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April 3, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:38
173 Can we collaborate with Christians? (Part 1)

Some of them hold so many similar beliefs - can we join forces?

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Good morning everybody, it's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
It is, well, it should be 7.40, but sadly, due to the strange fact that our planet keeps rotating on its axis, it is in fact 840 AM on March the 3rd, a Monday, 2006.
I hope you're doing well.
Thank you so much to the people who have been kind enough and I would put forward honorable enough to come out and support Free Domain Radio.
There's a donate button on the main page of freedomainradio.com.
My suggestion, 50 cents a podcast.
I do believe that it's worth it if you stack three of these podcasts together You get the price of a movie, I think, an hour and a half, hour and three quarters.
And I would like to think, I do believe that it is the case, and I would like to think that these podcasts have a value in terms of truth, entertainment, stimulation, philosophy, irritation, I'm sure at times as well.
But I'd like to think that they have together $1.50 worth of entertainment relative to a movie for, gosh, here it's like $13.
I'm not sure where it is where you are, but let's just say that I do believe that podcasts are worth 1 seventh or 1 eighth of a movie per So, I hope that if you're enjoying them, you will, I do believe I might say, do the right thing and come past and shove me some cash.
It's all going straight towards hardware and bandwidth so far, but I will tell you when I end up doing these from a hammock in Aruba.
And then, of course, you will have thanks that you will not believe, and I will name my firstborn son or daughter After you all.
So, thanks so much for listening, and please forgive the pitch.
I would like to talk this morning, and this will be a two-parter, and I was hoping to get to the facts yesterday, but I did not.
This is why, why, oh why, oh why, can we not join up with the Christians?
Are you crazy stuff who says that atheism is required for anarcho-capitalism?
Are you not simply an absolutist?
Is it not vaguely cultish?
Is it not exclusionary?
Is it not Rejecting those who have so much in common with us except for one tiny little thing.
Is that not a non-productive way to do it?
Isn't the fact that purists in ideological movements are a great danger?
Do we not think that being an absolutist is being a great... is putting things at risk and putting things like intellectual vanity and, you know, almost silly levels of consistency before the movement... the good of the movement as a whole?
And didn't you sort of notice that the Ayn Rand's movement founded because of her intellectual purity and blah blah blah?
And so when I say blah blah blah, I just mean that there's lots more arguments like that, not that I don't take these arguments seriously or respect them, because I do respect them.
My God, I mean, what a terrible, terrible, grievous error it would be, on so many levels, to want to put an intellectual framework forward or to have a conversation about an intellectual framework That was futile, because it sliced and diced things into such atomic levels of abstraction that anybody who didn't follow this straight and narrow path, like expecting two raindrops to fall in exactly the same pattern,
That anybody who didn't follow that path was wrong and exclusionary and then basically the ideas that I'm putting forward become a universe of Steph who's right and everybody else who deviates to a tiny degree and who doesn't follow the scripture of Steph or whatever.
That those people are wrong and I have to discard them and I'm going to be alone and bitter and ineffectual and everyone who's out there Who's willing and able to make compromises with like-minded groups will achieve something, and I will not have achieved anything, and what I think will happen, or this is somewhat likely to happen, is that if I go for a kind of intellectual I would just say consistency, but we can call it purity, if you like.
I know that that's been somewhat scrubbed of any kind of virtue and injected with a vague kind of horror from the revolutionaries and totalitarian people of the 20th century, but we can call it purity if you like.
Then, if I do that, then what I'm doing is I'm giving people an excuse to dismiss me, because I'm going to look
Like an intellectual purist, and I'm going to look intolerant, and I'm going to look like any one of the major or petty dictators who have swarmed the halls of the intellectual world since time immemorial, who are really putting forward ideas, ostensibly, but who are really doing it as a form of intellectual vanity and dominance and control and bullying and cultish kind of whatever.
And I fully understand these arguments.
It is to me rather amazing that people put arguments forward to me, and they're perfectly obvious arguments.
And they really do say them like, you know, one of the things that I'm concerned about, you know, as opposed to, and I'm not saying that they should lean upon my knowledge or wisdom, but the only thing that I can say is that if it's really obvious to you, I've probably thought of it.
I mean, I'd be pretty sure that I would have thought of it.
And also, if it's obvious to you and you tell me, then I can guarantee you that I've heard it a million times before.
And that doesn't mean that you shouldn't feel it.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't tell me.
I'm just saying that it would be nice for me.
Just for now, you know, if you want to do something nice for me, other than give me 50 cents a podcast, if you wanted to do something nice for me, it would be something like, rather than telling me like, wow, you may never have thought of this, but what about joining with people who are sort of similarly thinking to us, but who sort of are different in some areas?
