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Jan. 31, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:23
78 Running to Lions for Safety
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It is 20 to 5 on January the 31st, 2006, and I had a fine podcast this morning, but I didn't get to vent my spleen, so I'm going to have the rant that I postponed this morning, which left me just, you know, bottled up all day.
And I'm going to get into it this afternoon.
Now, this comes off a show which most libertarians who want to raise their blood pressure enjoy watching, and that is the fine CBS show called 60 Minutes.
Now, 60 Minutes is sort of, in sort of my view, and I'm no television critic, but, you know, it does sort of strike me that it is the Old guard facing the new world, right?
So these are sort of slightly older journalists who probably haven't faced any real government controversy since Vietnam and probably never thought that they would see things like pictures from Abu Ghraib and Outright invasion of a country for, you know, without even the pretense of trying to stop the domino effect, which of course never happened.
And, you know, probably a little shocked to sort of see things like the 9-11 attacks and, you know, the unbelievable escalation in the war on drugs and, you know, sort of the old guard journalists looking at the new types of problems that are in the world or in American society.
At least I can see them sort of trying to process this when they're on the show.
It's like, well, what can this mean?
I don't really even understand what language we're speaking when they're interviewing new people or the younger people on the show.
And one of the things that sort of struck me was that one of them, I think it was Ed Bradley, the cool guy with the earring, he had a show basically around how
a nuclear attack in an American city would seem likely within our lifetime or whatever within the lifetime of the older middle-aged person and that the government was supposed to be buying some some sort of serum or antidote to radiation poisoning and so on you know and they had ended up encouraging or
This company, I can't remember its name, they felt that they'd been encouraged to sort of research this serum and produce millions of these sorts of serums.
And so they invested, they got investors, and then the government ended up ordering like 100,000 of these.
And of course, if there was any sort of nuclear attack in an American city, you would need millions, right?
I mean, it would just be lunatic, and they would have to be self-administered, right?
There's just no way that you would have the kind of hospital facilities that you'd need to treat.
You'd be able to treat dozens of people, you know, maybe a hundred, you know, but there'd be hundreds of thousands of people who would need treatment, so you would need the stuff to be self-injectable and, you know, to be handed out without the...
The need of a physician's approval or administration.
So, I mean, all stuff that if you had a logical society you would sort of recognize as being a necessity.
With the important caveat, of course, being that if you had a logical society, and I don't mean a logical world, I mean a logical country, a free country, a country without a state, then you would never have to worry about people blowing up your cities with nuclear bombs.
And, you know, this is a particularly different kind of peril than occurred with the Soviet Union.
Of course, as somebody who's in his late thirties, I grew up with this sort of mad fear of nuclear war, but at least you were, you know, somewhat limited.
The fear of war was somewhat limited by the principle of mutually assured destruction, so that you knew that, yeah, the Soviets might be completely lunatic, but, you know, they want to live too, and if they launch, then we launch, and everybody goes up in a puff of smoke.
Therefore, it seems unlikely that, unless they're sheer devils, which they weren't, then it seems unlikely that that's going to occur.
So, although it was a scary time, there was still this mutually assured destruction thing.
Now, of course, what happens is now we have an amorphous enemy, supposedly, which, you know, is an enemy without a state.
That can't be attacked, that, you know, that sort of moves through the ductwork of society, so to speak, and, you know, is organized into cells and, you know, you can't nail it, right?
You can't wage a war.
The enemy is somewhat arbitrary and perhaps to some degree imaginary.
But, you know, they don't... you can't strike back, right?
I mean, so this, of course, has raised... has really reduced the risk of launching a nuclear attack, especially a dirty bomb kind of attack, because you can't strike back at anybody.
And, you know, this is one of the general principles of modern warfare that we've talked about before, that defense is now Far cheaper than offense, right?
Because in World War II, you know, to bomb a city cost about as much as to defend a city.
You know, anti-aircraft guns sort of were an equal price parity to the four-engine Lancaster bombers.
And so you had a kind of rough parity.
Now, of course, you can bring down a $20 million plane with a $20,000 Stinger.
And so, to attack is very expensive, and to defend is pretty cheap, right?
