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March 13, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:10
137 Propaganda Part 1: Differences between advertising and indoctrination

Helping the sheep shear themselves

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph.
It is 825 a.m.
on the 13th of March 2006.
Now, to those iPod users out there who have been writing me to tell me that they would really rather prefer it, If I were able to somehow see my way clear to actually putting numbers on these podcasts, I quite agree.
And I'm sorry that I haven't had a chance to do it yet.
What I did this weekend was I re-sampled my podcasts.
I have them all in one Gigabyte WAV format, and also some in 320 MP3s.
So I resampled all of those with high quality VBR down between 8k per second and 40k per second, which I think has made the podcast sound a little bit better.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to change... I'm not going to change the file name, but I am going to embed the number into the title.
That's sort of the way that I'm going to run it.
And I will put it in the track sequence as well, so you should be able to, if you're running this on an mp3 player... I've made the album consistent, freedomainradio.com, so that you should be able to open the album and sort by the track name.
Or, hopefully, I'm not sure if iPods can do this, you can go by the track number.
Sorted by the track number as well.
So that should take care of your problem.
And I fully understand it.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for those who wrote in to tell me it was an issue.
And all I can say is that you're very naughty people for grabbing all my bandwidth.
Because, of course, the only reason that people are going to have a problem sorting through 120-odd podcasts is if they've hoovered the whole thing down from my server in one fell swoop.
So, I found you!
So I hope you're doing well.
I am going to talk this morning about propaganda, which is a topic that came up just towards the end of my article that I wrote on the weekend, War, Anarchy and the State, and it's on lewrockwell.com.
If you can find it from here, great, but I suspect that you may have found this from there, so this may be rather redundant.
So, I wanted to talk about propaganda and its relationship to something I call positive and negative economics.
Propaganda, positive and negative economics.
Isn't that great?
What a fetching way to start your week.
I was going to also do the Libertarian Love Doctor, but I think I'll do that this afternoon.
I wanted to get these ideas down while they were still chasing their own tail around my mind and not wait until they'd settled into the little doggy basket of reasoned arguments.
So, I've also been working out on my metaphors this weekend, so I think I can stretch them about as far as humanly possible now.
So, propaganda is very interesting.
It's a very, very fascinating phenomenon.
But it really boils down to one thing.
And its relationship to advertising is also very interesting and I think really well shows up the difference between the free sector of the free market and the public sector.
So people often get these things confused because of propaganda.
They get the relationship between propaganda and advertising confused.
So let me just go over sort of my thoughts on propaganda and its relationship to advertising and then we'll talk about how it fits into negative economics.
Now, if you've ever been in the advertising game, you know that you have no control over the consumer.
I know that it sounds a little bit of a paradox for there to be a multi-hundred billion dollar industry that has no control over its target, but it's true!
You have no control whatsoever over the consumer.
You do not come up with an advertising campaign and rule the mind of the consumer in some market Svengali-like fashion.
It doesn't occur that way at all.
There was an interview on 60 Minutes where they were talking about SUVs and they were talking about how they were getting heavily advertised and so on.
And they were talking to an ad guy at one of the sort of big three auto plants or auto manufacturers.
And he said, oh man, you know, I wish it were that simple that we just come up with a catchy slogan and everyone buys our cars.
Everybody's just started to want SUVs.
And it's one of these sort of phenomenons.
It's one of these fads.
Somewhat related to tax incentives, of course, because SUVs were classified as light trucks and therefore were subject to the fewer taxes than cars.
So you were actually getting more bang for your buck in terms of machinery and features in an SUV than dollar for dollar you were getting for other cars.
So, it was partly a governmental thing, and partly just one of these circles, right?
Once it becomes a cool thing, then everybody wants one.
And once more people have them, more people want them, because they're terrified of being the little Hyundai that you dig out of the grill of your Monsterama two-laner 60-ton SUV.
So, he said, and I think it was very interesting, he just said, I wish it was that simple.
I wish we could do that, but we just can't.
Now the basic principle of advertising is all you can do is entice.
Entice the consumer to try your product for the very first time.
That's it.
That's it in a nutshell.
All you can do is stimulate demand for someone to be curious or want to be chic or want to look a certain way or Have a guilty pleasure or whatever it is that or pamper themselves.
