this, this, dislike of usury makes no sense to me. And this seems to be totally like, well, my, and the problem is that that's used by states as an excuse to regulate commercial affairs. So it's used as an authority to commit aggression. Or it's used as an excuse. It's used for hostility towards an advanced commercial capitalist society, like, oh, we can't have a contract and enforcement system because they will might enforce a loan contract which have usury. Let me guess, you're against bigness and capitalism too. No, no. As long as it's all, as long as it's just word based, I mean, you just, I can go catch a fish and then I can go sell it to someone. And as long as I'm not like signing a contract or taking something, you're not going to have your, you're going to have your nice, simple, walled in style life on capitalism. You're going to be a cog in the wheel and division of labor and buy your trout from the supermarket, you know. Yeah, yeah, I'm what I'm figuring out is, yeah, what I'm figuring out is if I'm going to like take this verse seriously and take the note, oh, things seriously. Yeah, you basically are screwed in terms of having the comfy life, which is exactly what Jesus says is going to happen. He says, you know, it's good. It's the hard way. It's the narrow road, blah, blah, blah. And I'm not saying I'm even going to necessarily do it. I mean, I still take those really in some interpersonal relationships, like family and friends, that's an area where I really have tried to practice this. Maybe you've got it backwards. Maybe the oaths you should try not to take are the ones with the state, but they'll be so uptight about oaths with like your spouse or whatever or your family. Wait, I should be uptight with those about my family? No, the other way around, not be so uptight. Like, you know, nothing wrong with telling you your mom, I'll be there for you when you get on your deathbed, or I'll be there for Thanksgiving and your wife. Those are not promises. Those are, to me, the way you phrase those is not above. I know we haven't really worked on the definitions. Well, sometimes people want promises. You know, they will say, will you be here for Christmas? Yes. Are you just making a prediction? Are you going to, you promise that you'll be here for Christmas? I promise, okay. I guess when you elevate, you're putting something on the line beyond just your... Yeah, that's what people know they can tell on you. That's some people want to be able to tell on others. You know, there's a utility. Well, what if you go to your lawyer and you tell him all your secrets and, but you don't want him to have a duty of confidentiality. You don't want him to reveal your secrets to the world, right? That's when you think about wanting a psychiatrist or your doctor or a lawyer. You just named all oath-based people and I wouldn't like be... Or a priest. You know, when you confess to a priest, you don't want the priest to tell people what your sins were. So I think, so you want a society where no one can trust anyone and you can't, you're just, if you have a problem, you have to deal with it all on your own, which... No, no, no. So, yeah, you wouldn't be able to trust necessarily people because the society wouldn't scale. That's why I said you're against capitalism. You need scaling. You need capitalism to require scaling. If you put it that way, then I guess, yeah, in some sense, then I would be, but I don't necessarily think that's the case in every... You can't just have handshake deals all the time going by reputation of your first cousin. Well, you're gonna have a simple small Afghani village. You need to have international transactions from remote parties who don't know each other and they need to be able to count on each other's commitments. Yeah, this is, I think, this is natural law. This is like within... I don't, I mean, I don't... You want things to be small and localized and... Yeah. I don't necessarily want them to be, but I just see why Jesus as this figure, as this person who claims to be mystical and he says this thing about oaths and oaths are all around us. So, you don't think you should be able to go see a therapist and confide some personal things to help work out a problem and be sure that they have an obligation not to reveal your information? Oh, absolutely. Right, right. I'm gonna assume, like with you, I'm totally cool. I consented to talk with you. You can use this recording however you want. I know, but I told you I was recording it, but if you would ask me not to and I agreed not to... I would be fine with that too. Even if you recorded it and you told me... I mean, if you told me you weren't going to and then you did, then I would be like, okay, this guy's not congruent. Correct, correct. But that means that there are some things you're gonna be uncomfortable being able to get help with because some things... Look, if I talk to someone who I don't completely trust, I know that even if they promise they're gonna keep something confidential, I'm gonna still be careful about what I say because if they break the promise, I could still get hurt if the information got out there. So, I'm careful about what I say, but sometimes you need to be able to say those things and so you go to a very trusted person, but you don't always have a trusted person that's like your brother or something. Sometimes you have to go to a professional outsider and in that case you want there to be a serious institutional and relational obligation arising from a commitment not to reveal your information. And I'm thinking a priest, counselors, medical doctors, psychiatrist, lawyers, your system would basically get rid of all those avenues people have. It's like in an Amish society, nobody ever seeks out those people, right? Because it's... I don't know about that. I can't believe that. I can't believe that some Amish people don't, on occasion, use the services of a lawyer, for example, or a doctor. Yeah, maybe they do. Of course they do. And they expect the doctor not to go blabbing their personal details. But if he does, they're not going to sue. I'm pretty sure they're not litigious like that. It doesn't matter. They're using the doctor partly on the expectation and knowing they're taking advantage of the fact that these doctors do or they're bedded in a society where they have this obligation and they're not going to violate that obligation. I think, see, to my mind, you're turning something that's natural and good into something that's unnatural and bad. So that's where I would disagree. Although, I can understand partly where you're coming from. I do think it's always better if it's natural and organic rather than forced. But I see nothing whatsoever wrong with someone making a promise to someone else. I think you're taking the bad examples and generalizing it. So it is bad to have an oath to the state. I agree with you. It's bad to require lawyers to have an oath to the state to become a lawyer. It's bad for doctors to have to take certain oaths, although the Hippocratic Oath is not the worst oath I've ever heard of. It's changed over time. Sure. But the fact that some oaths are bad doesn't mean oath making in general is bad. And maybe Jesus didn't mean that. I mean, you said it and I haven't. I