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Feb. 6, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:44
87 Cultural Blindness

The beam and the mote... Chomsky and state violence

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Good morning everybody, it's Steph.
It's 8.20 on the 6th of February 2006 in the AM.
I've actually been up since about 4.
I had 12 hours of sleep on Saturday and then seemed to be paying for it since it apparently appears that I must never get between 6 and 7 hours sleep on average, but that's alright.
Sometimes if you have a slightly overactive brain, one of the consequences you pay for it is sleeping a little lightly, so fair enough.
I was actually listening last night to Noam Chomsky, to an audiobook that I use the site called audible.com, which I highly recommend to people who are interested in listening to audiobooks.
It's great.
It's like 20,000 titles and you can join, so I think for me it's like 15 bucks a month and I get two audiobooks a month, which is more than I can manage.
Especially now that I used to listen to them in my car, but now instead of listening I am creating, so I guess that's a slightly better standpoint.
I've also invested in some slightly higher quality headphones, so hopefully I won't get as many complaints as I was wanting to get in the past from people who were saying, you know, dude, you know, love the podcast, but you might not want to sound like you're podcasting from inside a cement mixer.
So, fair enough.
And this is, of course, people who've thrashed their way through a couple of my food court A podcast where I am, of course, amid sneeze and clatterings and rumbles and so on.
So let me know if this level of quality works for you.
And I did, of course, record the top 10 myths about libertarianism yesterday using this microphone that I'm using in my car now.
But it was, of course, at home, so there was much less.
I've also tried taking the recording level down.
I think that that's going to eliminate some of the background noise, and of course it's a lot easier for you to turn your audio player up than it is for me to keep cranking mine down.
So I think this will work out in terms of quality.
I hope it will.
So anyway, as I was saying, I was listening to Noam Chomsky.
The man is an encyclopedia, without a doubt, and a very, very impressive thinker.
And I was lying there, sort of listening to Noam Chomsky talk about foreign policy, and oh my heavens, he is so bang on, it's ridiculous.
And, you know, you can ask him any question.
He goes from quoting Churchill in the early 20th century, to statistics about massacres within Vietnam, to the feminism, to the 60s revolutionary movements, to racism, to analysis of power structures.
I mean, he's a He's quite an intellectual master in so many ways, and I was sitting there thinking, geez, did I just call this guy a crazy lefty in one of my podcasts last week or the week before?
I was thinking, good lord, how unjust can you be?
I mean, this man is bang on and so on.
So I'm listening to him, and if you do get a chance to listen to his lectures on foreign policy, they are just scathing and irrefutable from a moral standpoint.
But then I continue listening to him and the talk turns to domestic policy and yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum out come the pirate ships of state programs wherein he's, you know, talking about Social Security, is about helping people and so on and then he mentions his Jewish background and, you know, then it all sort of comes together because one of the things that is very true is that the Jewish culture is very big on helping the less fortunate.
And because it is a collective fantasy or falsehood, the scar tissue that's inflicted on the young, which is sort of my definition of culture, they end up with, you know, crazy ridiculous ideas and a complete inability to see the violence that is inherent within their own group, right?
So they're very keen on analyzing the violence that is external to their group, i.e.
the American government to those overseas, but they really can't see the domestic violence, i.e.
social programs, welfare states, Social Security, and so on.
And they view that as sort of nice and helping people and the reason these programs are in place because we want to help people.
And, oh Lord, it just makes you wonder what happens to these people's levels of rationality.
In other words, why would it be wrong for the United States to inflict violence overseas in the form of wars and predations and subsidies to foreign murderers and so on, but once you pass across this magical imaginary border called the United States boundaries, why do the moral rules suddenly change and now it's perfectly fine for the government to inflict violence upon its own citizens in the form of social programs?
It's a mystery to me, but the only reason that it's not completely baffling is... Sorry, it's a mystery to me why they can sort of stomach this level of irrationality while, you know, being very, very rational.
But the way that I understand it, of course, is to look at, you know, that this man has a Jewish past and what that means.