You have to frame your product in a manner that entices people to try it.
Now all you can do is get them to try it for the first time.
If they don't like it, if they fundamentally don't like it, then it really doesn't matter what your advertising budget is.
Two intergenerational examples come to mind, which are still studied in marketing programs, I'm sure.
The first is the Edsel, which is a legendarily bad car that had an enormous advertising campaign.
I think it was the late fifties.
This car was just a complete wrecker.
The radio knobs fell off, the seats didn't move.
I mean, it was just a complete disaster.
But it had an enormous advertising campaign.
And it bombed like something wretched.
And nobody bought it, and it was junked very, very quickly.
Because it was very easy to figure out whether you wanted to buy something or not, even back then, right?
So you would say, oh, I'm interested in a new car.
You will know about the Edsel from all the ads, but you're not just going to say, well, the ads from the makers of the Edsel claim that it's great, so I guess I'll just buy it.
I mean, people aren't like that at all.
What people do is they do research based on the facts.
So advertising the Edsel will allow the consumer or the potential consumer of the Edsel to say, hey, when I'm looking into cars, I'm going to check out the Edsel because I've heard about it.
And what happened was, of course, people then began to look up car magazines, they began to talk to their friends, the urban jungle drumming communication lines were open, it's the way that they are in movies, and people just didn't buy it, because they heard that it was terrible.
So, the advertising simply put the product in people's minds, and that was just the very, very first step in them maybe potentially buying them.
For instance, when I wanted to get a portable music player, I knew all about the iPod, of course, and so I looked into the iPod.
Unfortunately, most of my music collection is in WMA, so I couldn't buy the iPod.
Now, even if I had been able to buy the iPod, I found that the price point ratio was just a little high.
I'd heard that the cases were easily scratched.
You can't replace the battery, at least when I was looking for one.
And so I did my research and I found a Creative Labs Zen Xtra, which was far cheaper, did not have a color screen, but had a larger capacity.
And the sound quality, as you can imagine from a manufacturer who makes sound cards, is fantastic.
And it has a lot of the other features that I want.
So, in fact, the Apple advertisements turned me on to a competitor's product, and that's also a risk.
When you are somebody who opens up a market, you can actually end up educating people about something like, ooh, there are great hard drive-based MP3 players, and that sends them off to go and buy those things from other people.
So advertising places a great strain upon your need for quality and consistency in your products.
So, the last thing you want to do is to educate everyone about a market and then have somebody else take it away with a superior product, which occurs when people begin to do their research.
And, of course, those at the bleeding edge usually do their research.
When some fan-shmastic kind of video card comes out, it's not the granny in Pasadena who rushes out to buy the $700 heat sink blaring power-draining monstrosity.
When you power up your computer, the street lights go down.
Or as I remember one review, really, I thought was very funny when I was looking to replace the power supply on my computer, and I was running so many peripherals like a Christmas tree in there, and I was reading one review of a power supply where the guy was saying, I had to replace my power supply because when I attached my latest peripheral, my existing power supply began coughing up human blood, which I thought was a little gross, but very funny in a way.
If you've ever been around straining hardware, you really do understand what he's talking about.
So, you really do have to figure out who's going to buy your products.
The new graphics cards guys are always the guys who are a little bit beyond their teens because it's a multi-hundred dollar investment, but they're bleeding-edge guys who have the money, who have the time, and who will read Maximum PC and read every online review they can find and understand what Doom 3 and Far Cry's test specs are.
And benchmark their own system, and it will take them days.
If there's anyone like me, when I buy a major piece of hardware, it takes me at least a day, and usually two, to do the research.
Not because of the price point thing, I'm not so poor off that way, but just because the idea of buying the non-optimal thing.
It gooses my shriveled and greedy and miserly soul with a kind of horror.
So, getting that bleeding edge participation is very tough as well.
If you are, of course, a major athlete, then you are constantly showered with things to wear.
It's like the Oscars.
Getting that bleeding edge factor is pretty tough.
And getting the cool factor is pretty tough.
But once you do it, it's great.
Because people then buy your product and they buy cool, so to speak, to begin with.
But buying a product that has a major market penetration is also something that is practical.
It's like paying a celebrity to endorse your product.
