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March 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:55
157 The Social Contract Part 3: Logic
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Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is quarter to six on the 23rd of March 2006.
Don't worry.
I'm not going to be jamming out three podcasts a day.
It's just that things are a little bit slow at work at the moment and for a variety of reasons, which I will get into another time for those who are wildly tracking my little career.
I actually have a little bit of time at work which is sort of unusual for me so I am putting it to good use because me love le facts but me cannot have le facts when I'm in le auto.
So to finish up the social contract I would like to talk about a theory of justice that was put forward by a Yale propeller head in the early 1970s.
His name was John Rawls and he wrote a book called A Theory of Justice.
I don't think he was brave enough or megalomaniacal enough to say THE Theory of Justice.
I think it was A Theory of Justice.
And I do remember learning about this in a course in law that I took Well, let's just say a while ago.
I'm having a time flash, so I'll be okay.
I just have to remember that I still like the singer Pink, and that keeps me young.
So his theory, which he put out in the early seventies, went something like this.
And I thought it was an imaginative and superficially plausible methodology for proving, or at least putting something forward that seemed believable, in terms of a theory of social contracts.
So his social contract went something like this.
He said, what kind of society would you and I Build, if we didn't know who we were going to be born as.
Yes, yes I know, it's mental, but it's interesting.
And it's not something that has entirely vanished from the mental space that we live in, in the world, and some older people who still sort of swallow this kind of stuff.
But let's give the guy his due.
It's an imaginative theory that he's come up with, so let's have a look at it.
Because to me, I think we've taken a fairly good swing at this nonsense called voluntary social contract.
So let's put our sort of thinking caps on and take a look at the second round of social contract justifications.
Which is, I think, best epitomized by this John Rawls fella.
Now, if you and I were floating in a void, in a sort of platonic void of pre-birth abstraction, and we're sitting there chatting with our non-corporeal brains rubbing together, and we're saying, OK, we don't know who we're going to be born as.
We don't know whether we're going to be male or female.
We don't know whether we're going to be smart or dumb.
We don't know whether we're going to be rich or poor.
We don't know anything about how we're going to be born.
What kind of society would be an ideal society for us to live in?
Or, I guess you could say, how would we hedge our bets to make sure that we got the best kind of opportunities that we could?
Now, his basic argument is to say, look, if you're a smart guy, you don't want to have a society with no opportunity.
Because if you're sort of born into some rural, idiot, medieval, surf-bound-to-the-land dictatorship, then you're going to have a kind of security, but you're going to go completely mental, because you're going to be stuck doing this dead-brain drudge work for the rest of your life, and never get to go more than ten miles from your village.
So that's fairly ungood.
And yet, if you are born a poor, mentally retarded child, you don't want a situation of pure and unfettered freedom, because all that's going to be is the freedom to starve to death.
And I'm just taking his point.
I'll argue his point as strongly as I can, and then we'll try and come back to it and see what we can't unpuzzle.
So, to reiterate, if you're going to have a lot of capacities, you're going to want to have a society that's going to give you lots of scope for entrepreneurial activities, for academia, for whatever.
As far as your talents can take you, you want a society like that.
So you don't want to design some brain-dead feudalistic or totalitarian society.
On the other hand, if you are born with some significant disadvantage, you don't want a pure anarchic society because then you won't have any social structures or support or governmental aid or a safety net to help catch you.
So what you're going to want to design, ideally, I mean this is sort of an ideal situation, what you're going to want to design is a society which gives you as much scope As possible for your abilities as is possible within the framework of also requiring a government-sponsored transfer of income from those who have the most abilities to those who have little to no abilities to sort of make it on their own.
So if you said, OK, I want a purely sort of social welfare society or a communist society, then you're going to be taken care of and so you're not going to have to worry about it if you are some retarded baby, but you're also then going to go mental.
So you sort of want to, in the bell curve, you want to hedge your bets, right, of who you're going to be.
