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May 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:59
240 The Greatest Argument Against The State

Removing the silencers from the guns of governments...

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
Oh, it's 8.40.
Overslept a little on my way to work.
So, I'm going to talk this morning about...
Well, there's a question on the boards about the most powerful argument for liberty.
What is the one clinching argument that we can use...
To convince the statist that the state is evil.
Well, I'm going to tell you what I think it is, but I'm going to also tell you that I can't exactly recommend where and how to use it.
It's a very powerful argument, but it's a brutal argument.
Now, it's not brutal because we're brutal.
It's brutal because the state is brutal, and it's brutal because violence is brutal.
And it has a certain kind of shock value, which is not sensationalistic, and it is not meant to be...
It doesn't exaggerate the situation in any way, shape, or form, but it really does get the point across in as succinct a manner as possible.
And I'm not saying it's the very, very best argument, but Because there are people with whom it is simply going to shock too much and turn them away from the movement completely.
But I'm not altogether sure.
I'm still, you know, working this one out.
I'm not altogether sure that it's entirely a bad thing if we turn people off with this argument.
So... Without any further ado, the argument against statism, that is in my view the most powerful argument, is simply this.
Is there a difference between lovemaking and rape?
Because really that's what it comes down to.
The argument back that we always hear about state violence is that it is democratic, that people choose it, that the majority chooses it.
So then we say, if there is a society where there is one extra man compared to the number of women, so there are 50 million women and 50 million and one men, and the men want to rape the women,
is that moral? Now, I understand that it's a brutal argument, but I think that it's something that strips away a lot of the crap around this idea of the state.
And it particularly takes away the sentimentality around the state.
Now, rape is a crime, in my view, that is far worse than theft.
I submit to theft every day.
I don't think I could ever submit to rape.
So, rape is a far worse crime than theft.
Crimes which involve a violation of the person are always worse than crimes which involve violation of property.
So, I understand that it's an argument that is stronger than the argument...
Sorry, the argument for rape is stronger than the argument against property.
But, it's not that the state is only involved in theft.
That's sort of the main issue that I think is worth talking about.
If we say that rape is worse than lovemaking, and rape is wrong, and lovemaking is oh so right, then it's important to understand, if people say, well, we're just talking about taxes here, it's like, no.
If we were only talking about taxes as far as the state goes, I'm not sure that I would be cranking out two podcasts a day and...
Normalizing them, exporting them, uploading them, annotating them, responding to all the emails I get.
If it were only property rights that were being violated, then really that would be something that would be less egregious.
The problem with the state is not just or not even primarily that it affects property rights.
If state taxation were at 20% from now until the end of time, I think it would be an evil that we could all more or less roughly live with, and we'd write some letters to the editor and we'd do this, that, or the other.
But I don't think that we would be throwing ourselves headlong into a movement that is designed to wake people up to the brutality and escalating evil of the state, right?
The fact that it escalates is...
Pretty important. So, the definition of the difference between a benign and cancerous tumor, of course, is that a benign tumor will not spread to other organs, does not grow explosively, and will not kill you.
You can have pretty big benign tumors that grow, but they don't spread to other organs and they don't kill you.
So the state, for I would say a good chunk of American history and for a good chunk of Canadian history as well, was more in the, if you forgive the metaphor, was more in the nature of a benign tumor.
So it was growing, but it was not threatening the survival of society as a whole.
It was sort of like a parasite rather than a cancer.
Unfortunately, over the past 30 or 40 years, and in particular since the end of the Second World War, which is why I make the argument that there's no way in hell's green acre that we could ever be said to have won the Second World War.
The citizens, right? The governments won the Second World War, but the citizens lost millions of lives and helped swell the state to the point where it became cancerous, which is what's really been going on.
Ever since the 1950s, late 1950s, I would say, I would sort of position it to late 1950s and definitely accelerating in the 60s.
And then after that, we know the statistics.
It's been a complete eruption and explosion and absolute catastrophic expansion of state power.
So we're in a situation now where...
State power has become explosive.
And when state power becomes explosive, and of course for many people, for the two million Americans that are in prison, and of course the vast majority of everyone else who's in prison, who's been in prison by the state for property crimes like not paying your taxes, sort of quote crimes, right? For having the bag of vegetation around...
