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May 24, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:24
249 Libertarians, the 'minimal state' and basic logic

Small state, huuuuge error!

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It's 8.34 a.m.
on the 24th, May 2006.
A very, very great apology to all of the board members who have had problems posting.
I will look into it today.
I didn't get a chance last night.
And what happened was, well, I actually have no idea what's happening.
But what happened was people found that posts of a certain length were no longer able to be posted to the database, and I have no idea how to get into administrative rights or see error logging or anything like that for...
This community server program, I will look into it though today, send off an email to the GoDaddy web hoster and see if they can't figure out what's going on to the database, and we will keep the posts flowing as soon as lickety-split we can.
So I hope that will be satisfactory, and sorry for the problems, but if I... I feel like a newbie IT guy when it comes to this stuff because all I did was click on a button which said, Install Community Server.
And after that, I have never...
I touched a single setting except for the odd one or two in administrative settings, which is only specific to the program and not to the database.
So we shall sort it out, and we shall get it back to functionality.
So my guess is probably that it's a pretty big set of posts by now, but I can't imagine I'm running out of space.
That would seem sort of strange.
Anyway, let's move on to the topic at hand this morning, which is the power vacuum.
Good friends, the minarchists will always talk about this.
And not just the minarchists, but statists of every hue and color will talk about this.
And what they mean is that the argument is something like this.
So if you've ever talked about the need to eliminate a state...
Or even if you've talked about a need to reduce it significantly, you will end up with the following argument.
Well, my friend, somebody will say, with that wonderful kind of denigrating, sarcastic, superior smugginess, they will say, well, my friend, what you have to understand about human nature is that people will always want a leader.
That's just, it's the nature of our species.
It's human nature.
It is just the way we are configured.
You could say it's part of our tribal history or whatever you want to call it.
But if you were to get rid of the government, all that would happen is you would create a power vacuum, you see?
A power vacuum would be created.
And then what would happen is somebody would rush in to take over that power vacuum, and then you would have a new kind of government.
So really, it doesn't make any difference.
A, you're not going to be able to get rid of the government because of people's innate desire to be ruled over.
But also, you are not going to be, even if you were able to magically get rid of the government, it wouldn't matter because a new government would be created because of the power vacuum.
I love how people start to misuse concepts in physics.
The funny thing is that...
It's even a bad metaphor in physics, right?
The power of vacuum in physics, of course, is that nature abhors a vacuum as...
I think that was bacon.
I could be wrong. But basically, if you suck all of the air out of a room or suck all of the matter out of a room and then you open the door, the vacuum will pull all the matter into it.
And that's why nature abhors a vacuum and a vacuum will always get filled up by something else.
That's sort of the basic idea.
But the flaw in the metaphor, even if we were to accept that it was a true argument from a moral or philosophical or political standpoint, the problem with the metaphor is that...
The universe is like 99.9999 ad infinitum percent vacuum anyway.
So, if nature abhors a vacuum, it seems to have made an awful lot of it, because that's what almost all of the universe is created.
The matter that exists in the universe is not even like sunspots on the face of the sun in terms of size and relevance.
It's virtually insignificant.
We are An absolute exception to the rule, which is that nature loves a vacuum.
Nature lives for vacuums.
And it's only, of course, gravity that keeps the air from hissing out into interstellar space, where apparently it really wants to go.
Which, you know, it does, based on physics.
But there are other kinds of physics which keep matter together, i.e.
gravity. Anyway, so we don't have to get into that.
I just think it's funny when people use a metaphor without any understanding.
Now, what are the arguments against this idea that human nature requires leadership?
Well, there's a lot of problems with this as a formula for understanding the world.
And I will sort of...
Give you some suggestions on why I think that human nature is not something that we can judge as desiring to be ruled over politically.
Now, the first thing that I would say to somebody who made this argument would be something like this.
Okay, so if I understand your argument correctly, people naturally desire to be led.
And therefore, they will always want to have somebody rule over them.
