All Episodes
Previous Next
March 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:22
149 The Costs and Benefits of Irrationality
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 20 past 1 on the 20th of March 2006.
I have to run a wee errand.
My friend, whose mother died, accidentally left his paperwork, his mother's paperwork, in my car, so I had to sort of drop it by him at lunch.
And, God forbid, I should ever be in the car and not be doing a podcast.
It would be unthinkable.
It just makes it a little less dull, you know?
For me, I hope for you, too, to actually have something to do in the car other than listen to an audiobook or sing along.
You'd be happy I'm not combining the latter with my podcasts.
So, I wanted to talk about... I just had lunch with my boss, who is a very smart Russian fellow, and he was telling me a little bit about this Balkan stuff.
And, of course, if you know, Balkanization for, I guess, ever since the First World War, and possibly even before, in European history, has always referred to this problem of ethnic conflict.
And people say ethnic, really what they mean is religious.
So I got, I pumped him for a little information to get my podcast up and going this afternoon.
And asked him sort of what the history was of the conflict and so on.
And he was saying that basically you have Christians, Russian Orthodox, and as he puts it, the Russians are about the most xenophobic people in the world.
So they really don't like anybody.
They dislike the, I guess, the Western Christians.
They dislike the Muslims even more.
And so you had a situation, a sort of Serbo-Croatian situation.
You had Tito in since the 1950s.
He was the guy who came up with the magic slogan, socialism with a human face.
I think he was one of the people who tried with great vigor and very little success to try and create market substitutes for socialist mechanics as we talked about recently in the issues around price and socialist calculations.
Kind of impossible.
But it's a pipe dream that people still dream of, bringing to bear on the problems of economics.
He tried that in the 1950s in Yugoslavia.
And so he, of course, as the central ruling dictator, he kept all these people relatively in line, all these sort of crazy religious divisions relatively in line.
And it's been a constant problem in this sort of multi-religious society without the sort of enlightenment ideals.
Anytime you put religion together with a non-enlightenment country, whether it's Turkey or Saudi Arabia or Germany, you end up with this complete tinderbox, this completely volatile, insane society.
And so this is something we don't really appreciate as much in the West because we had atheists Who came before us, or at least agnostics who came before us, who ridiculed the entire idea of religion to the point where they began to stay out of the sort of state arena, the public arena.
One of the things that's interesting, of course, is that a lot of people in America are very keen on this sort of... America was founded on Christian religious principles, which is of course the purest nonsense in the world.
The Founding Fathers were, by and large, not anybody we would recognize as Christians, even of the mildest kind, certainly not these born-again nutjobs.
George Washington rarely went to church.
His shadow rarely crossed the church door.
And when somebody complained about his erratic and inconsistent church attendance, he said, you know, I think that is kind of inconsistent, and he never went again.
Don't think that the Founding Fathers were religious in any way, shape, or form.
At least, the majority of them were not.
They were deists.
Mostly deists.
And deists generally are the people who say, well, it's like the blind watchmaker idea.
You know, that basically God wound creation up.
God is fine as a first course, but he does not interfere with human life or human affairs anymore.
He just watches.
And so there's no point praying, there's no point having an organized religion.
It doesn't really make any sense.
So this was the majority of people, and this was the dominant intellectual heir in the Enlightenment period, in the 18th century.
As one American cleric put it, mankind was in danger of being laughed right out of religion, because it began to be kind of ridiculous.
Voltaire wrote a lot about this, and a lot of the Enlightenment writers.
Diderot and the people who put together the philosophical encyclopedias and so on, They wrote rather scathingly about religion and the self-interest of religious people, and the people in funny hats with all the gold, and so on.
It's important to understand that there was really not much religion in the founding of America at all, and that's why the separation of church and state was fine.
Now, there is also this other myth around the founding of America that the reason that the separation of church and state occurred was because people were fleeing religious persecution, so they didn't want to create in America the capacity for religious persecution.
And I think that's an interesting theory.
Of course, what you would need to do to try and prove anything like that would be to find some commonality in terms of people who fled religious persecution and whether or not the place they fled to, whether or not they set up a free society there, you know, relatively free.
I mean, relative to America versus Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
And I think you'll find the answer is pretty much not so much.
Pretty much no.
That people who flee religious persecution, the first thing that they want to do is set up their own religious persecutions wherever they come.
But what happened, of course, in the 18th century was that the Christians had lost all credibility.
all these religious wars and so on, and the splits within Christendom, the violence, the doctrinal violence that was occurring throughout Europe for, gosh, for the past two, two and a half centuries, the religious people had lost pretty much their entire hold upon the moral imagination of Europe.
