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Dec. 2, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:54
5 Using the state for self-defense...

We always argue that we need the state for self-defense. Some logical problems with that approach

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Okay, so I guess welcome to a brand new experiment in my thought process and communications capacities.
I don't know what to call this exactly.
Perhaps it's going to be traffic jam because I'm going to my drive home, going to be jamming about ideas that I have about things like liberty.
And we'll see if my thoughts are of interest to anybody else.
So why don't we get started right away with, I guess, two topics that are on my mind at the moment.
The first is the problem of the argument from defense, or the argument regarding defense.
And I was chatting about this with my wife last night, and it sort of I guess I boiled over in frustration, thinking about the number of times that I have been talking about the argument against violence.
You know, violence is bad, violence is bad.
And I think we're all fairly clear that it is, in fact, bad.
But what people always get hung up on, it would seem, They always have to put this caveat in, like, violence is bad except for self-defense.
So I'm not allowed to go out and shoot someone, but if someone is about to shoot me, I can shoot them.
Everybody knows this argument.
So why was I boiling over in frustration?
Well, I've always had a mania for Intellectual consistency and simplicity and clarity and Occam's razor and all that kind of stuff.
And what I got irritated about after years of thinking and talking about this topic is just that we always have to say this thing.
Violence is bad.
What about self-defense?
Well, yes, self-defense blah blah blah and it gets all complicated and it sounds sort of like we're letting violence back into the equation as a possible source of You know as a moral contradiction like okay violence is back in and then we have to limit it and justify it and control it and manage it and then the police and the justification of self-defense on the part of other for other people and so on like I can defend an old woman who can't defend herself and this that and the other so
You know, given that I'm trying to sort of get out of pure theory and work with what has actually occurred in my life and what actually occurs within the world, I guess both past and present.
But first and foremost, starting from my own life.
Not, of course, that I'm the measure of all things, but if I have a theory about morality, the first place that I can look for for proof or disproof is in my life.
And then, of course, we can have theory.
So I guess I'm the lab, the experiment.
I'll tell you a little bit about my experience with violence and why I think that there's really no need to take this approach that we always have to put, except for self-defense, into our stuff against violence.
I grew up in a pretty violent family, I guess.
My mother and my brother... My father left when I was very young.
My mother and my brother were both emotionally and physically violent people.
I never, never raised a hand in self-defense.
I mean, I guess call me a weenie, whatever you like, but I just was never able to To justify within my own heart and my own soul the idea of fighting back against those who had done me wrong.
And I guess part of it was I've always had this mania for consistency and I was against violence from from as long as I'll go as I can remember.
And the second of course is that I think that deep down in my gut I got a very strong sense that it wasn't going to work.
I mean, if my mother was going to hit me and I was like, I don't know, let's say eight years old, what would hitting back do?
Well, all it would do is it would escalate, right?
And of course, I wasn't bigger than my mother in those days.
And by the time I did get to be big enough to actually hit her back without it escalating, I had already gotten a good deal of the theory down about nonviolence and no longer really felt that it was a good thing to do, I guess, morally.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't forgive my mother, and I don't like her, and I don't associate with her in any way, shape, or form, because, you know, I think she's morally evil and corrupt and a bad person, because, you know, to me, beating up on kids, pretty bad.
You know, that's about the worst thing that you can do, because, you know, if you hit a guy in a wheelchair, at least he can call the cops, he's got some place to go that's not your house.
And you don't have any legal authority over him, but beating up on a child, you know, they have no options, no escape, unless they want to throw themselves into the tender hands of child services, they're absolutely doomed.
And so that is something that I just never wanted to do.
And I never did.
I guess one other time when I was Probably around 13 or 14.
I was playing with a friend of mine on our balcony.
I can't remember exactly what we were doing.
I think I was forcing him to participate in one of my radio plays that I was very big on writing back then.
Something slipped and my elbow went into his face.
I was trying to pull a tape out or something like that.
And, you know, he was hurt, his eyes stang, he started stung, and he started crying.
Oh, and I just felt so terrible, even though it was an accident.
I just felt absolutely terrible.
And, of course, the idea of being violent, even through accidental means, was just repulsive to me.
