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Jan. 30, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:50
76 The True History of Violence (Part 2)
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's 5.23pm on the 30th of January 2006, and I'm heading home.
And I want to talk about the role of state violence in, I guess, long-term or familial corruption.
Because, you know, is there a more positive topic in the world?
I don't think so.
And as I mentioned this morning, in sort of an examination of a particular family from the scientific lab of Dr. Phil, I did want to talk about what What effects that state violence have, and in a very sort of subtle manner I think, in a sort of generational type manner, what effects that state violence has on those who end up in sort of corrupt family situations.
Now, for those of you who are psychologists of one form or another, amateur like me, or professional, it may, of course, have crossed your mind, as it certainly has mine many, many years ago, that it's possible that my hostility towards the state is a displaced hostility towards my own parents, and to all the sort of authority figures who were sort of bad in one form or another in my life.
I'm fully willing to accept that as a hypothesis.
I have done some pretty rigorous self-examination in this area, and I would say that there's some effect of it to some degree, of course, but one often associates the state with masculinity, yet I didn't have any masculine influences in my life.
So, I think that the one thing that, if I were to sort of look into my past and say, okay, well, how did my own experiences with authority shape my thinking around the state?
I think that what happened, if it's interesting to play a game of sort of cause and effect in terms of current beliefs and past experiences, what did happen was that I really didn't have anything to lose by questioning authority.
I mean, I myself, as a younger sibling, and sort of heard it around from school to school, I had no authority, and from country to country, I had no authority in my own life.
And also, I never expected, really, to gain any benefits from having authority.
And furthermore, I never was exposed to any sort of authority figures that were positive, and so I don't think that that gave me a hatred of authority.
I think what it did is it gave me a kind of clarity around authority.
In other words, you know, when you read these sorts of myths, like let's say the Norse myths, you've got Odin and And Ragnarok, and all this sort of stuff.
And you read these kinds of myths, and to you they seem, you know, kind of quaint, and maybe a little silly, and maybe a little overbearing, or overwrought.
But you can really see through the mythology to, you know, understand, well, why did these people believe it?
And, you know, what was in it for them?
And, you know, you can look at it very anthropologically, because you have no emotional investment in those myths, right?
You look at the sort of ...cat gods of ancient Egypt, and you sort of think, well, that's interesting, I guess, but, you know, it's kind of hard to...
To understand the worship of a cat, but you can look at it sort of sociologically and so on.
Well, I think that that was sort of my experience in growing up around authority.
That I never really gained much from it.
I never really possessed much of it myself.
I was never exposed to any really positive role models in that way.
You know, the toughest prejudice that I had to overcome was, you know, the belief that war was a positive value.
You know, this is sort of growing up on the British monography.
This was the greatest prejudice that I had to overcome.
So the way that you look at sort of Egyptian cat gods is sort of how I look at the state as just an interesting or fascinating power structure that has dominated mankind and does, you know, enormous evil and so on.
But I don't have any particular emotional investment in any government, right?
I've never felt that I am part of any country or any culture.
I mean, I think, like most libertarians, we don't feel that the current culture really reflects our lives and desires and values in any real way, shape, or form.
And any parts of the culture which do represent what we value are those parts that are being overwhelmed, like the vestiges of past rationality that are being overwhelmed by the current mad stampede towards self-destruction that Western society is in the midst of.
Actually, probably more than in the midst of, towards the tail end of.
So, you know, I sort of put that in as part of my sort of regular habit of talking about full disclosure and also to, you know, if anybody wants to write to me and say, well, you know, you really need to deal with the emotional issues with your family rather than attacking the state, I would say, of course.
I mean, that's so self-evident that, you know, the first thing that you want to do when you are Analyzing something is to understand your own motives and motivations around it.
You know, am I angry at the state because my father abandoned me?
Well, I don't think so.
After some pretty rigorous self-examination in this area, I don't think that is the case.
But, of course, even if it were the case, it wouldn't have anything to do with the logic of my arguments.
I mean, let's say that I was mad at the state because my father abandoned me.
Then, you know, you could play that game if you wanted, which might be, you know, I guess interesting.
And, you know, there's lots of biographers who make pretty good coin out of making up this kind of stuff.
But it really wouldn't have anything to do with the validity of what it is that I'm saying.
You know, you may just sort of have this opinion yourself.
But I don't believe that it is the case.
I have had great relationships with mentors in my business career.
