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March 19, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:14
147 Subjectivism and the State
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So let's have another chat this afternoon.
It is 5.20 on March the 19th, 2006.
Hope you're doing well.
So let's go to a slightly more abstract topic and chat about the question of subjectivism and the state.
Now you're going to run into, if you haven't already, hordes and hordes of goo-headed, jello-brained subjectivists out there.
And it's not because they're not intelligent.
They just happen to have imbibed a rather large coif of propaganda which has dissolved their capacity for rationality into a slavish regard for subjectivism or subjectivity.
So what is it in particular that you're going to run into?
Or if you have run into it, perhaps I can do a little bit to help you examine this in a slightly different light or a slightly different angle.
Well, subjectivism is the idea that morality, or reality, but generally it's morality, is subjective in nature.
You can't impose your will upon other people, you can't judge another culture by your own cultural standards, everything is relative, my parents did the best they could based on the information they had at the time, and so on and so on and so on.
You've all heard this, it's a postmodern stuff, it's pretty popular these days, and it is part of the general acid that is eating apart the philosophical legacy and history of the Western philosophical traditions and it is definitely a fungus to be combated with great swaths of cleansers.
So let's have a look at how subjectivism and the state are sort of co-related and how any appeal to subjectivism in no way justifies the existence of a state.
Now, there really are only three possibilities that I've sort of really heard of when it comes to subjectivism.
And if there are more, then let me know and I'll do, oh, eight to a dozen follow-on podcasts, you know, in the way that everybody really enjoys.
So the first, of course, is that subjectivism is false.
There's no such thing as subjective values or subjective morality that says subjectivism is no more valid than mysticism is in physics or religion is in epistemology.
That there is no such thing as subjectivism.
That morality is objective and rational and consistent and universal and all this kind of stuff.
Now the interesting thing is if And the idea of morality, or of morality itself, is objective and universal.
Then, fascinatingly, you can't logically justify the existence of a state.
So, for instance, if everybody has the same rights, and, you know, rights is subject to definitions and all so on, but I mean, I've talked about this a lot in my podcast, so if you've got this far and aren't sick of me yet, I assume that you've found some value in what I'm saying.
Even if it is just to irritate you to find out exactly when I'm going to go completely off the rails or have a car crash while podcasting in traffic.
So, I'm not going to go into the definition of rights, but just properties, aspects of the human condition, of human mind, of the human experience, of human life that are common to everyone.
Human beings in general have one head.
That's sort of the idea, right?
If you're not in a Monty Python film or an Ettin or some bizarre mutant, then you're going to have only one head.
That's a characteristic of humanity.
Now, If morality is universal for everyone, then you can't have a state.
That's a basic simple fact.
Because a state is by definition A collection of people with different, and in fact opposing, ethical absolutes than everybody else in society, right?
So a state, you can collect taxes, you can have a military, you can regulate people, you can run a police force, you can imprison people.
All of these rights or capacities are only available to people in the state from nine to five while they're voted in, blah blah blah blah blah.
So it's all not even consistent upon one group of people for their entire lives, but only when they're acting at the capacity of a So, I can't declare war, Tony Blair can.
And so he and I have very sort of different and opposing rights.
I can't collect taxes, he can.
And you can go on and on down the immense and sadly ever-growing list of government predations upon the disarmed citizenry.
You are going to see this kind of stuff, which is directly opposite For those in power and those not in power.
So, you know, to take a sort of extreme example, John Kerry, right?
The lantern-jawed stentorian poodle to rich wives, as he was, faced a real fork in his moral nature a couple years ago, I guess in 2004.
In one fork, The governor of the state of Florida was not Jeb Bush, and therefore it wasn't corrupt, and so he became the president of the United States.
And so he would have all these rights, speeches, declare war, the bully pulpits, and so on.
So he would have all these rights to do X, Y, and Z, which he does not have at the moment.
So his moral nature, what was possible for him and logical and moral for him, went through an enormous fork in the road based on You know, this guy who is the brother of George Bush running the Florida election recount.
So even if it was, let's say it wasn't even close, right?
So if you're running for office, you're going to have a whole bunch of rights, powers, capacities, and absolutes after you get into office.
And if you just happen to lose by one vote or ten votes or a million votes, you don't get those.
You get to be just some ordinary schmo growing a beard and putting on weight.
That's sort of one of the things that you really can't justify logically or ethically in terms of justifying the state if morality is objective.
If morality is objective, then you can't be switching moralities for this guy and that guy.
If he gets in power, if he gets out of power, this cop has a uniform on, then he takes it off, blah blah blah.
None of this stuff makes any sense.
So that obviously can never justify a state.