And it's not specific to Judaism.
It's all cults and it's all irrational, you know, invisible apple handing out kind of groups.
The reason that he can't see domestic violence is because he cannot see the harm that was done to his own capacity for rational thought by being brought up within an irrational community, right?
The dinner table of the invisible apple hit him pretty hard.
And sensitized him to violence, but then what he does emotionally is he pretends that the violence is only one way.
It's like he abstracts it to the government out and never talks about, you know, the rabbis and the, you know, sort of family rooms or dining rooms, family rooms full of PhD people who consistently lied to him about what it means to be human, right?
I mean, because they talked to him about Judaism, which is a completely imaginary fantasy that is very destructive, like all imaginary fantasies.
And this is sort of one of the main reasons why Judaism was responsible for, you know, a good chunk of socialism and, you know, could be considered largely responsible for communism.
So, you know, Marx and Engels were... Sorry, Marx was Jewish, Trotsky was Jewish, Lenin was Jewish, and so on.
And, you know, one of the things that happened, and it's very, very hard to look at this stuff objectively without feeling like you're sort of going into the creepy land of anti-Semitism, and I don't mean that in any way, shape, or form, but, I mean, other than sort of anti-collectivism, which, you know, Judaism falls into a category of it, and I wouldn't want to be just accused of picking only on Christianity.
But one of the things that happened in Germany during the 1920s-1930s, which culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust, was that Germany, of course, was much closer to Russia than we are.
So what happened was, the association of Judaism and Communism was very strong.
in Germany at the time.
And, of course, what happened was when the Jews got into power, they murdered... Sorry, when the Communists got into power, which, you know, was primarily a Jewish phenomenon, I mean, they murdered 10 million, 15 million Christians.
I mean, largely it was the Christians who were killed, or the kulaks, the sort of the richer peasants or the landowning peasants, who were almost exclusively Christian.
So, the way that Germany, or Germans, or a good chunk of Germans, rightly or wrongly felt, was, look, if the Communists win, you know, we Christians are all going to get slaughtered.
And, you know, they associated Communism with Judaism, and not unfairly.
And so when, you know, when the Nazis came along saying that, you know, the Jews were out to get the Christians, and that You know, we better get them before they get us.
It's not inconceivable why they might think that.
Again, this is like... I mean, I shouldn't need to say this, but perhaps I will for people who are shocked by this.
I mean, this is in no way meant to excuse or perform any kind of exculpatory action on the horrors of the Holocaust, because it wasn't like, you know, the innocent Jewish men, women, and children dragged off to these death camps ...that Auschwitz and Sri Lanka and other places were guilty of communism.
I mean, it was ridiculous.
If anything, they were merely guilty of the collective illusion that all mankind is guilty of, that it's more important to believe what other people say than what are the facts.
And, you know, human beings pay an enormous and sort of bottomless price for that illusion in terms of war and collectivism and social programs and state violence and Criminality and so on.
I mean, this is the price.
Everything that we believe that is false exacts a terrible price and it's not my rule.
I mean, in some ways I wish I could change that rule because it seems like the punishments are too heavy for the level of illusion that is involved for a lot of people.
But it is simply a fact of reality that if you believe things that are false, a terrible punishment will befall you or your children or your community.
And so when the Russians believed in communism, a terrible fate befell them, and it was unjust because it was the Russians of the next generation primarily who suffered.
And when the Jews believe in something false like Judaism, like being Jewish, which is just a collective fantasy, then they have a terrible price exacted upon them, which is both some, and I don't like to talk about collective responsibility, but it would certainly seem to be the case that just and I don't like to talk about collective responsibility, but it would certainly seem to be the case that just about every Jew that I've talked to has this belief that social programs are benevolent, and it would logically follow from their own belief that their community as a whole is benevolent, despite the fact that
I mean, not just the religious side of things, but the social side of things.
Like, the majority of Jews are not particularly religious, but they are still very big on this collective concept called Judaism, which is, you know, complete nonsense, right?