And really, those are the only two times that I've ever I guess the one extreme being that my childhood was subjected to quite a lot of violence but the other being that one incident that I recall very clearly causing somebody else direct injury with my body and just feeling unbelievably terrible about it.
So I mean for me at least the theory that if you are bullied you then become a bully is just not valid because I was bullied continually and have just since the very beginning of my life had this absolute Horror and hatred of violence.
Both physical violence, obviously the whacking and beating, but emotional violence too, you know, the kind of screechy screaming that certain people get into when they don't get their way and so on.
I consider that to be pretty horrendous behavior as well.
So what does this mean in terms of moral theory?
Well, I guess I grew up in a pretty bad neighborhood.
I had a violent family.
Some of my friends, I mean, they weren't exactly fisticuffs kind of guys.
But they did still continue to... I guess they were a bit more emotionally violent than physically violent.
Although I've never known anybody who has been involved in a fistfight.
I knew one guy once who was a network administrator for my company who claimed to have been a bouncer and had to defuse some fights and this and that, but I don't know if it was real or just, you know, I don't know, bravado.
So, I don't know anybody who's ever used any physical violence, again, except for my own family, and I have never myself used any form of physical violence that was intended, that was not just, oops, wrong place, wrong time, you in my elbow.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that I've never had any need for self-defense.
And I would bet that most of the people listening to this have also never had any need for self-defense.
I mean, if someone did come up and, I don't know, like stick a knife in my back and say, give me your wallet, I'd be like, yeah, here's my wallet.
You want the keys to my car?
Here's my wedding ring.
I mean, anything.
I mean, that's just stuff that can be replaced.
Who cares, right?
But I mean, A perforated spleen is probably something that is a little trickier to repair than, you know, a call to the insurance company or whatever.
So, I do understand the theory that, you know, violence is bad except for self-defense, except for the kind of not-so-minor fact that I've never actually seen self-defense In operation.
And I do understand the theory, of course, you know, like everybody on the street may have a gun, so robbers are going to be less likely to whatever, right?
And I'm certainly not suggesting banning guns or anything because, you know, I'm a libertarian, but...
I just really don't get the idea that self-defense is the way to go.
Prevention, of course, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
What I would much rather do is set up a society where violence was kind of virtually more or less non-existent.
And I certainly believe that is possible, because it certainly is possible in my life that I'm able to get through the day without using any violence.
And the problem with the argument from self-defense is it says, okay, well, violence is okay out of these situations, and then violence is okay on behalf of defending other people, and then you get the cops, and with the cops you get the taxes, and with the taxes you get the wars, and, you know, all the public debt, and, you know, all of the general slow slide into dictatorship that we're all On the slippery slope towards.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that violence is wrong, violence is bad, and self-defense doesn't work.
So, of course, then when you say self-defense is not morally valid, then people say, well, what about England in 1940?
They had Hitler, they had the invasion, and they had to fight with the Battle of Britain, and Operation Sea Lion, and this, that, and the other.
And I think that's a perfectly valid thing to bring up.
And if you take mainstream history to be the gospel, then that particular example of self-defense seems perfectly justified.
Well, if Hitler had overrun England and blah blah blah, the fall of the freedom and so on.
But I guess I'll bring a couple of thoughts up in negation to that, or in opposition to that theory.
If it's valid for the British government in that circumstance to use violence to defend the country, then we also have to look at the role of the British government in bringing that violence about.
I guess I'll drop a couple of historical facts into the mix to see if we can clear this up a little.
The British government, of course, put public education in in the 1870s, I think it was, in England, took control of the central banking and so on, much like happened in America, fought this horrendous war, the First World War, of course, from 1914 to 1918,
got the Americans involved and smashed the Germans with the help of America's 100,000 troops in 1918, imposed this unbelievable Treaty of Versailles on the Germans for a war which, let's say, was not particularly clear then or now exactly who started and whose fault, I guess it was.
And of course which achieved nothing other than to further fragment, shatter and demoralize European civilization and to destroy any capacity for classical liberalism or what we would now call libertarianism to continue to flourish.
But the British government imposed this unbelievable Treaty of Versailles on Germany with reparations that would have continued up until 1980, believe it or not.