For any one of the wide variety of regulatory infractions that people haven't paid their fines for, silly infractions of complicated and convoluted either tax laws or regulatory compliance laws or code violation laws for building things.
I mean, any one of the hundreds of thousands or millions, if you take the world over, of silly laws.
Well, these people are thrown in jail.
And what happens to them in jail?
Well, my friends, they get raped.
So when we're talking about the state, we're talking about both things like invasion, invasion of other countries.
The U.S. in Iraq and in Gitmo is subjecting prisoners to daily rape, if not participating in those daily rapes.
The stuff that we saw coming out of Abu Ghraib, the photos were by far the mildest of what is available, and I'm sure that it would absolutely turn your stomach and help you understand a little bit more what is meant by foreign policy, If we were able to see, or even chose to see, even if we could, the remainder of those videos.
Because there's no depth to which human degradation cannot sink to when you have people who have themselves been raped or traumatized as children, which is where you get soldiers from, right?
I mean, the pedophiles sow the seeds which grow up to be cops and soldiers and criminals.
And you put them in a situation where authority figures are turning a blind eye and encouraging them to do whatever they want to prisoners who have no recourse.
There is no limit. There is nothing that could be done in these kinds of prisons that we could not conceive of as the basest evil and imagine that people would shrink from.
It's all being done, and more, because we don't have, generally, on the outside, sadistic imaginations, and therefore we don't come up with things that are psychologically and physically tortuous to people in the way that sadists can.
And so... That situation of rape, of daily beatings, of nightly terrorizing, of torture, it's all going on in the prisons, in the regular prisons as well.
I mean, don't be fooled.
Those regular prisons are absolute, and we'll talk about this, I still have yet to get to the topic on prisons, but the prisons, especially in America because of the swelling of the prison population over the past couple of decades, Those prisons are absolute gulags of rape and gang warfare, a war of all against all.
I mean, this is what happens when the government takes over.
The funniest thing is that people say, well, we need state power to avoid violence.
Well, state power is at its greatest in prison, and that's where the violence is the greatest.
I mean, that's just kind of funny, in my humble opinion.
It's terrible and it's sad, but it's also funny when you hear people talk about how we need state power to protect us from violence.
Well, That basic question, which you can ask people, it really opens up the actual reality of the goddamn issue, which is that the state has guns pointed at all of us.
So, those who are statists are morally akin to women in a harem who are kept there under eunuch guards and if they try and flee will have their throats cut.
Who are lounging around telling all the newcomers, oh, it's wonderful, it's a sensual paradise here, it's beautiful.
And then if people say, well, what happens if you don't want to submit to the fat old king's poying and groping?
Oh, no, it's not like that at all.
We want to submit. Well, that to me is the moral equivalent of status.
They may prefer to be raped by the state...
Rather than have the social intercourse of capitalism, let's say, of voluntarism.
But that's their choice.
And of course, they can't have it both ways.
They can't say, even as the corrupt old hags of the harem, they can't say that we voluntarily submit to the rapes of the king, or the sultan, That it's voluntary, that everyone who's here is here voluntarily, but we also want the armed guards, right?
That's the fundamental contradiction of statism.
If they talk about the guns in the room openly, then they can't talk about voluntarism.
And if they talk about voluntarism, then they can't talk about the guns in the room.
Because this is the fundamental contradiction.
And there's no better way to bring it out into the open than to ask if there's a difference between rape and lovemaking.
Well, what is the major difference between rape and lovemaking?
Well, one is consensual, the other is forced.
Now, that's a pretty significant difference, and that's the fundamental difference between free association and statism, between capitalism in its ideal form and between this sort of mercantilist state fascism that we have these days.
So, if somebody is willing to say that there is a difference between rape and lovemaking, then of course you ask them what that difference is.
And you say, they're going to say something like, well, one is consensual, the other one is forced and therefore evil.
And you say, okay, then so far we are in complete agreement and we are brothers in the struggle.
We are in complete agreement because you and I are both condemning Forced association.
We are both condemning participative acts and violations of personhood which are forced, and we are both applauding voluntary interaction and transactions.
So we are both on the same page completely.
And so just as rape is evil, And lovemaking is good, or at least morally neutral.
Taxation is evil.
