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March 27, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:12
161 Goals and Objectives: The Gun in the Room

Starting the debate by pointing out the barrel

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Good morning everybody.
It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
It's 8.40am.
On the 27th of March 2006, freedomainradio.com.
I keep forgetting to say anything about that.
freedomainradio.com.
We have a lively and brilliant crew on the boards and occasionally I'll get the oomph to pump out an article and my blog is freedomain.blogspot.com.
You can email me at the website through the form mail or at freedomainradio.com.
So, I'd like to talk this morning about the gun in the room.
And this is something that I consider to be quite important because it is the opposite of futility.
It is the opposite of the futility that we feel and the fog in the future that we feel.
That we do not know how to get there from here.
That we do not know how we're going to get all of this massive state apparatus We've gotten rid of.
We just don't know.
And we are always looking for a methodology, and I understand that.
I'm a methodological fellow myself, and I fully understand the impulse to say, OK, see, we've got to have a 15-point plan, and the first thing we do is this, and once that domino is knocked down, then the second thing we do is that, and then step by step we're going to achieve our goal, and this and that and the other.
And I don't think it's going to work like that.
I don't think it's going to work like that.
And I'll tell you this too.
I have never heard of it working like that or seen it working like that in history.
Doesn't mean it can't work like that.
It just means that it wouldn't be the first place that I would go to when it came to trying to figure out how best to achieve freedom.
So the thing that I think has worked is this thing called, well I call it the gun in the room, you can call it whatever you want, but basically it is simply pointing out over and over and over again that there's a gun in the room.
That's it.
I'll give you something brief which I got out of a lecture from Murray Rothbard which I think supports this to some degree and I'll give you a couple of other examples and then tell you why I think it's the case.
Murray Rothbard used to go, I guess in the late 70s and early to mid 80s, he used to go over to Eastern Europe to Prague and places like that for economics conferences and there always used to be
These economists from Marxist institutions over in the East, from Eastern Europe and from Russia, there were these Marxist economics, if that's not a contradiction in terms, I don't know, it's like a theological logician, but hey, they would be there, and there would be this guy from the NKVD, the Russian secret police, who would be there as well.
And whenever they were in front of this guy, they would talk, you know, you capitalist pigs, and you know, this sort of thing, evil exploiters, and all that and the other.
And then when they were alone, they would talk about their desperate desire for a free market.
And he said it was actually kind of funny, and it became sort of a running joke in economic circles, as if something like this is funny, but hey, I mean, I'm no economist, so perhaps it passes for humor in the economics circles.
But the joke was that all of the Western intellectuals were arguing for the virtues of socialism, and all the Eastern intellectuals were arguing for the virtues of the free market.
Which is kind of funny, really, when you think about it, in a horrible, horrible kind of way.
Okay, maybe it is funny.
I guess I've laughed at worse things, but it just seems to me that when your brothers in spirit are laboring over under a vicious and brutal regime, that it shouldn't be like, ha ha, funny that you're proposing the ideology that is keeping them enslaved.
You know, you can go to a black guy in the South in 1850 and say, you know, slavery is a real virtue, and then stroll back to your manor, but I think that the black man might have some other feelings about your pronouncements.
And that is something that he talked about quite a bit.
He also talked about how, and I've mentioned this before, the second generation, third generation usually, after a revolution, has no emotional ties to that particular revolution.
They didn't sort of sacrifice their lives and their youths and their all this and that to to bring the revolution about so they can look at things more objectively and also they they are less touchable by the propaganda by the rhetoric by the soaring rhetoric that always always always always always associate is associated with state violence and
Maybe it's... I haven't really studied it, but it could be associated with personal violence, too.
I don't know enough about it to have any sort of opinion.
I suspect it might be, but I certainly wouldn't want to go on record as saying that it is.
But with state violence, for sure, you always get this soaring, beautiful record.
As Chomsky says, you know, this is a rhetoric.
As Chomsky says, you know, it's this kind of language.
It brings tears to your eyes.
It's so beautiful.