Is that correct? Yes.
And therefore, there's no possibility of getting rid of a state, and even if there were a possibility of getting rid of a state, a new state would be created lickety-split, and so it would all be sort of a massive amount of work for nothing.
Yes, that is the argument.
Okay, well, now, the empirical proof for this argument would be not that complicated to come up with.
I mean, there's two kinds of proof you want to work with, right?
One is the empirical proof, the other is the logical proof, and both of those are pretty much required to make a proposition stand, at least conditionally.
So, the first proof that I would sort of wonder about I would say, okay, so if everybody naturally desires leadership, then leadership should not need to use force.
I mean, that's kind of a given, right?
That all of these women think that I'm the sexiest big chatty forehead podcasting guy in a car around.
If I say, women think I'm the sexiest guy around.
And I say, I have a date every week.
I have a date every night of the week.
But what I'm actually going out and doing is kidnapping women.
Then can I really say that it's just female nature to be staggeringly attracted to me?
Would that sort of be something that you would say, yeah, I can see that.
Okay, so you put a gun to their head, chloroform them, put them in the trunk of your car and drive them out to some romantic spot and chat with them as they're passed out in the trunk of your car.
But I think I can believe that it's human nature to find you staggeringly attractive.
So, this is the usual, right?
This is the usual stuff that you come up with, that people come up with to justify the state.
They look at what people are forced to do, and they say, well, you see, that's what people choose to do.
So, that question of, do people love leadership?
If it's answered in the affirmative, then there would need to be no state.
There would need to be no state, because the state forces you to obey, and if you don't obey, it tosses you into one of the gulag rape rooms that litter the countryside.
And so, can it really be said that human nature is just drawn magnetically and loves leadership when that leadership is imposed at the point of a gun?
Because if we love leaders, they shouldn't need to be pointing guns at us.
If they're pointing guns at us, we don't love them.
I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.
I mean, I guess it all comes back to the family, right?
These people are just basically saying that when you've been ruled over by your parents, you will then end up with a personality structure that will constantly seek to be ruled over.
But that's at a personal level.
That doesn't mean that you go and provoke people out to hold guns to your head.
It just means that if you've had, you know, domineering and overbearing parents, that you may then end up in situations in life where you recreate that until you figure out that your parents were domineering, overbearing, and unpleasant, and then you're free of the past.
As long as you deny the past, you recreate it.
I mean, that's just the natural habit, right?
The truth will out no matter what, and your past is a ghost that haunts you until you see it in the light of day.
So... I just find this kind of funny, right?
Saying that there's something in human nature that chooses leadership.
Now, the other thing that I would find curious, even if we did accept this argument, and again, because it's an illogical argument at its root, you can accept any premise you want, and as soon as you move to the next one, it's going to be pointedly ridiculous.
If I grew up in Russia in the 1940s and the 1950s, and this is sort of when the raging cult of personality of Stalin was at its height, and I was exposed as a child to constant propaganda about what a living,
walking god Stalin was, Then, would it be fair to say that I found Stalin to be of value of my own free will?
I think not.
I think that if you're exposed to 8 to 10 hours of propaganda a day for 5 days a week, And your parents were exposed to the same propaganda, and everyone in the society is exposed to the same propaganda.
I think it's a little harder to say that you're choosing things as freely as if you were in a free society.
So, let's just say that we'll bypass the argument that it's considered to be something that human beings choose of their own free will, but it's in fact enforced upon them at the point of a gun.
Let's just say we'll bypass that argument and look at the next one.
Well, if people do love authority, then wouldn't it be more fair to say that they would love authority also in the absence of propaganda?
That's a fairly important consideration, and something that you would expect a minarchist for sure to understand, because they're against public school to begin with.
But if somebody is so wise, it's just amazing to me, the level of wisdom, insight, intelligence, depth, and just sheer epoch-cracking genius that you would need to have, to be able to see human nature clearly, through the bloody, murky, soupy...