When I have authority myself, which I really, I guess, finally got in my late 20s when I founded a business and became the manager of dozens of people.
When I got authority myself, I used it, you know, very gently and very carefully and I do believe very productively, right?
You know, whenever I had to call an employee into my office, I was fully cognizant of the fact that it's scary to have your boss say, you know, I need to see you in my office.
So, you know, I would sort of come up with phrases like, oh, listen, can I borrow you for a moment?
You know, some sort of non-threatening way of getting people into my office so I could talk to them about X, Y, or Z, you know, whether positive or negative.
You know, whenever I had to fire people, I tried to be as gracious and kind as possible and to help them get new work if they were good.
At what they did, but just wrong for that position or wrong for this company.
So, you know, if it were sort of psychologically motivated, then I should have a more unstable relationship to authority, which I find that I'm quite comfortable with and believe.
You know, I mean, authority, for instance, grows out of the utility that you can provide to those you have authority over, right?
I mean, the only reason that I was a manager was that I could help people the most.
In terms of making them productive.
That's sort of where my authority came from.
So I think it's safe to say that, although in the interest of full disclosure, I do want to talk about this possibility that my political beliefs are motivated by sort of early childhood or childhood experiences, I don't think that is the case.
And also, even if it were the case, so what?
It doesn't really matter in terms of true or false, right?
You know, Einstein might have had a pet dog named Relativity Uh, that he loved to death and that gave him the idea as it raced around the yard of the, you know, the constant speed of light, but it doesn't really matter other than sort of tertiary psychological interest.
It has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of his theories, so I'm just sort of putting that out because of course I'm going to talk a little bit about my family and the role of state power in corruption and the role of state power in ending You know, with me sort of in a situation where... sort of a very negative family situation.
So, you know, just so you know, I do have a full awareness.
I think a full awareness.
I mean, it's hard to say full because, you know, you learn new things every day.
But I have a pretty full awareness of my own emotional experiences in the past.
And I've worked through, you know, a lot of them and so on.
And so...
You know, if it freaks you out that I'm talking about the state and my childhood, then I hope that it's all right with you, because it certainly is all right with me.
And, in fact, I think it's a very interesting lab from which to approach things.
So, let's go back.
And again, I'm only going to go back three generations, although I could go back further.
If you actually are at all remotely interested, you can look up, certainly in a first-year psychology textbook that was around...
15 years or 20 years ago, there is a mention of one of my ancestors, who is a good friend with John Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher, with whom I have some overlap of agreement and some overlap of disagreement, but you can look up this guy, I think it was William Molyneux was his name, and we have a sort of history of being interested in ideas, I guess you could say.
And, you know, if you go back even further, my family, according to my father, who has some interest in these things, for reasons which will become clear, my family's French name, although we lived in England and then took up residence in Ireland, the French name came from the fact that we came over with William the Conqueror in 1066.
Fought at the Battle of Hastings, and I guess did fairly well.
Because we were given some titles and some land, and that's sort of the history of the family, right?
So it's founded on the good old blood-soaked warrior race, and that's sort of on my father's side.
On my mother's side, there's a lot more, I guess, Jewish influence, or Jewish history, as far as I understand it.
My grandmother was Jewish, which I've also been told makes me Jewish, so I could give, you know...
I could give a flying fig about that, since the idea of taking on somebody else's sort of pre-scripted identity would just feel unbelievably claustrophobic and nightmarish, you know?
Of course, if there are Spinoza and Jewish philosophers who have great ideas, fantastic!
Let's jaw about it all night, but the idea of taking on some sort of pre-formed cultural identity is just a complete I don't know.
I view that with complete horror.
So, you know, although people have said, oh, that makes you Jewish, I really can't imagine that that would have any interest or relevance to me.
So that's sort of the two sides of the family.
My mother's side of the family is sort of intellectuals and leftists and writers and so on.
And one of them did a big history of the unions and another one run sort of national prize in poetry.
So I guess you could say that I have some language and rationality from both sides of the family.
And, you know, although I don't know them, right?
I don't really know... I certainly don't know my mother's side of the family at all.
One or two I sort of knew briefly, but never really got close to any of them.
And on my father's side of the family, when I was younger, I used to spend sort of summers with aunts and uncles at the houses in England and Ireland, and that was great.
You know, I love the outdoors and I love spending time, you know, swimming and hiking and fishing and so on.
And, but I don't really know them.
I mean, it's been, oh Lord, it's almost 30 years now since I've sort of really had any contact with them.