Oh, wow, I'm just astounded.
You mean I should want to be on a volleyball team with people who, even if they don't have the same level of skill as I do, are interested in playing volleyball?
That's fascinating!
But of course, this is what we all do from the very beginning of time, right?
I mean, no one in our life has exactly the same ideas as we do.
And thank heaven for that!
I mean, wouldn't it be dull if everybody did?
It would be a You know, like going into an art gallery and seeing the photocopy of the same painting over and over and over again.
It would be sort of sad and depressing.
And I think that the differences of opinions that people have are beautiful and wonderful and magical and part of the great ecosystem that moves ideas forward.
So, here's my response, and I'm going to sort of break this into two parts.
The first part is going to be theoretical, and the second part is going to be sort of based on some scriptural facts or some scriptural readings that I think will clarify at least my position on this issue.
Now, first and foremost, should we join with the Christians?
Could we join with the Christians?
And, you know, you can insert the name of any group here, and I'm happy to discuss other groups like the Socialists or the Communists or whatever.
Should we join with the Christians?
You say, should I have conversations with Christians about liberty?
Heavens to Betsy, you can do whatever you want.
I mean, heavens, you can do anything that you feel like.
You can tell Christians that this podcast is interesting.
You can tell them that I'm the Antichrist.
You can tell them whatever you like.
You can say to them, yes, brothers, let us join together in pursuit of liberty, or you can say, we are blood enemies, and so on.
I mean, this is freedom, right?
This is all about freedom.
You can do whatever you want.
I think there are consequences, and as I've mentioned before, and I'll just touch on here, This is a huge task that we have taken on.
I think it's a fun task.
I think that it is an incredibly valuable way to spend one's time and energy.
So I think that there is no more noble pursuit, no more noble goal, than the discussion and dissemination of truth and theory.
I think that that is more than anything else that you can do with your time and energy.
That is the greatest thing that you can do.
It is greater than discovering a cure for cancer.
It is greater than ending war.
It is greater than feeding the hungry, because it will provide all of those things, permanently.
And all of those things, at the moment, are only ever involved with state power, which is the exact opposite.
You can do whatever you want, but given that this is a very difficult task that we have set ourselves, or that her nature is in some sense, or my demon has told me to do, in a sense, then I do believe that we should try our best to achieve the best.
And one of the things that I have a problem with in terms of things like intellectual purity and absolutism and so on, I mean, these are just terms that are thrown around by people who are frightened of integrity.
I mean, this is what people say when they're frightened of integrity.
Like, I got a lot of emails on the intellectual property thing saying that you, um, you're wrong and blah blah blah, and I do sort of feel that these are people who have stolen songs, or maybe you don't want to say stolen, maybe whatever, they've taken songs or borrowed songs or
...applied the libertarian view of property on digital media, whatever you want to say, and they're feeling sort of guilty about it, and rather than confronting their emotions and saying, OK, well, maybe I do feel bad about having stolen some stuff, and maybe I should do something about it, they come to me and say, you know, well, you're wrong, and blah, blah, blah.
And, of course, these are people who have written to me before, who fully understand the DRO model, and who now are suddenly saying that we need one absolute way to deal with something like property.
And so my perspective is we can do anything that we want, but we are on this road, for better or for worse, and the mind, once shaped by a new idea, can never retain its original shape.
So we are on this journey, and it's a one-way street, in a sense.
I mean, you can sort of pretend that you don't want to do this and go back, and I think that's just going to leave you discontented.
But if we are going to go forward, then we need to spend our lives and our times in a way that is going to be the most productive.
Because it's going to be difficult anyway you cut it.
But we need to spend our lives and times in a way that is the most productive.
And that means having a kind of purity.
So the people who wrote to me and they didn't want intellectual property rights to be negotiated by DROs, well of course that's just Not right.
I mean, if you understand the DRO theory at all, you know that you can't have any other agency that's going to command how people interact within society.
So, this is people who say you're too much of a purist and property, and suddenly they've already listened to, I assume, or at least read the articles on the argument from effect, and they've heard me mention my lack of respect for the argument from effect, and now I've got all these people writing to me saying, Yes, but digital media is not scarce, and therefore I can take it, because property rights are there to control only the movement of goods that are scarce.
And that's an argument from effect, of course, right?
Not an argument for morality.
And so you get these kind of fallback positions, and I have them all the time too, so please don't imagine that I'm sort of saying, ah, you people with your murky lack of purity.
I mean, it's the same thing for me as well.
