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Dec. 20, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:56
21 They hate us because we're good? (Part 1)

Do evil people really hate good people? (Part 1)

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Good morning, everybody!
Here, this is a shout-out to my millions, if not thousands, if not hundreds, if not a listener, at least my wife, who is happy to hear my thoughts during the day as we drift off to sleep at night.
It is 8.30 on a Tuesday morning on 20th of December, I think, and once more I venture off into the wild woolly lands of software management.
For a day of eking out bread.
Well, I have a couple of topics to talk about this morning.
I'm going to start off with a bit of a conceptual one and then we're going to sort of drill down into something a little bit more tactical.
The idea that I think is very interesting, that is constantly talked about in particular kinds of regimes, which is something like, you know, other people hate us because we are good.
And I think that is a fascinating topic, this relationship between good and evil and hatred.
Certainly it is, you know, when I was younger it was hard not to fall prey to a hatred of the government, to a sort of anger and frustration at, you know, the newspaper articles that were going on and
everything that's in the news and you know all of the blindness you know as my wife and I would talk about it was it really felt like we were in the middle of a plague and in that plague people were you know falling over and dying and we had a cure and we had a cure and not only and so we were walking around saying to everyone we have a cure you don't have to be sick you know myself philosophically my wife psychologically and
Not only would nobody take our medicine, but nobody would even admit that they were sick.
And not only would nobody admit that they were sick, but they all said that we were sick.
We have a sort of interesting personal challenge that's been cooking for about a year, a little longer for myself.
Insofar as, you know, we have no contact with What my wife calls the foo, which is a slightly technical term for family of origin, and what I call the ABC, which is the accidental biological cage.
And, you know, gosh, I tell you, explaining this away is really not very easy.
We face a lot of hostility and tension around, you know, when people say to me, how's your brother?
And I say, I don't know.
I haven't seen him regularly or barely seen him in six years.
There was a reunion of the company that my brother and I founded a couple of weeks ago and, of course, people who hadn't seen me in a while, who knew nothing of the fact that my brother and I, that I had ceased to see my brother for a variety of reasons.
I mean, pretty much all moral, but a variety of reasons.
And, you know, they were just shocked and appalled and stunned.
You know, I mean, it's, you know, people don't even know that it's an option.
And, you know, that is, they get very tense about it.
I mean, family mythology is heavily, heavily embedded into people's psyche, right?
I mean, it's one of the things that, you know, I was talking yesterday about sports and this belief or this inculcation of allegiance without ethical considerations.
So, you know, my team, your team, my country, your country.
With no ethical considerations.
Well, I tell you this, anybody who tells you that it's important to believe something without any ethical considerations is not exactly an ethical person.
And that is a pretty important thing to sort of get under your skin as a concept.
So, I would say that, you know, it's very important to sort of look at everybody who is saying, you know, family is everything.
Well, family is not everything.
Family is actually not that much.
You know, family is just an accidental grouping through biological history.
So, you know, when I say I have not seen or spoken with or had any contact with my mother in, I don't know, seven or eight years, you know, some people are like, But she's your mother!
As if I have allegiance to some concept without any regard to the person who actually inhabits that concept, which is a little bit more relevant.
I wasn't given birth to by a mother.
I wasn't raised by a mother.
I wasn't abused by a mother.
You know, I was abused by, you know, one particular woman who had, you know, what is it that gave her the claim to my undying allegiance?
Well, you know, she had sex with my father and she had the, you know, the magical ability, which, you know, everything from a protozoa on up does, to reproduce.
It's not exactly a high fence to get over.
I mean, there's, what, six or seven billion people in the world, you know, and so children, I think, still outnumber parents.
And so that would mean that every single human being in the world is perfectly moral.
And Who had children.
And that is, I mean, complete nonsense.
I mean, it just makes no sense at all.
I mean, Stalin had children.
Was she supposed to get him, you know, presents for Father's Day and say, I forgive you for, you know, this genocidal streak that you had in the 30s, 40s, you know, 20s and so on?
No, of course not.
You know, there's no such thing as a conceptual label that means anything.
All it is, is a descriptor.
You know, it would be like saying, You know, that mammals are more moral than reptiles, which really, you know, or sperm whales are, you know, more whimsical than blue whales.
I mean, they're just conceptual labels.
They have no moral, you know, no moral description within them, whatever.
I mean, other than, you know, good and evil, but of course good and evil is not what we're talking about.
We're talking about sort of things like family and country and team and so on.