I mean, it's one of the things that happened in Afghanistan when the CIA was funding bin Laden and the Mujahideen, that they were able to weaken the Soviet Empire, you know, because you had this unbalanced war of money, right?
All wars.
Fundamentally, a wars of money, a wars of attrition.
And so now, of course, how do you defend against a dirty bomb?
Well, you can't, obviously.
I mean, practically, and to all intents and purposes, you know, lots of stuff is missing, lots of stuff's floating around from the former Soviet Union and other places.
So, I mean, it hasn't happened yet, but it seems sort of likely to happen.
And, you know, this was going to be, of course, one of the ultimate nightmares.
And to some degree, you know, a fitting And, although completely unfair to the victims, but a fitting end to the cycle of, you know, bombing cities that began with nuclear weapons, that began with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in, I guess, August of 1945, and where, you know, hundreds of thousands of people died, both during and after these bombs.
And, you know, I know there are people who say, well, we would have had to invade Japan, and, you know, it's absolutely not true.
It's absolutely not true, and they knew that at the time.
You're never going to have to invade Japan in 1945.
The reason that they hadn't, you know, had this phrase, unconditional surrender, and all the Japanese wanted to do was to keep the Emperor in place.
Well, not the Japanese citizens, who I'm sure would have been happy to surrender at any price, but the Japanese ruling class, the people who had the right or the ability to sign a peace treaty.
They said, well, we'll surrender, but we want to keep the Emperor in place, and the United States says, no, unconditional surrender, bombed a bunch of cities, I mean, the firebombing of Tokyo was 100,000 people killed.
I mean, it's not quite as bad as the radiation one, but certainly one of the worst sets of bombings in the Second World War.
And so the U.S.
ended up bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were non-military targets.
And, you know, because they wanted unconditional surrender, at least that's the story, and the Japanese said, well, we want to keep the Emperor in.
And then after the bombings occurred, after the nuclear weapons were unleashed on an innocent population, then the United States let the Emperor stay in power anyway.
So, unconditional surrender was the mantra, and the bombs were for some nefarious purpose, which I don't think has ever been revealed.
I mean, there's lots of theories, you know, show off to the Soviet Union or whatever.
But, you know, the fact of the matter is that it was a simple genocide for no purpose.
I mean, there was nothing in the peace treaty that was negotiated with Japan at the end of the war that Japan was not willing to concede completely before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were dropped.
So, I gotta tell you, it is awful, the cycle of violence, and I would have nothing but sympathy, and will have nothing but sympathy for those who get caught up in a nuclear conflagration in America, but it is a terrible kind of cycle that occurs wherein, you know, America as the only city that has ever dropped an atomic bomb on an innocent civilian population may end up with the same thing happening in reverse, and these two things are not unrelated.
They're not unrelated.
I mean, I'm not talking about karma or anything silly like that.
I'm talking sort of a sheer logical fact of the matter that The act of dropping... I mean, it's the Second World War.
That was where the states got particularly brutal in terms of their attacks on civilian populations, right?
So the First World War slaughtered the men at the front, but the Second World War slaughtered the men, women, and children behind the front to an equal or greater degree than were slaughtered at the front.
And, you know, this, of course, you don't get a social institution called the government that slaughters millions of people who have nothing to do with The declarations of war or even direct combat, you don't get governments that slaughter millions of people, which is not then fundamentally corrupted as institutions and are now going to be full of, you know, the most evil kinds of people.
I mean, that's simply inevitable.
I mean, you can't sort of murder someone in cold blood and be the same person afterwards.
And social institutions like governments, while they don't have any objective or biological existence, do have a kind of culture that attracts certain people and repels others that, you know, That propels some people up the ladder and other people get kicked out.
And the act of genocide that occurred in both the British and the American governments, the direct targeting of millions of civilians and the direct slaughter of millions of civilians, you know, there's a reason why these two countries ended up in Iraq, right?
I mean, this is not accidental, right?
Once you start to dig into the cause and effect of things, very little in life does It turned out to be accidental at a sort of macro level.
And so, I guess the thing that I got out of this, I mean, of course there's this nonsense, like the 60 Minutes article, there's this nonsense about, you know, oh, the government should be, you know, the government should be buying more of these serums, and it should, you know, not be buying less of its serums, and so on.
And I just think that's plain silly.