And so he said that the society that we've got, which has enough of a free market and enough of intellectual freedom and property rights, enough of a free market to allow people to express by and large the scope of their potential, that aspect of things is good.
However, we also have and want to have a social safety net that takes care of people who are born who are less fortunate.
And so that's the kind of society that we would want to design if we're these abstract entities floating around before we're born and having no idea of the social, racial, gender-based or economic strata that we're going to be born into. gender-based or economic strata that we're going to be born it.
So he says that this is the idea behind the, you know, there's a variety of names for the kind of system that we're sliding out of at the moment, and we're sliding towards state collapse, but we're sliding out of something which could be called social democracy, or a mixed economy, or social welfare democracy, or whatever.
I mean, there's lots of different ways.
Welfare capitalism.
Lots of silly words to come up with.
But basically, it is allowing for a forcible transfer of wealth by an agency that ostensibly claims to and has apparatus in place to protect property rights, although that apparatus is virtually unavailable and unusable by the general population.
It's there, and of course, you know, corporations and politicians need it, so they definitely use it.
But this idea, of course, that you want to hedge your bets in society to have enough scope for your abilities without necessarily being completely hosed by accidental products of your birth is a pretty compelling one.
When I first heard this, I mean, I knew it was nonsense in my gut, but in my head I was like, yeah, I can see that I kind of want to hedge that for sure.
I can see that I kind of want to I'd have social supports if I was retarded, and yet I'd also want to have some free market elements in case I happen to be born with a lot of talents, so I can kind of see where he's coming from.
I mean, I knew it was nonsense in my gut, but in my head I can certainly admire the intellectual conceit, I guess you could say, or the piece of intellectual tomfoolery that goes on to make this like a viable proposition.
And, of course, it could well be said that a, I guess, a liberal, I'm guessing liberal, I mean, it would seem to be, a liberal, or a conservative liberal, or somebody who's kind of free-marketing, kind of social welfare, who, you know, which is kind of like the majority of people in America for sure, who are a little bit more left in Canada, but we still have some respect for the free market.
Well, it's not too surprising to me that a guy in Harvard would come up with a mental construct Which kind of praised exactly the society that he lived in, which had given him a post at Harvard.
I mean, that seemed to be like... I could sort of understand that.
You know, the people who are at the top of any particular society generally tend to praise that particular society.
That's not a very uncommon phenomenon.
And so generally it's the case that guys who are at the top of sort of social, economic, or academic spectrums tend to have a fair amount of praise for the existing society, whereas those who are not tend not to.
And I guess I'm trying to find a way to balance both worlds.
There's a lot to praise about our existing societies in terms of the abstract ideals we've inherited from about eight or ten generations past, but there's an enormous amount to criticize.
And of course you criticize it because you want it to improve.
If we were living in a theocracy or a communist dictatorship you sure as heck wouldn't be hearing these podcasts and I probably wouldn't be alive because I would talk in my sleep.
So how can we look at this particular mental construct and see if we can't pull it apart a little just to see where the problems arise?
Well I would say that at a purely materialistic level, I can understand that this would be a pretty compelling model if it could ever be static.
And I think that's an important thing to understand.
It's an important model if it's static.
So it's kind of like saying, Well, I would like to have the vigor of youth, and I would like to also have the wisdom of age.
And so, the perfect age is 41, or whatever, something like that.
Or 47, before you get to physically decline, and before your physical decline sets in, but you're old enough not to do stupid young man stuff, or young woman stuff, which, you know, I've certainly had my share of, and I'm happy to be past.
So what would it mean to sort of say, I like the age of 47?
Because you can't stop.
You can't stop at the age of 47, get off and say, this is a great balance for me.
I think I'm going to hang out here pretty much indefinitely.
Because, I mean, one of the things that's not mentioned in this is that the violence which underpins this transfer of wealth to help the sort of less fortunate is not static.
Violence is never static.