And this is what Jung actually calls the superstructure of brutality is sentimentality.
This is something that I've noticed.
When I was reading this in Jung, I felt quite a shock of recognition about this.
Because brutality is sort of the basis of the personality, but the defense mechanism is sentimentality.
And this was certainly true of my own mother.
It's certainly true of my own brother as well, who keeps making appeal to the fact that we're brothers without understanding that the moral relationship doesn't have any category outside of what he actually did to me.
I can't actually have a relationship with my brother.
I can have a relationship with that guy over there who I grew up with, but I can't have a relationship with something called a brother.
And so I find that there's a lot of sentimentality associated with violence, with brutality.
And you can see this, of course, with this sort of stirring honor of the Marine Corps, you know, stirring Soldiers walking slowly into the sunset and staring pensively off tanks and sort of out there saying to a few good men, we stand on a wall and protect you and stuff like that.
And I think the other guys...
The response to that phrase is, you know, you're bullies who picked on a weakling.
I mean, I think it's a little bit more accurate.
It would be even more accurate to say, you're people who kill anyone other people point at, which is a little bit less stirring, really, when you sort of break it down.
And so there is this real superstructure or reaction formation or defense mechanism called sentimentality, which is absolutely essential for violence.
It's absolutely essential for violence.
When you are commanding another human being to obey your will, you can't look down and see the gun in your hand and continue to do what you're doing.
You simply can't.
And that's why It's so sad to me that everybody uses the argument for morality except the real moralists.
That's why I keep pounding on this issue.
Use the argument for morality.
Use the argument for morality.
It's the only thing that's going to win, I believe, and it is something that we can learn a lot from our enemies.
If you go back, go back through any genocide in history, go back through any brutal exploitation in history, go back through any widespread use of state force, and you will see exactly the same thing.
You will see this cluster of sickening and sycophantic intellectuals pumping out the most glorious rhetoric to cover up the evil.
And you will see everybody swallowing it wholesale.
Even, and I would suspect this is true as well, even the people at the front who are actually doing the atrocities.
So when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, it was a brutal, brutal regime change.
And not exactly the most noble of the Western moments, of the Western allies, or the allies to be.
But he went in there and slaughtered a whole bunch of people, started incarcerating the Jews.
I mean, it was just brutal.
And the rhetoric that comes out of it, I mean, it's like watching an eagle slowly take off without noticing it's got a human head in its talons.
The rhetoric is astounding.
It makes you aware.
Coming in to restore order, to bring peace and tranquility and prosperity to the ethnic divisions of Central Europe.
We've been invited in by this, that and the other.
They want us to come in because they just can't handle a few misguided elements that we're going to help them out with.
I mean, you can't do it justice unless you're somebody who can spontaneously do iambic pentameter in traffic.
But it's beautiful stuff.
Even with Japan, when they're in China, the rape of Nanking, they're just slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people.
You wouldn't believe it.
The rhetoric is just gorgeous.
Bringing the light of civilization to the benighted.
I don't know what benighted is in Japanese, but I bet you there's some kind of...
Equivalent to it.
Shepherding everyone into a new dawn of beautiful prosperity and perfect tranquility and social peace and justice.
I mean, all of this stuff where you just go, wow, can I get a ticket on that Titanic?
That just looks fantastic!
And this is something you just see over and over and over again when you look at what happened in the Crusades.
It's exactly the same thing.
All the theologians, all of the intellectuals, they're all out there just crapping out this Gorgeous rhetoric about rescuing the heathens, saving them from their error, bringing them to God.
Actually, the last thing is pretty true.
They did bring quite a few of them to God, in that God doesn't exist.
And after the Christians were through with them, neither did they.
And it's all the same stuff, over and over and over again.
You look at the British Empire, the French Empire, the German Empire, the Roman Empire.
Every single time, you have this enormous amount of energy and effort devoted to obscuring the fact that there's a gun in the room.
Please excuse the anachronism for those empires older than about 1850.
Actually, about 1750.
But it's always the same thing.