Paying a celebrity to endorse your product is very practical and people sort of get a little confused about this in the free market.
There are basically two kinds of companies in the free market and the two types of companies are these.
The one type is the type that is going to make a quality product is going to be around to service it, and is going to continually release improvements to that product or service.
And those are the companies that you want to deal with.
But those companies tend to get a little bit stodgy, and they tend to be a little less innovative over time, so there are all these new companies coming into the fray.
Now, a new company is risky.
I mean, it's beneficial, of course, otherwise you wouldn't even be looking at them, but it's risky.
So, for instance, a new company coming into the fray, are they just selling a piece of craptastic software or hardware or service or whatever, and then they're going to take all your money and charge you for support and then vanish?
So they're just putting something together.
They're making up a bunch of specs, or they're jury-rigging a bunch of specs, or they're paying off a bunch of reviewers, and they're going to release this ass-clown piece of software or hardware or service or product into the market, take everybody's money and vanish.
Well, you don't want to deal with these people.
So how are you going to be able to tell the difference between these two types of companies up front?
Well, of course, the first and the most obvious one is you buy from IBM or whatever.
They're not going anywhere, at least not for a while.
Then you can look at the advertising budget.
So if you don't know the company at all, but they have sunk $50 million into advertising, you know that they're not going anywhere for a while.
So if there's some mp3 player that costs $300 that's received $50 million worth of advertising, You know that this company is going for a major market share.
You know for a fact that they're not going to go anywhere next year because there's no conceivable way that they can make their 50 million dollars back on 50 bucks on an mp3 player in anything less than a couple of years.
This may of course mean that they've overspent on advertising and they're going to collapse, but that seems unlikely because it's very hard to get 50 million dollars to advertise if you are a new company, unless you're going to have some significant board experience that's going to help you manage that money or that kind of growth.
So, getting a celebrity spokesperson is very important in this situation.
So, if I get Sting to promote my MP3 player, people can be sure that it's kind of, like, good quality, or at least that I'm committed to being around for a while, because I've got to sell a lot of MP3 players to pay Sting off for his time.
I can also assume that Sting, because he's pretty rich, He's not just going to do it for the money.
He's going to have to actually believe in the product to some degree.
He's not going to put his name out there for a piece of crap that falls apart after three days, no matter how much he's paid, because that's going to harm his future endorsement capacities.
So it's a complex situation, but it's important to understand that advertising is a very complex phenomenon.
The whole purpose of all of this complexity is simply to get you to try a product for the first time.
That's all they can ask you to do.
After that, if the quality of the product doesn't satisfy you, you're gone.
Never to return.
And I remember a friend of mine, when I was a teenager, there was a particular kind of gum out there.
And he said, you know, this gum is so unbelievably bad, every couple of years I will buy a pack just to remind myself.
I'm just curious to see if they've changed the formula.
But the gum tastes so jaw-achingly greased monkey bad that I just have to remind myself how the market serves different needs.
He, of course, became an economist.
I have to remind myself how the market serves different needs just by virtue of buying this absolutely repulsive gum.
It's a fascinating thing, advertising, but it's a very, very different thing from propaganda.
In advertising, you're appealing to people's self-interest to get them to try a product for the first time, and after that it's really up to them.
Like New Coke, right?
New Coke was the other example I was going to mention, which I'll keep brief.
New Coke had, I think, a hundred million dollar marketing campaign.
It was ridiculous.
It was like Joe and Coder's secret ring time.
They're taking the formula from A to B. All these sort of men and black guys stalking around with earphones and walkie-talkies and, you know, sort of embarrassed looks of people who are guarding fizzy sugar water.
Then they launched it to an enormous fanfare, and Bill Cosby was out there touting it, and he'd done a good job for Jell-O, so he was all over it, and it was supposed to be the best thing ever, and everyone took like one sip and went, oh my god, did you have no test groups at all?
And the whole thing, dare I say it?
Dare I?
Yes, I think I will.
The whole campaign It went flat.
You knew it was coming!
You knew it!
Come on, you can't say that this kind of humor is too unpredictable, can you?
And nobody wanted to have anything to do with New Coke.
It was too sweet.
It left an aftertaste.
It was too acidic.
It was just wretched.
And so it vanished, and they went back to classic Coke.