I don't... I'm constantly sort of having to realign my own thinking because, you know, I had exactly the same 20-30 years of propaganda that you did, and that's hard to... you never outbroke that, right?
I mean, that's how the way... that's the way that the brain channels are carved, and so creativity is a constant... I want to say challenge, because it is a thrill, right?
I mean, it's a...
It's a constant growth area, right?
I mean, if you want to take on a difficult sport, it's going to take you a while to get better at it, especially if you've learned things badly to begin with, and you get a better coach later on.
Then, you know, you're going to find you have to challenge these old habits, and that's part of growth and newness and all that, and that's, I think, a wonderful thing.
But when people talk about purity and absolutism and cultism and so on, what they're basically saying is that I don't believe in truth.
To take a simple example, as we all know.
I mean, it's 2 plus 2 equals 4.
Is that cultist or absolutist or anything like that?
Is that intolerant?
No, it's just a fact.
You know, I mean, is the scientific method absolutist and cultist and intolerant and all of these mean things?
No, it's just a methodology.
And if you want to claim that something is true, then you have to prove it logically and appeal to evidence.
I mean, I don't think that scientists feel that they are cultists and exclusionary and so on.
They're just saying, no, this is a standard of truth.
And if you want to have people respect your opinion, then you have to prove your position with logic and appeal to evidence.
I just don't see how we can be considered cultists or absolutists.
I know that there were irrational people, right?
When you get irrational absolutes, of course that is cultist, and that is exclusionary, and that is vicious, and that is destructive.
Of course!
Because you've got the two things.
You've got irrational and absolutes put together.
And I've talked about this in a number of podcasts before, but of course you're going to end up with violence and destruction and genocide.
There's simply no other way to resolve disputes if you don't have reason and evidence, things which are independent of subjective consciousness.
If you don't have things that you can appeal to independent of your own consciousness, then anything that you come to is going to be a battle of wills with other people, which eventually, if their questions are important enough and things like property do need to be settled in society, you're going to come to blows and then you're going to come to genocide.
I mean, it's absolutely inevitable.
And I certainly hope that nobody out there is thinking that I'm trying to dominate anybody with these ideas or I'm trying to tell anybody what to think or what to do.
Good heavens!
I mean, the last thing that I would want is for anybody to so fundamentally mistake the truth as to think that I am trying to dominate people with my thinking or telling people what to do.
I'm simply putting out a framework that I think is the right way to determine truth from falsehood.
And saying to people that if you want to talk about truth and falsehood, then you have to subject yourself to the scientific method.
Just as I do.
Just as everybody does.
I mean, that's not... It's not me that I'm asking you to subjugate yourself to, but logic and reality.
Just as you, as you can constantly and always ask me to, is to say that I myself must be subject to rationality and to evidence.
So, I'm not asking anybody to get under a tent that I'm not already under, or to subject themselves to laws of reality that I'm not fully subjected to myself.
So, it's not me.
Einstein isn't bullying me when he tells me that the speed of light is constant.
I don't say, fine, fine, the speed of light is constant, I'll obey you, but only because I am overawed by your stereotypical professorial appearance.
That's the only reason, damn you, I don't like you, I think you're wrong, but you're going to bully me or whatever, right?
I mean, that's silly.
Einstein himself would simply say, ah, you know, these are the theories.
And this is the evidence.
It seems to be the case.
So, you know, maybe I was right.
But it's not dominance.
He's not wielding any club telling you you have to believe him.
And it's exactly the same thing with me.
That's why I got an email yesterday regarding intellectual property rights where somebody was saying, you know, I hope that this doesn't make you angry but I think that, you know, they went on to tell me that they think that I have an emotional attachment to the ideas of intellectual property because I've spent so long as a writer trying to get published without success.
Or with, I guess you could say, with limited success.
And I was mildly offended just because I hope that I've never come across as somebody who's gonna get offended because if somebody tells me that they think that I'm illogical for x, y, and z reason, or that I have an emotional attachment that I'm not aware of... I mean, I'm telling people that...
Have emotional attachments to God's parents and governments and irrational absolutes that they're not aware of, or probably not aware of.
And so, for somebody to say to me, you might have an emotional attachment that you're not aware of, I think is a perfectly valid... I mean, how crazy would I have to be to have put out 175 podcasts on this topic and then say, are you telling me that I'm being irrational?
My God, man, how offended can you be?
I'm gonna drag your name all over the podcast and ruin your name with, you know, the listeners and so on.
No, of course not!
Heavens, I mean, I'm just putting some ideas out.
The methodology is not mine.
The methodology wasn't even invented by me.