So, you know, they're not a very strong influence at all in my adult life.
But to take up my father's side of the story, and this is just sort of great, let's go from sort of great-grandfather to grandfather, great-grandfather Apparently you're not such a bad guy.
My grandmother on my father's side lost an enormous number of, I can't remember the exact number, but an enormous number of relatives in the First World War.
And, you know, as large, I guess fairly large, landowners and aristocracy within Ireland, apparently I have the right to use Esquire at the end of my name.
But to me, that's about as relevant as having a Jewish heritage or whatever.
To large landowners...
I mean, one of the deals, right, is that you're sort of in the military if you needed to be, right?
So, of course, lots of male relatives went over and got blown to atoms in the First World War.
And, you know, of course, the entire family fortune was based on the aristocracy, which is a state-reinforced monopoly on land, which you have not earned, right?
I mean, you could say that you earned it by killing all the peasants who used to live on it, But I don't really view that as a particularly strong case for property rights, I guess.
So, you know, we have sort of a state brutality in our history and sort of part of the apparatus of state brutality and certainly large beneficiaries of state power.
Which, of course, warps your thinking and so on.
One of the things that's quite true about British culture is that they're very keen on separating children from their mothers, sons particularly, from their mothers ridiculously early.
I was sent to boarding school when I was six.
I mean, it was just, you know, can you brush your teeth?
You're off!
And the reason that they do that, of course, is that they want to separate you from sort of any softening maternal influences, as if that were possible with my mother.
But sort of softening influences of the feminine kind you need to get the kids away from.
You also need to put them in, you know, entirely vulnerable positions so that they can be brutalized by sort of their elders, right?
I mean, so you put a pack of kids together and separate them from their parents.
It's like Lord of the Flies with little ties.
So you want to make sure that you separate children from their parents.
Their mother has put them into these brutal social Darwinian environments.
And that way, you know, when it comes time to brutalize those under them, either in the military or just sort of in the aristocracy, when it comes time to To, you know, pillage the peasants.
Then, you know, you've already killed any capacity for empathy that they might have.
So they're good, willing soldiers and brutalizers of the existing state structure.
So that's, you know, one of the main reasons why, you know, boarding school is so important to British upper-crust families.
And so there was an enormous amount of death and destruction in my family during the First World War.
And then my great-grandfather was a profligate, and a womanizer, and a drunk, and gambler, and so on.
He got rid of most of the family fortune, as is sort of want to happen.
You know, a family sooner or later, this idiot gene strikes and, you know, the family fortune gets sort of whizzed away, I guess you could say.
And then my grandfather, sort of looking at the declining lands and, you know, the huge debts that had been left to him by his father, He decided to sell everything off that we had and throw it into education.
He was a pretty progressive guy in a strange way.
My father grew up with four sisters.
I guess there would have been more kids, but I'm not sure what happened to stop at five.
My father grew up with four sisters and all the sisters were well-educated.
My father was well-educated and so they stripped the remaining family fortune to provide education for their children and then sent them out into the wide world.
So, of course, you know, the family psychology, the family dynamics are entirely corrupted by sort of state violence in terms of war and state violence in terms of maintaining this hateful and theoretical and, you know, corrupting and, you know, fantastic and nonsensical privilege of the aristocracy, right?
Because we killed a bunch of people, we get a bunch of land, and if you try and take it from us, we'll kill a bunch more.
You know, not exactly the free market in action.
And then, of course, on my mother's side, my uncles were bomber pilots in World War II and, of course, were swept up in the sort of mad slaughter of the sort of helpless German civilians and children.
And as I think I mentioned before, one of my uncles was on the Thousand Plain Bombing Raid that caused the firestorm in Dresden in 1944, where my grandmother on my mother's side was murdered.
So, I mean, just sort of a sick pan-European nightmare of death and slaughter is sort of the history of my family.
And so then, of course, my mother was born in 1937 in Berlin.
And, you know, of all the places to be and all the heritages to have, not The best place, of course, is she had a completely nightmarish existence for the first, I guess, 10 to 15 years of her life.
I mean, just...
I mean, it wasn't like Germany snapped right back into place in 1945.
So she had this complete nightmarish existence, right?
So you have, on the one hand, we have a sort of warrior race.
On my father's side, you know, big other military, lots of death, murder, slaughter, and mayhem.
And then on my mother's side, you have people who are sort of more intellectual, slightly more lefty, but, you know, definitely, you know, bombed into the crap, had the crap bombed out of them in World War II.
