Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Our Abusive Relationship with the State

Oct. 13, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

12:00

Our Abusive Relationship with the State

This is the normal result of liberalism. Clip from Nick Dixon's interview of me: https://youtu.be/3z34M1SpmS4?si=gHjQFjBUxru99ODw

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	Right.
	What's the argument against civil liberties?
	Yeah, you say that, but I did see a tweet where someone in Labour was quoted an anonymous person from the conference saying, I'm surprised there's been pushback to this because we thought we'd done away with that civil liberties stuff during COVID.
	I'm only slightly paraphrasing, but they were surprised that the civil liberties arguments were still there.
	They thought they crushed the spirit of the English during COVID.
	I saw that, and that's very interesting, isn't it?
	We had got past the civil liberties argument, but that was the Conservatives in charge.
	That was Boris Johnson.
	And so, very much uni-party admission there.
	It's like, oh, no, we agreed with everything that the Tories did.
	We should have locked you in your homes.
	Frankly, we would have locked you down harder.
	And why are you still concerned about these civil liberties nonsense?
	Isn't this a bit 17th century?
	It's like, okay, even if it is, yes, it is 17th century.
	I'm happy to engage in that argument because I think it's really relevant at this point.
	But you can see how the system itself is just trying to outgrow the democracy it's contained within.
	The entire point of modern politics is not about the relationship of the individual to the state and the appropriate amount of liberty and restriction the state should have on it.
	It's actually about pure administration at this point.
	The idea that you could need civil liberties is very secondary to their need to administer everything in your life.
	And that's the future that they have planned for us.
	And I'm just really against that, frankly.
	Yeah, it seems they're in a sort of Chinese mentality.
	I mean, Trudeau famously said he admired the basic dictatorship of China.
	Seems like that's where they all are.
	And they use the word populist to mean democratic, and they use the word democracy to mean oligarchy.
	I heard someone put it like that.
	I think that's because David Starkey would put it that way.
	Was it?
	Yeah.
	I should have known that he was on this podcast.
	Well, he's right.
	I mean, populism and democracy are just the Latin and Greek terms for the same thing.
	So why the idea of not being a populist, the only alternative you have there is to be an elitist, and that's essentially to be anti-democracy.
	And so, ironically, the right has kind of found itself in the very pro-democratic frame, and the left has found itself in the pro-oligarchical frame, which is traditionally their opposite.
	It's interesting how they still have to use the language of the old world, the sort of more free world we had.
	They still pretend, they don't just say, yeah, we're post-democracy now, lads.
	Sorry about that.
	China, here comes China, social credits go on the way.
	They say we believe in democracy.
	And they say we believe in free speech.
	Starmo and Trump's there always go, it's like, but then you're arresting 12,000 people a year for speech crimes.
	But they don't just double down and say that's what we believe in.
	Why is that?
	It's a long explanation, if you want to.
	Yeah, let's do it.
	Basically, they do believe in a comprehensive total state that will liberate you from any of the unchosen obligations you have and the physical needs that you have inherited from your corporeal nature as being an evolved creature on the earth.
	The whole point is to essentially situate your will, your mind, in a position where it's never given any form of inconvenience, where you never suffer, you never have to go without, and you never have to make sacrifices.
	And so, in a way, they are kind of right when they say the civil liberties thing is not really going to be a problem because essentially you're going to have unbounded freedom and that's the plan.
	Like their intention is to get us to a point of unbounded freedom.
	But actually, if you think about that, that's exile.
	That's isolation.
	That's actually a terrible thing.
	And that's what they've been driving at the whole time.
	So they aren't actually being insincere.
	They just don't understand that having a gargantuan, intrusive managerial state will destroy aspects of humanity that actually we value very highly and we want to preserve.
	And these aspects are not based on individuality.
	They're not based on consent.
	They're based on being social creatures that inherit a web of social relations that we are born into and carry with us throughout our entire lives.
	And in fact, the entire moral and substantive content of human life is really contained in these relations.
	And they want to take you out of them.
	And actually, that's not good.
	And that's what the far right is.
	It's the area of the brain that says, actually, no, I'm an Englishman and I love my community.
	I love my family.
	I didn't choose any of these things.
	And I didn't consent to them either.
	But they're brilliant and they make life worth living.
	And actually, to be taken out of that, to be rendered a sort of stateless, atomic, free-floating individual who has no obligations or relations to anyone is actually an evil thing to do.
	It used to be a punishment.
	We used to exile people, which is that that's what that is.
	We used to impose that as a punishment on people.
	And so to have that as the overall plan for the entire civilization will require dystopian levels of control, because of course, otherwise, people will actually start to live as normal.
	And what's more, it creates a really strange relationship between the individual and the state because the state can only see each person as a rights-bearing subject.
	It doesn't see them as a relations-bearing subject.
	The relations themselves have been stigmatized.
	And so that puts you in a form of strange dependence with the state.
	The state is the guarantor and arbiter of your rights, but it's also the thing that is most likely to take your rights away.