I mean state violence.
I don't mean sort of individual criminal violence.
That's going to rise and fall to some small degree based on demographics, but State violence, organized, legitimized, collectivized, publicly funded violence is never static.
You never get a government that cooks around at the same amount, the same percentage of GDP, the same amount of public debt, the same, this never happens, the same amount of laws.
It's always more and more and more and more and more until you collapse.
So saying that, you know, I really want the figure of youth and the wisdom of age, so I'm going to stop at the age of 47, get off and just hang there forever, is rather deranged, right?
So saying that maybe in 1971 this was the configuration that pleased our good friend Mr. Rawls, and he said, you know, there's a lot of opportunity here.
Taxes aren't too high.
We've just put the Great Society programs in, so it looks like the poor are kind of taken care of.
Yeah, you know, this looks pretty sweet.
I kinda like this.
I think this is the right place to be.
Well, you don't get to stay there.
My God, man, have you never read any history?
You don't get to stay there.
there, 47 blows by and you're 57, 67, 87, 97, and then you are dead.
And that's what we're facing in society.
You never get to say, OK, we like a certain amount of irrational and publicly funded violence where you transfer wealth for free from the private hands to other private hands through the medium of offloading the cost of violence to the public sector.
So we've got this incredibly weighted situation where there's an enormous benefit for using public violence, but nobody's going to use it after a certain amount of people recognize how great and powerful and wonderful and enriching it is.
No, they're going to stop.
They're going to stop, absolutely.
Well, that's just deranged.
I mean, it's completely deranged.
So for this guy to say 1973, I guess he was writing probably a year or two earlier, right?
So early 70s, yeah, okay, it was a great time for music, but unfortunately later you get groups like Korn and Offspring.
But hey, we'll come back to that another time.
Don't want to tweak all of my young friends out there.
I'm sure there's wonderful music from these people.
Just, they seem to have a little trouble with melody, and they're kind of into the yelling.
Which, you know, is not so much the music thing for me.
But, you know, not that I don't like all modern bands, but that's another discussion.
So you can't stop violence.
You can't stop the spread of highly lucrative public violence.
Except by getting rid of the government.
Or at least making taxation voluntary.
We'll talk about that another time.
But I think that it's just kind of funny to say this particular configuration is something we can choose.
Life marches on.
We all get old and die.
Societies get more violent if there's publicly funded violence until they self-destruct.
That is absolutely inevitable.
So for me, saying, well, there's this perfect society that we can design, which we can freeze in time, so that even though there are wild benefits to the use of public violence, don't you know, people are just going to take a little bit of public violence, and then it's not going to be any feeding frenzy, right?
One shark is going to nibble my leg, and that's it.
There's never going to be a feeding frenzy, where I end up being kibble bits for sharks all over the place.
And so that to me is, just from a pure practical standpoint, that to me is kind of interesting.
Now, the other paradox that this guy's working with, when he talks about designing society, and of course this is the curse of the intellectual, right?
Which is to work with abstractions to the point where you really forget that there are any sorts of instances.
Unless, of course, the car dealership decides to sell you the concept of a car, and then says, walk out with the idea of a Mercedes and I'll charge you $80,000.
Then they suddenly say, no, this concept doesn't really work for me.
I actually want the thing itself.
And so, you know, intellectuals have no problem dealing with stuff in the real world.
It's just that when they're, you know, servants and slaves of state power, then they tend to get a little bit more keen on manipulating the old abstractions rather than dealing with the concrete instances of which they are one.
So, you know, it shouldn't be that hard for them to figure out.
So one of the things they talk about, this guy talks about, and this is part of the other kinds of theories that you'll find around social contracts, is As soon as you say a social contract is entered into, for whatever kind of reason you want, by an individual, let's just say.
Let's even say a group, right?
So, I wake up one morning and I say, you know, I'm going to join the state.
Well, it's either virtuous to do it, or it's pragmatic to do it, or it's both.