mean, you know, what he actually said is not clear because these records are not that reliable and they're not comprehensive and they've been translated many times. And, you know, maybe he had some exceptions in mind. He was just talking about a certain case. I don't know. Possible. I wonder if there's been a book written about this, like oath making as the source of evil in the modern world or something. Maybe you could make an extended argument for it. Oh, I'm going to write the book. That's all of my life work right there. Yeah. Maybe start with an article and then that would force you to kind of carefully define your terms and see if you can have a flow like a thesis, production, sustained argument, conclusion. It's not that the oath is bad is that it opens the door to bad. It's just it makes what was not necessarily possible before possible. If I make a commitment to my wife that I will be faithful to her for the rest of my life, what bad does that open the door to? Well, the way you phrase it is fine. You're just giving your word. No, it's a commitment. Yeah, but it's a commitment. It's a promise. No. Well, so, no, to me, that's not a promise. A promise is like, okay, after that said, Steven, do you promise? Then to me, you're elevating. That's like a second level. It's like... I don't know what you mean, but what does that mean? Elevating? You've used that before too. That's another thing. I'm not clear what you mean. Elevating what to what? Beyond, you're like taking it instead of, it's just beyond the base level of what you're saying. If it's math, it's like, instead of one, it's 1.5 power. Like, oh, more. It's heavier. It's greater. It's beyond. Look, we've already established that you're not good at math, so let's leave that to the side. You might divide by zero in an accident. Yeah, I might. Don't do that. All right. I got to go in a second. If you have got one more topic, we could do that, otherwise I got to run. Well, yeah, I appreciate your work. I'd like to... Do you say that you consider anarchists, libertarians, and libertarians anarchists or something like that? Do you have an article or anything where you talk about that? Read my article, What Libertarianism is, it's on my website. So libertarianism is just the consistent objection to aggression, or it's a consistent belief that aggression is unjust. And if you just open your eyes, then you will see that the state is also unjust because it commits aggression. So a natural application of that view of opposing aggression is to oppose the state. I mean, if you oppose aggression, you oppose the state because it's aggression writ large. It's like saying, if I'm against aggression or you're against murder, well, yeah, that's a type of aggression. And the state is a type of aggression. So not all libertarians see that. They think the state is necessary. So you need some state, and they see that it's dangerous, so they want to put limits on it. And a lot of libertarians are not anarchists, or I'm sorry, a lot of anarchists are not libertarians, like left anarchists, I wouldn't say anarcho-syndicalist, these types. I would say they're not true anarchists because you have to be a libertarian, meaning you have to believe in private property rights. Because if you say you're an anarchist and you don't support private property rights, excuse me, if you say you're an anarchist and you're not a libertarian, which means you don't support private property rights, then that means that private property rights can be violated. And that's what states do, states violate property rights. So you can't, you have, you have no grounds for opposing the state if you're not against private property rights being violated. So that's what I say. All non-libertarian anarchists are incoherent, and all non-anarchist libertarians are inconsistent. That's my thing. But it's a minority view. I mean, that's, but then we're already minorities. So I'm a minority within minority within minorities. Yeah. Well, that's, that's super interesting. I'm going to read that for sure. Sounds like you're even more of a minority. Yeah. I'm like, I'm like one out of a million. You're, you sound like you're one out of three, three billion. Yeah, it's difficult. There might be two of you, there might be two of you in the world. Yeah, maybe it, which is why I want to write more about what I'm thinking about. I have a tough time getting anything on paper because I feel every like six months, I feel like my ideas are way better than they were six months ago. And like, why would I ever put anything on paper if it's just going to be so much better later on? You should, you should register the domain Oathbreakers, oathbreakers.com. Well, I think registering a domain is a type of oath. Yeah, I know you'd have to make an oath to get, I know that's the dilemma. That's what I said. Your ideas are going to spread like wildfire. Well, I hope that at least my ideas were novel and maybe you like, because I feel like you, I really appreciate the way you engage with them. It's interesting. I'm just being, I'm being facetious. No, no, no, totally, totally. Yeah, because I'm just saying that your ideas are going to make them hard to spread because you won't be able to sign the contracts needed to publicize them. I mean, so it's, yeah, it's sort of like there's a, there's a joke in this great book by Jerome Tachilli called It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, where he is sort of a parody type accounting, sort of based in fact of the rise of the libertarian movement in the 60s and 70s. And he tells the story of this guy named Galambos. I don't know if you've heard of Galambos. He was, he was an early crank libertarian who had this insane IP theory. So he believed everything came from intellectual property and not only that, it was inalienable. Like, so even if you, even if you, if you're the owner of your ideas, you can't even sell them to someone because they're inalienable, which means that Galambos could tell all his followers his ideas, but they couldn't go tell other people and he couldn't even give them permission to tell them. So that's why, so his ideas naturally, so like some people like, well, tell us about this. Galambos is so great. I wish I could tell you, but if you could only hear it, you would, you would understand how great his ideas were. It's like, but you can't tell me. No, I can't tell you. So the joke is, yeah, expect those ideas to spread like welfare. Like it's a self-defeating doctrine that can intentionally hobbles itself from being spread. Yeah, I get it. So I see nothing wrong. If you want to write this up, I see nothing wrong with you writing a paper and putting it on the internet or self-publishing a book on Amazon, even if you have to click a couple of boxes. Yeah. Wolf, yeah, thanks a lot. I appreciate, yeah, all your work and I want to dig more into it, but I just, yeah, I had a lot of these ideas that have been in my head for a long time and I am not able to talk to, talk to like, you know, anybody. I got it. Yeah, if you get your thoughts together, if you want to have another chat sometime, give me a ring. Thanks a lot, Mr. Kinsella. Appreciate it. Okay. Have a good one. Have a good day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.