And of course, some people think that this was a whole double-whammy, reverse Svengali, propagandistic kind of way to just Raise the profile of Coke to get people to try the new Coke and then get them to switch back to old Coke and it was just a ploy and I mean that's all nonsense and I'm sure that people would really love to believe that who ran this thing but I'm sure their careers took a bit of a hit and nobody takes that kind of risks with a hundred million dollars especially when you're number one in the marketplace you don't need to spend a lot of money to raise your profile.
I thought that was kind of funny.
There's another famous campaign that came out of, I think, Hoover in England.
Came up with, if you buy this Hoover, we will give you round-trip tickets to New York.
And they did.
They put this campaign in place.
And then I think the cheap airline that they were counting on went out of business.
And they had to book them on British Airways.
Not the cheapest airline in the world.
And so it became quite evident to people very quickly that the price of the Hoover was, or the vacuum cleaner, was less than the price of the tickets.
And so people just who wanted to go to New York bought the vacuum cleaner.
And not only did this cost the company an enormous amount of money, because you can't just yank a campaign like that the moment people get wind of it, because then you have a public relations nightmare.
So it cost the company a fortune and it also destroyed their market in England for the next ten years.
Because so many people bought vacuum cleaners that they didn't need that they just left them in the closet.
Or they sold them to other people.
And so there was just no market for new vacuum cleaners for a while.
And it's not like you replace your vacuum cleaner every year or two.
So it was kind of funny.
And of course also they had to pay a lot of overtime to produce this massive demand for these vacuum cleaners.
So this is the kind of thing, this is the kind of era where you want to create enough of an incentive for people to buy your product and try it, especially when it's a 10-year purchase like a vacuum cleaner.
But you don't want to create so much incentive that people buy it just to get whatever the incentive is and don't really care that much about the vacuum cleaner.
Or if they do, it destroys your market for years while giving you enormous overtime expenses to produce the additional vacuum cleaners required over and above plan.
So it's a risky business, let's just say.
But propaganda is quite different.
With advertising, you're trying to get someone to buy it for the first time.
With propaganda, what you're trying to do is to get people to accept a system of coercion.
It's very different.
Very, very different.
When you are advertising, you are appealing to someone's legitimate self-interest.
It can't be a false self-interest unless it's, you know, I want to look good while I'm young.
But then you sort of have these cheapo teen products that are sort of aimed at that.
It's not like the The pants that you're going to sell to a 13 year old boy are going to be the highest quality because he's going to wear them for like six to eight months and then burst out of them.
And so you want to appeal to someone's genuine self-interest and you're not going to want to just to appeal to their sort of passing whim if it's a sort of high-priced product.
So you can't stimulate artificial demand.
I mean, you can for cheapo stuff, but it's not going to last very long.
It's not a sustainable business model.
I mean, who remembers the Tickle Me Elmo fad from like 10 years ago?
So you want to make sure that you're stimulating demand that is genuine.
So you have things like stuff that's going to make women look attractive, or want to lose weight, or it's going to make men look cool and help them attract a partner, or quality mp3s for people who are audiophiles, or mp3 players, and so on.
And so you want to stimulate demand that is genuine and is going to last.
So you have to appeal to real self-interest.
So you have to sort of know your customer, you have to figure out what makes them tick, you can have endless amounts of advertising, but also you have to have market survey groups where you say to people what do you... you pay them for their time for half a day and ask them exactly what they think about the company so you can manage your image and all these kinds of things.
So, this stuff's all very important, and it's the complete opposite of propaganda.
Now, propaganda is a situation where you are attempting to get people to ignore their own self-interest, and you're attempting to substitute a false self-interest.
A self-interest which serves the interests of those who wish to exploit the individual, rather than the individual himself or herself.
So, advertising appeals to people who are in a situation of choice.
That's why there weren't a lot of billboards in the Middle Ages for Catholicism, because if you weren't so much with the Catholicism, they introduced you to a rather wide and exciting array of torture devices, and then ended up burning you at the stake.
Not an enormous amount of advertising.
Not a lot of Buddy Jesus from that very funny film that Kevin Smith made, Dogma.
Not a whole lot of that kind of stuff.
So when you're in a situation of coercion, you don't advertise because you don't want to appeal to somebody's genuine self-interest because everything about the situation of coercion is exactly opposite to their self-interest.