I'm doing what I can to apply it to, I think, the most important sphere that the methodology needs to be applied to, which is the area of morality and social organization.
And I'm not even the first to do that, and I'm not going to be the last to do that.
So the methodology, the ideas, they're not mine.
I think that I've pushed the envelope a little further in terms of consistency, which is, I think, valuable, and as I've said earlier, the most valuable thing that I can think of to do with my time.
And so, for people to say to me, you are irrational, you are this, you are that, perfectly, absolutely willing to hear that.
Somebody on the IM on Friday was telling me that they believe that they have bested me in an argument, and they want to... It was kind of funny.
It was cute.
I mean, I thought it was flattering, but, you know, they were saying that they want to sort of go down as the person who has bested the great Stefan Molyneux, and I thought that was kind of... It was cute, and it was nice, but it was completely incorrect.
And I wrote to him back and I said, good heavens, I love to be bested.
I love to be proven wrong.
Because it's easier than, you know, melting my brain coming up with all these ideas.
If people tell me that I'm wrong, then that would be fantastic.
And if somebody can make the case to me that we should get together with the Christians, Or the Marxists, or Ron Paul, or whoever.
I mean, my heavens, what a wonderful thing that would be!
What a wonderful thing!
Then I could run for office, then I could do this, I could do that, and I wouldn't have to take this incrementalist and very difficult approach of proving libertarian morality through logic, of trying to explain the cause and effect as I see it, through the scientific method of ideas and society, of analyzing history, I would have a much wider audience.
I would be able to get on the radio.
I would be able to... I mean, all these wonderful things.
And so, if that were the best thing to do, and I was doing the wrong thing by focusing on intellectual consistency, then I think that would be wonderful.
But one of the problems... Well, there's two problems.
One is that the argument from effect doesn't sway me, because it's just not valid.
You can't proof-proof Through theorizing on possible results.
And I've talked about that before.
You can have a look at my blog.
I forget the argument from effect and I think it's an early podcast as well.
But the argument from effect doesn't work for me.
So saying you could reach more people if you don't focus on the whole atheism thing Is not valid, right?
I mean, I'm not interested in reaching people.
I mean, I know that you're enjoying these podcasts, at least I hope you are, but I'm not interested in reaching people.
I'm interested in talking about the truth, which is why I'm on a podcast, and why I'm not on the radio, and why I'm on a podcast, and why I'm not running for office.
And so I am interested in talking about the truth.
And if you find that valuable, I salute you.
From these distant mountain peaks of honor and integrity, I salute you.
But I'm interested in talking about the truth, and a methodology for determining truth and falsehood.
I am not interested in changing society, or reaching people, or having an audience, or convincing people.
I'm interested in talking about the truth.
That is the only thing that I have control over.
That is the only thing that I can aim at.
I can aim at being as rigorous and honest with myself as humanly possible.
I can aim at being as objective, entertaining, because entertainment, as I've talked about, is an important part of philosophy.
As Nietzsche called it, it's supposed to be the gay science, the joyful science, the joyful pursuit.
And it is.
So, you know, I try not to hide the fact that I enjoy it.
I aim at being as honest with you as possible.
I aim at not holding things back from a personal level, because philosophy does not just mean the study of the state.
It also means the study of the self.
I mean, it primarily means the study of the self, because the society and the government is an effect of our relationship to ourselves and to truth.
So I'm really, for me, aiming at the root and core of dysfunction, in terms of dysfunction going all the way from bad personal relationships to genocide.
I mean, I'm looking at the root of dysfunction, irrationality, and that means that I also want to tell you about my life when it's appropriate and things that I have learned.
So that you can understand where I'm coming from, and so I don't just sort of look like a floating head in a tank, you know, that I'm just sort of in here theorizing without any context from a personal situation.
You know, that having been said...
When people say to me, maybe we should join with the Christians, and, you know, insert name of group here, but we'll just talk about the Christians.
When people say to me, maybe we should join with the Christians, then they don't understand, and there's no reason why they would have, I don't think I've been as explicit about it before, they certainly don't understand my purpose, which is to talk about the truth.
It's not to join with groups who have overlapping beliefs and contradictory beliefs in order to move a social agenda forward.
Because, my friends, that had been tried for 250 frickin' years.
It has been tried for generations and generations and generations and got us precisely the opposite of where we want to be.
It's got us to the exact most horrifying and awful place that we can picture.
Which is a gargantuan state that is stripping civil rights, that is going to war without congressional approval, that is extending its violent fingers and guns into every nook and cranny of society and holding everybody hostage.
I mean, this has been the result of collaboration, right?