I mean, it's one of the things that has never been fully explained to me, despite asking a number of people who are both Jewish and also knowledgeable about Judaism.
Well, is it a race, or is it a religion, or is it a culture?
Or you could say it another way, instead of saying it as a religion, as a belief system.
Now, if it's a race, then obviously it has no moral criteria, right?
I mean, race has no moral criteria whatsoever.
There's nothing moral about being Asian or black or Caucasian or anything like that.
There's no possible benefit for simply based on genetics.
There's no moral criteria.
So you can't be better because you're part of a race.
So, okay, so they say, well, it's not a race.
Well, then, is it a belief system?
Well, if it's a belief system, then it should be not specific to any group, but rather should be a label that is created for anybody who holds that belief, which seems only logical.
So, for instance, you may not be a libertarian, but after slogging your way through my endless rounds of pontification, Maybe you've had some sort of drift towards that ideal or maybe you've sort of said, okay, well, I generally believe that morality is universal and absolute and, you know, it's not up to me and it's not up to you.
It's sort of up to the laws of logic and the facts of reality.
Therefore, there's no such thing as the government.
Therefore, there's no such thing as moral rules that are different if you call yourself somebody in the government and so on.
And maybe you've come the whole way to a rational understanding of society and morality.
Fantastic!
Good for you!
I mean, you're not obeying me, you're not obeying anybody else, you're just obeying the rules of reality and reason and your own conscience, which is, you know, good!
You can't be happy if you don't!
And that's great, then you can call yourself a libertarian or whatever.
Stephanesque, if you're thinking, I don't know, that was a term that an English teacher came up with when he began reading my plays.
Ah, it's very Stephanesque, he said, because, you know, because I have a silent x at the end of my name, it's tough to create any kind of movement named after me.
Basilosque?
Who knows, my middle name is Basil.
So, you know, good for you!
Then you are whatever, you know, a libertarian or whatever.
So, you know, you don't have to go through any ritual, you don't have to be born into it, you don't have to, you know, pass any test.
If you believe something, then you are that thing, right?
So if you advocate the scientific method, then you are, you know, sort of rationalist.
If you advocate a belief in religion, then you are a mystic or religious or, you know, an idiot.
So, you know, if a belief is merely a collective label for people who hold those beliefs, then if I sort of wake up one morning and say, you know, gosh, I'd really like to be Jewish, and I sort of pick up a bunch of books and read them and say, well, this is what I believe, well then, lo and behold, I should be Jewish, and there should be no way that anybody can tell me that I'm not.
I mean, there's no one who can tell me I'm not a libertarian.
We may have definitions about the belief, but they certainly can't tell me that I'm not an empiricist.
Or a rationalist, insofar as the supremacy of reason is the criteria for determining truth and falsehood.
You know, supremacy of reason derived from and validated by the consistent evidence of the senses, and so on.
Then, you know, nobody can say that I'm not that, right?
I mean, if I'm a fan of the Maple Leafs hockey team, I'm probably the only one left at the moment, given that I think they last won the Stanley Cup in 1967, a year after I was born.
Then, no one can tell me that I'm not a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Like, I go to their games, or even if I just sit at home and say, well, I did watch the game, even though no one can verify it, if I say that I'm a fan, then I'm a fan.
And, you know, so if I say that I'm Jewish and I believe what the Jews believe, then I should be, lo and behold, considered a Jew.
But, of course, I'm not.
To convert to Judaism is quite a chunk of effort, right?
It can take years.
And you know, even still, you're never really fully believed to be that intimate with the faith or the cult.
If you sort of come in from the outside, it's always sort of vaguely suspicious.
And Jewish parents don't say to their children, oh gosh, you know, it doesn't matter who you marry, but you know, maybe it'd be nice if they converted to Judaism.
They don't say that.
They say, you know, you find a nice A nice Jewish boy or a nice Jewish girl and you settle down and in fact one Jewish woman I know got such significant pressure from her parents to marry Jewish and to have Jewish children that she was told that if she marries outside the faith she is continuing the work of the Nazis in terms of eradicating the Jewish race.