And of course enforced this and enforced that there was no military for Germany and so on.
So they hoped to pillage Germany for hundreds of billions of marks, said you can't have an army, you can't have a navy, you can't have an air force.
I think they were allowed like a standing army of a hundred thousand or something.
So of course the Germans Say fine, okay, well we lost, we accept that.
You know, you've allied with the Americans and beat the pants off us.
So we're going to pay you your money, but hey, given that we're the government and we're not so big on paying at the expense of giving goods and services to our friends and punishing our enemies, what we're going to do is we're going to just print a whack load of marks And then we are going to just hand them over to you.
We're going to have inflation like you wouldn't believe.
We're going to absolutely destroy our economy, but you are not going to find that the marks we give you are worth very much.
So, you know, what happened?
Well, naturally, as you know, I'm sure, the German economy was destroyed in the 20s.
The middle class was completely wiped out.
You had people standing on rooftops shooting people because they were so frustrated.
I read a story once about a guy who had brought out an annuity which was supposed to give him a comfortable living in his retirement.
He cashed in his annuity, went across the street and bought a cup of coffee because that was all his annuity was worth at that time because of the hyperinflation.
So you had an enormous amount of, let's just say, British government interference, although it's the French and the Americans as well, of course.
But the British government did an enormous amount to destabilize Germany, to destroy the system of classical liberalism by participating in this absolutely horrendous war that just wrecked, killed 10 million people and of course left an enormous number of people wounded or widowed and thus depended on state largesse and foundation of the income tax, introduction of the passport system.
Everybody knows that the First World War was just the death knell of classical liberalism.
So, you get the First World War.
After the First World War, you get the Germans who just print money to pay off these ridiculous reparations.
There's a lot of damage done to the British economy at the same time because, of course, you either take money, which is worthless because they're just printing it, or you take goods, which destroys your own economy.
I mean, if you take a million shoes from German shoemakers and ship them over to England free of charge, I'm sure it doesn't take a lot to guess what happens to the British shoemakers.
They suffer and go out of business and then of course they're dependent on the state for unemployment insurance and so on.
And then so you have a situation where the British government destabilizes Germany, directly participates in this war and then what do they do?
In order to get Germany back on its feet, they start lending lots of money to Germany.
This is one of the things that contributed to the depression.
And then, of course, they exacerbate the depression by having these terrible trade policies, and by strengthening the unions, and increasing government spending, and raising tariffs and protections.
And so, governments basically could not have come up with a better plan for producing dictatorships in Central Europe than the course they followed from about 1914 to about 1930.
Okay, so let's just say that the British government had some hand in the creation of Nazi Germany.
Well, what happens then when Nazi Germany is created?
Well, you have, of course, people who believe that the British government is protecting them because they have ensured that Germany is unable to re-arm, right?
That's the big deal out of the Treaty of Versailles.
You can't have Alsace-Lorraine, you can't expand outside of your borders, you can't do this, you can't do that.
So you have this dictatorship growing, you've got Mussolini in Italy, of course you have Hitler in Germany, and everybody says, well...
It's okay, because the government has this treaty which is going to ensure that Germany never re-arms.
Well, everybody knows what happens.
Germany re-arms, they fly a bunch of people off to Russia to get trained as an air force, and they have these flying clubs which seem to fly suspicious monoplanes with guns.
I guess their hobby is extreme grouse hunting.
And, you know, they sign all these useless documents designed to keep Germany's aggression from boiling over.
And then, of course, they allow Germany to invade the Rhineland and to invade Austria, to invade Czechoslovakia, to invade Poland.
And then, of course, they finally go to war.
So, is it really the case to say that the British people had the right of defending themselves, and thus it's a good principle?
Well, of course, if the British people had successfully defended themselves against the existence of a government to begin with, well, then you wouldn't have had these problems at all.
So, I don't really see that as a very strong argument as to why self-defense is valid and just and good.
To take the argument one step further, the British people, of course, win the war.
The next thing they do, of course, is vote in the left-wing socialists.
They dump Winston Churchill, who's become pretty socialistic in his old age and has this magic belief that he can twirl Stalin's empire around the tip of his finger and make everything happen, if they happen well, if they just happen to meet once a week.