This is the result of people like Milton Friedman.
of compromising and wanting to get books published and wanting to get out there and having effect.
And it is also the result of Ayn Rand compromising.
And I think the woman was a goddess intellectually, and I worshipped for many years the ground that she walked on.
But the fact of the matter is that the compromise of allowing a state to exist has rendered the entire movement completely and utterly and totally futile throughout history and has meant that the few times when it's had an upper hand, it always results in empires.
So even when you get things like in England or in France, when you have revolutions and the overthrow of despotisms and the removal of monarchies, And the establishment of parliamentary democracy and the extension of property rights and suffrage and the elimination of slavery and the recognition of the rights of children and the rights of women.
This is when our philosophy takes hold.
And because it collaborates with enemies in order to achieve effect, it always collapses in the long run.
You can't take a little poison and feel good.
And so, I just look at history.
I mean, I didn't want to come to these... I really resisted these ideas.
I did not want to come to these ideas at all.
Isn't it much nicer to talk about a small estate, and to have friends with the conservatives, and to be friends with the Christians, and to be, you know, say, well, I'm agnostic, and I'm a minimalist, or a minarchist, or whatever.
I'm a classical liberal.
I, you know, I mean, that gets you lecture points.
That gets you books published.
There's an entire market out there for that.
And that market has been served by an enormous number of very brilliant people for generations.
And look where we are!
Our society is collapsing, and we have no capacity whatsoever in the intellectual world to push back at the expansion of state power, because once you accept a premise, you cannot reject logically an extension of that premise.
If you say that violence can achieve good, but only in these circumstances and limited, then you let the devil out in the world.
You let the tigers loose in society, and then you can nag at them and say, well, that was too much, I didn't want this, I didn't want that.
But how can you logically say that?
If you say violence in the form of the state, that certain people have rights and other people don't, it's perfectly logical.
And it's perfectly obvious that it's perfectly logical.
If you're going to talk about morality, which is what everybody talks about all the time, continually and permanently, just watch a Dr. Phil or two, if you can take it, and you will see that everybody continually and permanently and always justifies everything that they do according to the argument for morality.
So you cannot say there's a little bit of government, a little bit of violence, a little bit of opposing rights, because you've just eliminated the concept of rights and morality and opposition to violence already.
It's just a matter of time.
You simply cannot oppose violence unless you oppose violence.
It's really, really simple.
You cannot have a moral viewpoint if you do not allow that morality is logical and scientific and bound up in human nature, which means you cannot have a government, because a government is a little cabal of people who have all the opposite moral rules.
You can't have soldiers.
You can't have policemen.
You just can't.
I mean, I wish you could sometimes.
I really do.
And I'm certainly waiting, and I will wait until my dying day, for somebody to prove to me that this is incorrect.
That you can have a logical and empirical morality, and also have some people who have opposite moral rules from everyone else at certain times in the day, if certain other people say so.
I mean, that is never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to happen.
Nobody is ever going to be able to prove that morality includes opposite moral rules for different people at different times.
Then you can say that there's no morality, in which case there can't be policeman or a state because you can't have moral laws that can be imposed on other people.
It's really that simple.
Either morality is empirical and logical, in which case you can't have a state, or it is subjective and irrational, in which case you can't have a state.
When I've done a podcast on this, So, I don't want to waste my life.
That's what really it comes down to.
I don't want to waste my life.
And it's worse than wasting your life.
I mean, pick on anybody.
Pick on von Mises.
Pick on Friedman.
Pick on all these people who said, yeah, I think, you know, a little state is good, but you know, state interference in the economy is bad, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, what have they done?
They have led an enormous number of people down the path to perdition, if I may put it in a religious context, or using a religious metaphor.
They've got all these people to get all fired up about how bad the state is, while still allowing the state to exist.
I think that that's worse than spending your life being a statist, in my view.
And I know that this is going to cheese people off, but I think that people who harness The natural horror and anger and contempt that people feel for the moral absolutes of the state, who harness that and who lead them off down this garden path of being, I want a smaller state and I want the state separated from economics and so on, while still allowing for the existence of a brutal social monopoly that has the complete opposite moral rules of everybody else,
I think that they've wasted a lot of people's time and energy.
And it's worse than wasting it.
They've actually put those people's time and energy into the service of the state.
To criticize effects of the state, while allowing for the existence of a state, is worse than keeping your mouth shut.
In my humble opinion.
Because the problem is, how easy is it for me to separate my thinking from libertarian, the classical liberal sort of small state model?
There's a lot of confusion out there.
And it's done nothing to stop the growth of the power of the state.
I mean, Mises was writing in the 20s.