Swampy fog that now covers it because of state indoctrination and the constant threat of violence for any kind of thinking for yourself that goes on, or certainly acting for yourself.
Anybody who can see through all of the violence that is layered over the human soul from birth to death, anyone who can see true and original human nature and To say that it is voluntarily choosing all the same things that are currently inflicted on it,
both through violence-funded propaganda and violence directly itself, from cradle to the grave, and that is common across all society and across all generations, if somebody can see through To the original human soul, by God, I would like to meet that man or that woman.
I would like to meet that man and woman and just ask them a few freaking questions.
Because that's rather an astounding claim to make.
That is rather an amazing claim to make.
So to go back to the foot-binding example, so somebody, every single woman, every single human being has their foot bound in all of society, all across the world, and there's never, in fact, it's all done hidden right after nobody ever sees the original foot.
And then somebody looks at this foot and can immediately see, well, the original foot would look exactly the same.
But that's an amazing claim to make.
So foot binding is sort of, I guess, in the 19th century in China.
It was considered to be attractive if you had tiny feet.
So these women would have their feet bound, which was this excruciating and murderous process where their toes would be curled backward and would end up growing into their heels because they would just have so much force applies to their feet.
So to me, when somebody says, well, there's a power vacuum, and if you get rid of the state, people will rush into that power vacuum, you'll get a new state.
It's amazing. It's saying that what people will choose would be exactly the same as what they're forced to do right now, which is like looking at a world composed entirely of people whose feet are bound and curled and mutilated and destroyed, and saying, you know, if all of that force were removed, people's feet would grow exactly the same.
Well, that's an astounding claim.
And I would sure love to have a direct conversation with somebody who was able to make that claim.
Because, boy, if they could prove that, they would free me from a whole lot of podcasting.
I would just love it if somebody would make that claim.
It's like, don't be selfish, brother.
You tell me. You set me free.
I'm interested in freedom. If it's true that everything that I'm doing is futile and ridiculous and a chaotic tilting at the windmill, then let me know.
Set me free. Help me to understand that by saying to people that they should not have violence, Apply it against them involuntarily.
They should not be subjected to 14 or 15 years of propaganda.
If I think that it's worthwhile to say that violence is bad and people should not have it inflicted against them, if I'm completely wasting my time because people secretly are all masochistic and love violence, then, boy, make the proof.
Let me free. Oh, wouldn't that be wonderful?
How kind could you be?
Help us free. It's like all the people who claim there's a God, right?
Right?
I mean, if there is a God, then either it's based on proof or it's based on just what the hell you want to believe.
If it's based on what the hell you want to believe, that's fine.
Then say, I like God the same way that I would say, I like blue.
But I'm not saying it's an objective fact that everyone should like blue and that the liking of blue exists independent of human consciousness and is all powerful and eternal.
And just say it like it's an opinion.
Yeah, it's what I was raised with.
It's what I'm comfortable with.
It gives me some place to go on Sunday.
And so I'm going to work like I think that this thing exists.
Well, that's fine. But if you're going to say that God actually exists, if you're going to say that people who are subject to dozens of years of their whole lifetime are subjected to the most brutal threats of violence, if you're going to say that their actions exist, And if you don't share it with the rest of us,
I've got to think one of two things.
Either You're totally talking out of your ass, in which case you should just shut the hell up and stop talking about the state and stop trying to use specious and self-serving and pathetic and cowardly logic to justify the existence of a centrally murderous and genocidal entity.
Or you have this proof, but you just haven't gotten around to telling anyone yet.
I wonder which one it is.
So that's sort of the second way that I would approach it.
Now, the third way that I would approach it is that if it is human nature to love leaders and to want to have them rule over us from the cradle to the grave, if that just is human nature, then I've got sort of a significant question.
If it's human nature to want to be led, then who is it who is doing the leading and the enforcing?
So if it's human nature to be led, everybody wants to be bullied and pushed around and have guns stuck in their necks and be threatened with rape rooms.