But let's not worry about how power-corrupted Churchill, but rather look at what happened to the British people after they, quote, won the Second World War.
Well, what do you get?
You get massive increases in taxation, you get massive trade union, welfare state, free health care, national debts begin to just rise like you wouldn't believe.
And so, really, what did they win?
Well, they won a couple of years of peace, and then they won the increasing economic stagnation that began in the 60s and increased to the 70s.
And I know this because my mother was clever enough to recognize that England was heading towards socialist hell.
And so we fled England in 1977, shortly before Thatcher came into power.
And of course, where did we flee to?
But to Canada, which is, you know, North America's socialist loony bin corner.
So, can it really be said, of course, that the self-defense that occurred in World War II produced good results?
Well, no, of course not.
I mean, of course not, because it's all based on violence.
If self-defense is a principle, then the first person you need to defend yourself against is the government, and that doesn't work anyway.
In which situation would self-defense be a valid approach to a problem?
It doesn't work in wars.
It doesn't work when somebody comes into your house with a gun.
The only conceivable time that I could see self-defense being a valid thing to do would be some group of kids or teenagers has come in and they don't want to steal from you.
They want to rape your wife and kill you, let's just say, or rape you and kill your wife.
Well, then I could see having a gun around and shooting them, blah, blah, blah.
But, you know, really, you know, predatory, rapey home invasions...
I mean, what, 20 times a year?
10 times a year in an entire country?
Is that really enough to hang an entire principle on which opens up the capacity for violence and the police and the state and the armies and navies and air forces?
I just don't think it's the case at all.
And I guess last but not least, I'd sort of like to mention or at least talk about the idea that Self-defense or violence itself.
People say, well, you know, there are violent people in the world, and you need a government, and the government has to protect us, and this, that, and the other.
There's a million arguments against that, but I'll just sort of settle on one right here, right now, which I had with somebody who worked for me at my current company a little while back.
And he was a Christian, so of course he had this belief that the people were bad and only through Christianity and right thinking could their evil impulses be restrained and so on.
But let's not get into all that this time.
I've got plenty of commuting time to work over all of that nonsense.
But what he did do was he said it's impossible to imagine a world where violence didn't exist.
Yeah, I understand that.
I read the papers.
I know what's going on in the world and there's lots of violence out there.
However, I'd like to offer you an invitation, I guess you could say, to have a look at, not the papers or Iraq or other places in the world where violence is going on, not hand chopping in Saudi Arabia or anything like that, but have a look at the world that you live in, the world that you exist in.
And I bet you, it's all as to donuts, that you don't have any violence in your life.
Now, okay, let's say some exceptions, just stuff that's common, like maybe you'll spank your kids, or maybe you'll yell at your wife or your husband from time to time.
But I'm not talking about, you know, spanking.
I mean, I disagree with it, but let's not get into that right now either.
And I'm also not talking about yelling at your wife.
I think that's also a very bad thing to do, and of course my wife and I never do that with each other, which is not to say we don't disagree, but it's very civil, it's very pleasant.
But, you know, compared to something like war, compared to, like, a hundred thousand Iraqis murdered, compared to, you know, planes going into towers, spanking and yelling is really not violence compared to all of that kind of stuff.
So to look at your own life and say, OK, well, did I get my job by holding a gun to someone's head?
Well, unless somebody from the Sopranos mindset is listening to this, which I highly doubt, then I'm betting that you didn't get your job.
by holding a gun to someone's head.
Did you force your wife to marry you?
Did you force your husband to have to do?
If your kids disagree with you or act up or whatever, I mean, if they're disrespectful to you, do you pull out the brass knuckles and really pound them into a pulp?
I bet you don't.
When your friends disagree with you, your tempers might flare, but I bet you all restrain from beating each other senseless.
I bet you that you live a life that is free of violence, that there is no violence in.
Other than, you know, you've got to pay your taxes and, you know, you get pulled over for speeding and all that kind of stuff.
But I mean, I'm just talking in your life.
You do not experience any violence.
So when people say to me, pacifism can't work, anarchy can't work, everybody says so much violence and blah blah blah.
And if people don't want to be violent, all the violent people will take over and so on.