And none of these ideas and theories have done squat to even slow down the acceleration of the growth of the power of the state.
What it has done is caused people to waste an enormous amount of time and energy writing articles and emailing back and forth and getting all upset and going to conferences when they haven't got a hope in hell of succeeding.
Because they're fundamentally flawed and the premises are flawed at the bottom.
So I don't want to spend my life in the service of the state.
So I'm not going to talk about the existence of the state being moral in any situation or circumstance whatsoever.
And I don't even care about the state!
Do you understand?
I don't care about the state.
I don't care about religion.
I care about the truth.
I care about what is right, what is moral, what is logical, what is empirical, what is provable, what is scientific.
That's what I care about.
And as a result of that, I have come to some conclusions about the state and God and society and all these other things.
But I don't care about overthrowing the state.
Whatsoever.
If somebody were to tell me tomorrow the state is going to continue to grow, I would still continue to do exactly what I'm doing.
Why?
Because I'm happy.
Because it makes me happy.
Because it gives me the most beautiful relationship in the world with my wife.
Because it means that the few friends that I have I love dearly unto death and I couldn't imagine being any happier in my social relations.
Because I have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful life Talking and discussing truth with a brilliant crew on the boards and in emails, and every now and then on the Skype, which you can look me up.
I don't care about overthrowing the state, and you shouldn't either, in my humble opinion.
You shouldn't care about co-joining with Christians in order to have some effect politically.
Because it's not about having an effect politically.
It's not about converting people.
It's about being happy.
It's about being joyful in this science of ethics, in this science of reality.
We are so constituted as human beings that rationality and objectivism and objectivity is what makes us happy.
full of theories on human nature, but we're so constituted as human beings that rationality and objectivism and objectivity is what makes us happy.
Otherwise, we are madly willful, and we believe that we can make stones move with our brains if we believe in irrational absolutes, and that makes us stressful and hateful.
But But we are so constituted, as you would imagine, from a living organism that gets its sustenance from reality, we're kind of into reality, right?
I mean, that's the pleasure-pain mechanism of psychology, points you towards objectivity, truth and reality.
Now, it's painful to do it right now because we've been bent so much in the wrong shape by all of these crazy absolutes that we've been forced upon us in society and through the state and all that sort of stuff, all this crazy obedience we have to do.
But that's okay.
So we've got injured by the state and the physiotherapy which leads us to happiness and wholeness is painful, but that's okay.
I mean, people do that all the time when they get injured.
That's not something we should shrink at.
I mean, we should have the courage for that.
But I'm not interested at all in joining with Christians to pursue some agenda.
First of all, that agenda is only going to serve the Christians.
It's going to serve the Christians.
It's never going to serve us.
It's going to serve irrational people.
It's never going to serve rational people.
You mix in crazy, insane, violent mysticism with logical, empirical, scientific morality, who gains?
I mean, what do we gain from the Christians?
Nothing.
What do the Christians gain from us?
Legitimacy.
It's not going to work.
It will be serving the state.
It will be serving irrationality.
If you take your intellectual clarity and you take your rationality and your logic and you put it in the service of mysticism and say, we find value in these people.
My grocer might be a Christian.
It's not like I'm not going to deal with him.
But I'm talking about it from a philosophical truth-value standpoint.
We find value from these people.
We are willing to join with them.
And so basically we believe that both rationality is a virtue and irrationality can be a cause for good as well.
Well, what the hell do we believe then?
I mean, either rationality and empirical observation and evidence and so on is the path to truth, or it's not.
Now, if it's not the path to truth, then if you join with people who are mystics, then you're saying, yes, there is a path to truth which is scientific, and there is also a path to truth which is crazy mystical, and we're going to join together with these people.
Well, all you're going to do is serve irrationality.
You are not going to move the movement one step forward.
In fact, you're going to move it ten steps back.
And there's plenty of evidence of that throughout history.
Just look at all of human history.
The degree to which people rejected religion is the degree to which we got America.
And the degree to which people then worked to justify the federal government rather than eliminate government, which was happening in certain areas, particularly in Pennsylvania, which you can look up.
Murray Rothbard has some great articles on that.
The degree to which people then decided to collaborate is the degree to which freedom fell away.
You can't collaborate with crazy people.
And move rationality one step forward.
It's simply impossible.
I mean, to take a minor example, Christians have an enormous number of commandments within Christianity.
And this is an Old Testament, so it's the three majors, right?
Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
Which say, you gotta obey the government.
If the government is placed there by a god, you have to obey the secular power, blah blah blah.
Rebelling against secular power is as Lucifer did to God and all that kind of stuff, and I'll give you some examples of that this afternoon.