Well in that case of course it's no longer a belief system because nobody could adopt it without sort of approval from the cult leaders so it's not just a belief system.
So it's not a race, because that doesn't have any moral criteria.
It's not a belief system, because you need somebody else's approval to carry the label.
So, you know, well, what can it be?
Is it a culture?
Is it sort of a set of generalized cultural beliefs?
You know, the value of education, you know, whatever, the dominance of the matriarchy, who knows?
But, of course, it's not that, because there are many other cultures who have that same belief, and they don't call themselves Jewish, of course.
I mean, generally, sort of, immigrant cultures or cultures where there's been a significant transfer from a historical and usually land-owning society have a great belief in education, right?
Because that's how you get ahead in a society where you don't have a lot of property.
You become, sort of, you invest in intellectual capital rather than physical capital.
So, you know, generally it sort of dodges around Judaism, and this is true for a lot of cults, right, but it dodges around the question of inclusion.
So if you're born into it, then you have to be part of it, or, you know, if you're not part of it, then you're a bad person and you have to sort of create other people like yourself and marry within the cult and so on.
And, you know, but then, of course, they say, well, we're the best.
Well, why are we the best?
Well, we have these beliefs, we have these values.
Oh, okay, so everybody who holds those values is also the best.
No, no, no, no, because they have to have the culture.
Oh, okay, so people who hold the belief and the culture are the best.
Well, no, because, you know, it's matriarchal and blah, blah, blah.
Oh, so we're back to the race.
Well, yes, but we're the best.
Well, why?
Well, because we have... You see, you go around in this circle.
And it's a very sort of tightly knit web of lies that gives people a feeling of exclusivity and also gives people a feeling of virtue.
And those two things are of course mutually exclusive, right?
Virtue is universal and so if you have the capacity for virtue then everybody does.
In which case your virtue cannot be exclusive.
But of course if virtue is not exclusive then you can't pay for entrance.
So, to take a metaphor from the world of health, health is not something which is only available to Anabaptists, or to Mormons, or to... Health is available to everybody, assuming no existing condition or genetic disorder.
Health is available to the vast majority of people based on healthy practices.
You don't have to go through a ritual to become healthy.
You don't have to have some group bless you in order to become healthy.
You just become healthy if you follow certain practices.
But if you can define health, physical health, as something that you have to purchase from a group, then you can charge for it, right?
And so if you can define virtue as something which is available only through membership within a group that is approved of by people who are going to charge you for that membership, then wonderful!
You know, wonderful for the leaders, right?
They can collect all the money in the world from you in return for certifying you as a virtuous member of a community.
And that's great.
Except that, of course, they have a problem, right?
I mean, if it's simply the virtuous behavior, then what do you need the group for?
What do you need the leaders for?
What do you need to pay money for?
I might pay money to a personal trainer to help me at the gym.
But, you know, once she's taught me, then I know and I sort of don't have... I can teach my own kids, I can teach anybody I want, assuming that I'm not sort of in some sort of Olympiad or some sort of major competition, then I can just sort of accept that knowledge, absorb that knowledge, and then I don't need to be a lifelong member of some group and continue to pay sort of monthly dues or yearly dues or whatever.
Just to be part of a group.
Once I've already absorbed the knowledge about how to act, well, good for me.
Then I can sort of continue to do that and teach it to whoever I want.
So, for instance, I mean, if there's something within what I'm saying that you find to be useful from a sort of logical or moral or happiness approach standpoint, Well, great!
You don't have to keep... I mean, even if you were paying me now, you don't have to sort of keep paying me for the rest of your life because you've taken the knowledge, right?
I mean, you pay when you go to medical school, you pay to become a doctor, but you don't keep paying for the rest of your life because you already have the knowledge.
So, you can't just sort of say that this group is defined on the basis of knowledge.
Knowledge is shareable, transferable and perfectly reproducible.
So I can call myself a mathematician without joining a mathematician's guild or whatever, right?
So, I mean, I think I've sort of made the point.