And, of course, the rediscovery of the classical works, the rediscovery of the works of the ancients, was pretty important, because before Christendom, you know, in the Middle Ages, or the early Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, for sure, before Christendom, it was all like, there was only darkness before Christ, and there was no intellectual achievement, and there was only darkness before Christ, and there was no intellectual achievement, and there was no, you know, they were just rapacious heathens And so, when you actually began to discover some of these ancient texts, which came back through the Muslims in Arabia,
who had preserved them during the Middle Ages, during the Church's desire to get rid of them all, when they began flowing back in and people saw more about Aristotle and more about Plato and more about Democritus and all of the other ancient Greek philosophers, the Stoics and so on.
They saw all of those achievements.
They saw the achievements of Roman law.
They saw the achievements of the Roman social organization for cities as a whole, which they kind of needed, right?
Because they were starting to get cities back up again.
All of this sort of stuff, they began to really see the world outside the mere lens of Christianity, which is sort of kind of important.
When you're setting up a new society, to have a perspective that shows you the limitations of your current ways of thinking, that I think is kind of important.
And that was one thing that was occurring in the 18th century, is you really got the spread, not only of the original Bible, which started after the 16th century, so people could actually read the Bible in itself and not rely on the interpretations of priests, and they began to realize that there were translation errors, there were all these problems, And that the Bible was rather an insane book.
So you got to make a lot of fun of the Bible when you began to actually be able to read it.
So that was one thing that occurred I think that was quite important.
And another thing that occurred was you began to have access to the ancient texts of the ancient world which were non-christian in nature and could not exactly be called shoddy or non-enlightened.
And of course when you're reading in the church, and I've never quite figured this one out, I've read an explanation of it once but I never really found it too satisfying, I mean, the church had a real thing for Aristotle.
I mean, they just called him the philosopher.
And I can't exactly explain why.
If you know, please feel free to let me know and I'll be happy to broadcast it with the massive wattage that I'm able to do so.
But they really loved Aristotle.
They called him the philosopher.
It wasn't anyone else.
It was just that guy.
And there was a Neoplatonist who was sort of the guy who believed in a higher reality but tried to adapt it more towards the Christian theology.
But Christianity was kind of in tatters at this point.
And it all started, of course, with the Black Death.
I mean, the Black Death was one of the first convulsions that really shook the core of Christianity in terms of its moral authority, as I mentioned before.
You have all these priests who are dying like flies at the same time as the church has been preaching for 500 years that wages of sin is death.
Of course, the priests were all at everybody's deathbed, so the priests just died like crazy.
And by the by, because the Middle Ages, you basically had far fewer sons, so you got to aggregate much more of the land sort of under one person, which allowed for more Improved farming methods and crop rotation and so on.
The land was sort of centralized under one person.
So there were lots of things that happened with the Black Death.
First thing is it began to really undermine the credibility of Christendom.
And then of course the Catholic religion did an enormously wonderful job of undermining the moral legitimacy of Catholicism with this sort of sale of indulgences that was going on which drove Luther particularly mad.
And just briefly, indulgences were A Catholic phenomenon which allowed people to buy the excess virtue of the saints and of Jesus Christ.
So the saints and Jesus Christ had so much more virtue than they actually required to get into heaven because they were perfect, perfect moral beings.
So they had all this wonderful virtue and so they didn't really need all that virtue.
So there was a whole big chunk of excess virtue that the church had in its coffers, so to speak.
It had a big vat of virtue that it could scoop and sell by the bottle.
And I'm serious, this is actually the philosophy.
And so, because they had all this excess virtue, they ended up... Now, if you were a person who had not such an excess of virtue, so if you were some ordinary mortal sinner, Then what you could do is you could commit an evil action.
And then the Catholic Church would dip into its big vat of excess virtue, culled from the saints and culled from Jesus Christ, and they would sell you some of this excess virtue.
And what it would do is it would buy your time out of purgatory, or limbo, which I believe, as someone posted on the board, has been officially discontinued as of 1989, leaving a lot of people in limbo, dare I say it, In limbo.
You knew it was coming, come on!
I'm not that unpredictable anymore, am I?
Really?
No, can't be.
So, you had all of this sin, and the amount of sin that you had, assuming it was a venal sin, like not a mortal sin, a mortal sin you can't just go to hell directly for, like suicide or refusing to let a priest grope you, you go to hell directly.