That's what we all get up in the morning for.
Then the first thing I would ask is, well, if it's human nature to want to be led, then like, is it those space aliens from Luxembourg who are doing the leading?
Because it would seem to me that the political leaders, the bureaucrats, the prison guards, the police, the military, all those people, they seem to me to be fairly carbon-based.
And if I understand the whole concept of biology correctly, they do seem to be rather on the human side of things, at least physically.
And so what is their human nature?
Well, it's complicated.
Okay, so it's complicated.
So let's pretend that you didn't say your last stupid thing, which was that everybody just wants to be led, and start getting into the complexities.
And when people start to say it's complicated, they always mean, I'm going to contradict myself, but we'll call it a complication.
So then they say, well, it's partly human nature to submit to force, and it's partly human nature to inflict force.
And it's like, oh, okay.
So you have a situation here where human nature is defined as submission to violence and also as the utilization of violence in order to cause submission.
So that seems to me like human nature is kind of like opposite.
Right? Like you're defining a giraffe as both a quadruped with a long neck and a bag of protein that swims in the sea and trails tentacles.
So that's your definition of a giraffe.
I would sort of say that since you include something and its opposite in the same definition, that you might want to work a little bit more on that definition.
So that idea that you can invoke human nature...
To explain both the submission to violence and the utilization of violence in order to cause submission, well, that's a little bit not valid.
Certainly, something you have to go back to the drawing board.
Of course, my solution to this is to say that human nature is adaptable and usually includes a duality of responses, one of which is submission, the other of which is dominance, depending on your constellation of childhood stimuli and your environment, your birth order, and so on.
And so that's why you end up with people split along these two lines, and it all comes back to the brutality of the family.
Now, that's the third way that I would approach the topic.
Now, the next way that I would approach the topic of the power vacuum is to say, well, how is it that you and I and the people we know actively go out and solicit violence against us?
Because if people want to be ruled by violence...
Surely, if that's human nature, if we just wake up in the morning and we desperately want to be ruled by violence, then surely we should be seeking it out.
I mean, that would be the empirical proof, right?
I can say human beings like to eat.
And what's my proof? Well, you know, lots of people go to restaurants.
There are farmers. People are alive.
What did you do today?
Well, I had some breakfast, then I had some lunch, then I had some dinner.
And what did I do today?
Well, kind of the same thing. Maybe a couple extra snacks, because I'm a snacky, happy fella.
But that would be sort of the way that I would approach that proof of the thesis that people like food.
People seek out food.
Well, what do they do? They eat food.
So, if people sort of naturally seek out power structures to rule and control them, then the question would be, well, what have you done today or yesterday in your life to actively go out and seek out these power structures?
And then the guy's going to say, well, but I understand the power structure, so I don't seek them out.
As soon as you say to someone who says, it's human nature to be a slave, then you say, okay, well, how are you a slave?
What have you done to solicit slavery in your life?
And the guy's going to say, well, I don't do that because I understand that blah, blah, blah.
I've got the whole thing down.
I've got the number on this racket.
And that's fine. But then you see you have a slightly additional complication to the theory, because now you have three categories of people.
You have people who want to be slaves, you have people who want to enslave by their nature, not by their choice, but by their nature.
And then you have people who can understand this scheme and refrain from participating within it to some degree, or at least comment on it.
So I think that when we start to look at Occam's razor, we're starting to look that this may not be the best explanation for human life.
Now, of course, if the person says to you, oh yeah, well this morning I called up Helga, the SS guard dominatrix chick down the street, and I went and got myself thoroughly spanked by, you know, four rabbits and a ping pong paddle, then I went to lunch and I got a guy to punch me at the restaurant, and then I, you know, like, and then I went and provoked my boss and got fired, because I just love it when people exercise brutal and arbitrary authority over me, and it gets my, uh...
Just in case you're wondering, that's a truck without a muffler.
Just thought I'd mention that.
So, if somebody says that to you, then I can sort of understand where they're coming from.