Now, there are a few minor exceptions and they're very quickly covered up.
So, for instance, and I take this directly from Noam Chomsky, just before the First World War, when Churchill was in Parliament and Churchill was a very long-lived parliamentarian and Churchill made a speech where he said, look, we need to increase our armaments basically because we've got half the world under our thumb and people don't like it and they are pretty much going to rebel against us as much as possible.
We want to keep the Empire this way so we're going to need more money for weapons and we're going to need a bigger army and in particular we're going to need a bigger Navy, which was the big thing that Britain had at that time.
And that was pretty frank.
I mean, that's pretty open, right?
We've taken them over and we are...
Slaughtering them and repressing them and controlling them.
Please don't misunderstand me.
I don't fall in for the socialist rhetoric or sentimentality that if England had withdrawn or England had never been there, situations or circumstances would have been better for these people.
My God, no!
I think that situations certainly for the women who were part of the Suthi ritual, which is where you had to throw yourself on your husband's funeral pyre and burn to death voluntarily with him, something that the British outlawed, there were some people who were far better off Under the British rule, and of course you only have to look at what our good friend Gandhi managed to achieve.
Again, you want to get rid of the sentimentality around Gandhi as well, and recognize that through his drive for independence and his socialistic tendencies, not only did he sell a couple of future generations of one of the world's largest, most populated countries into future state slavery through his socialistic tendencies, which Nehru inherited, but hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people were killed during the separation time.
This is the violence that gets unleashed by these mystics and all we do is look at them doing their little knitting in their bald heads and say, gee, how wonderful it is that they are so spiritual.
We don't track it either because it's very hard for us.
And the reason that it's hard for us, I mean, I'm sure you know what's coming now.
The reason that it's hard for us is that We have an enormous amount of sentimentality around our own families and that's why I say that the family is the foundation of the state.
We have the sentimentality around families and, you know, mom, she's your mother, you know, it's my family, you know, together we may disagree but fundamentally we're always there for each other and blah blah blah.
And, you know, families are choking little fetid gulags for the most part, at least the ones that I've seen and I've known and I've read about.
I mean, read literature and find out how many happy families there are.
And so from these horrible little airless prisons that we call families, we drape all of these little box-like tiny gulags, these airless little cells, we box them and we drape them in the most god-awful kind of rhetoric to sort of convince ourselves that something warm and we box them and we drape them in the most god-awful kind of rhetoric to sort of convince ourselves that something warm and wonderful and close and intimate and beautiful was going In the absence of every single direct experience that we had with our families.
I mean, it's kind of funny, right?
I mean, it's the Stockholm Syndrome didn't just happen to Patty Hearst, right?
This is when she got kidnapped.
I think it was, I can't remember, about a nine and a half gang or something.
She fell in love with her captors because they brutalized her.
You know, she did the natural organic thing to survive, which was to flatter and praise and eventually fall in love with her captor.
That's what you do when you're When you're kidnapped as a woman, in particular, this is what you're going to do, right?
You're going to get raped, you're going to have to raise the guy as a kid, so why not pretend to yourself that he's some kind of great guy, so that you don't have to live with that for the rest of your life?
Raped by a sort of psychotic monster.
So this sentimentality, it starts very much in the family.
It also starts, of course, enormously in public school.
You get this enormous sentimentality erected over the sort of bloody guns of the state, and so somebody put a list on the board.
I can't remember them all.
I do want to go through them in a series, but that's going to have to be a somewhat intermittent series, because it's not something I can do without reference to some tangible facts, as opposed to my semi-tangible opinions.
That's a sentimentality all the way through high school.
And then the fascinating thing that happens in university is it gets reversed.
I don't think this is particularly true in the sciences, it may be, but definitely in the arts the sentimentality gets reversed.
And that's quite fascinating as well.
And it gets sort of superficially reversed.
Fundamentally, it's not reversed, right?
So you get all of this stuff about how FDR saved us from the Great Depression, and won World War I, and won World War II, and won the Cold War, and Reagan was a great guy.