So you want to keep them these sort of empty, numb, obedient, brain-dead, broken, slavish sheep because you are forcing them to do something and you would rather them do it voluntarily than have to spend the extra time and money and effort and resources to force them.
Basically, you can't force people very easily in the modern world.
I mean, you can over in the East, but in the Western democracies, you can't force people very easily.
It's not like everybody's legally disarmed and nobody has access to the Internet and there aren't truth movements and intellectual movements based on libertarianism and classical liberalism and objectivism and minimalism and anarcho-capitalism and market anarchism and all that.
Those things are all sort of out in the bloodstream and when they tried it with the draft it really didn't work so well.
The draft was a very dangerous time during the Vietnam War for the establishment because the naked gun of the state, which is always under the table when everyone's at dinner in their tuxedos laughing and there's a bunch of goons with guns under the table pointed at everyone, That's the reality of the state.
The last thing you want is for anyone to whip away the tablecloth and for other people to say, oh my god, there are guns everywhere.
And so you've really got to blind people to the reality of coercion.
And so you have to present things as a choice.
You have to present things as a preference, as if everybody's chosen it.
And what?
You wouldn't imagine choosing it?
It's unthinkable.
And that it's a virtue.
I mean, all advertising, in general, is a generalized statement, so I apologize if there are exceptions.
Please let me know if there are, and I'd be happy to mention them on air, or on air, in car.
So, you generally find that advertising appeals to self-interest and rationality.
It doesn't mean that people don't make whim purchases, but for a business to be sustainable, they have to appeal to self-interest in a plethora of choice.
And so, that's sort of one approach, and so they use the argument from efficiency.
Nobody ever says, if you don't buy Tide, you're an evil person.
I mean, Tide wouldn't last very long as a product if that was the approach they took.
Because people would sort of naturally get offended by that.
It's like, my mother didn't buy Tide.
Are you saying she's evil?
Hey, that's my mama you're talking about.
So, I wanted to talk about the opposite approach, which is propaganda, which destroys self-interest.
And it uses the argument for morality all the time.
You can't have propaganda unless it uses the argument for morality.
The people in... I mean there are some minor sub-aspects of it.
So the people in Russia during the 1950s or the 1960s during these miserable failed five-year plans of Stalin's and Khrushchev's were told that you're poor but the West is even poorer.
That's a famous joke which I think, or at least it's famous to me, it tells a lot about the difference between the two systems and also the benefits of propaganda.
That in Russia, in like 1962, in the middle of a snowy, wintry, minus 40 Moscow night, you've got this lineup of people waiting to buy bread from the government store.
And one of the old women turns to each other and says, oh, this is terrible, I'm so cold!
And the other one says, yes, it is terrible, but imagine in the capitalist countries the government doesn't even distribute the bread!
Which I think is just very funny on very many levels.
And so propaganda uses the argument for morality and says our system is moral, other systems are immoral.
And it uses the argument from efficiency a little bit.
But not much.
Only as a distraction.
So, for instance, in the healthcare debates up here, there's this healthcare debate about, ooh, we don't want two-tier medicine.
We don't want a tier for everyone and then a tier for the rich, as if that doesn't already exist.
And if it's not the case that if you know someone who's a doctor, you get great treatment, and if you don't, you line up until you die.
And so they don't want this sort of two-tier system.
So you hear all the time in advertising, government-run advertising, and the advertising that is funded by the state medical workers union, by the forced union dues of their victims, you hear, well, health care, public health care is a fundamental Canadian value.
It is a fundamental Canadian value, and that's funny.
That's funny in a way.
It's sad because a lot of people are dying up here because our health care system is so bad, but it's sad and funny at the same time.
And why it's funny is, of course, because if it were a fundamental Canadian value, or a fundamental value of any kind, you wouldn't need to enforce it.
People like candy bars, right?
So there's no sort of government-run thing saying, buy more candy.
Candy is good.
Because people already like it.
Now advertisers will say, buy my candy.
But you don't need a whole bunch of government-run propaganda.
You don't need all of these man and candy courses in public schools.
To get people to want candy.
People just like candy.
You don't have any problems with the sex drive of teenagers.