Because you've got to give some answer to the question of human motivation.
Why would somebody surrender a portion of their rights to the state?
Well, they're either doing it because it's moral or virtuous to do it, or they're doing it because it's pragmatic, it maximizes their returns, or their use of resources to do it.
Or both.
Now, it's a little tricky to say that people surrender their rights to the government because it's moral.
Because, of course, if it's moral, you should just surrender all your rights to the government and we should have dictatorships everywhere.
I mean, a moral thing is not kind of like halfway.
It's not like murder is bad, but, you know, cutting people up a little is good.
I mean, it doesn't tend to be that way in reality, right?
In some people's minds it is, but it isn't in reality.
And so, it's not like if there's a virtue in terms of surrendering yourself to the state, then it's a virtue.
You just do it.
I mean, and anything that withdraws from that is sort of like not a virtue, right?
Like, telling the truth is always a virtue.
Doesn't mean that I always tell the truth, but when I'm not telling the truth, I don't claim that it's still a virtue, right?
I mean, I may choose not to.
Oh, yes, this pasta is wonderful, you know?
If a friend's wife is cooking for me or something, yeah, I mean, it might only be okay, but I'm going to say that it's wonderful.
But I don't say that that's a virtue.
I'm saving her feelings or whatever.
No, I just don't want to get into a discussion about the pasta.
And I'd kind of like to have more pasta, so I'm not going to make herself conscious about her cooking.
The other thing too, people who say that obedience to the state or surrendering your independent will to the state is a moral virtue, have a little tougher time selling that after that whole fascist Nazi communist thing that happened not so long ago.
They have a little bit of a tougher time selling that as a moral ideal.
And this is why you generally don't see the kind of arguments that you're used to in the Middle Ages and even in the 18th and early 19th centuries where people said Well, you know, the king is put there by God, and so you have to obey the king as if you were obeying God, so surrendering all of your rights to the state is exactly the moral thing to do, blah blah blah.
You don't see that kind of stuff.
It resurrected itself in the collectivist 20s and 30s after the First World War, particularly in, of course, Japan and Italy and our good old friend Germany.
But it's not something that you hear argued for very much.
So it really has to be pragmatic, right?
So pragmatic.
And this is, I mean, I gotta tell you, I don't think this stuff's that hard.
And I don't think I'm that bright that I can just see my way through all of this stuff with no problems.
I think it's just a matter of looking at things like you're kind of stupid, right?
I mean, that's what I do.
I mean, if you want to know what the secret is, just look at things like you're kind of dumb.
Do the Colombo, right?
And just say, OK, so if I was three years old and somebody was explaining this to me, how would it work?
So basically Rawls and these kinds of social contractarian people are saying that a human being maximizes his economic and personal advantages by surrendering part of his So I have to pay taxation, but in return I get the protection of the rest of my property, so I give up 10% or 20% of my property, which is when most of these guys are writing, or even lower if it's earlier.
I give up a couple of percentage points of my property in order to protect the rest of my property, and if I don't give that up, I've got no property.
So, you know, it kind of makes sense, right?
It kind of makes sense.
I give up part of my day every other day to go to the gym.
And I do that because, you know, I kind of enjoy it.
There are times when I don't want to.
I kind of enjoy it.
But I kind of want to live longer, right?
So it's fine.
It's perfectly valid to sacrifice part of something to gain a bigger part of something else.
No problem with that.
I sacrificed some of my freedoms to get married.
Although I am far happier married than I was when I was single.
So to me it's been an enormously beneficial thing.
But of course I did give up some freedoms to gain other freedoms.
So when it's personally chosen, it's fine.
Personally chosen, it's totally fine.
But the basic argument is that people like to maximize resources, and that's why they agree to obey a state.
Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine.
We're all very happy with that.
I have no problem with the proposition that people like to maximize resources.
And that's why you can't have a state!
Oh my god!
I mean, it's just so retarded!