If subjectivism is true, in other words, if morality is sort of just opinion, is whatever you want it to be, right?
So if everybody believes in foot binding, then foot bind is good.
If everybody believes that a war is valid, then a war is valid, blah, blah, blah.
If everybody believes in the welfare state, then the welfare state is good.
This is sort of the democratic approach to morality, but it's even more subjective than that.
That's sort of the third category, which is cultural subjectivism.
But if morality is an opinion, And there's no such thing as objective morality or objective truth, then you can't have a state.
The whole purpose of a state is to impose values on other people.
The whole purpose of a state is to force people to do stuff based on the values of other people, right?
So, someone says we should go to war in Iraq, off we go to war in Iraq, and if you don't agree with it, we'll put you in jail.
And we want socialized medicine, or we don't want this, and we don't want the welfare state, unemployment insurance, income transfers between states and provinces, the Federal Emergency Relief Aid, you know, 10,000 million rules and regulations in the Federal Registry.
All of this stuff is all about forcing people to do stuff that they don't want to do, or preventing them from doing stuff that they do want to do, which is the exact opposite of subjectivism.
So subjectivism says that personal values are just that.
They're personal.
They're opinions.
They're like, I like blue, you like red.
I like apples, you like oranges.
You can't conceivably have a law.
I mean, you could, right?
But I mean, nobody would logically be able to defend a law which said everybody has to paint their house blue.
So that is a pretty important thing to understand as well.
If values are subjective, if values are relativistic, then there is no such thing as objective morality.
I don't think that's true, but hey, you know, if people like you that, more power to them.
Let's take them on.
But if you accept that, or if you're up against people who are arguing about that, then clearly you cannot have a government, because a government is all about imposing values on other people.
If values are subjective, if values are mere aesthetic preferences, what you grew up with, what you're used to, what you're familiar with, what your parents taught you, what you feel like, whatever, Then, you clearly cannot have a government, because a government is all about imposing will and values on other people, and you can't logically do that, because everybody's values are subjective, which means no one's values are better than anybody else, which means imposing values from one person to another is immoral, is wrong.
You can't just sort of say, well, that's their value or whatever, right?
Because everybody's a human being, therefore everybody has a right to their own subjective values.
You can't impose the values on other people.
So that's all.
There's no way the state can be morally justified in that situation.
Now, when you point this out to people, generally their fallback position, their sort of cowardly little nook of relativism, tends to be the following.
Okay.
There's no such thing as objective reality.
Fine.
There's no such thing as subjective reality, but there's cultural relativism.
So the people in Micronesia believe this, in general they believe that, so they kind of have the right to have a system which reflects that, which is governmental, which blah blah blah blah blah.
I'm sure we've all heard the arguments before.
And this is a very interesting opposition to the idea that market anarchism or anarcho-capitalism is the only valid moral system, which, as far as I can see and can logically figure out, it is.
But people will say, and it's based on this democratic rule of the majority, that the majority has the right to impose their will on the minority.
Well and good.
And they do that through the state and so on.
So this cultural relativism is that, well, the people in Saudi Arabia, they're pretty much taken off the hands of the thieves, whereas the people in America are pretty much with the gassing or electrocuting of the retarded and the children, and the people in Iran are this and so on.
So they have the right to have a social institution called the state, which imposes the will of the majority on the minority.
And I think that's an interesting justification for the state, but it doesn't work at all, right?
And there's a couple of reasons why.
It's a little bit more of a sophisticated one because it's a slightly more murky argument, so it takes a bit more sort of kicking around the murk to sort of figure out what's going on at the root of the argument.
But the basic idea is that in any society, we'll just take Micronesia as a small island chain, in any society there's a belief, a set of beliefs that you know somewhat more or less in British people to some degree believe this and versus Saudi Arabians who believe that.
So there are these general cultural beliefs within society and that the state reflects those and can enforce them and so on.
Well, that's all very interesting and there's lots of different ways to approach this.
I'll just come up with a few or just mention a few here to see if they sort of make sense to you and if you think that they're worthwhile.
Now, if you say that there's such a thing as cultural preferences that are general to a population, then the real question, one of the first questions you can ask about that is, is there public education?
That's sort of an important question.
Because if there is public education, then you can't really say that there are values that are common across the culture, across the civilization, because they're just taught.
Which is a whole lot different than them being values, right?
It's like saying that somebody who's in a prison cell must be really agoraphobic and must really like being in a prison cell.
Why?
Well, because he doesn't leave.
And the fact that he's locked in and he'd be shot if he left, you sort of ignore that, right?
You say, well, this is all a choice.
