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Jan. 30, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:11
75 The True History of Violence (Part 1)

The deep roots of evil and need

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Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 8.37am on the 30th of January, 2006.
Monday morning, heading to work.
And I hope everybody's doing well.
I would like to chat this morning about a history of coercive power and its effects.
And I was sort of, I guess, inspired to chat about this for two main reasons.
One is that Christina was talking about somebody that she knew who had a sister who got pregnant early and then was in the welfare state programs for a couple of years and then got through school.
I think she did a college degree.
I guess that would be a technical degree in the States.
And then got off welfare and got into the community as a productive member of society and all this sort of stuff.
Of course the guys she got pregnant with didn't stick around and do the right thing and so she was sort of asking and you know I think quite legitimately so, well isn't that an example of something that's good that's happening through the welfare state?
Now I mean she fully understands all of the moral arguments but I mean there are And that is, to me, a very interesting question and a very productive question to to chat about.
well, this person seems to do quite well through the welfare state, and therefore, you know, there could be some good in it.
And that is, to me, a very interesting question and a very productive question to chat about, because there are individual instances wherein people do well from government programs.
And, you know, when those people are, when you're chatting with people or about those people or, you know, with anybody, really, somebody's going to know specific examples of people who do well.
through government programs.
And so I think it's worth having a chat about this, this topic, right?
And what is sort of meant by people doing well through state programs, and see if we can unravel some of the cause and effect.
Because the argument for morality would not require this.
So this is obviously optional, and this is much more of an exploration.
than any sort of logical proof.
So feel free to skip this if you're down with the argument for morality already and are, you know, I guess slicing down illusion left right and center with your logical katana.
But just in case you're not, this kind of question which can stall people from an individual basis Well, you know, would you want this woman to be thrown into the street and to have her life ruined and to not have any charity and so on?
So, what I want to talk about is the really subtle effects of the transfer of wealth.
The transfer of wealth is one of the fundamental aspects of social organization.
What I mean by that is that...
Society organizes, in a state of irrationality, which is virtually all societies in all times, society organizes its ethics to serve economic needs.
Right?
So, I mean, you know, obviously in Islam you have a certain a tithe, right?
A certain percentage of your income that's supposed to go to the church and it's supposed to help the poor.
And of course, you know, there's absolutely no, nobody has any interest in helping the poor.
in Islam because otherwise they would recognize that the separation of church and state and the foundation of property rights does far more good to help the poor than, you know, giving 12 shekels to somebody to, you know, give to somebody else after they've taken their cut and not being able to lend for interest and so all the other things which Sharia law forbids.
So, you know, it's clear that nobody has any interest in actually helping the poor In these kinds of situations, what they are interested in is you giving them money without them having to work for it, right?
I mean, that is one of the biologically adaptive strategies that human beings want to use if they are better at language than they are at producing something productive.
Then they're going to become some sort of sweet-talking imam, or priest, or politician, and they're going to guilt you with With the poor, right?
You have to help the poor.
And the price of your illusion about what it means to help the poor, the price of your cowardice in not laughing at these people and saying, go get a real job, the price of that is twofold.
Well, of course, you know, your economic interests are harmed and the interests of your children are harmed, right?
Because these people, you know, grow and swallow power and continue to educate the young and, you know, make things worse and worse.
And the other thing that happens as a consequence of this illusion is that poor are harmed, right?
I mean, that's sort of the key thing that I've been trying to sort of get across.
I've been writing articles about this and podcasting about it that You know, when people say, how will the poor be helped in a libertarian society?
Well, the poor will be helped, right?
I mean, you're assuming that the poor are helped now, and the poor are not helped now.
But then, of course, people are always going to come up with these individual objections, right?
Well, I know so-and-so who did such and such, and that worked out beautifully for them.
Now, to take this example that I mentioned earlier, this woman who got pregnant when she was in her early teens, sorry, in her mid to late teens, and had the baby, the guy didn't stick around, and so on.
Obviously, she came from a terrible, terrible family.
I don't know any details about the family, but I'm going to hypothesize.
And I'm going to hypothesize based on my own family experience, so be aware!