So, I mean, that's certainly just sort of a brief sort of sprint through this idea that I've been talking about, about how conceptual entities, concepts, you know, have no moral content whatsoever.
Can't be judged as good or evil.
And, you know, there's no way that you can have allegiance to a concept, you know, any more than you can buy a house with the idea of money.
And so, it really doesn't matter Whether somebody is your family or your countryman or, you know, lives on your block or is part of your team, I mean, those things don't mean anything.
All they are is descriptions of either biological or social relationships.
And they have no moral content whatsoever.
But, of course, there are lots of people who are bad people, who want to survive through parasitism.
And, of course, they don't want to expend the energy to steal, right?
I mean, this is the hypocrisy and the slime that is at the heart of manipulative evil.
I mean, I do divide evil into two categories.
You know, honest evil and dishonest evil, if that makes any sense.
So, you know, a guy who sticks a gun in your ribs and says, give me a Rolex.
At least he's honest about it.
At least he doesn't want you to curl into a ball and worship him and give him your Rolexes forever.
He's just saying, "Give me a Rolex.
This is a situation of physical force.
You can do with it what you will, but these are the facts." He's taking the risk that you're going to be some jujitsu master and take him down.
He's taking the risk that you're not some suicidal guy who's going to put him in a situation where he's going to, you know, have to shoot you.
You know, he is taking all of those risks himself and giving you the chance to fight back.
And, of course, he generally is only going to prey on those who lurk around in his neighborhood.
You know, of which it's not that hard to figure out where not to go.
So, I view that more as an honest predator.
You know, like, I mean, the gazelle doesn't like the lion, but the lion is not evil.
I mean, the grass doesn't like the gazelle either, right?
But that doesn't make the gazelle evil.
You know, everything is a big circular food chain.
Wait, I'm gonna burst into song in a moment.
Nope.
No, the moment's passing.
Okay.
So, everything is a circular food chain.
We don't look at any particular inhabitant as evil.
And, you know, predators have a territory.
They have a methodology.
And, you know, you can fight back.
And so, I view, you know, a simple honest thief as somebody who is, you know, one category of evil.
And I, you know, I consider this an almost completely inconsequential evil.
Now, there's another category of evil.
Which is by far, by far the majority.
And that is the category of evil that demands that you treat it as good.
That you believe it, that it is good.
And, of course, They tend to band together and they tend to be collectivists because they want you to worship this collective ideal, which, you know, we all have some susceptibility to for reasons that I can't quite think of now, but maybe an interesting topic for another podcast.
But all these evil people who want you to worship Uh, them, and want you to voluntarily go and give them stuff on a regular basis.
I mean, obviously they're smarter in some ways than the thief, but boy oh boy are they far more evil.
You know, the thief, the direct thief does not demand that you corrupt your thinking, you know, you can be pissed off about this guy.
I'd say, man, I'm never going down that alley at two o'clock in the morning again.
You know, the other group of evil people are more parasites than they are predators.
And they are, you know, I mean, the people everybody knows, right?
These are the people who, you know, they're the school teachers who tell you that socialism is good.
You know, they're the news anchors who, you know, report breathlessly on government activities while never mentioning the fact that it's based on violence.
You know, these are the academics who are smarmy and cynical and, you know, will put anybody down who's interested in any kind of objective morality or has any sort of respect for the free market.
You know, they're the priests who, you know, every time that something good happens, say you have to praise God.
Every time that something bad happens, say you have to praise God because God works in mysterious ways.
You know, this is the church, you know, who, despite the fact that it failed to act on, you know, I don't think the pedophilia problem is just a generation old.
Let's put it that way.
I don't think that the pedophilia problem was not occurring in the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages.
You know, I think that that's been a pretty permanent category.
of the Catholic religion.
And, you know, by the by, it's not so much because priests are celibate, but because priests are gay, and generally the kids that they're preying on are sexually mature, though not socially mature, boys.
You know, if you put a heterosexual, you know, 25-year-old guy in charge of a bunch of 15 or 16-year-old girls, of course You know, if sexual activity resulted, it would be, I don't know, wrong to some degree.
I'm not going to get into the politics of that.
But it would not be exactly like, oh my god, how deviant can you be?
You know, where of course, you know, the problem with the priests, by and large, is that they're homosexuals.
And they're homosexuals who aren't permitted or have put themselves in a situation where they've agreed not to have open sexual relations and are put around a young group of boys who are biologically in their sexual prime.