You get this sort of stuff in high school to some degree, to a large degree.
And then in university it all flips, you know, like Reagan was a fundamentalist, and you still get FDR saved us from World War II, because that's something that... I mean, the state isn't going to give that one up, right?
I mean, the state isn't going to give up World War II very easily, which is why it always comes out, oh, Nazi World War II, oh, you wouldn't want to live... How would you feel speaking German and marching in a straight line, you damn libertarian pacifist, you... I mean, people aren't going to give that one up, because You know, everybody wants to think violence is going to work somewhere, somehow, and if 40 million people died for nothing, then, you know, you kind of have to reconfigure how you look at the world, and people don't want to do that because of their families and blah blah blah.
So...
In university they kind of reverse it, so they'll be against the militarism, as they're left-wing in university, right?
So they'll be against the militarism, and they'll be for the welfare state, or the four social programs.
They'll be somewhat against the war on drugs, or anything that's associated with or considered to be derived from Christian fundamentalism.
They will be against all that.
But they will be for the welfare state and increased foreign aid and trailing after Bono asking him to sing you a song rather than drone on and on about how more blood money needs to be poured into the pockets of dictators!
So this is a, and there's lots of reason for that which we don't have to get into right now, but I just sort of want to point out that all the regimes in history absolutely focus on this rhetoric and you can see it not just in terms of fancy language but you can see this in terms of people are not
If you read or plow your way through the moral horror of the Gulag Apicalago, and you can read about this in Treblinka and other things as well, when the government exercises violence against people, it doesn't just go into their homes, shoot them, like in daylight, and then just Leave the bodies to rot and go away.
That's never how it works.
And Solzhenitsyn talks about this quite a bit early on in the book where he says that, you know, why didn't anybody say anything?
He said they tried to grab one woman in the middle of a market during the day and she just screamed and kicked and everybody gathered around and these guys ran away.
They always come in the middle of the night.
They're always quiet.
They drag you off.
And do they drag you off and just shoot you in the black Mariah?
No.
They drag you off and then they'll incarcerate you.
And they'll charge you with a crime.
And they will transport you.
And they will have a mock trial.
And they will do this.
And they will do that.
And they have all these laws.
And they have this unbelievable amount of ritual.
That allows people to believe that something other than murder, that kidnapping, torture and murder is going on.
And if you look at the army, you see exactly the same thing.
If you want to see it going on in the modern world, You know, there was an old t-shirt that I remember reading when I was younger.
I don't know if it's still popular, but it was sort of, join the army, go to new places, meet exciting new friends, travel the world, learn the trade, blah blah blah, meet all the indigenous people of the world, and kill them.
And I thought that was kind of funny because that is really the truth, right?
I mean, it's what this Marine was trying to tell me a couple weeks ago about how noble and brave and dedicated and patriotic and loving and wonderful and kind and helpful and all the soldiers were.
And that's all just the most rank kind of nonsense, right?
I mean, you don't... it doesn't make any sense.
This is just what is told.
This is just the story.
This is the fairy tale that is told in order for people to pretend that there's no gun in the room, right?
They want to... basically want to... like a... like an ink... like the ink of a squid, right?
You grab at a squid and it darts away and squirts all this ink so you can't find it.
Well, this ink... this is all the ink that's written to cover up this brutality.
This feasting on the helpless, this genocidal murderers that go on, hundreds of millions in the 20th century alone, and you can't see that there's a gun in the room.
And if you can see that there's a gun in the room, there's only one gun, and it's actually in the hands of the victim.
Most of history is this elaborate recreation wherein the dead body is propped up and A gun is put in the dead body's hand and then the guy who actually had the gun puts his gun down and pretends to be cowering in a corner when the complete opposite happened.
There was a Far Side cartoon from many years ago where a guy shot A bear.
The first panel is the guy shot a bear while the bear was sleeping peacefully with butterflies around.
And then the next panel is the bear has been stuffed in this sort of standing, growling, menacing, horrific kind of way, as if this guy was in self-defense.
And this is the history of the state.