And charity is good, or at least morally neutral.
Because there is no moral difference at its base between taxation and rape.
Both of them are violations of personhood, one through physical ingress and the other through the robbing of property at gunpoint.
Both of them involve significant threats to physical harm.
You can get raped without having any physical harm to you.
If the guy is holding a gun to your neck and you don't struggle and don't fight back, then you can survive a rape without physical harm.
I'm assuming he uses a lubricant or something.
And, of course, you can survive in a situation of taxation without harm if you accept the fact that there's a gun in your neck, you shut up and you comply.
So what this does, and I understand it's a rough metaphor, so use it with caution, use it with as much gentleness as you can, use it like confusion, like, help me understand this, because this is where I come from in the realm of rape, that forced interactions and violations of personhood are evil.
And so that's where I sit in terms of rape.
Do we agree? Yes, we agree.
Well, then help me understand how it's different.
Now, of course, the way that people will always explain that it's different is based on democracy.
And this goddamn majority argument, I'm so sick of it, Because it's such a patent load of bullshit that everybody keeps spouting all the time without giving it a single second shred of thought.
And they speak it with such obvious pomposity like they're lecturing newcomers to the country to a fine democracy.
They're lecturing newcomers from Darfur or Syria to a fine democracy.
Well, this is how we do things here.
It's a better way of doing things.
I know this because I had to go for my Canadian citizenship because of border crossing problems and, oh, the lectures we got.
But this goddamn majority argument is really getting on my nerves and we really need to smash it.
And I think we need to smash it not kindly.
Right, so if somebody says, well, taxation is different from rape because it's a majority.
It's like, well, I don't quite understand that.
Because if a gang of men descends upon a woman and votes whether she should get raped, would you say that that's therefore just?
Like, would that be a legal defense that you would respect?
So you're in the jury, and a pack of thugs descends upon some woman in her house and rape her.
And then she presses charges against them, and you're in the jury, and the gang leader says, and he's got a videotape of this, he's like, no, no, no, no, we voted!
We voted! It's a vote!
Majority rule! Oh yeah, there's always some people who aren't going to agree with the way you use violence in a democracy, but it's a majority.
Don't worry. Would you say, oh, I didn't realize it was a majority.
I didn't realize you voted.
Oh my god, I feel so stupid.
Not only, my friend, are we going to turn you free, but here's a thousand bucks for your trouble of being arrested.
Oh, how sorry we are.
We didn't realize you frickin' voted on it.
Well, that's a perfectly valid analogy for democracy, is it not?
Am I missing something?
Is there something in the metaphor that's not the way that it should be?
Is there something in the metaphor that doesn't accurately describe how a democracy works, this pack-majority rule?
In fact, well, it's not a majority rule, of course.
There's lots of ways that you can oppose democracy.
This, I think, is the clincher.
I think this is the simplest one.
Because if you approach it like...
Oh, this is sort of where I'm coming from.
Help me understand if I'm wrong.
I mean, that's the way you could approach it, which might work.
That's the way I would approach it if I was arguing with a woman, and I find arguing with a woman different from arguing with a man.
I would approach it that way.
With a woman, with a man, I would simply approach it more directly for a variety of reasons we can talk about another time.
But there's something in that that I think has a great deal of power.
It sort of simplifies and clarifies the whole thing.
So you don't end up having to dig up statistics on...
The welfare state or on government programs and the growth thereof and taxation and how many bureaucrats run the school departments in one country versus another and you don't even have to go through the argument for morality.
You don't even have to do that.
This, I think, is the simplest way to talk about the state.
The state is rape.
And it doesn't matter if the state makes rape legal.
Rape is still evil. And there's no human being in the world that you will talk to who will tell you to your face, especially in public, that rape is good.
I mean, there's just nobody who's going to do that.
So, what it allows you to do is to take the moral high ground away from all those people who talk about how the state helps the poor and the state helps the old and the state is there to protect us and violence will occur without the state.
Because then you're on the defensive of proving how the state actually escalates violence within society, but in a subtle manner that's hard to determine and blah blah blah.
So, what this approach will do, once you bring up the rape thing, and it also doesn't force you into the Nazi problem, right?
You bring up the Nazis and everybody rolls their eyes.
This is a pretty simple and visceral one.
The state is rape.