There's going to be some personal information in here, but don't freak out!
I'm just a little lab, that's all, whose experiences can be helpful in generating some theses or hypotheses which can, of course, must be validated by reason and empiricism.
And also, I watched a Trading Spouses... No, I'm so sorry.
I watched a Dr. Phil.
Sometimes I remember to tape Dr. Phil.
My wife, of course, is a psychologist, or practices psychology, so it's worth seeing what's out there that our patients are being exposed to.
So she reads a lot of these popular self-help books because that's the kind of stuff that some of her patients are reading and she needs to know what's in it.
In Dr. Phil's episode, it was the aftermath of a shopaholic.
There was this woman who was really into spending money.
And they tried to get that under control and it kind of worked and kind of didn't.
And what it turned out, the underlying causality behind her obsessive-compulsive shopping was that her husband, who was a doctor, was just verbally abusive to a pretty strong degree.
And they talk about verbally abusive.
They set up cameras in the home and so they can see this guy You know, yelling his kids, calling them effing stupid and effing assholes and all this kind of stuff.
And, you know, you could see the kids just sort of breaking down, you know, like sandcastles in a storm.
You could see their wills breaking down, you know.
Two of them have dropped out of school and, you know, they can't get their lives started.
So, of course, this guy, and this is very common in sort of abusive parenting, you know, he breaks down their self-esteem and confidence because of his own verbal sadism, or his own sadism, and then he castigates them for being underachievers, right?
So, I mean, this is pretty common.
It sort of skips a generation.
Now, one of the things that came up, oh, and there's another thing too, is that the man was physically brutal.
I mean, there's a story that was mentioned which, you know, didn't shock Dr. Phil as much as it shocked me, and didn't alter his sympathy towards this guy, in my view, nearly as much.
I mean, it should have completely reversed it, but when his son was young, he took a whip to him because he was eating food on an expensive couch and, you know, whipped him and actually broke the whip on his neck.
I mean, just astounding things.
Of course, I'm sure he only got away with it because he was a doctor and therefore could treat the kid at home, but I mean, that's just, I mean, that's just beyond evil.
I mean, that's worse than taking a baseball bat to somebody in a wheelchair is beating a child in that manner.
And so, I mean, at that point I would have been, well, okay, the thing you need to do is you need to You need to turn yourself in to the law authorities.
I mean, I know that I'm no fan of the state, but in this case, punishment is absolutely required and it's the best that can be done.
And you need to confess to this crime, and you need to do your penance, and you need to pay for your kid's therapy, and you need to get out of their lives, and you need to... whatever, right?
But the reason that this sort of struck me in conjunction with Christina's question about the positive effects of state power that can be seen is that this gentleman also was a... his father was an army man, right?
He just...
I touched on it very briefly and I did get the sense that he was, I mean this guy looked like an army guy, so that flat-top crew cut and stuff like that, but his father was an army man and I think a career, I would guess, a career army man.
So this is a man who had stayed in the military for, you know, decades probably and had that sort of whole approach to things like Discipline and vulnerability and empathy and so on.
So, and this guy was of an age where it seemed likely to me that his father had served in World War II.
Again, these are hypotheses, but, you know, if it's not true for this family in particular, it's certainly true for my family and it's certainly true for other families, you know, millions and millions of families around the world.
whose parents have served in combat.
And the reason that I think this is all important is that when you look, you can sort of look at specific things that occur in society and miss the big picture of causality.
And it's a complicated topic, so I'm not going to obviously close it off this morning, and you're not going to be able to close it off with conversations that you have with people.
But it's important to know that you don't start reasoning from A situation that is irrational and say well look some good results occur and I think that's sort of very important and If you're in an asylum and somebody wins a chess game, it doesn't mean that they're rational.
It just means that they're sort of crazy, but they have the ability to win a chess game.
Similarly with autistic individuals, you can have high skills in math and so on, but it doesn't mean that they're mentally A-OK, right?
I mean, it just means, oh, you can have idiosynvance.
So, you know, particular characteristics without looking at the big picture of causality is not a rational place to start figuring things out, right?