This is what is generally called history.
Certainly what is called contemporary history, for sure.
I mean, I was emailing this gentleman who I think does a podcast called Blast the Right, and I was sort of saying to him, well, we don't like the fact that government solutions, or as he said, libertarians, I said, in general, I'm no spokesman, but in general, we don't like the fact that government solutions are imposed on people by force.
And he wrote back this pretty, I haven't replied to it yet, but it's a really acerbic email.
It's like, what are you saying?
Are you saying that Bush is imposed on everyone who voted Kerry?
Are you saying that Social Security is imposed upon people who are communists?
What are you talking about?
And that's a very common reaction.
Of course he knows.
He knows that there's a gun in the room.
And you know that he knows because he's bringing out the most extreme and silly examples.
People just can't process the fact that there's a gun in the room.
And if there is a gun in the room, it's always in the hands of the victim.
Always, always, always.
So Hitler was defending himself against the predations, both financial and potentially military, from the Jews.
And what Britain said was that if we don't grab the empire, then Germany will.
And if Germany grabs the empire, then we're going to face another European war, which would be the end of civilization.
So in order to save civilization, we have to have Amritsar and things like that.
So there's all of these justifications, always, always, always.
Nobody can look down and say, I've got a gun in my hand.
And I'm pointing it at a quivering, naked man who is absolutely helpless and terrified and has peed himself and has shit himself, that I have a gun in my hand.
I'm pointing it at this man because you can't look at the moral horror of that.
You can't look at what you're actually doing.
You simply, simply, simply, simply can't.
That is why this chilling empathy is also extended, this sort of sycophantic empathy is also extended, to people who get injured in wars who are our guys.
And there's absolutely no record whatsoever, no empathy whatsoever, for people who get killed on the other side.
I mean, that's the standard.
You can't find any counterexamples.
With the one minor exception, I think, and I haven't studied it closely, but this is sort of based on rough memory, That you got some degree of dissemination of the victims within Vietnam very late in the war.
Like 1970, 1969, very late in the war.
And, of course, this is something that is also forgotten as well.
The student protests that started in 1970, the student protests I mean, this is after eight years of war.
This is all shutting the barn door after the horses left.
This is all ridiculous.
I mean, in 1968, a reporter toured South Vietnam and said that he felt that it was entirely possible that the entire culture was going to become extinct.
They can't even nail down the number of people murdered in Vietnam to the million.
Two million, three million, five million.
They don't have a clue how many people were murdered.
They don't have a clue what happened when you put the most insane carcinogenics into the biosphere through Asian orange and dioxin and the aftereffects of napalm and so on.
I mean, the birth defects and the mutant babies and the cancerous and the... It's just wretched!
I mean, an entire culture was decimated, murdered, destroyed, poisoned, infected, slaughtered slowly through illness or quickly through fireballs.
And you have a few pictures.
that reside in people's minds about these millions and millions and millions of people.
And even those few pictures don't really show the reality.
So you have this naked girl running down the street, and what is moving is the terror.
But you don't really see any physical injuries in her.
And you see this photo of the guy holding the gun up against that guy with the thatch of hair, the bald guy with the gun up against the guy with the thatch of hair, the thin guy.
And if you've ever seen the movie, there's a whole movie of this, where they shoot the guy, he falls and blood pumps out of the hole in his head, and you'll see this picture, and you know, this is obviously something which...
You can empathize with and understand, but it's very foreign, right?
You don't see this domestically.
You don't see a guy who's not getting paid his taxes getting gunned down.
You see a lot of nonsense about Waco, and I'm not saying that I know much about Waco, but you have a lot of stuff around Waco that has to do with the evil cult and so on, and so it's okay that we kill them.
Another thing that's also important to understand about Vietnam is not only did the student protests only occur after eight years of people literally going to jail for protesting the war, but also another thing that happened was the US military wanted out.
You were using a civilian army to fight a colonial war.
You don't do that, right?
What you do is you hire mercenaries or you hire locals.