So if you get a hold of kids for 14 years of straight state propaganda, and then you say, lo and behold, the culture seems to have similar values, and if you don't go to state school and if you don't pay the taxes of state school, then you get shot and thrown in jail, or shot in the leg, tried and then thrown in jail, or shot and thrown in a hole in the ground, but definitely the shooting is part of it, I'm pretty sure of that, then it's really hard to say that this is sort of a cultural value.
So this is just a scar tissue.
This is just enforced opinions upon people.
Like magically, everybody who went through and became sort of stars in the communist system were pretty much communists, right?
But it wasn't because they chose it.
It's just that you couldn't get ahead without being a member of the Communist Party.
And if you pretty much spoke out against it, you'd get flushed down into the gulag and you would spend the rest of your days, and short days they would be, in misery, shame, degradation, starvation and death.
So it's kind of hard to say that that would be a sort of culturally chosen value.
So if there is public school, there's simply no way to tell what the values of the society would be otherwise.
Because there's all this propaganda and so on.
And it's enforced, right?
It's not like advertising.
It's a choice.
And I talked about this recently in the propaganda podcast.
Now, if you say, well, let's just bypass that question, you know, that should be enough.
Let's just bypass the question and say, okay, well, there's no public school, whatever.
Everyone has, you know, kind of the same opinions.
Then the real question, of course, is does everyone have the same opinion?
Now, if everybody has the same opinion, if all the values in the culture are the same, everybody has the same opinion, then you don't need a government.
Because nobody's going to disagree, really.
So if everybody in a culture believes, I don't know, that you should resolve your disputes in contract and personal relationships by thumb wrestling, and every single person in Micronesia believes that, well you don't need a government because everybody's going to respect that, everybody's going to perfectly agree with that, and that's how you're going to solve all your disputes and your problems and property rights and so on, then there's no such thing as the requirement for a government.
So, for instance, if you have another culture called Communesthesia, or something like that, or another society where nobody believes in property rights, or everybody believes that property should be held in common by, you know, the tallest guy in the village or something, well, then you still don't need a government because everybody's going to believe that, everyone's going to follow that, there's no problem with that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But of course, that's never really what's presented.
What is presented is that there's a majority belief But there are minorities or groups within that majority belief who do not believe that and do not believe it in an absolutist manner.
They believe the exact opposite or some deviation from the general social norms and they believe that in an absolutistic fashion.
So, for instance, if I was an agnostic, and I lived in a village, and 99 out of the 100 people who lived in the village believed in God, and I did not believe in God, but I kind of went along with it, kept to myself, didn't say anything, well you still wouldn't need a state.
Right, you would only need a state, I mean in this sort of formulation, if I felt that the existence of the church was pure stone evil and I blocked people from going into the church, I interrupted the priest, I harangued, I don't know, like I...
Spiked the wine with scotch or cocaine or something and, you know, harmed people or did whatever.
Then you would need a government.
I mean in this sort of formulation.
I'm not saying you need a government objectively, but the only reason that you would ever need a state is if people disagree to the point of violence.
That's sort of important.
So if you steal my car and I try and get it back and you pull out a gun and I want my car back, then you could say, OK, well, we have a need for a state.
I mean, I don't believe that you would, of course, but you could make that argument for sure.
It would be somewhat logically consistent.
In general, then, you've got this problem that the majority of people in a particular society believe X, but a significant number of people in society believe the opposite of X, or something quite different from X, and everybody is willing to go to reach for a gun, to enforce this particular way of doing things, and they can't resolve things peacefully.
That's sort of very important.
So you have a situation, you've got a majority of people who believe one thing, and you've got a minority of people who believe another thing, and there's a huge amount of disagreement in this environment.
And that is another argument for the existence or the need for a state.
Now, of course, one of the reasons why we get confused about this is because there exists such a thing as countries.
So, for instance, in Canada, a lot of people believe in socialized medicine because they've been programmed by the state schools and so on.
And a minority of people don't believe in socialized medicine and the reason that we need a state is because we have a country.
So if I could form my own independent DRO and you could have your own independent DRO wherein you could have your sort of quote socialized medicine everyone pays into a common kitty and everyone cross insures and so on and I could have my own I don't really want this sort of quote socialized medicine so I'm gonna have a DRO where everyone buys their own insurance individually and is measured according to their own health standards and goals and whatever, then we really don't need a government because we both can get what we want.
You can have your collective insurance system which everybody can subscribe to voluntarily who finds it worthwhile and I can have my non-collective insurance system where everybody subscribes to their own personal insurance for health care and so there's no need for a state in this situation because we have no need for conflict.
Nobody has to have one central authority that imposes their will on everyone else.
So you can't presuppose the existence of a country when you are arguing for the existence of a state, because those two things are synonymous, right?