I just don't find that at all credible.
I mean, I've known thousands of people in my life.
My wife has known thousands of people.
She's treated hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people.
Violence doesn't really happen.
Yeah, I know people get stopped on the street and somebody will hit them and some this and that and the other.
But I tell you, I tell you, that violence is all completely avoidable.
I mean, I've never had anybody mug me in my life.
Okay, once when I was 11, I guess somebody, you know, said, give me your lunch money or whatever, right?
Not exactly the end of the world as I knew it.
But I've never been in a fistfight.
I've never known anybody who's been in a fistfight.
I've never known anybody to hit anybody else.
I have never known any of this to occur.
And I don't know anybody with whom this has occurred.
And it's not like I grew up in some kind of gated community where I just didn't know any bad people.
Of course I did.
I mean, I grew up in a pretty bad neighborhood and I had a pretty violent family.
But nonetheless, I just don't know that many people who use violence.
Even the cops that I've talked to don't like using violence.
I mean, they're full of bizarre illusions about the good that they're doing and the need for their services and the fact that, you know, they're not thugs is somehow defined for them in a way that makes them comfortable, but they still don't like using violence.
So what I'm trying to say is that a world without violence, a world where violence just is not part of people's social interaction, is absolutely and entirely possible.
And if you doubt me, Just have a look at your own life and look at how you resolve disputes.
Look at how you deal with things.
Yeah, you get frustrated.
Yeah, you probably yell at people you shouldn't.
Yeah, you do this and yeah, you do that.
Maybe you hit your tennis ball too hard sometimes or whatever, right?
But compared to things like war and what the government does in terms of taking income away from everyone and all that, It's really not very common.
Where violence is common is where you get a bunch of sociopaths in uniform who are overseas who are paid to go and kill people and are told that the reason they have to go and kill people is it's kill or be killed, it's save the children in their cribs, it's if we don't get them they're gonna get your kids and children and wife while you sleep and blah blah blah.
So if you put people through the dehumanizing process of becoming police officers or becoming soldiers, and then you pay them to go and do these things for money that they extort out of a helpless population that's legally disarmed, and if you also tell them that what they're and then you pay them to go and if you also tell them that what they're doing is morally good and to question it is morally evil, well, if you create that enormous disparity in power and motivation and funding, i.e., if I obey you,
I'm well paid, and if I disobey you, I go to jail, well, I'm well paid, and if I disobey you, I go to jail, well, of course you're going Of course you are!
Exactly as if you put, as Milgram's experiment did, as if people know about that, you know, I'm sure you do, that he divided college students into two groups, one called the prisoners and the other one called the prison guards.
I think this is in the sixties, before a bunch of killjoy ethics legislation came down the pipe.
If you put an enormous amount of power disparity and motivational disparity in a group of people, which to me is the exact definition of something like politics or the government, then of course you're going to get violence.
Of course you are.
And, you know, you can see this just as an example by the fact that, you know, if a congressman's kid gets caught with pot, nothing happens.
And if a black kid gets caught with pot who's a ghetto kid, well, they toss his ass in jail and throw away the key.
So, to sum up, I don't think that the principle of self-defense is particularly valid.
I can't find, except in the most extreme situations, that are so unbelievably rare.
Like, who cares, right?
Like, yeah, I work out even though I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.
So, you know, the self-defense, I really don't care about as far as the principle goes.
And the problem that I have with the principle of self-defense is it opens up all of these possibilities for the use of violence and the institutionalization of violence in the form of the state and in the form of police and armies and so on.
So, no to the defense of self-defense, I guess you could say.
Self-defense is itself indefensible.
Oh, isn't that clever play on words?
Anyway, the second point is that life without violence seems to be entirely possible.
It seems to me entirely empirical.
I've never seen anybody hit anybody.
I've never seen a fight.
I've never experienced a fight.
Nobody I know has ever seen or experienced a fight.
Nobody I know... I don't even know anybody who has a gun.
That's not like a... I guess when I was younger I knew a couple of people who hunted, but the violence is really not the norm.
It's far from the norm.
It is extraordinarily unusual in society, except If you train people for it, and pay them to do it, and give them no consequences, and tell them that it's right to use violence, then you will get violence.