And my grandfather joined the resistance movement and fought against the Nazis.
And so, you know, here again you have just sort of murder and slaughter and death and mayhem on both sides of the family.
And, of course, my mother and my father met in Africa.
And I sort of always believed that you could have an airplane hangar full of 5,000 people, put my mother and my father at opposite ends of the room, and they would absolutely make a beeline to each other because they're just, you know, You know, both of them together are like 20 pounds of crazy and a 2 pound bag.
So, you know, they got married.
I won't go into the whole history about that because that's sort of less relevant.
But, you know, when things went bad in their relationship, you know, my mother was sort of hounding my father with sort of threats of lawsuits and litigation and taking him to court over and over again and so on.
And so my father was sort of hounded out of the company by my mother's use of state power.
He was perfectly willing to pay alimony and child support, but my mother was very greedy and rapacious.
She was a beautiful woman physically, and so she had lots of sway with lawyers who would be happy to do some sort of pro bono work for her.
So my mother was able to hound my father with this belief that she could get all this money from him.
And again, it's complete abuse of state power, right?
I mean, these sorts of state legal apparatuses where you can get this kind of stuff done is, you know, would be a lot tougher to do in a stateless society.
So, of course, my father, well, he had a lot of trouble trying to get any kind of work in England, right?
He was a geologist, so there were some reasons for that.
But also, you know, there was a monopoly, again, a state-enforced government union monopoly on teaching and higher education, as there generally is.
So the government is responsible for the universities and there's a union which keeps people out of teaching, so he couldn't sort of, although he's taught a number of times at universities, he couldn't get a job teaching, which is sort of the alternative if you are unable to practice your craft in the land that you're in, geology being sort of specific.
And he had done his PhD in Africa, so he basically, by being hounded by my mother's Abuse of state power and also being unable to penetrate into the unions to be able to stay in England and teach.
He fled to Africa and returned his career there.
My mother, of course, she was pretty poor.
Another reason that we were poor is that by returning to Africa, my father, and this is the story, I don't know the truth, but I believe it's true, he was unable to send money to my mother and my brother and myself because you can't send money out of South Africa, or at least you couldn't in the seventies, say.
And I'm sure that's true.
You just can't send Money out of out of the country and so my father was unable to to give us as much money you know as he says I don't know if it's true or not right with the sort of he says where you can't get the money out of the country and therefore assuming that it's true then of course another reason why we were poor was a because my mother had used the
power of the state to drive my father out of the country and because my father couldn't get work in a field where he could have stayed around and helped us financially then well You know this is a then he couldn't get money out of the country in Africa So there's lots of reasons sort of state power had sort of it didn't break up my family Although you could definitely say that both sort of families exposure to the brutalities of war had not given them exactly the most stable of
capacities to relate positively to other human beings.
And so, you know, state power, you know, sort of brought my parents together.
Sorry, the state power produced my parents' personalities to a very large degree.
And then when they, so, you know, sort of rendered them incapable of having a productive emotional relationship with each other, and then when they split up, state power You know, caused my father to flee and state power messed up my mother in terms of giving her access to the corruption of the legal system and so on.
And so then, of course, right, normally what would happen is that the woman would need to find a man, right?
I mean, this would be the sort of logical thing that you would have to do.
You got two kids, young kids.
I was like six months or a year old.
So you have two young kids and you have to, you know, get someone to help you, right?
Because you've got to go to work.
Who's going to take care of them during the day and how are you going to deal with it?
So again, I'm just talking about a free society here.
You would have to find someone to sort of take care of you.
And so you would probably, if you wanted that, right?
Someone to take care of you and your children if you're a woman.
So if you wanted to do that, you know, the logical thing to do would be to say, huh, okay, well, I really messed up this last marriage or You know, even if I put the entire blame on my husband and he's a jerk and so on, well, I chose this jerk and chose to have children with this jerk and also chose to have, you know, a second child when the marriage was clearly in significant danger, right?
So, the normal thing to do, knowing that you need to get another man to sort of help you pay your bills and to take care of whatever your kids, and knowing that for a man To take on two very young children is not such a positive thing.
You would kind of need to start fixing yourself up, right?
Like, you would kind of need to not... Like, you'd know, well, if I get another man who's a jerk, it's going to be really bad for me, right?
Because I'm going to lose my alimony or, you know, lose the little amount of money that I'm getting from my existing husband.