I mean, if you look at a helium balloon and you say, wow, gravity has been suspended, everything floats upward.
Right?
And you're not actually doing a sort of rational service to the evidence of your senses.
And the reason why I'm going to sort of talk about these issues is because, yes, you will always find individual situations where the welfare state seems to have done some good.
for someone.
So let's say this guy, the son of this doctor, military son, the guy whose father was a military man.
Let's say, and I don't know if it's true, but let's just say he got student welfare and he got himself on his feet and he got into university and completed university and so on.
Well, then you would say, okay, well, this guy has, you know, the welfare state helped.
Look, he had this horrible parent and, you know, he had his whole, you know, physically abused, emotionally abused, you know, scarred for life.
But look, the welfare state kind of dipped in and gave him some money and gave him some resources and he sort of He did okay, he did well after that, right?
And I think that's something that, you know, people often get confused about.
And, you know, from my standpoint, or from the standpoint, I think it's logical, I mean, certainly tell me if you think it's not, it would be sort of like saying, look, this black guy was sort of helped by this white guy who gave him some money and and you know uh... gave him some uh... uh... uh... gave him some some of the medical help paid for his medical help because he broke his leg.
Right?
And you say, oh, isn't that nice?
But then of course if you sort of pan the camera back and you realize that it's a slave owner who is uh... you know, stealing from the other slaves in order to pay for the healing of this
uh... other slave that who's like the slave owner himself broke right then you would not be so much with the aww it isn't that nice and isn't that sweet but you would look more at it being a continuum of horror from start to end and so you know if this kid from the doctor phil show was able to use student welfare and get ahead you would say aww you know isn't that nice well where would he be without welfare And, you know, that's not the question, right?
That's not an important question.
The important question is, what effect has state power had on this family structure as a whole?
What effect has state power had on this family structure as a whole?
So I'm going to just sort of theorize.
I'm going to theorize with this family.
There's some facts that we know, so I realize that some of this is going to be a stretch, but no problem.
We'll work on my family as well, probably this afternoon.
But if we look at this guy's family, well, what effect did state power have on his life?
His father, his grandfather, was a hired killer or, you know, assuming he had volunteered for the military and those who stay in the military usually have volunteered for the military, then he was somebody who decided that a good career choice would be to accept coerced tax money from the government
In order to be somebody sort of willing, able, and eager, perhaps, to go and kill people, to go and murder people that his leader points at, right?
This is obviously morally indistinguishable from a hired killer or a mafia enforcer.
And, of course, the only reason that this man was able and willing to do that, there were sort of two reasons that the father of the doctor was willing and able to do that.
The first is that he was paid to do it.
I mean, he was paid to do it and he was never going to jail.
The reason that a lot more people don't become Mafia enforcers is that the money is uncertain, you've got to have contacts beforehand, it's kind of dangerous because your enemies can fight back, and you're going to go to jail.
Even though the state power swells the coffers of the Mafia enormously through making drugs, gambling, and prostitution illegal, nonetheless, if you are a hitman for the mob, you face a number of risks.
If you are a soldier, Right.
You're going to get medals and public ceremonies and shake the hand of the president.
And so the first thing is that you get paid to do it and you're immune from retribution.
And of course in the U.S.
Army you're particularly immune from retribution because the kill ratios are like 10 to 1, 15 to 1.
And that's as late as Vietnam.
I mean it's not nearly that.
It's not nearly that bad now.
If you look at the number of people who've been killed in Iraq versus the U.S.
people who've been killed in Iraq, you're talking sort of 25 to 1, 50 to 1.
So the chances of, and that of course is the first overseas direct war deployment where Americans have faced significant risk in, you know, dozens of years.
Well, I guess you could say there would be Kosovo as well, and I don't know what the ratios were there.
But overall, as a career soldier in the U.S.
military, It's not like, you know, one out of five of you is going to become a kamikaze pilot.
You're actually fairly immune from the risk of war, especially if you get into a senior role, right?
And so it's not that dangerous.
You're well paid and you obviously get huge benefits after like 20 years of working.
You can retire, which is not too bad.