I mean, come on, people, how long does it take?
How many New Orleans does it take?
How many Iraqs does it take?
How many Vietnams does it take?
How many welfare state programs does it take?
You know, how much abuse do we have to take before we finally get it through our thick skulls that these people are not interested in protecting us?
That we are protected only to the degree that we provide resources to the people who own us?
I don't know why it's so hard for people to understand this.
Perhaps it's the case with libertarians, I don't know.
But certainly there are many libertarians who think that the state can be controlled or reformed or minimized or something like that.
This is all complete nonsense.
You cannot minimize profitable evil.
The best you can do is beat it back to remission and have it start its growth again.
There's no state in history that's ever been successfully and permanently reduced in size.
So if it hasn't happened for 6,000 years, don't wait for it tomorrow.
It is simply a social institution that, like slavery, we must simply get rid of.
The degree to which you think it is reformable is the degree to which you are serving the enemy, the degree to which you are in the service of evil.
Because the people in the government like nothing more than for us to debate about how it should be reformed.
You know, how it should be controlled, or how it should be improved.
It's just hilarious, right?
I mean, they have no problem with all of that nonsense, because it doesn't question or oppose the fundamental premise, which is there's a group of people in society who are outside a general moral law, but who use a sort of false moral law to dominate others.
If you can't answer that question, We've no business talking about the government.
And once you do answer that question, you realize that there can never be, morally, any such thing as the government.
So, I mean, aside from, you know, oh, the government's not buying enough serums and so on, it is just sad.
It is sad to see.
It is sad and depressing, and it makes me angry to see Just how pitifully people cling to this fantasy, you know, that there's someone out there who's going to love them and take care of them, and that the government wants to help, and, you know, there's these shining, glowing public servants who are only interested in wake at dawn, and only sole thought is the protection of the people, and... I mean, my God, people!
It's just astounding that After the 20th century, and after 9-11, and after New Orleans, and after Vietnam, and after Korea, and after... I mean, you could go on.
I could do two podcasts just listing off the amount of crap.
After Nicaragua, after Grenada, after Haiti, after Kosovo, after bombing the aspirin factory in the Sudan, I mean...
What conceivable justification could there be for the idea that anybody's interested in protecting us?
It's just astounding!
It's like there is no God up in the sky who is watching your every move and taking care of you.
And there is no government in Washington or in Ottawa that is looking after you and trying to figure out how to best serve your life.
I mean, the people who are in government are sociopaths.
The people who are in government are fundamentally Anti-life, fundamentally anti-value.
You know, if you are somebody who can provide value to other people, you don't get behind the trigger of a gun and point it at them.
You know, if you are somebody who can win the love of a good woman, you don't turn into a rapist.
If you're somebody who can earn a productive living and enjoys the give and take of business, you don't become a thief.
You don't become a stick-up artist.
You know, the people who are in government are clouded by a poisonous, thick fog of evil.
And they're absolutely a living cancer upon the world.
And they are not interested in helping you, even if they were like us, even if they were just like us.
Do you wake up every morning and figure out exactly how you can go about helping all the starving children in Africa and in India?
Well, no, of course not.
You go to work, maybe you give a little bit to charity and so on, but you don't.
And one of the reasons that you don't is because there's nothing that you can do that's going to work.
I mean, the only thing that you can do that's going to work to actually help people is to educate people about truth and morality and philosophy, and that's a long-term solution.
But there's nothing that you can do, you know, if you see sort of that famine in Ethiopia, it's entirely man-made, right?
I mean, the famine that was in the late 80s, early 90s, and you saw these pictures of these poor men, women, and children in the middle of a stony desert, huddled on the ground.
And of course, the first question any sensible person asks when you see that is what the hell are they doing in the desert?
Well, of course, what they're doing in the desert is they've been herded out there so that the government can get lots of foreign aid to buy military and an army so that it can further oppress them.
That's what's so funny about watching that duncehead Bono prance around wanting to rip off uranized money to fulfill his own megalomania about saving people.
You know, I mean, he's a crazy, loony, lefty socialist.
Fine singer, fine songwriter, great performer, but dude, you know, get off the magic carpet ride!
You know, governments are the cause of the problem in the third world.
And governments are not the solution.