You don't use average citizens to fight a colonial war because it's bloody and it's brutal and extended.
And especially in that kind of non-urban environment, in the rural environment, the jungle in particular, you simply can't do it.
It's completely wrong.
So what happened was, of course, the army was completely collapsing.
One of the reasons that they ended Vietnam was because they would have ended up with no army.
I mean, the generals, well, we've got to get this whole thing falling apart.
Around 67, 68, you started having soldiers fragging their officers.
They were completely strung out on drugs.
They went completely insane and would kill villagers.
You see this kind of stuff in Apocalypse Now.
They're not kidding.
This was the state of the army towards the end.
You can't use domestic civilians and draft them and then have them fight a bloody, brutal, long, dangerous, dirty, vicious colonial war.
With no front lines, with no clear moral goal that anybody can believe in.
There's never a clear moral goal.
That's one of the reasons why the army didn't put up a huge resistance to being pulled out, because it was kind of like, we got to get them home or we're not going to have an army anymore.
And you can see from the aftereffects of the Vietnam War exactly what it meant for civilian soldiers to be in that kind of conflict.
The British knew better, right?
They hired the Gurkhas, the French had the French Foreign Legion, all these mercenaries.
I mean, that's exactly what you do.
And I've heard rumor, and I haven't confirmed it, but I've heard rumor that there's a lot of Mercenaries over in Iraq as well, and that's kind of important, right?
I mean, they're not using a lot of the civilian army in Iraq, which would explain why the casualty lists seem kind of low relative to the conflict that's going on, but of course the one thing that's wonderful about mercenaries is that you don't have to report their casualty lists, right?
They're sort of like morally equivalent to the enemy that you're killing.
So this is sort of to say, in general, that you always need this superstructure of sentimentality over brutality.
There's a reason That Hitler lined up all of the police and the military and had them recite an oath of allegiance to Hitler.
I mean, all these things you'd think is a complete waste of time and energy.
But evil people, they really get it.
They really understand it.
They know that you have to get people's moral agreement with the brutality and in order to do that you have to portray it as the exact opposite.
of brutality.
You have to get murder to look like healing.
You have to get genocide to look like saving the world.
You have to get everyone to believe the exact opposite.
And of course, the reason that people do believe the exact opposite is that they have this odd kind of belief that man is a social animal, and so I have to have people around me, and so I have to make compromises with my integrity, and that's all just the purest nonsense.
I I mean, that's just something that people are told.
It's not something that people actually believe.
And there's lots of reasons we can get into that another time.
But people believe, well, you know, I have to, you know, the best way to get ahead is to go along and this kind of stuff.
And I just wanted to sort of point out that all we need to do, I mean, all we need to do, and it's, I mean, this stuff's fun, and it's great to have all the theory and this and that, but all we have to do over and over and over again is to say, hey, you know, there's a gun in the room, right?
So people talk about, oh, well, the poor people need this, and the social security, and the nice, and good, and help, and health care for the this, and 40 Americans without health, all of that stuff's fine.
You know, they say, well, that's very interesting.
I just sort of wanted to point out that there's a gun in the room.
That's pointed at everyone.
So it's kind of funny for me that you're talking about all these morals when there's no morality in the situation, right?
I mean, maybe Social Security is the best, wisest, most wonderful idea in the world, but we don't know because there's a gun pointed at us.
There's a gun in the room.
This is what I have to keep doing with Christians.
This is what I have to keep doing with Muslims and with Jews, is to say, I'm sorry, but you want me dead.
Like, I'm sorry, but there's a gun in the room.
I'm sorry, but you subscribe to a vicious genocidal morality that wants me and millions and millions and millions and billions of other people in the world put to death.
So there's kind of like a gun in the room, and you know, it's nice that you think that Jesus was a nice guy, and someone posted on the board and said, you know, well maybe there are Christians who are out there saying, well they have their What Would Jesus Do bracelets, and it helps them become more spiritual and nice and kind and gentle.
And that's very interesting.
I mean, but this is part of the propaganda that we all imbibe, and it's very hard to see it.