I don't mean to sound rude, but this guy's at Yale!
I mean, he can't be stupid!
He may be blindly programmed, but he's not an idiot.
And so, when someone says, oh, sorry, it's just funny to me, and maybe I'm looking at it wrong, and maybe I'm missing something obvious, but it just seems kind of funny to me.
So, we obey a state because people like to maximize resources and minimize risk and danger and so on, right?
Okay, fine.
Well, what principle do you think is applying exactly to people inside the government?
I mean, to me, that's kind of funny, right?
Again, it's kind of like you're joking, right?
Like you're not serious about this.
So saying, look, I want to maximize my opportunities and minimize my risks, and that's why I want to just create this sort of capitalist welfare state.
Okay, that's fine.
So people, you give all this money and power to the government, and the people in the government, what do they want to do?
Well, they want to minimize their risks, and they want to maximize their resources.
And so how are they going to do that?
Well, they're going to keep raising taxes!
I mean, it's just, it's funny!
It's funny!
Or, if you have a situation wherein the state can redistribute resources, then that is going to affect how people want those resources redistributed.
So, if the state has the power to redistribute resources to the poor, right, so it takes from the rich and gives to the poor, And people enter into that because all of these citizens want to maximize their resource allocations, or maximize their resource usage, and minimize their risks.
Well, then, of course, everybody's going to want to be poor and get money from the state, and nobody's going to want to be rich.
And this general undertow is going to alter the whole equation.
As soon as you put a system in place like the welfare state, you immediately begin changing everybody's behavior.
I mean, this is something that was proved pretty recently, I guess, within the last 20 years.
This guy got a Nobel Prize for it.
I can't remember his name.
He was an economist.
He says, yeah, okay, so you put a particular thing in to solve a problem, like there's just a few, a little bit of drug use, so let's just make it illegal and get rid of it, because it's just a small problem.
It's going to take like two weeks.
But the moment you make drugs illegal, you suddenly have a whole lot more, right?
I mean, because it's profitable, and we went through this before.
So I just think it's kind of funny to say that we should obey the social contract, because it's pragmatic for us to do so, because we want to maximize our resources and minimize our risks.
Well, okay, of course.
But I mean, it's true of everybody.
It's true of all the people in the state who have access to all the guns and who can forcibly transfer everybody's wealth.
I mean, is it really that hard?
Am I really going through 1,500 pages of mathematical proof?
Am I really the guy filling up blackboards proving Fermat's Last Theorem?
I mean, am I really that esoteric and that I have a gorgeous brain that this stuff's really complicated.
I'm doing it while I'm driving.
It's really not that hard.
I don't know what is wrong with people's brains that they make up all these different categories.
Obey the state because that way you get to maximize your resources and minimize your risk.
And the way that the people in the state are going to do that is by enslaving you.
Oh my god.
Oh man.
I'm sorry, maybe I'll edit this part out.
I just think this is just enormously, deliciously, hilariously awful.
I mean, the guy's even admitting that people like to maximize their resources and minimize their risks, and so we should hand Hand our money and lives and futures and our children's futures and our personal property rights and our freedom of speech, we should hand some portion of all of this over to people who, if they follow the same principle and the same rationality that we do, which is supposed to motivate us into handing these things over, if they follow that same rationality, they're going to take the rest of them away!
I mean, that's exactly what's going to happen!
The degree to which you should enter into a social contract, based on pragmatic reasons, is the degree to which the social contract is going to destroy you.
I mean, it's just so... so clear.
I just don't know why it's so hard for people.
I mean, I can't explain Einstein's theory of relativity while I'm driving, not in any mathematical detail.
Actually, not even while I'm not driving.
But I mean, I'm driving and it's obvious, right?
You say, okay, well, so the rule is that, you know, maximize your resources, minimize your costs, okay, so then the people who have violence are going to be subject to the same rules, and how are they going to do that?