There's not a lot of courses saying, you know, you really need to have a sex drive and you really need to ogle the opposite sex and you really need to concentrate for at least four years when you're locked up with idiot teachers and idiot classmates.
You really need to focus on abstract algebraic calculus.
That's the major focus.
And not think of anything else.
You don't need all of those classes because it's a naturally occurring phenomenon.
No more than you need puberty camps where you go and coaches help you achieve puberty.
It simply happens.
It's natural.
It's biological.
It's great!
But you don't need any propaganda for it, because it's something that people want.
It's a human drive, or it already exists, and the self-interest is natural.
I mean, sorry, to take one last example, you don't need an incentive for people to get married and have children.
That's what the majority of people want to do anyway.
You don't need big government programs saying, it's moral to get married and have children.
Now, eventually, and I think this is occurring in Quebec, when the society has become so ridiculously over-complicated, expensive, heavily regulated, and heavily taxed, you then end up needing a government program basically saying, to be a good member of the pure l'air society, you must, you must breathe, eh?
So that is something that's important to understand.
Propaganda is forcing people or is inculcating a mindset in people that gets them to act against their self-interest by appealing to a false virtue within them.
So somebody on the board posted a funny cartoon about how you have to pay your taxes so we can defeat the Axis, which is like a Donald Duck cartoon from 1942 or 1943, I guess it would be.
And it's funny because they're basically saying, yes, you want to go and spend your money on yourself, but that would be wrong.
This is when you had to pay your taxes voluntarily, so it was very expensive to get people to pay their taxes if they didn't want to.
If people didn't send their taxes in, they didn't deduct them at source.
That was something that the wonderful Milton Friedman introduced at the end of the war as an idea, and I think spent a good 40 years apologizing for that fabulous little bitty afterwards.
I mean, it would have happened either way, but...
That's something that's sort of important.
So they say, well, you're going to spend your money at the Lazy Hour saloon just on wine and women and song and waste it all, whereas we're going to use it to fight the enemies of freedom and give us your taxes and blah, blah, blah.
Now, you don't see those ads anymore on pay your taxes or else you're a bad person because they deducted source for the most part.
And it's not something they really need to worry about.
So there's no propaganda for it.
So that's a very sort of interesting, I think, at least an interesting opposition between these two situations.
So in propaganda, they're going to attempt to tell you that what is virtuous is the exact opposite of your self-interest.
And only bad people would want something like getting rid of the welfare state or getting rid of the government itself.
Unthinkable!
Oh, haven't you seen any Mel Gibson films based in the future?
So they're pretty much going to get you to go against your self-interest.
And so what they need to do is they need to do two things.
They need to hide the violence and they need to pump the rhetoric.
They need to put this soaring rhetoric into place in order to get you to believe that what is against your self-interest is actually a good thing.
So, when you're talking about the public healthcare system up here, you never see the ads which say, yes, it's based on guns, but it works.
For us, anyway.
So, let's just keep doing it.
There's never an appeal to naked violence because that would be far too honest and that would be far too of course unsettling for people uh... mostly at the top i think other people they are getting a little bit more unsettled by this stuff in general especially the young because they're seeing all the disastrous after effects as i talked about in one of my very early podcasts systems which the state takes over work for a little while because they defer the taxes required to fund them to the next generation through deficit financing
And also you get the self-discipline momentum of people who've come into that public sector market from the free market.
So it works for a little while and then it's a complete disaster.
And so the people who are younger are seeing that complete disaster.
Especially when people begin to see how the baby boomers are treated on their deathbeds.
It will be the time to finally get rid of this tumor-esque monstrosity of socialized medicine.
But propaganda never says, It's something we force you to do because you're selfish and bad and we're virtuous and good and you just have to be forced to do the right thing, so there we've got the guns, don't argue.
That wouldn't be propaganda, that would be honesty.
That would be a public service announcement, I guess, but you're not going to see that from anything to do with propaganda.
What you are going to see from propaganda is smiling pictures of nurses and everybody's concerned and people hooked up to beeping machines and grateful patients and children who are virtually in tears talking about how their meningitis was cured or their bone marrow cancer was cured and they wouldn't be alive today if it wasn't for blah blah blah blah blah.
That's what you're going to see.
Nobody's going to talk about, if you don't obey the system, we're going to shoot you in the leg.