And, of course, there's social approval to it as well.
So, you know, everybody thinks, ooh, you're a soldier, ooh, you're protecting my liberty, ooh, the guns are facing outward, not inward.
Isn't that great?
And, of course, nobody associates, nobody has the, well, few people have the patience or the logical rigor to trace You know, the deployment of troops overseas to the sort of general rampant hostility to the U.S.
and foreign countries.
You know, such that the U.S.
people who travel in Europe have to wear a Canadian flag and so on.
So, that is why he was able and willing to become a soldier, this guy's father.
And of course, because he was a paid killer, then he became evil.
Or he was evil at first, and then the paid killer just made it worse.
What it did was it made it unrecoverable.
And so, if it's unrecoverable, then if you've gone and killed someone, you can't exactly go to confession or have psychological treatment and become a happy person again, because You know, what you've done can't be undone.
You can't bring someone back to life.
If you steal from someone, you can restore their property.
But there's things that you can't restore.
So that is what happened to this guy's father.
So then, of course, he becomes a violent and destructive brute at home.
So this guy, who called himself a rageaholic and was emotionally dead, You know obviously after you've beaten your children you can't experience any flicker of happiness again and you will be compelled to continue to abuse your children or you are going to have a psychological collapse that is likely to be unrecoverable, very likely to be unrecoverable because you can't give your children back a happy childhood even if you haven't damaged them physically permanently.
So this doctor was raised by this sort of paid killer of the state.
And so, of course, he says, well, I absolutely inherited my violence and my evil temper from my father, who was a military man, and so on.
So that's this generation, right?
Now, the next generation that occurs is that the father grows up to be a doctor.
Now, doctors are highly, highly in demand.
And I've got to tell you, having known Christina's stories and having written a book about this, her experience in hospitals for 10 years, doctors get away with an enormous amount because there's so much in demand because there's this sort of rigid monopoly that they maintain for themselves through their unions.
So doctors can be horrible and abusive and degrading and humiliating and they can scream, they can throw things, they can do whatever the hell they want, and they're not going to get fired.
As I've mentioned before, the best thing you can do for civility is to lower demand for people.
The higher the demand for someone, the more they can act in horrible manners and get away with it.
Freddie Mercury, the singer for Queen, once broke, according to the report of an assistant, a big mirror over this guy's back.
He was upset about having to walk from his limousine because it couldn't get through the crowd and he was angry and so on.
Because, you know, I mean, nobody's going to say to Freddie Mercury, you're fired, right?
Because he's, you know, a member of a million, you know, multi-million platinum selling band.
And a pretty key member of that is the front man, right?
So, you know, you can't exactly fire the guy.
So he can get away with a lot.
So, I mean, you can't really do much about that in the case of Freddie Mercury.
But, you know, wherever you have a situation where a monopoly restrict supply when demand maintains, it's sort of very high just as a basis, then you end up with a situation wherein people can act badly without retribution or with almost no retribution.
And that is something that is very important to understand.
When you talk about monopoly and when you talk about the government distortion of the economy, you are talking about, often, abuse of one form or another.
When you see this all the time with unions and the violence associated with unions, it's sort of too well known to go into here.
But what people don't often understand is that doctors are very often extraordinarily abusive.
And the reason that they're able to do it is because they've restricted supply to the point where, and of course the government has controlled the doctors to a very large degree, and they've done this with the full cooperation of the AMA.
I mean, the AMA could blow the state control of medicine out of the water, in about a month just by forcing everyone to go on strike.
But the AMA likes these regulations because it raises the barrier to entry, keeps the prices of its union members high, and therefore it gets to take more in union dues.
So, the reason that I'm pointing that out is that it's no accident that this highly abusive man became a doctor and was able to maintain his practice And I'm not saying he beat his patients with a whip or screamed at them or anything like that, but he faced no personal risk of career and economic failure based on his temper.
And, you know, I bet you he says, oh, I'm perfectly nice with my patients at work, and that's simply not true.
I mean, it's simply not true.
There is no such thing as Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Somebody who is abusive in one situation is going to be abusive in another situation.