But if you were simply somebody who did some venal sins, like you thought impure thoughts or whatever, Then you would actually go to Limbo, the purgatory, and it's sort of a dull place and you have to sit around.
It's sort of considered to be like climbing an endless wall to some degree.
And you would be there for, you know, 5,000 years or 10,000 years or whatever in order to work off your sin.
And what happened then was, at the end of that time, you would then be allowed, after you'd worked off your sin, you'd be allowed to go into heaven and everything was good and hunky-dory and so on.
So what happened then?
Well, the church would sell you this excess virtue.
It's called indulgences.
And what it would be would be buying time off, like getting rid of time that you would be required to spend in purgatory in order to get to heaven quicker, right?
So you might give somebody, I don't know, 10 gold pieces in the church and that would buy you 500 years less time in purgatory.
It's beautiful, right?
Because you can't exactly get a refund if it turns out to be wrong, given that you'd be rotting in the Grave and wouldn't have any eternal life.
You can't come back and get a refund and even if you could, well you can't take it with you so it wouldn't do you much good anyway.
So they have this wonderful setup wherein they get to charge people for cutting down time in purgatory to cutting down a jail sentence which doesn't even exist to begin with.
So really quite a fantastic scheme.
Quite a fantastic setup that these people had put together in this situation.
This began to switch.
So after a certain amount of time, what began to happen was, no longer did you actually have indulgences that you would buy after the fact, right?
So if you went and did something wrong, like you married and you went and you slept with your mistress, then after that you'd feel real guilty, you'd go to the church and he would say, 10 Hail Marys plus 50 gold pieces and you'll sort of wash clean your sin and it's like it never happened.
And what happened then was you began to buy this sort of stuff in advance.
You began to buy this excess virtue in advance.
So before you were going to go and have your naughty weekend with your mistress, you would be able to buy these indulgences.
And you would then be able to, or allowed to, go and do this guilt-free.
Like, you'd already bought your forgiveness ahead of time, so you could do whatever you want.
Now, not that harmful when you're talking about a weekend with your mistress.
A little bit more harmful when you talk about, say, murdering all of the Muslims in a particular area, say, during the Crusades.
That would be another way of being able to buy your way out of sin.
And, of course, there are all these convoluted explanations as to why thou shalt not kill does not apply to Muslims, when you have indulgences, and all this kind of stuff.
And this was the stuff that drove Luther, I mean, one of the things that drove Luther completely mad, right?
I mean, well, I mean, it wasn't a big journey.
He's pretty mad to begin with.
But that was one of the things that occurred in that situation.
So Luther basically ended up tearing this stuff apart and arguing vociferously and blah blah blah.
So this is one of the things.
This is where the Christendom split and you got all these religious wars and the monopoly of the Catholic Church was shattered and you ended up with the Greek Orthodoxy, the Anabaptists, the Lutherans, the Zingalians, the Calvinists, the whole mess of them.
Killing each other like crazy until everyone went, okay, maybe this is such a good idea.
We need to sort of get these religious psychotics off our throats and the best way to do that is separate the church and the state, right?
Obviously, if you have a relationship or an official state religion, if you have a relationship between the church and the state, then you have a problem because everybody who's in that environment is going to want to be the dominant religion and use the power of the state to offload the killing of all their religious competitors onto everybody else and blah blah blah.
And it's hard for us to see this.
Because we've had the separation of church and state, though it's crumbling pretty quickly in America.
We've had it for so long that it's hard to remember just how violent these religious people are.
But of course, there's no real difference in human nature between the people who are Muslims and in those crazy countries, and the people who are Christians and in these slowly becoming crazy countries.
And the only difference is the configurations of power, right?
So if we were to resurrect the non-separation of church and state, then we would end up with the same kind of problem very quickly.
So the sort of major reason that I'm talking about this is because I think it's important to understand what the cost is.
Right?
What is the cost of irrationality?
Now, I understand that there's a lot of comfort in irrationality, sort of short term, and I think it's sort of a cowardly kind of comfort, and I've taken refuge in it myself, so again, no stones except from glass houses.
But I think it's very important for us to understand the costs of irrationality.
And those costs can be overwhelming and very unpleasant.
But unless we see them, it's very hard for us to make any kind of judgment about it.
So, for instance, there were, I don't know, I think 70,000, 90,000, 100,000 Muslims and Christians killed in Sobo-Croatia, or in the former Yugoslavia, or in the Balkans, in the 80s and 90s.
And why were they killed?
Well, they were killed because people had religious beliefs.