14 15 16 even 13, you know boys are sexually mature and So, I mean of course pedophilia is one of the most repugnant moral crimes in the world But you know, it's not particularly surprising to me that if you put somebody who's attracted to the people that they're in charge of and those people are sexually mature and you don't allow that person to have an adult relationship that You know, it's not
You know, it's what Camille Paglia used to say about women who got themselves into compromising situations.
That, you know, and they would say, well, I went to this frat party, I got really drunk, I got separated from my friends, I don't remember what happened, but I woke up and, you know, my genital organs were tender and I have vague memories of bad things happening.
And, you know, Camille Paglia's argument was, you know, Of course it's wrong if something bad happened to you, but my God!
I mean, could you be dumber?
Similarly, if I leave my wallet on a bench in Central Park and I come back a day later and, my God, it's been stolen, well, of course whoever stole it was wrong, but it's not like I have no responsibility in the matter.
So, you know, that particular aspect of, you know, pedophilia has been a central part of the Catholic Church in particular, but it would be a part of any, you know, any religion where you put people attracted to, with sort of sexually mature members of a sex that they were attracted to together in isolation, and especially when you prevent
That person, the adult, from having an open and adult relationship, then, you know, of course, you're kind of herding things into a situation.
You're herding sort of circumstances into a situation where bad things are bound to occur.
So, of course, the church has moral culpability in setting all of that sort of stuff up and teaching all these ridiculous things.
But, you know, the churches, of course, churches are one of the most famous ones where they have a concept that you're supposed to love.
You know, the church and God and all that, regardless of the moral actions, like the actual morality that is occurring.
And, you know, politicians and patriotism and soldiers with their, you know, murderous nationalism and all that.
I mean, all of these people are parasitical insofar as they're not honest thieves.
They don't come and actually put a gun to your head.
What they do is they get you to worship their evil as the good and then, you know, you will voluntarily hand over everything.
Everything!
I mean, my God, if you think about it, the parents who hand over their children To the flesh-eating machine of the military.
It's just unbelievable what people will do in the name of what is good.
I mean, if you've seen... I don't know much about Cindy Sheehan, but I do remember when I saw Fahrenheit 9-1-1 That there was a woman in there who, you know, raised her son in a military household.
Everybody had been in the military.
They were just, you know, basically a gang of murderers and their malls.
And her son was sent to Iraq and, you know, when her son was sitting on the bed waiting to go to Iraq, he was saying, Mom, I'm scared.
I don't want to go.
You know, and of course, this could be something that people say in hindsight, oh, he had a premonition.
They'll have to get all spooky like it was fated, right?
Because if it was fated, then they're not morally responsible for sending their children off to be murdered.
But if we assume that it's true, you know, she sat him down, according to her own report, and said something along the lines of, you know, well, son, I really do understand that it's okay to be frightened, but, you know, courage is what you do when you're frightened, and it's the right thing to go to war, and you've made a commitment, and, you know, defend your country.
Like, she just piled all these soft, suffocating rocks of conceptual slavery all over the guy, and, you know, he basically went off to Iraq and died.
And then, and then, and then, oh my god, I can't believe the horror, she got angry at the White House.
I mean, think about that for a moment.
What the hell did George Bush have to do with sending her son to war?
I mean, it's ridiculous.
I mean, I live in the same world as George Bush and I'm not going to be a Marine.
I mean, she gets angry at the government because the government lied to her?
Oh, please!
I mean, anybody who thinks that the government doesn't lie on a continual basis is just a plain fool.
I mean, they're either retarded or they've just chosen not to see.
Well, you know, there are consequences of failing to examine reality.
There's consequences of failing to look at the facts.
So it's not particularly surprising that one of the things that happens to people who fail to realize that the government lies is that their children will get murdered.
So that's one thing that I find just shocking and foolish.
And of course part of the whole weird thinking that people have that somehow the government is responsible for the fact that their son signed up to the military.
I mean, okay, if there's a draft I'd have a little bit more sympathy But, I mean, that's not the case at all.
I mean, this is all voluntary.
And, you know, anybody who signs up for the military, you know, is perfectly aware that they're being paid to kill people.
I mean, the military is not a charity.
The military is not a social organization.
The military certainly is not a business.
It's not a bureaucracy.
I mean, the military is a murder machine.
It is a murder and maiming and destruction machine.
That's all it's for.
So that's sort of one thing that I find kind of shocking about, you know, people's reactions to, you know, the sort of conceptual power that evil has sort of trained them or drilled them into that they've just never woken up.