The only reason that he's not directly screaming at his patients is that they defer to his authority.
In a way that his children don't, right?
I mean, children don't care what you do for a living.
They just care about whether you're a hypocrite or a good person, whether you are honest and decent and kind and loving.
But most importantly, they care about whether you're Morality is based on power or virtue.
Because, you know, the way you try to control children is to tell them that this is the good.
And if you're doing it only because you want them to obey you, because you want to humiliate them, but you're using the good, then you will never ever gain the respect and love of your children.
I mean, they will forever hate you in their hearts, and rightly so.
So, to me, it was no accident that the son of a military man became a doctor.
And, you know, of course then would have all of the scope for emotional abuse, and of course potentially physical abuse, we don't know, but certainly of emotional abuse, because state power has controlled the access to doctors, has raised the demand for his services to the point where he can do pretty much anything he wants and he's not going to get fired.
I mean, it's almost impossible to get fired.
And again, I don't know as much about the States, but I'm guessing that it's still the case.
Simply because there's too many people making money from you.
So, I mean, the AMA or the CMA, they're not going to fire you.
They may suspend your license for a short amount of time, but they're not going to fire you because they make so much money off of your salary.
The government doesn't ever want you to quit because, you know, they make an enormous money off of taxes from your income, and also, you know, the government likes to have, you know, as much crappy medical care available for as cheap a price as possible, so They're not going to fire you because that's one less doctor that's available to badly treat the general population, which makes the general population restive and may even cause them to start questioning the value of taxation for medical care and so on.
So, you know, and the patients have no power.
You know, certainly in the public health care system up in Canada, but I believe to a large degree in the States as well, I mean, patients have no power.
This is sort of why Doctors listen to you for, you know, 18 seconds before giving you a diagnosis and they shuffle you around from place to place in order for everyone to crank up their billables and so on.
So the fact that this guy's father became a doctor is perfectly predictable, perfectly understandable.
And so, of course, in the first generation, like the grandfather, you have, you know, paid A paid killer who is, you know, stone evil and so on.
And then, in the second generation, you have a monopoly-protected or quasi-monopoly-protected doctor who can pretty much do whatever he wants without fear of retribution from an emotional abuse standpoint.
He can snap at his patients.
He can get angry with them.
He can get impatient with them.
He can humiliate them.
And the patients really can't do anything about it because the demand for doctors is so high relative to their restricted supply.
And, you know, let's also look at what happened to this guy's mother, right?
Because one other option that could have occurred is because these guys have been married for like 25 years or 24 years or something like that.
And why didn't the woman leave, right?
Why didn't she leave this, you know, you're like, what, you beat my kids with a whip?
Are you crazy?
You know, I'm calling the cops and I am going to leave you.
Well, and again, I'm not saying that this is directly as causally related as what I've been talking about, but the fact is that this woman was able to spend $15,000 a month, right?
She was a total shopaholic.
And so, you know, she had gotten used to a lifestyle that she couldn't just sort of up and break and change.
And that's also fairly important to understand when it comes to figuring out the effects of state power on individuals and on families.
So the fact that her husband was a doctor who was part of this, you know, coercive monopoly of doctors meant that he was able to make You know, a pretty enormous salary.
And I don't know what kind of doctor he was, but let's, you know, even if he was a GP, right?
I mean, GPs are vastly overpaid for their ability to look up symptoms and, you know, write prescriptions, you know, which is a pretty simple thing to do, right?
Anybody with Google can sort of spend a couple of days figuring out their symptoms for, you know, 95% of what people get ill with.
and figure out the symptoms.
Sorry, maybe not 95%.
That may be a little exaggerated.
But, you know, for basically for writing prescriptions and making referrals, you know, which is a lot of what GPs do, I mean, they're not exactly doing open heart surgery right there in the table.
And, you know, they generally are pretty heavily overpaid, right?
I mean, they should be paid sort of like a pharmacist is paid, or, you know, perhaps a high school teacher.
But you know, of course, they make like 10 times that amount or eight times that amount.
And the reason is because of this coercive monopoly.
So the woman is sort of trapped in a golden cage.