Sorry if I've repeated it once too often, but it is an important point to sort of work into your mental muscles.
And so, you know, the group that claims virtue has a constant problem that they need for people to feel that the only way to be virtuous is to be part of the group.
And yet at the same time, they can't claim that there is some way of being part of the group that is innate.
So, I mean, one of the things that happens, based on my exposure to Greek culture, I'll talk about that.
You know, my wife is sort of told, well, Greeks are the best.
Well, okay, why Greeks are the best?
Well, because we invented philosophy, and we invented this, and we invented that, and democracy, and the scientific method, and blah, blah, blah, right?
We discovered atoms.
Democritus discovered atoms way back.
Okay, so then you would say that anybody whose ancestors did great things is virtuous.
Well, of course, that's no longer something which you could ascribe to the Greeks, right?
I mean, everybody can look at an ancestor who's done great things culturally or even within their family and say, even if that great thing was, you know, I survived slavery or something like that, or I flourished despite, you know, this oppression in the parent country or whatever, the mother country.
So, you know, that doesn't mean anything in terms of being Greek.
But, of course, if you say that everybody who is Greek is virtuous, then that's really a problem to examine or to understand.
It falls apart, you know, the moment you start to look at it.
So, if everyone who is Greek is virtuous, then it is impossible for a Greek to do a non-virtuous action.
And so, if you can find one evil Greek person, then you sort of have a problem, right?
You could sort of say, well, they're not really Greek, even though they may have been born there, have big hair, and be named Appadappadappalapolis.
So, that is one of the central problems of this sort of collective virtue idea.
So, you have to say, well, the Greeks are the best because we value family, and we value education, and we're there for each other, and blah blah blah.
Well, then, of course, that's got nothing to do with being Greek, right?
I mean, that's just the way that, you know, this community kind of works.
And therefore, any community that follows those same principles is a community that can claim all of the virtues that the Greek people claim.
So, it's a very complicated and foggy Gordian knot right at the center of this belief.
And, you know, this is true for Judaism, it's true for Christianity, though a little less true for Christianity because it's easier to convert.
And it's true for all cultural beliefs and, you know, Americans and so on, right?
Nationalism really falls into this category very strongly as well, that it has to be defined as, you know, born and bred, but also it has to be defined as ideas.
So I would say that, you know, this is sort of one of the problems that you face when you're talking to people about these kinds of things.
And this level of fogginess around virtue is why you get these problems with socialism and communism and so on, and some of the things that, you know, Jews and Christians and Muslims to a very large degree, and I haven't sort of gotten into the whole Muslim topic yet because I still need to do some more research, but It's coming.
Just because, you know, I would be enormously upset if at least one major religion was not upset with these podcasts.
I would consider that a personal failing.
So, you know, this fogginess at the core of morality is why people can't see the violence of the state, because they can define virtue as a lack of aggression, right?
So Noam Chomsky is like, well, the United States has committed the worst sin, which is aggression, which is, you know, the use of violence against helpless and disarmed victims.
And, you know, more power to him.
His analysis of what happened in Vietnam, and what happened in Cambodia, and what happened in the Philippines, and what happened in Granada, and Haiti, and so on.
Fantastic stuff!
I mean, it's stomach-turning as all hell, but it's fantastic stuff to understand his moral passion about the problem of using violence against legally disarmed or legally, you know, scantily armed at best citizens, where there's an overwhelming superiority of force There's obviously great immorality.
It's immorality no matter what, but it's even worse when there's a great disparity in force.
So, for instance, he rightly points out that Vietnam was subject to the greatest bombing campaign and use of military power that had ever existed in human history.
In fact, more bombs were dropped on North Vietnam than were dropped in the entire Second World War.
You know, four, the official estimates, I think, are 2 million kills.
A more realistic estimate would probably be 4 million.
I believe half a million were the results of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated in the early 60s.
You know, you're dropping dioxins and massive amounts of Agent Orange and enormous amounts of biochemical warfare weapons in order to sort of destroy the foliage, destroy the cover, and destroy the food supply of the military.