A state is a monopoly of legal, the ability to generate or initiate force in a geographically defined area for a small particular group of people, particular times of day, if certain ballots get cast, and everybody, whatever, right?
So you can't presuppose the existence of a country to justify the creation of a state, because those two things are somewhat synonymous.
So you sort of can't assume.
It's called begging the question, where you assume the answer in order to prove the argument.
So that really doesn't make that much sense logically at all.
But hey, let's be nice guys, and let's let them have their country, and let's let them have their... forget about the public schools and so on, and let's say, okay, well, cultural relativism is fine, and it's the fact that the majority believe this and the minority believe that, or you say this is the justification for a state to impose the will of the majority no matter whatever, right?
Okay, fine.
Well, the fact of the matter is, of course, that The accumulation of instances does not prove a false proposition.
So if I write 2 plus 2 equals 5 a million times, it's not the same as proving that 2 plus 2 equals 5.
And if a whole bunch of people believe that if you throw yourself off a cliff you can fly, it doesn't matter how many people throw themselves off the cliff.
The truth is not democratic, is what I'm saying, right?
So if you're saying that it's an absolute moral truth that the majority has the right to impose its opinions on the minority, basically you're saying, well, might makes right.
The reason they can do it is because they are bigger, they outnumber, and they can then force people to do it, right?
The same way parents are bigger than children, so parents can force whatever, right?
So that's perfect.
That's not logical at all.
You can't claim that it's a morally logical thing to say that the majority should be able to impose its will on the minority because there's just a bunch of individuals, right?
Now, the other interesting thing about a state is that a state is not the majority imposing its will on the minority.
Even if we say it's not officialistic, it's not national socialist, it's not communistic, it's not any flavor of totalitarianism other than brute majority rule, in a democracy you do not have the majority imposing its will on the minority.
Why?
because the majority simply chooses a bunch of people who lie to them to get into office to impose that minority's will on the rest of the population.
So nobody in Canada wants income tax, and nobody in Canada has ever voted for income tax, and almost nobody in Canada has ever voted for socialized medicine, except for a couple of real old doofers from Saskatchewan who loved this Tommy Douglas guy.
So the fact that this stuff exists in no way represents the will of the majority of Canadians.
In fact, you could absolutely say that if the majority of Canadians wanted socialized medicine or the welfare state or whatever, then you wouldn't need to worry about it.
You wouldn't need any taxation because people would voluntarily contribute to a central agency, whether a state or not, which would fund this and blah blah blah, right?
So if it is the majority of Canadians, a large enough majority that you could claim cultural relativistic preferences that can be imposed by a state, Then you wouldn't need a state to impose it.
If 90% of Canadians love socialized medicine, then the overhead that you get from collecting taxes on the remaining 10%, the amount of overhead that's going to cost you, is far more than just letting those non-10% pay.
Those 10% don't have to pay.
So, it doesn't really make any sense, if the majority really does believe in something, it doesn't make any sense to have a state.
It's dangerous, it's overhead, it grows, and also the idea that it's just going to ignore the majority of the people's wills and go and do its own thing, which is what you see happen more and more in democracies, that's a high enough risk that it really doesn't make any sense to have a state in that situation.
Now, you can say that if 51% of Canadians want socialized medicine, then they can impose their will on 49% of Canadians who don't want socialized medicine.
And that's a little bit closer to the argument for the state.
However, the problem is that that can switch, right?
So you can get the 51-49.
The closer it is, the more it's likely to switch.
And of course, the fact is that you don't vote on existing institutions in any state or any democracy.
Nobody votes every day or every week or every month or every year or for a decade about whether we still want socialized medicine.
So the closer it is in terms of balance, the more justification you can have at some level for the existence of a state, but then the more it's likely to switch and therefore the less justification you can simultaneously have for the existence of a state, because you don't get to reverse all these state policies.
That's not what happens in a government.
And a government, as I mentioned before, is always a minority of people imposing their will on the majority of people, because the majority don't even get to vote for people in an unlimited democracy.
You don't get to vote for anyone who hasn't already been bought and paid for by special interest groups.
I talked about this in a prior podcast, so I won't get into it in great detail.
But it doesn't make any more sense to say, because of cultural relativism, whether it's a majority, a minority, one person, a million people, that there's any justification, logically or morally, for the existence of a state.
So I just wanted to kind of jot these ideas down.
Oh my god, it's a short podcast.
Wait, let me stretch it.
Out, out, out.
No, I won't.
I'll be good because I need to get back to cleaning up my study.
But I wanted to jot these ideas down.
I was on the Hellbound Alley show recently and we touched on these topics.
I wanted to go a little bit deeper into them because they were very interesting and I also wanted to organize my thoughts for an article, but I hope it's been helpful for you.
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