I can sort of appreciate where they're coming from.
That at least they're talking honestly about a human nature, like an idea of human nature that they have...
Developed based on their own predilections.
The first study of mankind is man, and the first study of the world is yourself.
Self-knowledge is where you start, because you do share a human nature with other people.
And so you first of all want to start looking at your own life, not at lofty abstract ideals and coming up with all this ridiculous nonsense that people spout about politics and philosophy.
You just want to start looking at your own life.
So if you trust the evidence of your senses, that would be a place to start.
When it comes to, are the evidence of the senses valid?
I'm not saying it's a proof. I'm just saying it's a start.
And it might lead you in a particular direction.
I think that would be sort of interesting.
So if somebody tells you that the evidence of the senses don't work, you can flick your fingers in front of their eyes and say, well, you blinked.
So perhaps I'm not understanding how you're reasoning it to the complete opposite of your own experience.
I mean, shouldn't you just build with the basics of what you're experiencing and start to extrapolate from that and work with conversations, understandings of other people, and so on.
Well, people don't do that, sadly, but they have no problem when they haven't even looked at their own lives or their own basic experience.
They have no problem extrapolating into universal absolutes because they're living, God-given idiots.
And all that we can do is hope to point out some of their contradictions and get them to shut up.
I'm not positive that anybody who's this plain dumb, and I hate to use this ad hominem argument, but really, people.
I mean... Somebody saying that we're innately drawn to power structures who has never lifted a finger to innately create a power structure of his own.
And you can do this in your personal life.
You say, oh, people are innately drawn to power structures.
You say, oh, are you in a relationship?
Yeah. You say to this guy who says this, I say, oh, does your girlfriend or your wife, do they beat you?
Well, no. Well, why not?
Well, I wouldn't. I don't want someone who's beating me in my life.
But surely that's a brutal power structure that people are drawn to.
So surely in your personal life, you should be drawn.
Like, do you have friends who beat you up?
Do you have friends who ritually humiliate you in public?
Help me understand how you've come up with this theory.
Forget about the state. I mean, God, that's like, that's six million miles down the road of our reasoning.
Let's just do little steps to begin with, right?
I mean, this is somebody who's a mental toddler who thinks they're running a marathon when all they're doing is falling flat on their face on the carpet.
So, just start with baby steps.
Start with their personal life.
Tell me how this theory of yours shows up in your life.
Tell me how this theory shows up in your life.
And if they say, well, it doesn't, it's like, well, then, what are you talking about?
Well, I'm looking at the broad sweep of history, and I'm looking at, like, that's fine, but wouldn't you want to start with your life?
Okay, if it's not your life, how about all the people you know?
Do you know lots of people who are out there trying to raise up these additional power structures to go on?
And they'll say, well, there are lobbyists and this and that.
It's like, that's fine. Okay, we'll talk about that later.
What we're talking about, first and foremost, is your life and the people that you know.
Who among them actually go and seek out this power structure and they love to get humiliated and they're just itching to get people to stick guns in their neck?
It's like the patriarchy.
Yeah, people start talking about the patriarchy.
It's like, great!
You tell me where there are these men who have all of this power that you know and that you experience.
I mean, I don't mind if people want to talk about crazy patriarchies in, I don't know, Saudi Arabia.
Sure, let's talk about those.
They'll always come back to this date, but let's start talking about those.
But in the West, boy, you just tell me, I'd love to meet these guys.
I think it'd be fascinating. But this is people who just, they take the emotional scars of their childhood, they project them into universal absolutes, and they theorize about them and corrupt the world until the day they die.
And the moment you start asking them about their own personal experience, personal experience of those that they know, it's often a little bit harder to come up with the actual facts.
And people are sort of shocked by this.
They're shocked at the very idea that you should ever start to work empirically.
They're baffled by the very notion, like it just doesn't process for them.
No, no, no, no, I've got to read Susan Sontag.
I don't want to actually have a look at my life and how it's lived.