Absolutely staggeringly evil stuff.
I mean, I don't know what the population of Vietnam was, but I gotta tell you, 4 million is probably at least a third, if not more, of the population.
Which would be the equivalent of killing about 100 million or 120 million Americans.
You know, I mean, America goes completely ballistic over 3,000 when just one of the many wars that it's been involved in in the 20th century resulted in the sort of futile deaths of the equivalent of over a hundred million Americans.
And, you know, the complete devastation.
In fact, there was one writer who in, I think, 1966 wrote that he was concerned that the Vietnamese people faced not just genocide, but extinction.
Because, I mean, there were so many people fleeing the country, and the culture had been so devastated, and the death count was so high, and all of the social institutions had been destroyed.
So, you know, it was just unbelievable what happened in that country in terms of the amount of slaughter.
And, of course, people focus on things like the My Lai Massacre and so on, As if that is the relevant issue in terms of violence, right?
A couple hundred people got murdered by, you know, some uneducated kids in the middle of nowhere who were scared to death and, you know, we're in the situation of complete breakdown of any kind of moral authority, or moral autonomy probably is more specific.
And, you know, people focus on that because they can't focus on the major crime, which is, you know, the nice guys in suits and air-conditioned offices who've got nice accents and speak, you know, eloquently and have been to Harvard and so on, that these people are the ones authorizing and deciding to commit troops.
And he rightly points out, of course, that a single war crime instance, of course, is that in Fallujah they destroyed a hospital because they were concerned about its capacity to give aid to the enemy, specifically banned as a war crime in the anti-war crimes legislation passed by the Republicans in 1996.
Wherein, if you do anything to interfere with the legitimate use of a hospital, or any kind of use of a hospital, or if you interfere with medical personnel in any way, it is a war crime.
And it is punishable by the death sentence according to the legislation that the Republicans themselves passed.
And of course, you know, there is no possibility Not even the remotest possibility that anybody's going to bring this up in the media.
The fact that, according to the legislation that the Republicans themselves passed, all of the people at the top should be tried and convicted of war crimes, of which there's ample evidence, and the penalty of which, of course, is death.
It's the death penalty.
So, you know, that's sort of one minor example of one thing that happened in Fallujah.
And, of course, Chomsky also rightly points out that In the Nuremberg trials, nobody cared about the soldiers.
I mean, it's not that nobody cared, but it never seemed morally right to go after the soldiers.
So if you're some soldier in Germany who's sort of said, you know, somebody sort of points a gun at your head and says, you go to the Eastern Front and you go kill a bunch of Soviets or we're going to shoot you, I mean, it's really hard to say that that person has any sort of moral autonomy.
Whereas, you know, the people in nice suits in the offices, the generals and mostly the civilian leaders, right?
Because the generals generally followed the rule of the civilian leaders.
And in Germany, of course, there was a lot of military resistance to the Eastern Front campaign.
This is one of the things that produced a plot against Hitler and against the whole Nazi hierarchy, because the generals fully recognized that this would be the end of the Wehrmacht and the end of the German army.
But, you know, it's sort of tough to go after the soldiers.
It's tough to say to someone, you're morally wrong when you're drafted, and if you don't fire at your supposed enemies, then you're going to get shot yourself.
Kind of tough to throw people in jail or hang them for that kind of Moral problem, but it's the civilian leadership that is the ones that they have the most choice.
They have the most education.
They have the most moral responsibility.
There's absolutely nothing which compels them to start these wars and to prosecute them to the extent that they do and to target civilians and so on.
I mean, that's all personal choice of the highest order.
You could even say that if somebody can't find a way to make a living except by joining the army, then it's tougher, but you could still argue that there's a diminishment of moral responsibility.
However, if you are a well-educated civilian leader who's been able to make it to the top of the hierarchy, As far as sort of civilian political power goes, you have choices.
I mean, you don't need to work, actually.
You probably have enough pension and income to get out of the whole racket.
So you have all the choices in the world.
You can take a job in the private sector, you can emigrate, you can do whatever you want.