By raising taxes and suppressing dissent.
I mean, it's just, it takes you literally 20 seconds.
I mean, I'm not saying it took me 20 seconds to come up with from the time I was 12.
I mean, it took a little bit of work to get sort of fluid in this kind of thinking, but it does seem to be fairly obvious, right?
This is just the basic argument for morality.
That if you've got a rule, it applies to everyone.
So if you should join a state and give up your taxes to maximize your economic advantage, you're handing violent power over to those who maximize their economic advantage by taking the rest of your money.
Now, it's going to happen over time.
It doesn't happen immediately.
But, oh, I don't know.
I don't know.
This guy's Harvard.
Harvard.
He's from Harvard.
You know, he's got an editor.
He's got grad students.
He's got co-professors.
He's got lots of people who, I guess, would really get off on debunking a Harvard guy's theory.
And what, nobody?
I mean, no, I haven't heard this argument anywhere.
Oh well, maybe, maybe it's just me.
Again, maybe I'm missing something really obvious.
It really doesn't feel like it.
It really feels like this is kind of like the truth.
But it does give you a sense, I think, of just how unbelievably conformist thinking is, right?
I mean, how unbelievably propagandized everybody has been who's an intellectual, right?
I mean, yeah, I think I'm a pretty good intellectual.
I think I got a couple of brain cells.
I think I got some horsepower.
And I like to talk, as you may or may not have noticed.
And fortunately, at least 12 of you out there like to listen.
Oh, one of those, Christina.
And one of those is my friend, whose mother died.
Okay, let's just say, there's a couple of you out there who like to listen.
I'm more than happy that you do.
But it's just important to understand, this is the level of intellectual maturity or understanding that we have in the West at the moment, and it's horrifying.
I made a post, I put a post today on Freedomain Radio on the board, unless you're my boss listening to this, in which case I was working very hard on the contract, but I posted something on the board where I was sort of pointing out this, and I was saying that the intellectual and moral climate is so corrupted in the West But so few people see it that it's kind of like you and I, like we've grown up in some lilac field and we love good smells and we suddenly walk into a slaughterhouse and we're like, oh my god!
It reeks in here!
And all the guys working in there who've been there for 20 years are like, what?
And we're like, the smell!
It's unbelievably putrid!
And they're like, smell?
What smell?
And they really can't smell it.
They become so desensitized to it.
And the amount of bullcrap that we get stuffed in our throats every single day from the age of like two onwards... The amount of that stuff has just rendered most people completely insensate to any kind of rational thoughts.
And they just have no clue about the amount of Bad smells that are in their noses every day.
They really have no idea.
And when we come along, and this was an argument about taxes, right?
So you said the basic thing, taxes are violence.
And we come along and we say, yeah, you know, taxes are kind of with the violence there.
And people are like, huh?
What violence?
What are you talking about?
And it's exactly the same as walking into the slaughterhouse and saying, oh my God, does it ever stink in here?
And people are like, stink?
What stink?
There's no stink.
It's like, you know what?
There really is.
You just don't know it.
And it's the same thing with this kind of intellectual stuff, right?
Social contract and this and that.
It's just that people are so used to being lied to, they've started lying to themselves.
They have no capacity for truth anymore.
And that's why they're saying, like, smell?
What smell?
There's no smell.
And that's something that's important to understand.
I think we've got to be patient with it, frankly.
I think that we have to be patient with it.
I think that it would behoove us to be patient with it, because we are trying to advance the science of human knowledge pretty considerably here.
The most important form of human knowledge, which is ethics and political science.
And so I think it's important for us to be patient and to understand it.
It does get a little exasperating at times, but it can also be very funny.
At least it is to me.
So I hope this series has been helpful.
Suggestions are always welcome.
Please come to the boards freedomainradio.com forward slash board and there's a post just in case you want to run some particular idea through my chattering head box.
Feel free to do so and I'm always looking for suggestions for new shows.
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