So, obviously, there's an enormous number of Christians who believe that you have to obey the ruler, right?
Which is where you get things like the draft, and why you get Christians going and obeying.
Well, you know, I've got a thou shalt not kill, but I've got to obey the government, and blah, blah, blah, so obey the government.
And there's very, very few, I mean, there's some, there's some who were conscientious objectors, particularly Quakers.
Some who were conscientious objectors, and good for them, to the degree that they did that.
I think honorable footnotes, for sure.
But the majority of Christians simply go along with it, and they've got lots of Bible justifications for all of that.
And then you get some Christians who are libertarians.
And why are Christians libertarians?
Why?
Simply because they believe that man is in a fallen state.
That man is evil.
That man is corrupt.
I hope that firetruck isn't going to my work.
Well, I'll get a bit of a day off.
Anyway.
They believe that man is in a state of fallen virtue.
Man is innately corrupt and evil and subject to Satan and temptation and so on.
And because man is evil, man cannot rule over man.
They are libertarians because they believe that no human being is virtuous enough to rule over any other human being.
Now, of course, the problem with that is, I mean, that's fine for the Catholics, but for the people who are less into the whole fallen thing, which is a lot of Christians, they do believe in original sin, but they also believe in human perfectibility, or at least the possibility of human perfection.
Not absolute perfection, but perfectibility, like in the goal of becoming perfect.
And so, lots of Christians believe in that, and therefore, the most logical social organization for Christians who believe that, and it's a lot of them, I would say it's the majority, who believe that human beings can gain virtue through obedience to God.
I mean, that's pretty common, right?
There's some who would say, you're totally fallen, right?
The Calvinists, you're totally fallen.
You've got no chance.
It's actually a random lottery, but you should be good because, you know, just for the hell of it.
But the majority of Christians believe that virtue is possible through allegiance to God, obedience to the words of the Bible, obedience to the priests, and so on.
And so, of course, the most logically beneficial society for these people is a theocracy, which is what we have now, right?
We have a guy declaring war, we have an imperial presidency, a guy declaring war because God tells him to.
That's a theocracy, right?
I mean, that's exactly what we have.
And so, this is the natural result of collaboration with Christians, right?
Because Christians believe that human beings are innately fallen, but perfectibility is possible through communion with God.
Therefore, the only moral society is a theocracy where the person at the top is at one with God.
And this is exactly what the Bible justifies.
The Bible primarily is a philosophical service to tyrants.
The main reason that it survived was its use to the secular rulers, right?
Fool ourselves about that, right?
It is a manual of slavery to arbitrary power.
I mean, that's what it is telling you to do, and you do it for God.
I mean, that's to some degree important, but the main thing you do is to the secular ruler, right?
I mean, that's why, I mean, this is no shocker, and I'm certainly not the first person to come up with this, so I'm sure you've heard this before, but I mean, let's just be, you know, pretty bald about it and say the facts as they are.
So, for the majority of Christians and anarchist society, it's exactly... I mean, people, my friends, my brothers and sisters, this is exactly why people think that anarchism results in mohawk, shaven-headed, tattooed forehead, swastika-bearing, nightmarish civil war violence.
Because human beings believe the Christian propaganda, for the most part, even if they're not specifically Christian, they've heard so much propaganda about man's evil natural state that there's simply no chance, no possibility whatsoever That human beings could ever end up doing the right thing from that standpoint.
They just can't.
It's completely and utterly impossible.
This is because man has fallen.
There is no way at all that human beings can end up doing the right thing.
All they can end up doing is destroying themselves, because they're in a fallen nature, and therefore they need to be constrained.
I mean, this is the whole idea, right?
Why do you need God?
Because you're innately evil, and God is your only chance of salvation, and all this kind of stuff.
I mean, this is what people believe.
And we all believe this, to some degree, because we're all raised in a Christian culture.
Or if you're not raised in a Christian culture, then you're raised in a Jewish culture, or raised in a Muslim culture.
There's no possibility whatsoever for human beings to be self-regulating and productive members of society in the absence of an exterior monopoly or coercive monopoly on virtue.
Whether that's religious or state-based, this is the whole point of Christianity, of religion as a whole.
Is that you have to break people's legs and then give them a crutch, actually, and then keep breaking their legs continually.
Because if human beings can be moral, independent of exterior bullying, then we have an anarchist society.
We have a free society.
But the reason, this is the major reason that people don't go for the truth.
This is the main reason that people are frightened of freedom.
Because they've been told over and over again that man is fallen, that man is brutalized, that man is evil by nature, and therefore cannot ever self-regulate in the absence of an exterior power like the church or the state.