You're not some, you know, half-frozen soldier stumbling around in Eastern Europe with a gun ahead and a gun behind, with a gun in front of your face and a gun at the back of your neck.
So, in the Nuremberg trials, of course, they focused on the civilian leaders.
A little bit the military leaders, but mostly the civilian leaders.
The German foreign secretary was hung because of his role in generating the circumstance which has led to the Second World War.
So, you know, the Nuremberg trials were very much a recognition of the fact that it is the civilian leaders who are the most morally culpable for the atrocities that result from war.
Because they start war, and war ends up with atrocities.
You can prosecute people for those atrocities, but by far the greater moral responsibility lands upon those who who started the war.
And he says, and I'm not sure I agree with this, but he also says, and on those who ideologically create and supply the propaganda which supports the war.
And I sort of have to think a little bit more about that.
So, I mean, Chomsky's analysis of the predations of foreign policy and the absolute evil of civilian leaders in sort of creating wars and sending troops to their deaths, it's brilliant.
It's, you know, it's jaw-droppingly great.
However, of course, I would suggest, as a hypothesis, that because he was raised Jewish, he can only see violence in one area, which is what faces outwards from the group.
So, for instance, he's fairly clear that Israel does not own the occupied territories, the Gaza Strip and the area where the Palestinians have been herded into.
Because he can see the violence which goes outside of a community.
However, he cannot see, and this is the result of being brought up in a cult, he cannot see the violence which is pointed inwards at a community.
that becomes nothing but virtue, because he was raised to believe that the community is what supplies virtue internally and should never attack other communities externally.
And so, you know, where he is very clear on it is completely evil to use overwhelming military force against a minimally armed or disarmed population, you know, good, more power to you.
You know, I would agree completely with that.
But then he turns around and says, but you know what's really great is social security and socialized medicine.
Now it's hard for me to understand why it's so hard for him to understand that those things are only in place because the state is willing to use force against a legally disarmed population who are helpless in the face of the military power they're facing.
And, you know, that just seems so self-evident to me.
It's almost impossible to understand that a man so intelligent would miss something so obvious or obscure something so obvious.
And also, if you give the government... I mean, that's sort of the one majorly obvious flaw in this kind of thinking.
And it's one of the problems I have with the left.
I mean, the left is fantastic in foreign policy and, you know, just wretched and horrible and evil in domestic policy.
Because they say, well, you know, we should use the state for good.
We should use the violence for good, right?
We don't like this form of violence in foreign policy because we sympathize with the downtrodden overseas, but we're more than willing to use violence internally to achieve our ends because we sympathize with the downtrodden here.
And so I just don't understand how they can create that dichotomy in their minds.
But then, of course, I can't understand how scientists are religious either.
So, you know, that's something which is just scar tissue, right?
It's scar tissue from culture.
But the other thing which I also find enormously difficult to understand about this kind of thinking is, do they really think, does Noam Chomsky really think that the government can have the power
to impose enormous taxes and bureaucracies on the domestic population, using the power of the police and the military and the entire might of the state to extract this money by force to run these social programs, and that that in no way is going to give them the money to wage wars overseas?
It's another thing that, again, I can only understand in the context of he's got a fairly large division of insanity within his brain based on having been raised in a cult that he's never effectively dismissed or questioned.
And I don't claim this to be a particular virtue that I can do it, it's just that I was never raised in a cult.
I mean, I was raised in the cult of one crazy German woman and one sadistic All the brother, but, you know, that wasn't exactly a universal cult with 5,000 years of history or anything like that.
So, I mean, it could just be a lack of exposure.
I don't know.
But I just find it staggering that, you know, people think, well, you know, we can use the government for this great, wonderful end, you know, without thinking that, okay, so if we're giving the government the power to extract taxes, you know, taxes are not going to be given up voluntarily.
People aren't going to pay taxes at 50 or 60 percent voluntarily.
I think people voluntarily will pay sort of 5 or 10 percent taxation, which would be more than enough for, you know, even if you didn't want to go with a completely stateless society, would be more than enough to fund the essential functions of government.