And that is sort of one of the very basic natures of religious beliefs.
And the fact that it doesn't occur here, because we have defanged the church by preventing the church from offloading the attack upon competitors to the state, doesn't mean that the situation isn't the same.
Human beings are pretty much the same the world over.
And so wherever a particular configuration of power results in genocide, we know for a fact That same configuration of power is going to result in genocide elsewhere as well.
Just because there's no particular difference between human beings.
There's no sort of magic ingredient in the air that causes people over in the Balkans to be more violent than anybody else.
So what you do have is you have these divisions, these unofficial divisions, that are created by conformity to irrational beliefs.
And you could say that they're nationalism, but in that case it generally is mostly around the area of religion.
And so you get these sort of festering hatreds and so on that are built up over many, many years, like the Turks with the Armenians, which of course was the one to two million genocide that occurred in 1915, I think it was, during the First World War.
And this is the price that human beings pay for irrationality.
And this is sort of a cost-benefit analysis that is important to understand when you're discussing things like religion or nationalism with people.
I think it's well worth stepping them through this sort of basic idea that there is a price to be paid.
for irrationality.
And I understand that there are benefits that come out of irrationality as well.
I don't mean sort of philosophical benefits, but there's sort of short-term comfort benefits that come out of irrationality.
So if you have a bunch of people in your culture who've all lied to you and taught you things that are foolish, untrue, and corrupt, then you never, if you believe those things and continue marching in the same silly outfits and continue singing the same silly songs and continue having the same ethnic prejudices and hatreds, I understand that that brings you a The benefits of irrationality are not particularly worth examining because they're so obvious.
Human beings do it because it gives them social comfort and they don't have to confront people.
And they don't have to break with their families, and they don't have to break with their cultures.
They don't have to think for themselves.
And it's just easier, right?
It's easier to just, in a lot of ways, to stay in that sort of sickly bath of cultural vomit that most people wallow in throughout their whole lives.
But there's a price to be paid for it.
And the important thing to ask people, in my humble opinion, the important thing to ask people is, do you think it's worth it?
Do you think, in terms of just a basic cost-benefit analysis, Do you think that it's worth it to have this price that you have to pay?
So, of course, you could ask of the Jews, right?
So you have these irrational beliefs around Judaism and your philosophy and your people and your religion and your culture and so on.
All of this is pure nonsense.
And what does it result in?
Well, you know, six million of you got killed just in one particular sort of couple year span.
Is it worth it?
Would you have given up Judaism to keep those people alive?
Sort of an interesting question, right?
But it's a pretty real question.
So you say to these Serbs and these Croats and these, you know, ex-Yugoslavians, these Balkans, and you say, okay, so you're really into being Russian Orthodox Christian, or you're really into being just, I guess, Western Christian, or you're really into being a Muslim.
I understand that.
I get that it's a comfort for you, and it's great for you, and you love it.
Do you think it's worth a hundred thousand people killed and an entire generation destroyed?
Is that something that you feel is worthwhile?
And that's something that I would say is kind of important to ask.
Because it is a very real question.
This is the price that people pay for their irrationality.
And that's something else that you could say if people say, well, I'm against the war in Iraq, right?
You could say, I mean, this is sort of some conversation that I might have with somebody who was intelligent enough.
If they're a Christian and they're against the Iraqi war, to me it's kind of an interesting question.
So you might say to those people, would you be willing to give up your Christianity in exchange for ending the Iraqi war?
That's a very interesting question to me, at least, right?
For instance, if people are against the war who are socialists, you would say, okay, well, would you be willing to give up the welfare state in order to prevent the Iraq war?
And, I mean, there's different configurations, of course.
If somebody's pro-war but anti-welfare state, they're sort of on the Republican side, then you would say to them, OK, well, would you be willing to give up the Iraqi war if it meant you could get rid of the welfare state?
Because it's all a package deal, right?
I mean, you give a dollar to the government, they're going to slice it up and spend it however they want.
Once they've got your dollar, right, you've lost control of the whole political process, which is why I think I may have mentioned you shouldn't have a state.
Did I?
Wait.
Yes, I think that was in my third podcast, probably at about 22 minutes.
Anyway, so the real question to ask people is, are you willing to give up your irrational beliefs in general in order to prevent irrational manifestations of those beliefs that you may not have associated with, or maybe you dislike, or maybe you have a problem with?
But it's a very real issue.