So I've got to get me a quality man, a man who's going to stick around.
I have this liability of two little children that's not going to be this new man's first choice to invest his time, money and energy into.
So, I better make myself a much better person so that I'll be able to attract a great guy and, you know, have my kids taken care of.
You know, you would normally, just based on economic reasons, you would have a very strong incentive to improve yourself, right?
To find a way of relating to people better, to deal with some of your demons and so on.
But, of course, what did my mother do?
Well, she found a place where she got subsidized housing.
She took the publicly subsidized buses into town to work At a legal firm.
I think, coincidentally, they dealt with a lot of government business, but that's sort of neither here nor there.
So, on the income of a secretary in subsidized housing and with subsidized transportation, and of course subsidized schools, well, free schools, right?
And subsidized Daycare or you know sort of after-school care well because of all of that she was able to make a go of it So she never had to sort of improve herself to the point where she Could have a stable relationship with a decent guy, so she kind of got away with it, right?
She got to have all of the economic goodies without having to have the maturity or the sort of being a better person that those things would normally require or entail so of course that I had an enormous impact on myself, right?
So my mother never had to deal with her demons and my mother never had to sort of get a better guy than the one she'd had.
So, of course, she had this series of, you know, low-rent idiotic boyfriends, never really interacted with me very much, but, you know, obviously not guys who are real keen on settling down, but guys who were just sort of attracted to her physical beauty and, you know, liked, I guess, the sort of arm candy of my mother and, you know, but never any sort of quality or decent guys.
Now, of course, the interesting thing then is that we end up... I'm sort of jumping around a little here, for which I apologize, but I'm just trying to pick up the sort of influence of state power on my family.
And we move to Canada, right?
So, you know, of course we get rent-controlled and heavily subsidized apartments in Canada.
Again, free schools and so on.
So, you know, again, a move that would have been tough to make financially without having sort of improved yourself to the point where you could attract and keep a quality guy and so on.
And, you know, so then shortly afterwards, well, my mother, as I've mentioned before, has a sort of mental collapse, and there's a variety of reasons for that that I'm aware of, but I don't have to get into that here.
It's not a pleasant topic, and why clutter a perfectly logical analysis of state power and its effect on my family with things that are troubling and don't serve anybody else any purpose.
So, you know, my mother had this mental collapse.
And then what happened?
Well, of course, she was put into an institution.
And, you know, of course, this is all paid for by the state.
All of the medical care that she required and required beforehand and so on, all paid for by the state.
And, of course, there's no insurance company that's taking any interest in getting her better, right?
I mean, this is sort of this, how did state power corrupt this aspect of things?
Well, in Canada in particular, right?
If she'd had an insurance policy, then they would have had some interest in getting her rehabilitated.
But, of course, there was no insurance policy.
So, what happened?
Well, of course, what happened was that, you know, doctors sort of kept referring her to places and, you know, the psychologists kept, you know, sort of giving her tests and, you know, she was put into the institution and then taken out and then put in again and You know, everybody's making a fortune off this sort of deranged woman, and nobody has any stake whatsoever in making her better, right?
I mean, because it's sort of state power, right?
So my mother gets sort of trapped, and again, I'm not sort of painting her as any kind of victim, because she had choices all the way, but my mother You know, views herself, or feels, or ends up being trapped in the system.
And then, you know, there's other things.
She sort of uses state-sponsored legal aid to start suing these doctors, thus causing an enormous amount of trauma.
And also this fantasy that these legal aid lawyers were going to get her some large amount of money, again, prevented her from dealing with her demons, the issues, the guilts, the anger, the rage.
emotional dysfunction that my mom had shielded from herself for so many years, primarily through the exercise of state power.
So, what happens then?
Well, I mean, skip over all of the stuff that I went through as a teenager to sort of keep skin and bone together.
What happened then was, of course, my mother got put on a disability pension, right?
So she's now getting money from the state, which allows her to survive.
So she's in rent control department taking publicly subsidized transportation.
And she is put on training courses, which, you know, take up some of her time and energy.
She's merrily suing these doctors on state-supported legal aid.
She is getting disability pensions.
And she's in a, you know, heavily rent controlled and subsidized department.
So she's able to make a go of it, right?
Based purely on, without working, without fixing any of her problems, without dealing with any of her demons, she's able to survive.
Which is kind of important, right?
I'm not saying she's rich, but there's a big difference between, you know, 15k a year and zero, right?
So, what does this mean?