But you don't get that if you don't have a government.
That just doesn't happen.
So if this makes sense to you, and it certainly makes sense to me, I'm not saying it's the be-all and end-all, because that doesn't happen until I come up with a syllogistic proof for all this stuff, which is my brain-bending task at the moment.
Then what I'm saying is that don't listen to the cynics.
Don't listen to the people who tell you that your violence is somehow endemic to human nature, that we're savages, that we'll look at all the wars and people are just bad and whatever, right?
That's all nonsense.
That's all nonsense.
Because people just aren't bad.
People don't like using violence.
And it takes... If you want another chunk of proof for that, look at the amount of conditioning that it takes for somebody to be comfortable or at least desensitized to using violence.
I mean, there's a reason that you're put in basic training for months and months and months.
And there's a reason that, you know, only certain people are allowed to come into a volunteer army.
You have to have a tendency for a lack of empathy or desensitization, and then they have to just pummel you for months and years to get you to actually be comfortable with violence.
I mean, look at the amount of propaganda.
I mean, cop shows.
I mean, the amount of propaganda that people are subject to in order to get them to be comfortable with the violence is just staggering.
If it was such a natural human condition, well, we wouldn't need it.
I don't need a lot of propaganda to have a sexual drive or to want to eat chocolate or, you know, to want to sit on the couch when I'm tired.
I mean, that stuff just happens because it's part of my physiology and part of my nature as a human being.
But in order to make people violent, You have to do a heck of a lot.
You have to, you know, beat them as kids.
You have to yell at them as adults.
You have to pay them.
You have to tell them that it's all moral.
You have to subject them to endless propaganda.
You have to brutalize them emotionally.
In boot camp, I mean, you have to do a lot to twist someone into being a violent person.
To me, it's sort of similar to, you know, when I think it was in China, at the turn of the, I guess, mid-19th to early 20th century, the foot binding was very common, right?
So you've got these women who had their feet bound up in excruciating tightness, and their feet were mutated, their toes were growing into their heels.
I mean, it's just horrendous, right?
So yes, it's certainly possible to shape a human foot into a ball, but it's not exactly natural, or it's not exactly the natural state of a human foot, which is to grow, you know, strong and straight and blah blah blah.
Yeah, okay, some people are born with six toes and You know, drop dodges or whatever, but that's very much the exception.
There is a natural and healthy human foot, and there is a natural and healthy human soul, which is, you know, not always the most patient and kind of entities, but definitely not, you know, some murderous violence.
You know, if I don't get my rent reduced, I'm gonna go shoot someone.
That's just not how people are.
There are people out there like that, just like there were Chinese women with bound feet.
But, you know, what you need to do is to look at the circumstances that produced these personalities, rather than sort of imagine or believe that these personalities are somehow natural.
That there's lots of these human predators out there, and boy oh boy.
I mean, if you... Okay, one final example, just because I'm almost home, and I've got another two minutes.
One final example is, just look at religion, right?
I mean, when people were forced, when children were forced to go to Sunday school, and everybody had to be religious, and if you weren't religious, you were shunned, and you were whatever, an outcast, then wow, you know, wouldn't you know it, lots of people are pretty religious.
But now, if you look at sort of the modern middle class, kids really aren't taught to be religious.
You know, they go to church a couple of times a year, maybe a wedding or two, and Christmas and Easter maybe.
But they don't really go for this whole religion thing.
And so the natural human state, the natural state of the human soul is also atheistic.
And I know, of course, I'm using the word soul blah blah blah, but I just mean that for the totality of consciousness and emotional apparatus and physiology and so on.
The natural state of a human being is pacifist and atheistic, and I don't believe in a government, really.
Sure, there's tons of people out there to the contrary, but that's just a mark of an enormous amount of pressure that's been put on them emotionally, physically, and so on to conform to all of that nonsense.
And as soon as we start correcting people's thinking, you know, proving a better argument and showing the value of a better world and the morality of a better world of pacifism and Forget about self-defense and don't be violent.
Then, you know, we'll have exactly what we need, which is people who believe in violence and the natural virtue of the human soul.
And boy, won't that be just a beautiful, beautiful world.
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