If there's a difference between rape and lovemaking, then there's a difference between taxation and charity slash purchasing voluntarily.
If rape is evil, why is rape evil?
Because it's a violation of person at the point of a gun.
Well, if you don't pay your taxes, you get dragged off to jail where you will be raped.
It is a violation of personhood at the point of a gun, which then occurs regularly.
See, rape, let's just say rape is a one-time thing.
That's evil enough. I mean, that's stone evil to begin with.
But what about the state where if you don't give them your money...
They'll drag you off to jail for five years while you will get raped dozens of times.
How do you feel about that?
How do you feel about a local mafia agency that if you don't pay them protection money, they're going to drag you off to their rape rooms where you're going to get same-sex rape dozens of times?
And then they're going to turn you back loose, dazed, bleeding from your butt into the world, and wonder why it seems so hard to reform criminals.
How would you feel about that as a punishment?
Because prisons are rape rooms.
Prisons are run by the...
I mean, that's something that everybody's got to understand.
I mean, that's not a made-up thing.
That's just a simple fact.
Prisons are rape rooms. So if rape is wrong, and even if you don't want to say that theft is wrong, but surely punishment for not paying or coughing up your property to those who've got guns to your neck to be dragged off to rape rooms for a couple of years, surely that is a pretty evil thing to occur.
No matter who frickin' votes for it.
No matter who thinks it's right.
Because if you're talking to a feminist or a woman who's taken any kind of college, you can say to her, well, you do understand that at one point rape was not considered wrong within society.
It was only up in the post-war period that rape within a marriage was considered to be something that was wrong.
And in the past, for instance, rape of women in a land that you conquered as a sort of marauding band of state thugs, rape was considered perfectly legitimate.
It was the spoils of war.
And rape within society was considered to be only a problem if you raped a more powerful wife or produced a child or something.
So rape in and of itself was not considered wrong.
So there were times when rape was considered perfectly legitimate.
Was rape legitimate at that time?
Was it right for a rape to occur if society felt that rape was fine?
And of course any feminist worth of assault will say, no, of course not.
Of course not. Women should never have been subjected to legalized rape.
And then for me, it's like, well, we're exactly on the same page then.
That men and women should not be thrown into prisons for not coughing up their property and subjected to institutionalized, legalized, protected, repetitive rape.
We're on the same page, and it doesn't matter if everybody thinks it's okay.
It's still wrong.
It's still evil.
It's still an utter and total and brutal and evil violation of person and property.
For the state to hold guns to our necks, and if we don't comply, throws us into its specially crafted rape rooms.
Minimum security, my ass.
It is actually minimum security for your ass.
So that's an approach that you can take that I think is a clincher.
Like if somebody can't go with you through that.
If somebody can't say, yeah, you know, I can see that there's a difference between rape and lovemaking.
Right? They're going to be able to tell you that.
And they're also going to be able to tell you that a gang of thugs cannot defend rape by calling a vote right before the rape.
That doesn't legitimize the moral evil of rape.
Therefore, majority rule doesn't change the moral nature of the behavior.
Now, they'll be able to go with you as far as that goes as well.
Now, they may not go as far with you as to say that violations of property are morally equivalent to violations of personhood in terms of rape.
Fine. Then ask them if they understand that prisons have endemic rape in them.
And they'll probably say, well, yes, I have heard something about that.
Or they might say, no, no, no, prisons are wonderful little models of correction, right?
In which case you're dealing with a complete state parrot who has no brain whatsoever, who can't figure out anything to save his life.
And is obviously going to be absolutely useless when it comes to figuring out whether or not any sort of moral criteria can be applied to the state.
This is somebody who simply has been completely broken, destroyed morally, and is simply parroting and apologizing for evil.
So, in other words, you're probably speaking to somebody from the media.
So, they will be able to go with you that far.
Now, if they do go with you to the point where they can say, I think legitimately with you, that they can say, yes, rape is wrong, and it's quite different from lovemaking.
It's quite the opposite from lovemaking, in fact.
And also that a majority rule doesn't change the moral nature of rape.
And also that a single rape...
Is not as morally evil as institutionalized and repetitive rape where you can't get away.
You can't fight, you're in prison, you can't get away.
You face the same rapist every day, and they have the same power over you every day.