	And so it's a deeply unhealthy, almost kind of abusive relationship where you go back to your abusive husband and you say, no, you know, this time he might not smack me.
	He really loves me.
	Look at all the rights he's providing with me.
	And then suddenly you're in jail for a tweet.
	So it's actually a deeply unhealthy and incoherent thing that they're trying to bring into existence.
	And yet they believe in it wholeheartedly.
	Yeah, I mean, there is an incoherence there, surely.
	I understand the being unencumbered by all responsibilities is the kind of liberal materialist dream, whatever you want to call it, free from all the old obligations, but then centralized into a state that controls everything.
	Is that why it takes away the free speech?
	Because obviously there's a contradiction if they think that's freedom, but you're not free to say anything.
	It's obviously not freedom.
	Well, it depends what you mean by freedom, actually, doesn't it?
	If it's freedom to do the things and say the things that you truly believe, that's not really freedom.
	That's a form of freedom, but their view of freedom is freedom from someone being able to make a claim against you, basically.
	And this is all laid out in just all canonical liberal texts, really, Rousseau, particularly, where it's maximal dependence on the state and minimal dependence on one another.
	So you give up, it's almost like a pact with the devil.
	You give up that one central freedom, and then you sort of, all others are unlocked, all licensed.
	You can do pretty much what you want, as long as you have total fealty to the centralized state.
	Yes.
	And this is why all of life has to be drained of morality as well.
	Because, of course, judgment comes from your community, right?
	Your moral standards come from your community.
	And so actually, being a strange, like pride degenerate doing disgusting things in the street, that presupposes a moral community that actually has intentionality for some other reason.
	That is something that is beyond yourself.
	And of course, that's the innocence and sanctity of children, right?
	To create an environment that's actually wholesome for children to be born and raised in.
	Well, that's as far as the liberal state is concerned, that's no morally better or worse in and of itself.
	And actually, it's got a huge number of like collective hang-ups that the liberal state says, well, what about the freedom to be an insane degenerate pride parade in the middle of the street?
	Like, sorry, what about their freedom?
	It's like, that's not a freedom.
	Like, that's actually them imposing on a community.
	But if you only see each person as an individual rights-bearing subject, then the community itself, and you've stigmatized the community as basically being illegitimate because it was never chosen, then you can see how they would arrive on one side and not the other.
	All right, very interesting.
	Since I mentioned it as well, and it's related to that, it is reported the police are making 12,000 arrests a year.
	I saw a chart, I don't know if it was accurate or not, it seemed probably accurate, where we were leading the world in that by far.
	The second was Belarus, which had about 6,000, and then everyone else was way lower.
	Quite an extraordinary thing for the pioneer of civil liberties to be leading the world in speech arrests, which were essentially thought crimes.
	I think, well, on that chart, I saw that chart myself.
	China was quite significantly far down.
	Only like 3,000 or something.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But if you think the population of China is in the billions, we've got 70 million, something like that.
	So the fact that we, just in raw numbers, outpace China, so by such magnitude, suggests that per capita, we're probably the most tyrannical state on earth when it comes to speech crimes.
	Incredible.
	I mean, the latest one, as we record, has been probably Pete North arrested in the middle of the night for posting a meme, which many other people posted.
	And he keeps posting afterwards.
	And he keeps posting, which is interesting.
	Yeah, I appreciate that.
	And I'm laughing, even though it's completely awful, but it's kind of like I'm laughing at the absurdity.
	And friends of ours have been detained at the airport, and even George Galloway was recently detained at the airport.
	So my question is: how do we get out of that?
	I mean, that's an international disgrace.
	How do we get out of that as a country?
	I mean, obviously the surface answer is, well, just stop arresting people for crimes on speech.
	So repeal any of the laws that are being used to criminalize people because of things that they say.
	Adopt a kind of American-style First Amendment approach to people talking would be the most obvious answer.
	But the problem is that the nature of the society that they're trying to create underneath all of this and through which the speech crimes are a kind of exigency hasn't gone away.
	And so the fact that the individual rights claims that the state is responding to in these speech crimes by criminalizing certain amounts of speech reveals that the problem will persist.
	And so, okay, even if Nigel Farage comes in and says, right, okay, we're going to get rid of these laws, a Labour government will come in the next day and say, well, actually, no, we need these laws to protect these minority communities from negative characterizations because somehow that's a form of oppression.
	And so the state, in this, the state considers itself to be the arbiter between groups and not the source of oppression in and of itself.
	So, I mean, at least in the sort of classical liberal heyday, it was understood that the state was the primary instrument of oppression.
	But when you have the universal administrative state that seeks to liberate everyone from the society itself, like consciously so, it doesn't, it views itself only as a tool of liberation.
	And so what it looks for is the imposing opinion of the majority against the minority and says, right, okay, that there is a form of oppression.
	And my job as a liberatory apparatus is to bring those people out of that.
	And if that means criminalizing the majority when they start saying things, then that's what I do.
	And so you'll notice how liberalism itself, it's not even been perverted.

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