I've got to read other people's interpretations.
I've got to read other people's ideas.
I've got to be a fundamental second-hander in the Randian term.
I've got to just wonder about what other people think is true.
I don't actually want to think for myself in my own life what is true.
So that's sort of the fourth approach that I would take, would be to say, okay, well, then explain to me how this shows up in your life.
You're a human being. You have the same human nature.
Tell me how it is that you actively pursue people inflicting violence against you.
Like, do you go to the local Hell's Angels bar and start tickling their beards with a boa?
And also, if people are so into having power structures control them, and if they're so into being controlled by violence, why is the violence always so hidden?
Like, if it's human nature, all we want is power structures to brutalize us, then why is the violence always so concealed?
Why is there the need for all this propaganda?
If human beings are naturally drawn to power structures, then why do they need to have it drilled into them over and over and over and over again?
That these power structures are moral and essential and helpful.
This is kind of funny.
It's like a leftist for me.
It's like somebody who says, I have risen above propaganda by choosing an entirely different set of propaganda.
It's like those people who want to individuate themselves by getting tongue piercings.
I want to individuate myself the same way that everybody else who wants to rebel rebels.
I just think that's kind of funny.
Somebody who wants to individuate themselves by starting to stack those neck rings on themselves and turning themselves into a little human giraffe, I'd have some respect for that, because you don't see a lot of that.
That looks kind of individuated in a kind of weird way.
But no, it's always the same thing.
It's always the Green Day hair and the eyebrow ring and the, you know, it's kind of nonsense.
It's just kind of funny. But anyway, it's neither here nor there.
Now, the last way that I would approach this idea is that what you will always get appealed to is people who, ah, I don't want to talk about my own life.
I don't want to talk about the people that I know.
I don't want to talk about anything that's got any kind of empirical facts behind it or any kind of personal experience behind it.
What I want to talk about is...
The Grand Sweep of History.
That's what people are all about.
The Grand Sweep. Oh, look at all the Grand Sweep of History.
This is kind of funny.
Who do you think history is composed of except the people like you and I? I mean, why is our personal experiences not valid next to the Grand Sweep of History?
So, the Grand Sweep of History argument is something like this.
Well, all human societies have had governments.
And therefore, there must be something that causes all human societies to want governments.
I just think this is kind of funny, right?
So, the real question there, of course, is, well, if all human societies have had governments, and, of course, human societies have progressed to some degree, I mean, we have better governments now, say, than they had in the 8th century, Then, how could that sort of be said for other systems, right?
So, for instance, all human societies had monarchies or aristocracies prior to the Greek society, and certainly all Western European societies had aristocracies prior to X, Y, and Z, and then France got rid of theirs, I think Spain got rid of theirs, England bizarrely kept hers.
But there are changes in human society.
And when those changes in human society go along, people seem to be, you know, sort of okay with them.
So if you were to say in the Dark Ages that serfs, those poor pitiful serfs, it's human nature to want to be enslaved on a 4x8 plot of land for your entire mortal existence.
Okay, well now that doesn't happen.
Now people have more freedom.
So, is it human nature to want that level of violence imposed upon you?
Is it human nature to want Like the Stalin-esque gulag level of violence inflicted upon you, or the sort of Khmer Rouge, Kampodian bloodbath killing field nightmare imposed upon you, or is it human nature to want taxes?
Because when you look at, say, when there was no income tax, it wasn't the people who were saying, oh god, oh god, I've got to have an income tax.
All you have to do is look at the causality.
It's like somebody gets, I don't know, injected.
I'm just going to make something up here.
Pardon my not being able to come up with a good medical metaphor.
But somebody gets injected with something that makes them diabetic.
They get a huge shock of sugar or something and it wrecks their pancreas and they become diabetic.
Well, then you say, well, it's human nature.
You see, all these people want their insulin shots.
It's human nature to want insulin.
Oh, it's the human nature of somebody who's been made diabetic that is human nature.