It's always been one of my beliefs That, you know, defenses or what lures you into evil is you are blind to evil until you have actually lost everything.
And then, evil opens your eyes and deserts you.
So, this woman was shielded from the nature of the military, shielded herself from the nature of the military, and, you know, sort of sailed along in this, you know, happy and sinking boat of patriotism.
And then when her son was murdered, then the scales fall from her eyes and she wakes up and goes, oh my god, the military is about murder!
And now if she'd known that before, she would have done what any sane human being would do, which is, you know, drug your kid, take him to Canada, chain him to a bed and get him deprogrammed and make sure that he never goes back to America.
I mean, that would be a sane thing to do.
And you would do that for two reasons.
One, you don't want him to die.
And the other, two, that you don't want him to kill people.
You don't want him to become a murderer.
You don't want him to become a devourer of human souls.
That's kind of important.
That's the other thing that's astounding about this woman.
I mean, it's not astounding psychologically, because it's exactly what you would expect, but it's astounding from the point of view of just how blind people can be.
Because she's all teary, and unhappy, and sad, and broken-hearted, and angry, because her son was murdered.
Does she give one thought?
To the Iraqis that her son murdered?
I mean, that's just how sick people are in the modern world.
She's all broken up because her son has been killed because she raised him to be a soldier.
and sent him to the military and overcame his final last gasp of rational life where he said, oh my god, I'm frightened and I don't want to go.
Suddenly you say, well, baby, here's a bus ticket to Canada.
We'll join you in two days and we'll go live in Alaska.
We'll go live in the northern wastes.
No, she was the one who convinced him to go to Iraq.
And then, when he dies, she's all broken hearted about her loss.
And she gets angry at the White House.
Right?
She doesn't get angry at her own parents who raised her with the virtue of religion.
I mean, I bet you, I bet you a million dollars that George Bush never sat down with this woman and explained to her just how wonderful the military was.
The military ethic is inculcated by family and by sick and corrupt movie makers who create these pornography films about the nobility of combat.
It's not the White House.
I mean, George Bush makes what?
Everybody, even a supporter, has seen maybe one hour or two hours of his speeches in his whole life.
That's nothing.
That's nothing.
I've seen more You know, I've seen more commercials for X-Lax, and I don't take it every day.
What gets you down is your family and your community, and to some degree the culture, although the culture as a whole feeds off the corruption within the family in particular.
She's not getting angry at her own father, like, Dad, why did you lie to me?
Dad, why did you tell me that the military was so great all the time?
She doesn't sit there and go, holy crap, if my son is a murderer, then, you know what?
All of my family have been murderers.
We have all supported murderers for generations.
I mean, obviously that would be quite a lot.
For somebody to swallow, and it would take a soul of almost unprecedented rigor and strength to be able to accept that.
And of course, that's why these murderers tend to breed in these little nests of religious patriotism and continue to march off to kill others, to kill the innocent in the name of patriotism.
And of course she didn't think, like her son died, and I don't know what his position was in the war, but I think it's fairly safe to say that, you know, he was involved in murder in some way.
I mean, he was either, you know, baking bread for the murderer, or he was, you know, processing paperwork for the murderer, or he was a murderer himself.
The fact that the military is murder is still at the basis of the facts.
Her son, who was sitting in a semi-protected Humvee or sitting in base, was probably killed by one of these improvised explosive devices.
Her son was well protected.
And the people that he was fighting against were completely unprotected.
I mean, both Iraq wars, both the Kuwait war and the Iraq war, I mean, were absolutely nothing short of genocide.
I mean, it just absolutely makes you laugh, while at the same time you cry tears of horror, you know, when you see George Bush in his, you know, pimped-up little Top Gun moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln talking about, you know, we have prevailed!
Prevailed?
You guys sky-bombed the shit out of these helpless peasants from 20,000 feet.
You know, you spun scuds into their little tents when they couldn't even get the sand out of their kalashnikovs.
I mean, it's unbelievable how people talk about the U.S.
having prevailed in these wars, you know, when it was just a decimating slaughter from above.
And, oh my god, I mean, just the...
It would be like me beating up a girl guide and saying, you know, that was the prize fight of the century.
And fortunately, and through the grace of God, I have managed to prevail against this eight-year-old girl with one hand tied behind her back.
I mean, wouldn't people just look at me and say, you are one sick, sick human being.