And, of course, governments are going to want to party with a rock star who tells them to raise taxes on their population.
But there's no chance that the foreign aid that you're talking about is actually going to go and help these citizens.
And we can get into foreign aid another time.
It's a very complex topic and a very interesting topic.
But foreign aid has nothing to do with helping the citizens, but rather it's a kind of reverse taxation.
And subsidy to Western corporations, right?
So I mean, you'll give money to a foreign government in return for that foreign government giving contracts to your military or to companies within your public or private sector.
So it's just a way of subsidizing in a different kind of way.
And of course, you know, the amount of arms that governments sell abroad is staggering.
So the idea that you're interested in foreign aid when you're selling arms to third world governments, that you're interested in the health and welfare of their population, it's just, I mean, it's a grim, black, horrible Dark joke.
So, we can get into that another time.
But, the other thing that I wanted to mention was, well, how is the whole, they're here to protect us, working out for you, America?
I mean, that's sort of a fundamental question.
You know, how is the whole, we're relying on the government to protect us, working out for you?
I mean, you had the whole 19th century, you know, almost no wars.
You know, you didn't get involved in the foreign entanglements that the Founding Fathers warned you to stay away from.
There were almost no wars the whole 19th century.
You know, the United States has declared war three times and it's gone to war dozens and dozens of times.
But in the 19th century, almost nothing.
I mean, the Spanish-American War, I don't even know the dates, but I know that there was almost no war in the 19th century.
Then, you know, I won't go into the whole details because I've gone into it once before, but, you know, the First World War, the Second World War, the Depression, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War.
I mean, at the time that you were, that America was negotiating the treaties to close off World War II, I mean, the State Department was stuffed to the gills with KGB spies.
I mean, these are the people that you're relying on to protect you.
You know, then of course you get unbelievable amounts of meddling in the Middle East, both because of the Bush-House of Saud kind of relationship, where there's $200 billion of funding to the House of Saud, which of course pisses off Muslims, even the crazy Muslims who are fundamentalists, don't like the House of Saud because it's so obviously a playboy, you know, death cult that, you know, I mean, even if you're a Muslim, you're not going to be that big a fan of them.
You certainly don't like the, I mean, given that these people know the Crusades the way that we know Vietnam, you know, having Christian soldiers over there, you know, not so nice, really.
Not such a good idea.
To be out there waving Christian guns in the face of Muslims who, while a crazy bunch of loons themselves, didn't exactly fare too well and have very strong memories of the Crusades.
And, you know, so you've got all of these 800 U.S.
bases all overseas.
I mean, you have troops stationed in Germany, in Italy, in France, all throughout the Middle East, in India, in South Korea.
I mean, there's just... And why?
I mean, what complete lunacy is this?
What the hell does the U.S.
government have to do in any of these places?
I mean, would America feel happy if China decided to station 100,000 troops in the United States and we're patrolling up and down Times Square.
Wouldn't we get kind of pissed off at that?
And yet, these are the people that are supposed to be protecting us.
And then, of course, you get this sort of abortive bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, which the U.S.
government, to my knowledge, had some involvement in.
And then you have, I mean, the war on drugs.
The welfare war on illiteracy, the government's educational programs, which just turn out dumber and dumber people every day, forcing the U.S.
simply can't stop importing people because its own citizens have been too poorly educated to run the economy that was developed by their forefathers.
And now, what happened?
Well, we had 9-11, right?
And would that be enough to say, Geez, you know, I really don't think these guys are doing a very good job of keeping us safe.
Because, you know, a couple of thousand people just got murdered right in front of my eyes.
So maybe we should look for some alternatives to what's actually going on.
No, no, of course not.
What happens then is everybody says yay to the Patriot Act.
And off they go to Iraq, right?
And off they continue to fund Israel.
And yes, yes, I know.
I know that Israel is a wonderful democracy in their own example in the Middle East.
But, fine.
Then, you know, make money off the Jews around the world to send money through the synagogues.
That's fine.
But don't tax Everybody else to support your desire to go and live in the midst of your sworn thousand-year enemies, right?
I mean, of all the places to go and settle down as a country, they could have gone anywhere, right?