I mean, if you reframe it, right?
That's the whole point of logic, moral logic.
You reframe stuff and say, is it okay if, right?
So, you know, if I said, well, okay, so there's a guy who joins the KKK, and he reads all of the writings, the sort of genocidal, murderous writings of the Grand Vizier, or whatever the hell they're called.
And he's sort of sitting in a park thinking about the KKK and coming up with all these peaceful and wonderful loving thoughts because of his association with the KKK, and he keeps looking at all these genocidal writings, and he sort of becomes a loving, wonderful guy.
Well, wouldn't you say that that's just the most ridiculous thing in the world?
That if you are somebody who believes in genocide as a viable solution to disagreement with people, then would it be sort of faintly ridiculous to say that this could make you into a wonderful, wise, kind, nice, gentle person?
Now, does this mean that all Christians are not this way?
Well, I don't know.
I'm actually sort of beginning to swing around in my opinion about that, having met enough Christians now.
I actually don't find them very nice at all.
I find them really weird and mutated, and there's an enormous amount of propaganda about Christianity and religious people in general.
But they really are mentally ill people, and they really are morally sick people, in my experience.
And I know that there's lots of little old ladies who are supposed to be this wonderful, nice, kind people.
But when you look at Christians and their relationship to their children, and their relationship to choice, and their relationship to thought, and their relationship to questioning, there's a lot of rage in Christians.
There's a lot of brutality.
Christianity is child abuse.
Religious instruction is child abuse.
And you can't go through that kind of child abuse, that kind of rank destruction of your identity and capacity to reason in the service of brute authority in terms of parenting and church, you can't go through that and not have it leave some scar tissue and some serious irrationalities and negotiation and interpersonal difficulties.
So this is something that you just have to keep pointing out.
This is all we have to do is keep saying, hey, there's a gun in the room.
Yeah, I understand that you think it's a great program, but there's a gun in the room.
But it's violent.
If people don't agree with it, they get shot.
So it doesn't matter whether you think it's a right or wrong program.
The fact is that you're condoning violence.
Now, if you can look at me in the eye and say, yes, I'm condoning violence, I think that people should be shot.
Who disagree with me, then fine.
At least you're getting somewhere.
At least you're bringing this gun out into the open so that other people can view this more directly.
Other people can see the gun in the room.
Even if the guy is willing to wave it around and say, yeah, damn it, if somebody doesn't help the old people out by giving them money, then I'm going to shoot them dead.
Then at least, you know, at least the naked power has been revealed.
And other people can say, you know, I really don't like that whole gun thing.
I mean, I understand what the guy's saying.
Maybe it's a nice thing, but it can't be a nice thing if it's forced, right?
I mean, that we pretty much understand.
The moral responsibility declines just a little when you have force.
So we have a gun pointed at your head.
And so, of course, is moral virtue.
So even if it is the most wonderful thing in the world, it ain't the most wonderful thing in the world if you have a gun to your head.
And so that's my sort of basic message about what it is that we do.
Don't get lost in the complexities.
You know, what you have to do is the easiest thing in the world and the hardest thing in the world.
Together, right?
Because it's going to have effects on your families and it's going to have effects on your work situations if you end up bringing this stuff up.
And it's going to have an effect on your friends.
And it is a basic fact that you have to recognize that there is a gun in the room.
That's why we're libertarians.
Because we don't like the fact that there's a gun in the room.
And nobody else likes the fact that there's a gun in the room.
But we're the people who don't lie to ourselves and say, There's no gun in the room.
And we don't say that there's no gun in the room.
Sorry, we say that there's no gun in the room in every room, right?
So the socialists will say, yes, there's a gun in the room in foreign policy, but there's none in domestic policy.
And the conservatives will say the opposite.
The Republicans will say the opposite.
But we say there's a gun in every room in the world, and we're sick of it.
And we want to point it out over and over and over again.
And if it makes you uncomfortable, we're sorry.
But the fact is that there is a gun in the room, and it's high time that humanity let go of that gun.
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