So if somebody who is a Muslim in the Balkan states, maybe their kid got wiped out in some sort of shelling, Serbian shelling in Sarajevo, then you say to that person, oh my god, there's a weeping and wailing, I fully understand it, it's absolutely horrible, then you say, okay, well, would you be willing to give up this ridiculous, irrational faith in order to prevent this from happening again?
Would you be willing to do that?
Now, of course, they won't.
I mean, they won't.
But the fact of the matter is that they then can't complain about the deaths.
Because it's a natural consequence of irrationality.
When you have irrational absolutes, you're going to end up with violence.
I already talked about this in concepts.
Who is the master?
That is a natural and inevitable, it follows as the day follows night, that you will get violence from irrational absolutes.
It may take time, it may come out in different ways, but it certainly has already come out in America, for sure.
And it certainly has already come out in Canada, for sure.
In brutal, brutal ways.
So, in America, you have the war, and you have the FDA, which is banning life-saving drugs.
You have the welfare state, which is stripping money from people and creating absolutely destroyed families and brutalized children.
You have the war on drugs, which has put two million people into these rape-room gulags that they call the American prison system.
So, without a doubt, these irrational absolutes Of nationalism and statism and Christianity have already created intense violence in the West.
We don't see it, right?
Because we don't like to see it.
But it's absolutely there.
The moral costs are just horrendous.
You can't measure them, but they're very real.
And they have long-term effects on the moral nature and moral strength of a society.
And I don't mean just in general.
I mean individually, in terms of individuals.
So that's something else that's sort of very important to understand.
So if somebody says, I'm against the war in Iraq, you can say, are you willing to give up the very idea of such a thing as an American country, of a country called America?
Are you willing to give up the idea of a state?
Are you willing to give up Christianity?
Are you willing to give up nationalism?
Are you willing to give up whatever blindnesses you have around parental corruption or social corruption?
Are you willing to give all of those up in order to prevent this from happening again?
Because if the world is rational, genocide doesn't happen.
If the world is rational, there's no such thing as a state.
Religion is sort of regarded as people who believe in flying saucers right now.
And there really is no reason or funding for or ways to determine who's good and who's bad, right?
The wonderful thing about things like religion, race can't be changed this way.
But again, I don't think that we need to worry too much about race in a free society.
I'll get back to that more later this afternoon.
But how would you know who's an enemy, right?
Unless you could figure them out, right?
I mean, if you have two white people, one's Jewish and one's Christian, and another one's Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox Christian, how are you going to tell them apart if you don't have religion?
You can't, right?
We're all in the same mix.
A common humanity is that much easier to maintain, to understand, to penetrate, to empathize with, to imbibe, to inculcate.
It's also much easier to get along if you don't have all these artificial divisions.
American, Canadian, blah, blah, blah.
So, the real question when people dislike specific manifestations of irrationality is, are you willing to give up your irrationalities to eliminate these manifestations?
So, if you don't like something like genocide, are you willing to give up church and state, nation and race, class and gender, and all of this nonsense that we use to slice and dice humanity up into good and bad moral piles, which always results in violence?
Now, if somebody says, and I'm not saying it's going to be an overnight thing, but if somebody does say in general, yeah, you know, now that you've sort of made the connection for me, and it may not be just this podcast that does it, but they'll get it sooner or later, now that you've made this connection for me, you know what?
I really would be willing to give up these beliefs of mine, these irrational beliefs, in order to prevent these kinds of genocides.
Well, then I think that's a very noble thing.
I think that is a wonderful thing.
I think that people like that should be praised and applauded, and we happy few at the beginning of all of this will hopefully have high schools named after us in 200 years.
Because, you know, it'll be from the free market which we've helped bring about, it'll be because there's no state, and people will be eternally grateful for the shackles that have been taken from around their necks.
And we will have done an enormous part in bringing that about.
Although I don't think it'll be 200 years, but, you know, it takes 200 years for cultural heroes such as ourselves to finally make it to the forefront of mythology.
But if people aren't willing to do that, that's fine too.
I fully understand that.
So you say, I would rather have genocide and keep my irrational beliefs.
I'm not saying I respect that choice, but that is the choice.
There is no other choice.
If you're going to go with irrational absolutes, you're going to get genocide.
Absolutely.
There's no other way that human brain, human society, human interactions are ever going to work.
And if they then say, well, I want to keep my irrationalities.
I want to not have genocide, but I want to stay a Christian or a Muslim or an American or whatever.
That's fine.
I understand that.
Then you get the genocides.
Then you can't really complain about it.
You've chosen the genocides.
You've chosen the violence.
You've chosen the war.