They could have bought up tracts of land in Brazil for, you know, dimes an acre and been perfectly content to have a Jewish state in Brazil.
uh... which they could have uh... you know defended it from you know who would ever go on attack them there but now of course the jewish uh... estate has to be founded right in the middle of uh... you know uh... countries which have sworn uh... you know a sworn enemies of the jewish race since the dawn of time and of course the reason that the jewish government i did that all the jewish state was created there was that the government Uh, can continue to pillage the gullible forevermore based on the fact that they're in danger, right?
So, oh, we're encircled by enemies and so on.
It's like, well, that's fine, you know, but you chose to go there and, uh, you know, if you're encircled by enemies, that was sort of stupid, wasn't it?
But, um, so of course, you know, the United States funds Israel to billions and billions of dollars a year and sells arms and, you know, They're always sort of in the one-two lockstep at the United Nations.
And no change in policy.
I mean, everything is just an escalation of what came before.
And it's just astounding.
It really is exactly like watching a drug addict kill himself.
You're getting a diminishing return on the drug, so you escalate more and more the stuff which is causing your life to become more and more miserable until you die.
And this kind of addiction, the addiction to violence fueled by the fantasy of state benevolence, is, you know, the death spiral of the American empire.
And it is going to end in a particularly ugly way.
And it's possible that it's going to end with bankruptcy.
It's also possible that it's going to end with some sort of dirty bomb.
I don't consider the latter one too likely, because I think America's doing exactly what the people who hate it overseas wants them to do.
But what is amazing to me is that At no point is somebody saying, gee, well, not nobody, but almost nobody is saying, you know, this really doesn't seem to be working.
Maybe we should take a pause here and regroup and re-evaluate.
Because, you know, we were told we were safe and that, you know, we had this dangerous, deadly enemy in the Soviet Union.
And it turned out that the Soviet Union was not dangerous or deadly because it rotted from the inside and collapsed.
And who knows how many decades before it collapsed, it was no real threat.
And then, you know, the first World Trade Center bombing, second USS Cole, and then the Nigerian bombings, and then the second World Trade Center attacks, and the Pentagon attacks, and the planes that crashed in Pennsylvania were shot down, more likely.
And now we're talking about dirty bombs right after the invasion of Iraq.
And the amazing thing is that people are still out there thinking that the government is interested in protecting them.
And I just can't believe it.
I just can't believe it.
It's like watching abused children go back home over and over and over and over again.
And their parents getting worse and more abusive and more violent and more destructive.
And they just can't break out of this death grip of fantasy.
And really, that is the price that is going to be paid.
You know, if there is a dirty bomb, or if there is a nuclear bomb in a US city, you know, I hate to say it, because it is a terrible, terrible kind of justice.
The kind of justice that I would never countenance as virtuous, but it is a terrible kind of justice that, you know, a country which is refusing to begin to really examine the nature of state power and the nature of state control and the nature of the foreign policy.
I mean, the information is all completely available.
It's exactly the same argument that I used for the Christians in terms of moral responsibility.
You know, there are websites where you can get every single bombing raid that ever occurred over Iraq in the 90s.
Thousands and thousands of bombing raids.
Hundreds of thousands of people killed, or starved, or, you know, died through lack of medicine through this embargo.
All of the information, people, it's a click away.
It's a couple of clicks away.
If you want to get a complete breakdown of US foreign policy and the atrocities committed overseas by the US Army, or the British Army, Easy peasy, nice and easy.
All you gotta do, couple of clicks, couple of Googles, and you're there.
Nobody's asking you to pull an alias and break into the archives of the CIA late at night and smuggle stuff out.
You know, we're not talking about a major investment of time or energy here.
It's right there.
It's completely available.
It's less work than turning on the television and finding a show on the topic.
And if people don't do it, if they continue to let their taxes go to a government which brutalizes people overseas...
Then it's going to keep happening, and you know what?
It's going to get worse, and it's going to get worse, and it's going to get worse until people wake up.
That is the very nature of fantasy.
That is the very nature of illusion.
Your life will get worse and worse and worse until you wake up.
That is just a natural fact of life.
I wish I could do something about it.
I really wish I could, but I just can't.
There is simply no way That you can live in the shadow of evil and continue to fuel it through illusion and through taxation and not take a clear moral stand against evil and not have universal moral rules that you're willing to obey and to sanction from whichever way the guns are facing.