Well, what it means is that my brother and I have no control over her whatsoever, right?
We can't, you know, in a sense, force her to do anything.
And I know that sounds harsh, you know, force your mother to do stuff.
But, you know, it is, of course, something that, when you are dealing with somebody who is self-destructive, right, you do like to be able to have some control over their behavior, right?
I mean, or at the very least, to not be forced to subsidize their misbehavior, right?
So, my mother is on this wantonly destructive path of suing doctors and screaming at people and, you know, just sort of Uh, you know, way beyond the pale in terms of mental health.
Now, theoretically, of course, if my brother and I were paying her bills, then we could have Being able to say, look, you have to go to a psychiatrist, you have to get on some antidepressants, you have to start taking therapy, you have to start dealing with these issues.
And we would have had some pretty good power to achieve that if, you know, without us she would have, you know, kind of nothing, right?
She would be out on the street and so on.
I'm not saying we would have pushed it that far, but It would have been a sort of heavy leverage to have in negotiations with my mother because, you know, as it stood, whenever we tried to reason with her or tried to get her to improve, you know, she'd just blow up and scream and so on.
And so there was no capacity for us to affect any of her behavior because, you know, everything that she did, all of the consequences of her actions, she was shielded from through a sort of violent state.
coercive power.
So, you know, all of this is sort of very, very important.
And I don't sort of say this because I think that there's any particular interest in my family history.
I do say it, though, because if you want to start looking at where people end up in their lives, in It's sort of very important to understand how they got there.
And 99.9999% of the time that I've looked into it, people who've ended up in a bad situation have ended up there because the state has subsidized all of their terrible decisions to the point where they have simply not generated or developed any better habits.
I mean, we're sort of aware of this at a fairly obvious level when we think about, you know, if the state sort of subsidized gamblers, subsidized their gambling, then, you know, the chances of them not gambling would be very slim, right?
All right, to none, right?
Slim to none.
And so, you know, the only thing that causes certain types of personalities to change is, you know, hitting the wall, right?
Running up against, well, gosh, I really can't do X and I can't do Y and I have no money and I've alienated whatever, right?
So the sort of community or the sort of communal sympathy that you need in order to be able to protect yourself from problems in your life.
You know, these people just don't develop it.
They just don't develop it, and that's sort of important.
And how can they not develop it?
Because, you know, all of their stupidities, and all of their immaturities, and their evils, and their incompetencies, and their irrationalities, they're all subsidized.
So, to sum this up to some degree, and you can rewind if you want a more detailed summing up, But, you know, when you look at somebody like my mother and say, oh, you know, this poor woman, she, you know, she's obviously not very mentally well, very mentally, and she needs the States, and she needs this kind of help, and so on, because, gosh, you know, there's just lots of people out there, it seems like this, and, you know, how can we throw them all out onto the street?
You know, you really are putting the cart before the horse.
I'm not saying you would do this, but if one were to.
Because you need to look at how did this person end up in this position, right?
How did this person end up so completely dependent on state subsidies and state handouts and so on.
And I bet you, you know, you look into their history and you're going to find that to be the case, that the reason that they ended up in this position was because of state subsidies to begin with.
So for instance, and just sort of to top it off with a topic that I mentioned beforehand, I'm sorry, let me just go back one second, because it's not just state subsidies, it's also state corruptions in terms of, you know, war.
I mean, war is obviously, as I've mentioned in recent articles, Subsidized by the state and only possible because of the income redistribution that the state is the very nature of the state.
But, you know, it's not just, you know, welfare and so on, but it's war as well, right?
My family is completely corrupted by war, by the arbitrary power of being aristocracy, by the constant subsidies of people's bad behavior.
I mean, just, you know, crippled.
I mean, emotionally and mentally crippled, my family.
I mean, All of this abuses of power that they were both enmeshed in as perpetrators and as users and as victims.
War plus subsidy equals mental illness just about every single time.
And that's where my mother ended up.
Is she responsible?
Well, of course she's responsible.
But could she have made far better choices if she had had You know, a different set of incentives and punishments.
Well, of course!
I mean, she absolutely would have, right?
I mean, there are very few people who won't be brought up short when they're facing a life on the streets, right?
I mean, especially women, right?
I mean, so, again, I'm not saying that we should wave this around as punishment, but, you know, the natural consequences of, you know, failing to improve oneself economically can be pretty harsh, right?
Failing to learn how to negotiate, failing to learn how to create win-win situations.