You've chosen the taxation.
You've chosen the welfare state.
You've chosen the military-industrial complex.
You've chosen the abuse of altar boys.
You've chosen all of that.
It is a package deal.
Irrational absolutes lead to universal violence.
Nothing you can do about it.
Can't change reality.
So that's sort of the cost-benefit analysis that people need to be aware of.
And then if they say, yes, I do want to keep my cultural prejudices and ethnic biases and religious infant's view of the world and I want to keep all of this and I want to dance the silly dances and wear the silly hats and eat the silly food, fine.
Then you choose the genocides and you can't really complain about them.
I mean, I'm starting to read this book called A Problem from Hell, America in the Age of Genocide, or America's Responses to Genocides.
And, of course, it's a heart-rending reading, as all this sort of stuff is, when you hear about genocides.
But then, you know, she's like, well, the American government should have done this, and the UN should have done that.
And it's like, OK, so basically you don't want genocide, but you want aggression against the American population to get funds to stop genocide.
So you don't like violence when it's in the open, but you like violence when it's against disarmed enemies, when everybody obeys, so it doesn't really look like violence.
I mean, this is the sort of level of intellectual development that we have in the West, which is infantile.
I mean, the Western intellectual development is half retarded, half infantile.
And, you know, I'm sorry to say that, and I know that that sounds sort of vain or whatever, right?
But I don't consider myself any more intelligent than the general intellectual, but what I do think is that I have a bit of a mania for consistency, which I think has served me well, and I seem to have some sort of inability to believe in propaganda, or at least much propaganda, certainly as I get older.
And that's really the only difference, right?
I mean, as Noam Chomsky says, the day that the New York Times When printing war atrocity stories on the front pages sort of reacts in horror to the fact that we have these genocidal weapons in our hands and are using them against disarmed and poor Iraqis, the moment that they realize that we are holding a gun and we are disturbed by that fact is the moment that we start to become civilized.
Well, that's very much the case for me with this kind of stuff as well.
I mean, that's really the choice that is in front of the humanity.
It's the choice that's in front of civilization.
If you want the irrational absolutes, fine!
Then you get the wars, and the genocides, and the rape rooms, and the prisons, and the invasions, and the slaughters, and the predation of the young, and taxation, and so on.
You get all of that stuff, and that's... I'm not saying that's a good choice, but if you choose that, fine!
Then you can't choose to complain about these things.
So, if you are a Muslim and you want to stay a Muslim, fine!
Don't complain about the slaughter of Muslims.
If you are a Christian, you want to stay a Christian, fine.
Don't complain about the Iraq war, which fundamentally is justified by Christianity.
If you want to be all these things, fine.
Stop complaining about the effects.
It's like hearing somebody who wants to eat chocolate cake morning, noon, and night complaining about gaining weight and getting diabetes.
It's like, you wanted the cake?
Then take the consequences.
Take what you want, take what you want, and pay for it.
And so I just find it kind of funny when people say, well, we want to use the government to eliminate violence.
We want to use the government to eliminate genocide.
And isn't it sad, as General Dallaire writes, oh, in Rwanda it was so sad the Americans didn't even jam the frequencies that the genocidal murderers were using to track down and kill all of the helpless and hapless Rwandan people.
I can't remember if it was the Hutus or the Tutsus or whatever it was.
Well, of course they didn't.
Of course the U.S.
has never intervened in any genocide whatsoever.
Of course not.
It's absolutely insane to think it would.
What it does use is genocide to build up more military, the money of which goes into private concerns.
And everybody's happy there who makes all that money.
But then we use the military to actually go and stop genocides.
So you can't use violence to stop violence.
You just can't.
You can only use rationality to stop violence in the long run.
And, of course, everybody knows my arguments on self-defense.
I'm not going to repeat those here.
But I think it's important when you talk to people, you know, like I said with my friend who had the problem with his credit rating, you know, I say, okay, well, you know, but you want the Iraq war if you want to be an American, right?
It's that kind of crazy nationalism or irrational nationalism or any kind of nationalism is believing in irrational absolutes.
And that's fine.
Then you get the war.
If you want to be a Christian, you get the war.
If you want to be a statist or you want the welfare state, you get the war.
If you want the war, you get the welfare state.
It's all a big package deal.
And the moment the people understand that, then they can actually stop complaining about and start doing something which might actually help, which would be to start to undermine the actual causes of these sorts of things, which is the irrational violence that people have within their own minds, usually that they've inherited from their families.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
And hey, you know what?
▲
Export Selection