That's something you can never see in propaganda.
So you have to present it as if it's an enormously beneficial thing, but also hide the fact that you're being forced to do it.
So they're appealing to your argument for morality, the argument for morality that's basically embedded in the heart and soul of every human being who's not a complete sociopath.
They're appealing to the argument for morality, but at the same time they're completely hiding the gun, right?
Because the two are absolute opposites.
You simply cannot combine violence with the argument for morality.
Because, of course, the argument for morality says it's a universal good and I am appealing to your virtue.
I am appealing to your virtue.
And of course, if somebody is virtuous, then you don't need to force them to do something.
If they're not virtuous, then they do need to be forced to do the right thing in this particular mindset, but they're not going to listen to the argument for morality.
And of course, Ayn Rand talks about this far more efficiently than I do in Atlas Shrugged, so if you haven't read that...
You know, give it a shot.
But the basic idea is that if you are virtuous, then you are going to be susceptible to being manipulated by the argument for morality into accepting coercion.
So if you do care about the sick and the poor and the old and the indigent, then you are going to be susceptible to government propaganda that says, these people need to be taken care of, and we're going to do it.
I mean, they won't say that they're going to do it by force, but they are going to do it by force.
So these people need to be taken care of, and we're going to appeal to the virtue of the general population to...
Obey that, or to accept that, and then we're going to force everyone to do it.
Of course, if you have to force them, then they're not virtuous to begin with.
If nobody cares about the poor at all, then nobody's going to care about the argument for morality.
But because people are susceptible to the argument for morality, you know, you don't need force.
As I've often said, when I talk about getting rid of the socialized medicine up here, absolutely everybody says, well, how would the poor get medical care?
And so my general answer, of course, is that the poor would get medical care because you care that they're going to get medical care.
And that's pretty important.
That's the way to do it.
I say, if I was a libertarian and I said, let's get rid of the public health care system, and not one single person said, but how are the poor going to be, how are the sick going to be taken care of who are poor?
Then I would be a little bit concerned about how they would be taken care of.
But since everybody asks that, you know that they don't need to be forced.
So, for instance, I have had an email back and forth with a gentleman who runs another podcast called Blast the Right.
And, of course, I've done a podcast on loving the lefties, and so I wanted to point him this way to see if I could alter his thinking to Freedom Main Radio.
And he emailed me back, and I sent him an email version of what is libertarianism and top ten myths about libertarianism.
And he emailed me back, and he said, that's interesting, I'll listen to those when I do something on libertarianism, but tell me this.
If there was a baby who was dying by the side of the road and nobody wanted to take that baby in, does the government have the right to take that baby in?
And of course, I'm sure that you're all leaping on the fundamental contradiction of that by now.
Or if not, you should play these podcasts a little bit slower.
Because the basic contradiction is, as I wrote back to him and said, well, I'm not sure I can understand the question.
Because the government is simply people.
So, if nobody cares about this baby who's dying by the side of the road, then nobody in the government will have passed laws to take that baby in, or if they have passed laws, nobody's going to enforce them.
So if you say, nobody cares about the poor, you then can't say, so we must have a government program, because by your very definition, nobody cares about the poor.
Now, of course, if a minority of people care about the poor, then you say, well, we need a government program then.
Well, then that doesn't work, because the minority of the people won't vote for it.
The majority of people who don't care about the poor will vote to get rid of things like the welfare state, or will vote to never have it come into being in the first place, or will never even think about voting for it, because they don't care about the poor.
So if a minority of people care about the poor, you simply won't have a government program unless you have a dictatorship, in which case you have to hope that the majority of people who care about the poor are in the government, which is really contrary to exactly what happens in history.
If the majority of people care about the poor, then you don't need a government program because the majority of people care about the poor.
So there's lots of reasons why.
And of course, if everybody cares about the poor, you definitely don't need a government program.
This is sort of something that's very interesting when you think about how people view these issues.
There is an appeal to... Government propaganda is appealing to the argument for morality.
Health care, public health care is a fundamental Canadian value.
But of course, if it was, we wouldn't need to be forced to do it.
And so, if it were, the last thing we'd need is all of the overhead, and I've mentioned that in arguments before, and I've said, people who say, well, we really need government-run healthcare, and everybody believes that, and everybody understands that.