All of these things have, you know, pretty extraordinary negative effects financially.
And, you know, yet with the state, they can all be survived.
And therefore, they're just people don't hit the wall, which causes them to change.
So to mention briefly the topic that I talked about this morning, which was, you know, this woman who, you know, had a kid and got into welfare and, you know, ended up doing better and so on.
This is a very interesting topic.
And just to sort of mention it briefly, why I think it's important in this area is that if you look at the realm of sexuality and, you know, And sort of understand that, you know, the control of reproduction, of teenage reproduction in particular, is pretty essential to families, right?
To understand that is to understand the role that welfare has sort of had in corrupting families and corrupting social structures such as this.
So, you know, let's just sort of roughly tally the economic bill that a child out of wedlock produces in a family, right?
You know, it generally will curtail the educational progress of the mother.
It will cause enormous medical bills because, you know, I mean, you may not have insurance for teenage pregnancy and therefore you may have to pay for it directly.
Or even if you do buy insurance for female pregnancy, I bet you it's going to be pretty expensive.
So either way, there's a lot of negative costs there.
You may have the cost of a wedding, if you're lucky, and you won't if you aren't, which is going to cost you even more in the long run.
You're either going to have to put up, if you're the parents, the grandparents are to be, with your kid having her kid in your house, so a screaming baby and so on, which is pretty disruptive.
And of course, you may only be in your 40s, Which is sort of not what you want.
You may be in the height of your career.
So there's a lot of expense around that.
Of course somebody's going to have to pay for all of the natural expenses of childbirth and early childhood.
Diapers and cots and you know all of the sort of peripheral stuff that goes with clothing.
All the stuff that goes along with having a baby.
So, you know, enormously expensive.
And then, of course, as the kid gets older, either the mother completely arrests her development and stays home with the kid, or maybe take an online course or something.
But, you know, it's kind of hosed economically.
But the parents, of course, have to start subsidizing.
If the mother wants to continue education, the parents either have to babysit, which is a huge investment in time, Or they have to hire a babysitter, which is obviously very expensive and somewhat risky.
And this is before the baby gets to school age, right?
So, of course, in a free society you have to pay for your own schools and so on.
So, I mean, just economically it's a complete nightmare.
The other thing, too, is that in terms of the marriage market, You know, any man who's looking at a woman who already has a kid with another man, and especially if that kid is young, must automatically knock, you know, what, half a million dollars off his net worth, right?
He's got to pay half a million dollars to get a hold of this woman because he's now going to have to subsidize and take care of this kid from here to eternity, right?
So, and it's not even his kid, right?
So the woman in the marriage market now has a significant liability, which means that she's going to end up with a worse quality man than if she were not with a baby, if she didn't have a baby.
And that has a lot of effects, right?
So you're risking another baby and another... like you tend to go down the slippery slope, right?
So you could be risking another baby with another shiftless man who's also going to take off.
You know, you're going to risk a guy, you know, being interested in the daughter finding out about the baby and saying, whoa, not for me.
Or, you know, there's sort of any number of other things that might occur, but generally the whole family is going to be net negative quite a bit because of the expense of this baby who's going to have to be taken over by By the husband, or, you know, by a woman if the man has custody of the baby.
I mean, I want to sort of make this all about mothers.
So, you know, economically, and then there's tons more that you can go into, but economically, it is an enormous catastrophe for a woman to have a child when she's not in a stable relationship.
I mean, it doesn't have to be a marriage, of course, but some relationship wherein the costs and burdens are going to be shared.
And so, of course, the question is, when the net negatives are taken away, what happens to people's desire to control or to influence, particularly female sexuality, in the teenage years?
Well, I'm telling you, it kind of evaporates, right?
It's not going to be eliminated completely, but it's going to be a heck of a lot less than if families had to bear these enormous financial burdens directly themselves.
Or, you know, if the mothers had to directly themselves, well, people would be a heck of a lot more careful, right?
I'm not saying anything like abstinence.
I'm talking about a more rational approach to sexuality, which is, you know, you just make sure you get the implantation of the pill, or you make sure that the woman can't get pregnant, Or, you know, you use three condoms in a spermicide.
Or, you know, you sort of honestly and openly talk to your children about alternatives to intercourse wherein they can experience sexual satisfaction without the risk of this, you know, financial catastrophe called an unwanted pregnancy or a pregnancy outside of a stable relationship.