Like, if you're in prison and you don't get any dentistry, and then at some point you just rip out your own tooth because it's become infected, oh, it's human nature to want to rip out your own teeth.
You see? Everyone who's in prison who doesn't...
It's like, dude, they're in prison and they're not getting any medicine.
Like, what are you talking about?
Like... Are you crazy?
Are you not noticing that they're in prison and that they're not getting any dental care and all they're getting to eat is candy floss?
Are you mad? Are you insane?
And this is the same sort of argument.
If you look at human nature wants control, well, how do you explain the human nature that then subjects itself, body and soul, to the Chinese mandarins of the 14th century, and then ends up with tiny tariffs and no taxation and almost no government at the...
I mean, relative to the Chinese experiment, relative to the post-revolutionary American experiment.
Is it the same human nature?
Is it the same human nature that says, I really want to have Stalin looking over me?
And is it the same human nature that also then says, and I really want George Washington to be doing his thing thousands of miles away when I'm not paying any taxes?
So is it human nature to want no property rights, or is it human nature to want all property rights?
So that, of course, is something that's a little tricky.
You have to start to create this Ptolemaic system of astronomy to explain this from a moral standpoint.
It's fairly important to understand.
If it's human nature to want to be ruled over, then to what degree?
I mean, there's all kinds of getting ruled over, right?
All kinds are getting ruled over.
There's getting ruled over like your daddy is a pedophile or your mommy is a pedophile and you're stuck there or you're in an orphanage or you have nuns beating the tar out of you every single day and you have no hope, no future and you feel psychotic and suicidal.
That's sort of one level.
And the other level is in the American experiment that every time you buy a bar of soap you have to pay half a penny.
To the government. And that's about it.
So, if it's human nature to want to be ruled over, then how is it explainable that human beings do not mentally collapse when that ruling over them is taken away?
You know, you say, it's human nature to want food.
Well, sure. Well, how do we know that?
Well, people want food. Well, what happens when they don't get food?
Well, they get kind of frantic.
They really desperately want food.
They'll even start eating their own toes if they're in the Andes.
So we have some pretty strong empirical evidence that people want food and drink.
Power? Well, if human beings want to be ruled over, then the fact that human beings survive and flourish when the rule over them diminishes, and that the people themselves do not demand power, That power over them be increased, then that is a pretty significant blow against the theory, I would say.
I mean, any one of these brings the theory down, in my view, or at least says to the person, I think you might not know what you think you know, and therefore it might be worth you going back to the old drawing board and working just a little bit before you start justifying the state.
So, the fact that human beings progress as well, that we have a better government now than we had a thousand years ago, I think is somewhat important in terms of this theory being problematic.
Because if human beings just have this desire for power and all governments just replace new governments, then there should be no progress, right?
Not to say things like human beings, all human societies had slavery in the law.
Now, I know we have a kind of de facto slavery with welfare and so on, but I'm just talking about in the law.
All nations had slavery, and so it sort of, to me, would be an insult.
And there were slave-owning people and those who were pro-slavery who made exactly the same argument as these idiots with the power vacuum argument, who said, well, look, the blacks are inferior, you see, and the blacks require slavery, you see, because they're all slaves, and they're submitting to it, and that means that they're inferior.
We'd never submit to it. And so we know that the blacks are inferior, look at their civilization, look at their culture, look at the fact that they're slaves.
Obviously that justifies the system of slavery, that blacks are naturally, this is their natural place, it's their natural home.
They're sort of like retarded children with big muscles, and so they need to be ruled over, and this is their natural home, because look how placid, look how happy, look how this, look how, yeah, there's some who want to run away, and they're the troublemakers, but we're talking about them for the most part, right?
So, then, it's exactly the same argument that's used for the power vacuum.
Well, there are states everywhere, and we've always had states, and therefore people must love states.
The same way that there's slavery everywhere, and everyone's a slave, and the slaves are owned in every culture, therefore the slaves must love being slaves.