I mean, this is all perfectly obvious, right?
I mean, this is not anything too shocking, I'm sure that I'm telling you.
This is exactly what people believe.
This is exactly why people are frightened of freedom.
This is the whole point of these doctrines, is to make people frightened of freedom and self-regulation and independence and integrity.
It's exactly the point.
This is exactly why it's all propagated, is to make people frightened of us who tell the truth.
It's to make people frightened of the very idea that human beings can be benevolent, that human beings can self-regulate, that society can run without an arbitrary, centralized, coercive monopoly of either philosophy through religion or of violence through the state.
I mean, collaborate with these people?
These people are precisely why we are marginalized.
I mean, aside from everything else, and I know that this is to some degree the argument from effect, which I don't completely reject, I just don't view it as primary.
But to collaborate with religious people?
I mean, religious, that's exactly why the world is not free.
I mean, literally, it is like collaborating with a fascist to gain an anarchist society.
It's a complete contradiction.
How many times do we have to face this problem?
Oh, well, in a free society, there'd just be civil war.
Well, it's not empirical.
This is what people believe as an axiom.
And how on earth do they believe it?
That's what I keep asking people.
Who do you know who uses violence?
I'm just trying to get them to look at the facts and not look at the propaganda.
Not instantly spout forward without thinking all the propaganda against freedom that is put forward to the majority by religion.
If man has fallen, and therefore the best society is theocracy, and some people will say that human perfectibility is impossible and therefore we need anarchy because man is so evil that any rule of man over man will be horrible and destructive.
But if human perfectibility is impossible, then I could certainly see that the dominance of one will provide at least some stability to others, whereas the war of all against all will provide no social stability.
This is why I find that the anarcho-capitalist Christians are just quite exciting when it comes to thinking about their logic.
I mean, it just seems kind of odd to me.
But the idea that we're going to get a free society collaborating with Christians is... I mean, it's unthinkable.
I mean, we wouldn't even have to deal with this question.
If there was no religion, of course, there would already be a free society.
I mean, you've got to understand that.
If there was no religion, we would have been free from the state generations and generations ago.
I mean, there's no question of that whatsoever.
In my mind, you know, maybe you can argue this with me if you want, and maybe I'm missing something, but I am absolutely certain that we would have... I mean, this is why I go for religion.
This is why I go for religion.
You cannot have Religion and freedom together.
Because freedom is about rationality and empiricism in the scientific set of ethics.
And empirically, people like to work together peacefully.
I don't know anyone who uses violence.
I've had very few people who've told me that they know people who use violence and those who do use violence only use violence because the state has made it profitable at drug gangs and so on.
So, human beings by their very natures are peaceful and cooperative.
It's absolutely certain.
And we know this because if you don't beat a child up, if you don't humiliate and shame and bully a child, this is how the child grows up.
Human beings in a state of nature are benevolent, kind and wonderful.
Human beings tortured and corrupted by other human beings turn violent.
Yeah, sure.
Poodles in general are peaceful and friendly.
If you keep poking a poodle with a sharp stick for about 10 years and then give it rabies to boot, yes, it's going to be a little unpredictable and it's going to be a little violent and it's not the nature of the poodle.
It's just the response to corruption.
It's the response to all the negative stimuli.
I mean, so please!
We know that human beings like freedom because when they don't get it, they get neurotic and they get unhappy and they get vicious.
So, we know that humanity should swim in freedom the way that fishes swim in the sea.
And you take a fish out of the sea, put it in the bottom of the boat, and it's sort of flopping around, and yeah, of course, the fish doesn't look too successful there.
It looks like it needs a lot of help, but that's because you've taken it out of its natural element, which is peace and freedom.
Logic, rationality, empiricism, all those goodies, that's what we're designed for.
I mean, that's why so much effort has to be put into propagandizing us with all of the exact opposite of those things.
I mean, if human beings were naturally mean and vicious, you wouldn't even need religion!
You wouldn't need state schools!
If human beings were naturally patriotic, you wouldn't need 14 years of government propaganda.
If human beings were naturally murderous, you wouldn't need boot camp.
Anyway, I mean, I've talked about all this stuff before, but...
So that's really the gist of things this morning.
I would like to talk about some of the Old Testament.
I'll look at some of the New Testament texts as well, because a Christian theocracy is what we're laboring under right now.
But let's look at some of the biblical texts which support obedience, the absolute need, a moral absolute of obeying secular power, regardless of its ethics and blah blah blah.
And then we'll look at some of the contradictory ones, the ones that say the opposite, because, you know, we'll be fair.
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