But, of course, with the power of the state riding into the rescue of unwed mothers, well, then, you know, the medical costs are subsidized, you get welfare, you get child supplements, you get free dental care, you get free pills and shots.
I mean, everything is so enormously subsidized that, you know, I mean, basically it's like, yes, you got pregnant, that's a bad thing, that's a stupid thing, you shouldn't have done that, blah, blah, blah.
But it's not like an, oh my heavens, where are we going to come up with half a million more dollars over the next 20 years, you know?
I mean, that's all pretty important stuff.
So, you know, the question is not so much, well, look, this woman got pregnant.
She was a teenager.
The guy didn't stick around, but she got into welfare.
And isn't it so much better now that she's a productive member of society, and so on?
Well, no.
No, it's really not.
Because again, you have to look at the influence of violent power, state power, in its capacity to shape decisions like having unprotected sex, or taking the risk, or whatever, and knowing that the consequences are not going to be a complete economic disaster, but that you will be able to survive, and you will be able to sort of make it.
And, of course, the more people do that, the more that other people do that, the more it becomes acceptable, the more you look like a square for saying, well, it's bad to have a baby outside of a stable relationship.
You know, and it's sort of hip and cool.
I'm not saying it's ever like a real positive, but, you know, lots of other people are doing it, so it seems like kind of a viable option.
And, of course, as I've talked about before, having a baby and being a mom is probably a whole lot richer than, you know, having to flip burgers at some job.
And so, if you can sort of make the same amount of money off, you know, sort of net, But have a baby too and not have to get up and go to work that way.
Then it sort of becomes more of a viable option, especially if lots of your friends are going to do it and you're all sort of hanging out and so on.
So when you're looking at questions like, well, this person benefited from welfare and isn't that nice and isn't that great, then you do sort of have to look a little deeper, a little bit more into how did she end up in that situation where she required that kind of state subsidy because she had a baby and so on.
And I would absolutely tell you for sure I mean, just look at the statistics, if you don't believe me, on sort of teen pregnancy and unwed mothers and so on, that it's entirely because the state subsidies have shifted the risks and the burdens and the costs away from those who have bad habits towards those who have good habits, right?
I mean, it's the people who have, you know, gotten married, have stable relationships, and who have kids at a responsible age in life who pay the taxes to support all of the people who make bad decisions and, you know, Have kids early and non-stable relationships and so on.
And so anytime that you're going to transfer money away from good decisions towards bad decisions by force, well, you're going to increase bad decisions and you're going to diminish good decisions, right?
Anything you subsidize will increase and anything you tax will decrease.
So, I mean, that is sort of a fact, right?
I mean, again, don't take my word for it.
Just look at the statistics and, you know, Drive around certain sections of town and you will see, you know, what I'm talking about.
So, I mean, this has been a fairly lengthy and involved discussion.
I hope that it's been helpful.
I think that if you do want to have a look at the effects of state power, I mean, you know, taxation is just one tiny aspect of it, I think it's very important to go back and look at family histories and get the full history.
And you can, of course, look in your own history and see if there's anything that's of value here.
And please let me know if there is, and you don't mind me sharing it anonymously even on emails of the week.
But, you know, go deep, go find out exactly what's happened at the root of things that have produced these kinds of situations, right?
I certainly look at my mother as, you know, a will-less person, and that's her responsibility, but a will-less person who got caught in a sort of the narcotic web of state power, and became sort of inured to, or immune to her, the negative consequences of her own opinions, because, you know, they were sort of slow, subtle, and years in coming, and by the time they came, she'd already kind of given up the ghost as far as mental health went.
So, you know, look deep into these kinds of questions and don't just sort of assume an even starting point, right?
You know, like, well, this woman, you know, she had a bad family and so on.
Well, why did she have a bad family?
How did that bad family survive economically?
You know, how did they flourish?
What decisions would have been different if they hadn't had all their bad decisions subsidized in one form or another?
So, I just think it's very important to look at that so that we can get a clear idea of the effects of state power Because, of course, what we want to do is to try and prevent these situations from coming into being, not to find ways of solving them when they are already in existence.
So I hope that that's a helpful approach.
Please let me know if it is.
And, of course, please let me know if you want to sort of open your kimono the way that I have and let me know a little bit about your family history and look deep into the subtle effects of state power.
And I think you'll find that a lot of your family history is dominated by the existence of state power of one kind or another, so please let me know if that's the case.
Thanks again for listening, as always, and I hope you're doing well.
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