Well, I gotta ask you, do you really think that's the case?
If that were the case, that people love being slaves, then what's with all the chains, and what's with all the slave catchers, and what's with all the whippings, and what's with all the brutality?
You know, it's kind of tough to say that it's voluntarily when it's inflicted.
So that would sort of be another way that you could approach this topic.
Just empirically, in the grand sweep of history, human beings try to improve.
If everybody prior to the rise of capitalism was totally in love with having virtually no property rights, then how do you explain the fact that the moment, the moment that capitalism began, People began streaming out of the countryside and into the cities.
How do you explain? People are so naturally drawn to being ruled over, then why is it that the moment that you could get a job working 18 hours a day in a factory in the city in the soot, that you fled the countryside and moved to the city?
If people are so innately drawn to being ruled over, then how the hell do you explain the fact that about 10 billion people swarmed over to America the moment that it opened its doors for business?
How do you explain that? It's absolutely bizarre.
It's like these people just don't think about history at all in any kind of meaningful way.
Everybody desperately wants to escape the violence that's inflicted on them.
Now, the question, of course, is then, well, how does it all come about?
And we can talk about that another time.
We're just talking about this power vacuum argument that is used to try and diffuse anybody's desire to get rid of the state or to minimize the power of the state.
And it is really a remarkable argument to make, because it flies in the face of all historical evidence, all personal evidence, all logic, all rationality.
And it is one of these complete abstractions that is made up in somebody's head.
It's a pure second-hand view.
Nobody working empirically from first principles would ever, ever come up with this power vacuum argument, even if they just looked at their own life.
So, and the last thing that I'll say, it's not exactly ending with a bang, but we have a whole bunch of categories of people and their relationship to power at the moment.
And now, of course, we need to add one more, which is the category not of people who, so far I think we have three categories.
We have people who desperately want power over them, to have someone inflict power over them.
We have those who desperately want to inflict power over others.
We have those who are able to see it and rise above it.
And now we have a fourth category, which would be people like me, who simply don't believe that it's a true theory at all.
So now, given that we have four diametrically opposing positions, can it really be said that this is something to do with human nature?
Can human nature include not just two opposites, but four complete opposites?
Can we then say, well, it's human nature, and the way that I know that it's human nature is that it includes these four opposite things.
I think that you may, in fact, be completely talking out of your ass at this point, if you have this theory, and you might just want to take another swing at it, because it really just sounds, it sounds to me, that you're a tool of the state, that all you're doing, and of course, fundamentally, you're a tool of your family, fundamentally, you're just justifying the power that was inflicted on you as a child.
So the real root of this thesis is that People are brutalized as children, and what they do is they justify it by saying, well, I really wanted it.
I was a bad kid.
I mean, this is the other thing, too, right?
People who were told by their parents, you're a bad kid, so I have to brutalize you, are the ones who end up with, well, you see, the world is full of bad people, and therefore we need to have a state.
I mean, this is all, it's a direct line.
And the people who are into the power vacuum argument are that there was simply no other way to parent me other than to brutalize me, because that's human nature.
And the fact that there's no evidence for it in history, the fact that it's completely illogical, the fact that that person does not in any way take that as a principle that they live by in the present, the fact that they don't know anyone who does that, the fact that the theory is completely contradictory in terms of the differences of opinions that are supposed to be subsumed by this general idea of human nature, none of that means anything.
Why? Because they're not talking about politics.
They're talking about their family, and that's where you need, like, say, oh, did your father teach you this explicitly or implicitly?
Did your mom teach you this? Did you learn it in school?
Like, where did you come up with this idea?
And, you know, what's the etymology of the belief?
I mean, that to me would be the place to start.
And you will find within a few minutes that they will reveal something about their family that is entirely why they have this belief, and then you can stop wasting everybody's time pretending you're talking about the state.
So thanks so much for listening. Please come by and donate.
I would really appreciate the money that you send my way.
I will try and get the board fixed up today.
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