There's simply no way to do it and maintain a happy life.
It's absolutely impossible.
And if it's not a dirty bomb attack which kills 10,000 people, then it's going to be a nuclear weapon that kills 100,000 people.
And if it's not that, then it'll be a series of nuclear weapons that kills a million people.
And it will continue, and it will continue, and it will escalate, and it will escalate, until people wake up.
That is always the way that it works.
There's simply no capacity for the human psyche to live in destructive illusions and have things to be stable.
The truth is stable.
Honesty, integrity, those things are stable.
Violent lies and falsehoods and addictions are not stable.
You know, people's... The great thing about getting older, for me, is that you begin to see a real arc in people's lives.
So I've now known some people for 30 years straight.
You can see a real arc in their lives.
Things are not stable.
You know, the people who seemed cool younger and who were kind of nonchalant about any kind of emotional growth or who were cynical or who were flippant or whatever, well, they pay a price.
You know, they pay a price.
The people who went for style over substance, they pay a price.
The people who went for flash over integrity, they pay a price.
Things don't stay stable.
So all illusions continue to exact an increasing price on the psyche until the illusions are rejected or questioned and evaluated and rejected.
The unfortunate thing, of course, is that If those illusions have continued to the point now, and of course in Western civilization they have continued for thousands of years, that we need a state, that there is a God, that countries exist, that the collective has some moral rights separate from the individual, all of these things, the illusions that we have carried in the West, and I'm only going to talk about the West because the East is quite another topic,
But the illusions that we have carried about the nature of morality and the fact that we have used the arguments for morality to create highly segmented moral criteria or moral categories so that, you know, a policeman has one, a soldier has another, A politician has another, a union leader has another, a person on welfare has another.
I mean, we have almost as many moral categories in the West as we have people, and yet we claim a universal morality.
And these kinds of illusions, where we are taking the power of the argument for morality, which is the most powerful argument that exists in the world, because morality drives the psyche and everyone's life, we have used the argument for morality and turned it to the service of evil, to the splitting up of Human society and human individuality into wildly opposing moral standpoints.
So, some people must be taxed, some people must tax, some people must receive tax, some people cannot murder, some people are allowed to murder, some people must murder, some people cannot steal, some people are allowed to steal, other people must steal.
I mean, we have just created so many, such a kaleidoscope of moral imperatives, that it is no accident
whatsoever that our society is facing increasing violence confusion chaos destruction uh... and addiction to to further and further fantasy i mean if you build your house on sand you are going to be forever trying to prop it up and every time you prop it up you make it more lopsided and it gets more collapse uh... is more prone to collapse uh... it is just ridiculous the amount of mental energy that people are spending these days
To keep this spinning, kaleidoscopic, mad fantasy of moral fragmentation alive, it's just, it absolutely is astounding.
And they keep running back for more, and keep running back for more, and everything keeps getting worse, and keep getting worse, and nobody will wake up!
I mean, this could be such a wonderful and beautiful world!
This could be such an amazing place to live!
The kind of joy that I have in my life, and that I have with my wife, could be everyone's!
And why shouldn't it be?
We're all born healthy and virtuous and great and wonderful and creative and intelligent.
And we are bludgeoned either physically or emotionally or mentally in the public schools.
We are bludgeoned into near-comatose.
We are bludgeoned into near-vegetative state.
I mean, we are corrupted and warped and undermined and destroyed at every turn.
And the illusion that we have is that the people who do this to us are interested in saving, helping, protecting, giving us a leg up.
I mean, we have, as a society, a complete Stockholm Syndrome relationship to power and authority.
And now that they're talking about dirty bombs in US cities killing hundreds of thousands of people, there's still no impetus for people to wake up and wonder, how the hell did we get here?
What steps did we take where we ended up watching a TV show Where terrorists would be willing and able.
This is a scenario that is willingly entertained.
That terrorists would be willing and able to slaughter hundreds of thousands of defenseless citizens.
How did we get here?
Why do they hate us?
Because we're virtuous?
No, well of course not.
And I've talked about this in two podcasts before, so I won't go into it again.
But, you know, they hate us for the same reason that we hate them, right?
We hate them because they kill us and we're scared.
And they hate the U.S.
government because the U.S.
government kills them and they're scared.