But they're not going to pay 60 percent taxation for, you know, all these nonsensical social programs and overseas wars and, you know, preferential tariffs for big corporations and welfare for large organizations and so on.
So they're not going to do that.
So of course the government's going to have to have all of this power.
To be able to extract the taxation or the taxes from the general population.
So the government's going to have to be well armed.
It's going to have to have a lot of power.
It's going to have a lot of control.
You've already created two separate moral rules for the rulers and the ruled.
And so what do you think is going to happen?
Even if you were able to snap your fingers tomorrow and get rid of the military-industrial complex, But leave in place the power of the government to wage war against its own citizens for the sake of supposed benefits like welfare and social programs.
Well, what do you think's going to happen?
The government's got all this money.
It needs to have a military in order to be able to extract taxes from its own population.
How long do you think it's going to be before it gets involved in overseas conflicts again?
Because, of course, the best way to extract money from citizens is not through social programs.
And, of course, there's a reason why... Well, sorry, it is initially.
There's a reason why America is becoming more belligerent overseas, and that's because it's so completely obvious that social programs aren't working.
I mean, that's why the U.S.
has increased its belligerency over time.
Because social programs simply don't work.
The war on drugs isn't working.
The war on welfare isn't working.
The war on illiteracy isn't working.
The war on poverty hasn't worked.
So how is the U.S.
going to continue?
The U.S.
government going to continue to extract vast amounts of tax revenue from its population?
Is it going to say, well, we're going to increase funding for public schools?
Well, that clearly doesn't work, and nobody's going to buy that story anymore.
Are they going to say, well, we're going to eliminate drugs?
Well, of course not.
Nobody's going to believe that for a second.
Are they going to say, well, we're going to make everybody literate and everybody educated and nobody's going to be poor anymore?
Well, those things are all testable.
And, you know, they've been tested and found completely wanting over the past 30, 40 years.
And so it does seem to me that the only logical way to continue to be able to increase and extract Well, from the general population, is to create another, yet another, unverifiable, amorphous goal that requires an enormous amount of resources and has no end.
Right?
And of course the best one to do that is war, and by far the best war is the war on terror.
Because there's no enemy, there's no state to defeat, there's no end to it, it's infinitely escalatable, and you don't even need an attack to continue the war on terror, right?
September 11th will do for at least a generation.
And when they need another attack, I'm sure that another one will be forthcoming through accident or intention.
So, you know, there's just no way that you can give the government the power to create social programs and use force against its own citizens.
Without simultaneously giving it the power to wage war overseas.
It is one and the same.
You can't give someone a gun and say, now only use this for good.
I mean, this sort of superhero mythology that you can have great power and not be great power of violence and not be corrupted by it, I mean, should really be relegated to comic books and not to intelligent people's analysis of world events.
So the only thing that I can say is that it is the corruption that is based on this lie called culture, which puts this weird, foggy, exclusive yet universal morality at its center, which blinds people to the coercive nature of the state in dealing with its own citizens.
And it's because they can't see the coercive nature of their own culture as it dealt with themselves as they were growing up.
So I think that that's something that I'm sort of relieved that I listened to that, both because it gave me some great information about U.S.
predations overseas, but also because it allowed me to stand by my thesis that he's a crazy lefty.
There's nothing against Noam Chomsky.
You know, he's a victim of a particularly brutal kind of cult.
I mean, the longest lasting ones are always the ones that are the most emotionally abusive, and Judaism certainly falls into this category based on the conversations that I've had with people.
And, of course, starts with the mutilation of the male through circumcision and just goes on from there.
So, I hope this has been helpful.
This analysis of culture is very important to understand.
And, you know, if you have examples from your own life, please let me know.
I'm always curious to hear it.
And, again, I'm going to mention my blog now just because a number of people are rebroadcasting my podcast and, you know, people may not know where to get more of the same.
And so my website is www.freedomain.com and my email of course is s.m-o-l-y-n-e-u-x at rogers.com.
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