And again, I use the word trapped here very loosely.
But one of the things that has occurred is that the symptom that she took, which is probably psychologically the symptom that kept her in this abusive relationship and got her to punish the guy, and it's the one thing that she couldn't leave, She couldn't leave him because she was so addicted to spending such a high amount of money that divorce was not an option because she wouldn't end up being able to spend that much money.
So that's probably why this particular symptom is how her mental distress manifested.
And don't get me wrong.
I mean, I have no sympathy for the woman.
You know, she's stone evil as well because, you know, she said on the show, Mother's supposed to protect the children and I feel like a failure as a mother.
It's like, well, no.
You're worse than a failure as a mother.
You're an evil human being.
I mean, if you don't remove your children from some guy who's screaming epithets and beating them, then, you know, you are stone evil, right?
I mean, absolutely.
So the mother, you know, probably had less reason to leave, right?
I mean, if he was some drunken Garbage men, or I don't know, like, no offense to garbage men, I'm sure you do a fine job, but, you know, if he was some lowly paid, you know, yelling guy, then, you know, she would be much more tempted to leave, right?
But, you know, because he's so overpaid, she gets sort of locked in this gilded cage and can't get out, or at least, you know, it doesn't feel like she can get out.
So that's sort of another example of, you know, the large number of circumstances that sort of co-join in order to keep these children in this abusive situation.
Now, you know, of course there are social workers who have no interest in rescuing these kids.
There are people who are afraid of this guy's economic power as a doctor, right?
So he's got a lot of money.
He also, if you, you know, if you sort of confronted this guy about his kids, you know, maybe he could sue you, right?
So he could use the power of the state for libel and so on if you tried to act in such a way as to protect his children.
Again, that's sort of another example of You know, arbitrary and coercive state power, and I mean, sort of, it's everywhere, and of course the government didn't force this guy to beat his kids or anything like that, but if you look at the power of the state, just in relation to this family, I mean, there's lots of other examples that you can give, and I'm all about going over my own family history, which I can go into much more detail than this family from Dr. Phil,
But if you look at the number of circumstances that have sort of co-joined themselves together to ensure that these children get abused, right, or to create an enormous likelihood that these children will get abused, right, I mean the government taxes people in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s to pay for this guy's father to go around the world and kill people, you know, which completely corrupts his moral soul and, you know, causes him to become a violent and abusive person if he wasn't already, or cements it even if he was already.
You know, this guy becomes a doctor wherein he has, you know, arbitrary and ridiculous levels of authority based on the monopolies that doctors have and can be abusive and destructive without, you know, having any threat towards his career advancement or his career as a whole.
And also, you know, the amount of money that he makes through this monopoly is exorbitant relative to the services that he's providing and we know that because there is a restriction of supply which always raises prices.
And so, you know, to say, well look, government power is really helping this kid because government power produced, you know, gave him welfare and, you know, he's got all these opportunities and it subsidized his schooling and so on.
Well, you know, you can't just look at one aspect of state power.
You really can't.
You can't just look at a slave owner and say, look, this guy's leg was broken and he paid to get the leg fixed.
That's nice.
You have to look at the entirety of it and it's a complex and subtle form of history to figure out what effect state power has in the corruption of families and the creation of people.
who need things like the welfare state and so on.
And so, the other thing I was going to talk about, but it's been a fairly quick drive, and maybe I'll chat about it more this afternoon, is, you know, this woman that Christina's friend knows, or someone that Christina knows, her sister, who ended up getting pregnant very young, having her kids, and then having state welfare for a time, and the history of that.
I'll talk about that briefly this afternoon, and then talk a little bit more about my own family history, which of course I can go into more detail about how it was that I ended up in Canada with an abusive mother and no sort of family support.
You know, the role of state power is not insignificant in the chain of events that led to that and I think it's worth chatting about.
I won't go into any kind of gruesome details but I think it's worth chatting about just so that you understand that this kind of evil is a continuum and a good chunk of it is rooted in the abusive power that occurs at the state level and of course a good chunk of that is rooted in the abusive power that occurs philosophically
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