You know, the U.S.
government, like, if you want to understand how your government views you, Your government views you, obviously I've used metaphors before, livestock and so on, but even the most benevolent people in your government view you pretty much the same way that you view starving children in Africa.
Well, it's sad, but really what can you do?
I gotta go to work, I gotta make my money, I gotta feed my kids, I gotta pay my mortgage, I gotta...
I've got to get ahead, I've got to do X, Y, and Z, or my mother's ill, or I've got to do this, or, you know, I've got to have this family function, or I've got to buy 16 presents at Christmas, I've got to... I mean, it crosses your mind from time to time, and I guess you'd sort of say, well, it'd be nice if it were different, but what can you do?
Maybe I'll send a little bit of money here or there, or whatever.
But your government views you exactly the same way That you view these people, and that's the best!
I mean, a lot of governments, and your government to some degree, views you exactly the way that the Ethiopian governments view their Their own citizens, which is points to be used for the self-aggrandizement and for the expansion of their political power.
The same way that the Ethiopian government herded all of its citizens into the desert and then sent pictures all around the world to generate millions or hundreds of millions or billions in foreign aid, it's exactly the same way that your government continues to expose you to rampant weapons of mass destruction type dangers in order to continue to escalate its power and to gain control over your taxation and to have you further surrender your civil rights.
This is how your government views you.
It's not even as benevolent as a slave owner to a slave, because at least the slave owner has to keep the slave healthy.
It is not even as healthy as a prison guard to a prisoner.
It's not even as healthy as a farmer to his livestock.
So a farmer to his livestock at least has to keep the livestock healthy and reproducing.
It is simply a parasite to a... Sorry, it's not even a parasite to a host.
It is a predator to prey.
That is the relationship that you have with your state.
At the very best, the most benevolent you're going to get is You two starving children in Africa would be nice if it were different, but really what can you do?
I'm busy.
But, you know, the vast majority of state activity occurs at the level of predator-to-prey.
Right?
The farmer at least has to keep his livestock alive.
The lion cannot survive unless he eats the antelope.
And the predator-prey relationship is entirely clear.
And, you know, it's unbelievable to me that one by one the antelope are getting picked off, and the rest of the antelope are sitting there huddled together, all chittering to each other.
It's like, oh, we need to rely further on the lions to help protect us.
We need to rely further on the lions to help save us.
Oh my, how are we going to do that?
We've got to really write the lions, because it would be great if the lions would really help protect us.
I mean, it's just madness.
It's just complete lunacy and madness.
That this would be the approach that people would take to the problem of danger.
To go directly to the predators, to offer the predators more money, more power, more guns, more subservience, more praise, more worship.
And think that the predators are going to do something to protect you?
It's just astounding to me!
And I know that in the Libertarian movement, as Ayn Rand's influence, and Ayn Rand was a Russian, and therefore she had a very aggressive sense of foreign policy, because she hated the Soviet Empire, so she was very... And she was, you know, I don't know what her ideas were about Israel, but, you know, I certainly know that the Ayn Rand Institute seems to be pretty pro-Israel.
Well, pro-Israel.
But, I mean, none of that means anything.
You know, the fact of the matter is you just need to look at the information that you have in front of you.
The interests of the government are directly opposite to yours.
Every time they win, you have to lose.
The government powers continue to expand over and over and over and over and over again for the past 200 years.
The government has no problem slaughtering people or leaving them to sort of starve and rot in New Orleans.
The U.S.
government has now been negotiating our safety in the world to such an effective degree that now we have to worry about hundreds of thousands of people being murdered by dirty bombs.
I mean, if this isn't a predator-prey relationship, I really don't understand what a predator-prey relationship might look like.
You don't run to the stick-up artist looking for personal protection.
I guess you could pay him not to attack you, but even that doesn't work with the government, because the government continues to escalate taxation and foreign wars.
So there's simply no metaphor that I can really understand it, except it's a bunch of antelope running to a bunch of hungry lions looking for salvation and safety, and it is just complete lunacy.
So I hope this has been helpful.
I'm going to... Actually, good.
I kept my temper fairly well, I think, which is nice.
And I hope this has been helpful.
Obviously, feedback is always welcome, and I hope you're doing well.
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