And also that that is, of course, the natural result of not obeying the state, is to end up in a situation where you are repetitively raped.
I think that we have a fairly good argument for exposing the moral nature of statism.
I think that we actually have a pretty good approach to it from that standpoint.
I think that that is going to be kind of like A clincher.
Because, of course, if somebody can't go with you that far, then don't even bother opening your mouth to them.
Then they're obviously just completely stone evil and corrupt.
And you might as well be arguing ethics with a pedophile, which is a complete waste of time and energy because somebody who's become a pedophile is obviously about as morally corrupt as a human being can be.
And you're not going to have any luck.
They need like 10 years of therapy.
and massive amounts of personal restitution to those that they have wronged in order to be able to even think coherently about ethics and they're never going to do that because they're a pedophile so they don't want to be good so This issue of getting people to understand that we've got to stop talking about old age security if you want to take this approach.
If you want the clincher, this is my suggestion.
You've got to not talk about old age security.
You've got to not talk about the war and whether it was just and whether there were weapons and whether they knew beforehand.
You've just got to start dealing with the basics.
This is the simplest way, in my opinion, to get the argument across that the state is violence, right?
Just to equate the state with rape, because the state is rape.
In fact, it's worse than rape, because it ends up with repetitive rape, and also a rapist doesn't end up genocidally murdering hundreds of thousands of people, and rapists are not responsible for the deaths of a quarter of a billion people throughout the 20th century.
So the state is far worse than rape, and...
If people can at least start with the concept of rape, then they can, I think, end up with a fairly decent approximation of minor aspects of the evils of state power.
That forced association is evil, and if you don't want to use rape, you can, of course, try something like that the majority should vote for who you marry.
If the majority rule is so good, then the majority should vote for who you marry.
They say, well, that's not right.
Because, of course, for women that's equivalent to rape anyway, right?
If somebody else decides who you can marry, then you're stuck in a situation of rape forevermore.
But... If somebody you're arguing with says, yes, it is wrong for us to have a situation where a man or a woman is forced to marry somebody else by the will of the majority, then you can say, okay, well then majority rule is not good in some situations, so help me understand where it is okay to have majority rule and where it is not okay to have majority rule.
Just help me to understand that and we'll all be happy and hunky-dory.
And then, of course, the person is going to start flailing around, and it's going to be pretty easy to pick apart their arguments.
So, I hope that this is helpful.
I know that it's a rough section to hoe, but I think that it is the clincher.
I think it absolutely is the clincher, and it absolutely puts the other person on the defensive.
And what it will do...
The most important thing to do when you're arguing with this stuff, in my opinion, figure out who is genuinely interested in trying to figure out the truth, who is genuinely curious about the truth.
Those are the people you want to talk to because those are the people that you can actually have an effect on.
You want to separate those from those people who are just trying to screw you over.
Who are just trying to mentally attack you and undermine you and will say anything to oppose your position.
Who basically will throw any kind of crap that they want at your position in order to undermine your confidence in it.
They're not people. And this is the majority of people you'll be talking to, so don't fool yourself around this.
The majority of people that you talk to will simply oppose you because you have anything to say of value.
If you're not spouting some empty-headed cliché, then the majority of people will simply oppose you because you're saying anything that is approximating truth.
They will oppose a communist, they will oppose any ideologue, and they're just opposing you because you have some ideas and some coherent way of looking at the world.
They're not opposing you because they don't agree with capitalism.
They're nihilists, right?
They don't agree with anything. They don't agree with any values.
They've been completely destroyed by their families, and they're now just a virus in the world.
But there's talk about ideas and values and this and that.
But everything you say, they will fundamentally oppose in any way, shape, or form that they can.
So don't take that personally, of course.
Don't think that it's anything to do with your ideas.
It's just them repeating the same mental destruction that occurred for them as children, where any time they tried to show any kind of mental initiative, they were completely crapped on by their own family.
So they learned that ideas are dangerous and you shouldn't think.
And so whenever they hear ideas in the world, they attack it because they haven't experienced their own pain, right?
They're justifying what their parents did to them when they tried to think.
And of course, I went through this, so I have a fairly good understanding of this.
Whenever I would try and come up with any kind of defense for what it is that I did as a kid, of course, my mother would always say, well, I thought, why would you do this?