Well, I mean, that's the way that I look at any pronouncements of victory in Iraq or prevailed like you were fighting anything that was able to fight back.
I mean, of course, the US never, never, never, We'll attack any kind of army that's capable of defending itself.
I mean, that's the very clear lesson that those who oppose US foreign policy have gotten out of, you know, the past 50 years.
They'll feel comfortable attacking El Salvador and arming people in Nicaragua and attacking, you know, Haiti and, you know, Pissant little countries like that.
But, you know, when it comes to the Soviet Union, they're all, hey, let's sit down and talk, and here's some agricultural subsidies, and let's make sure that we never, ever piss these people off, because, you know, they have actual nuclear weapons and can do us some harm.
I mean, the U.S.
is, oh my God, I mean, they have never, ever, ever fought an army that has any capacity to strike back, and especially to strike back the U.S.
population, which is why the events of September 11 were so You know, remarkable because, you know, it was absolutely unprecedented for the guns to be pointing towards the U.S.
rather than away.
I just wish that, you know, let's not get into that.
Let's deal with that another time.
So, you know, the question of of evil.
And I know that I'd started with, you know, that they hate us because we're good.
And then I went into, you know, these couple of different natures of evil.
One being the honest evil, right?
The predator.
And the other being the sort of weasel evil.
Good name for a band.
The weasel evil, who are those who are parasitical and will teach you to love evil so that you will voluntarily go up and put your head on the chopping block rather than them having to chase you around.
And then, you know, we went into, you know, people's relationship and their adherence to the evil that is presented to them as the good.
And I was hoping to, you know, sort of tie this topic off, but I mean, I guess I've got a good topic for this afternoon's drive.
But, where, you know, this question of, you know, what is evil's perception of good First and foremost.
And what is good's perception of evil?
So, what is a good man's perception of an evil man?
And, I mean, it's a very interesting question.
I mean, and it's something that, frankly, anybody who's got any kind of moral sense to them, it's a problem that we face every day.
There are obviously two categories of evil in terms of what people do, right, as I mentioned before.
And, you know, the interesting question for me has always been, well, who is more evil?
Is the person who Is the parent who trains and constantly talks about how great the military is, is that person more evil?
Or is the person who believes that goes and signs up and goes and shoots people in foreign countries or domestic countries probably within a generation, is that person more evil?
And I think it is a very interesting question.
Formerly, I guess up until A couple of months ago, my real opinion was that the only evil in the world was active predatory violence.
So, you know, George Bush isn't evil, but, you know, the guy who's the soldier in Iraq or the soldier in Afghanistan is evil because he is the one who's actually got the gun and he's shooting people and so on.
The reason that Like most people who are interested in this topic, the reason that I withheld the label of evil from those who advocated murder, rather than those who committed murder, was because if you say that those who speak evil are evil, then you end up with censorship.
And censorship will then be corrupted by the government, and even if you can't publish things that are false, Like, you know, the military is a moral institution, or the military is not about being paid to murder.
If you say, well, we ban those statements, then of course, you know, I mean, within 12 minutes, the state will be taking that over and making it some other criteria.
Like, you know, you can't say anything bad about the government.
One of the great things about freeing myself from the state, which has sort of been a journey of mine for the last year, is that I don't have to worry about that stuff.
I don't have to worry about censorship anymore, because the only moral society is the stateless society, where, you know, everything is based on voluntary contract.
Then, you know, there really is no such thing as censorship.
If you want to live in a community where You know, you can't say anything bad about turnips.
You know, just throw that into your little local constitution, into your, you know, local DRO relationship, or, you know, found a community or build a community where that's the case and then rent out the houses and then, you know, you can evict any of those turnip-hating evildoers.
That's fine, you know, so I don't have to worry.
About how the state is going to corrupt any kind of moral judgments that I make.
So if I got everybody to believe tomorrow that speaking positively of the military was wrong, then I don't have to worry about the state taking that over and then saying, well, you know, now the military's good and you're bad and all this kind of stuff.
I mean, that's just not an issue for me because, well, there's no such thing as a government.
So that frees me up quite a bit to talk about the evil of language.
You know, that will, I promise, that will get us back to our original topic.
You know, the mildly unfortunate aspect of that, of course, is now I've... Actually, I'm not quite at work.
I'm going to pick me up a bagel because somehow the two yogurts that I have in the morning always have me gnawing on my sandwich before 11 a.m.
So we will pick this up this afternoon on the drive home and talk a little bit about what it means, the relationship between language And evil.
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