Then I'm like, okay, well, that's great, let's get rid of all of the overhead of the tax laws, let's get rid of the government, we don't need it anymore, because people will just send their money voluntarily.
And then people, oh, well, people won't, because of, well, that's like, okay, but you can't have it both ways.
You can't say, and this is the fundamental paradox of propaganda, It takes two seconds of thought and maybe two minutes of argument to get people to understand the differences here.
So when people say to me, and you can use health care or whatever, or you can use the welfare state, when people say to me, health care is a fundamental Canadian value and everybody wants it.
Then I say, well great, then let's get rid of the government because it's a lot of extra overhead and a lot of extra hope.
All these bureaucrats and all these forms and all this taxation and all of this enforcement and the police and everything.
I mean, it's an enormous amount of overhead.
And if everybody cares about the sick and the poor, and you say that it's a fundamental value of our society, then you can't say that we need this overhead.
It's a complete waste.
You can't say it's voluntary and then say we need to enforce it.
Now, if people then say, well, if you make the taxes go, people won't give as much money, right?
Then, okay, well, then you can say that helping the poor or helping the sick is a fundamental Canadian value or fundamental human value, and that's fine.
So people will send less money, but that's fine, because you're getting rid of this enormous overhead.
So you actually don't need to worry about that.
And then you'll end up with people saying, well, people are selfish, they won't do it, all they do is care about themselves, they won't help the poor, this, that and the other.
And that's fine.
But then you're back to coercion.
You then can't say that it's a fundamental value.
If you then say, after you're told, well, let's make it voluntary, if then people fall back to the position and say, well, people simply won't do it voluntarily, then you sure as hell cannot say that it's a fundamental value.
And that's a very important thing to get people to understand when you're talking about these sorts of things.
And again, it doesn't require any statistical knowledge or any procedural knowledge or any legal knowledge of these issues.
It's just a basic fact.
If something is voluntary, then it does not need to be enforced and there's no moral virtue in forcing it, right?
Even if it is a fundamental virtue to help the poor, to help the sick, forcing people to do it at the point of a gun strips their capacity for being virtuous.
And it's certainly not a universal value.
If you force everyone with the threat of jail to perform a particular action, it's certainly not a universal value.
So that's the thing that's very different about propaganda from any other sort of argument or approach.
With propaganda you want to get people to hold the whip themselves.
You want to get the slaves to forge their own manacles by appealing to a false virtue within them or creating a false virtue within them that blinds them to the fact that they're simply herded around and bullied and have guns pointed at them and they're shuffling in this zombie democratic kind of way under the watchful and harsh eyes of their political masters.
So you don't want them to think of that.
You don't want them to recognize that, but actually cause their self-esteem, their pride to react.
So you've got to get them all waterlogged and fuzzy with all of these false virtues and hide the guns completely.
And that's the real purpose of propaganda.
So propaganda, and I'll talk about its relationship to negative economics this afternoon, propaganda is about destroying people's capacity to act on their own self-interest.
It's about muddying and clouding and destroying people's accurate perceptions of the violence that they're subjected to.
So in the realm of advertising, you're appealing to people's rationality and self-interest in a situation of free choice, where they both have to choose to start it and choose to sustain the behavior that you want in buying your product.
In propaganda, you're blinding people to the fact that they have no choice.
You are giving them the illusion of choice by saying, well, only good people would choose this and we're forcing you to do it anyway.
You are sort of muddying people's perceptions to get them to live with a state of coercion where they have no choice, rather than appealing to their self-interest in a situation where they do have choice.
And so the one is, of course, advertising is an invention of the free market and can only occur in a situation of freedom.
Well, you have the capacity to choose between different products and services and propaganda is always a state mechanism because it's always about getting people to believe that what they're forced to do is actually kind of what they might choose to do and it's kind of good.
So it's blinding people.
to the reality of coercion and the absence of choice.
So I hope this has been helpful, and I will... Sorry if I was a little bit jumpy back and forth.
It was quite a tough drive with lots of rain and cars swerving because they were late, so I hope it wasn't too disjointed.
I'll try and edit it a little bit before I post it.
So I hope you're doing well, and I will talk to you this afternoon.
All the best.
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