I thought, and then she'd say, well, don't think!
And it would be the same thing with the boarding school that I was at, that if you questioned the rules, it was just bad, you shouldn't do that, you should just do X. You're not here to question orders, you're just here to do X. Now, fortunately, I've processed all the pain and rage that that direct assault on my being engendered.
And so I have some capacity to understand the nihilistic position because I've experienced it directly, but also the capacity exists in me to oppose it, right?
You want to understand it and you want to oppose it.
That's the way to deal with these kinds of things, which is why I keep bugging people to deal with their childhoods, right?
Because you can't oppose what you haven't accepted in yourself and what you haven't morally judged and experienced in yourself.
That's why we have to embrace the opposite.
We have to embrace the unthinkable.
We have to embrace everything that is the opposite of what we think, so that we can then oppose it effectively.
You want to understand your enemies.
You want to be your enemies.
You want to live in their skin, walk in their shoes, and then you will be able to oppose them.
But if you just oppose them while rejecting everything that they think and feel, you're just two television sets talking to each other.
There's no actual discussion that is occurring.
So, I hope that this is helpful.
I would really recommend that you work this position out.
I would recommend that if you have somebody in your life that can play devil's advocate, and if you want to call in, maybe we can do it on the radio show on Sunday.
Sundays at 4pm, we have, and finally I remember to talk about it, Sundays at 4pm Eastern Standard Time.
We have a wonderful roundtable for the Freedomain Radio listeners, and we can get a whole bunch of people talking together, and of course you can ask me questions, we can ask each other questions, I'll play devil's advocate, and I usually have a general topic.
And Christina, my wife, is on the call, so she's great to be able to answer questions you might have on psychology or motivation or personhood or anything like that.
And so if you want to join in that conversation, which you have probably heard once or twice if you've downloaded those recordings, If you want to join in that conversation, come to freedomainradio.com and just look under general, I think the general category, category of general items.
There is a notation.
We'll usually post it an hour or two before about how to join in.
You need to download TeamSpeak clients, which is what we use.
We'd love to use Skype, but Skype will only let you have five people on a call.
We do use Skype for chit-chats.
Like if you want to just ask a question, you don't have a microphone, then use Skype.
And, of course, my Skype ID is my first name, Stefan, S-T-E-F-A-N, underbar M-O-L-Y-N-E-U-X.
So it shouldn't be that hard to find me, all lowercase.
Join in that conversation.
But really it's worth practicing this one a little bit before you pull it out because what's going to happen is people are just going to eye-roll and explode back at you because they know that you're on to them, right?
So, when people get angry at you and start pushing back heavily, that's a great sign.
That you're onto something with them, that you're really getting them on the defensive, right?
Because these corrupt people are so used to being on the offensive and putting all the libertarians in the world sort of at the knife edge of defensiveness.
So once you start bringing rape into the question, people will be like, oh, that's nothing like it.
Don't bring that up. That's ridiculous.
I'm going to come up with that kind of stuff.
But of course, if you're individually talking with someone like that, then I would gracefully exit the conversation, just say, okay, well obviously we're not going to even agree on the moral nature of rape, so we're not going to be able to agree, and then you're like a scientist arguing with a mystic.
You're not even agreeing on the scientific method, so how on earth are you going to be able to agree on anything else that's to do with truth or falsehood?
But if you're arguing in a group and other people are witnesses to this, then I would keep going.
And I would keep going not because you have any interest in trying to change the completely broken and corrupt mind of the person you're discussing this with, but more so because you want to give other people a glimpse into a rational and freer way of understanding the world so that they can open their minds to libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism or Scientific morality,
or however you want to put it, so that they can start to understand that there are alternatives out there to the same kind of crap that's being pumped out of the media sewer that hoses us down every day.
So that would be my approach, but practice it a little bit first.
It is an explosive argument.
It really does reveal the core of what the state is all about.
It's well worth using, but be aware that you don't want this gun to go off in your hands, so I would just say a little marksmanship ahead of time would probably be a very, very good idea.
So thank you so much for listening, as always.
I appreciate all the donations that you can send my way.
It really helps me to improve the quality, to take the time, and to draw more people towards the site, to increase the listenership, and so on.
So I really appreciate that.
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