May 29, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Good afternoon, everybody. | |
| It's quarter past five. | |
| It's Steph. It's the 29th of May, 2006. | |
| How are you? | |
| Come by the boards and let us know. | |
| Having some very interesting conversations there. | |
| And on having a look at the logs for Free Domain Radio, for the podcast downloads, I see that in the last six or so days, we've broken 100 new listeners every week or so, which is great. | |
| I haven't gotten around to analyzing how many of them get to the second podcast. | |
| I'm sure it's not exactly 100%, more like 200%, because that's why I have an arts degree. | |
| But I'm pleased about that. | |
| Of course, thanks to everyone who's doing outreach, and thanks to those of you who've contributed to the quality of the conversations that are going on here. | |
| I appreciate it, and hopefully future generations of people who may be a little bit more free because of what we're doing here. | |
| Appreciate it, too. So, let's talk about something. | |
| I've been meaning to get to this for a while, and I have had a sort of minor pause on the topics coming in from the board. | |
| There have been some discussions on the recent podcast, the one from yesterday, some discussions on whether or not it is a cult, which is a good discussion to have, of course. | |
| It's always good to double-check these things. | |
| And if you want to go to freedomainradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D, you can look up that topic. | |
| You just look for the podcast number. | |
| People usually put it in the header. | |
| Well worth having a look at the discussion about whether I am... | |
| The Jimmy Jones type or more of the not-so-Jimmy Jones type. | |
| But it's a good discussion. | |
| You might want to check it out. So I've had a minor breather, so I can get back to my list of preordained topics. | |
| Now, the topic that I would like to get to today is a topic that is related to minarchism, but not specific to the kind of stuff we talked about about a week and a half ago. | |
| And the topic is this. | |
| Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, saith Benjamin Franklin, our good founding father. | |
| And this is something that you see quite a lot in minarchistic debates, or in debates about the state. | |
| And it really is, to use the parlance of a modern, sort of postmodern kind of usage, it is a severe case of blaming the victim. | |
| When I say blaming the victim, I'm not talking about the kinds of things that are usually meant. | |
| Like a woman marries an abusive guy is not exactly a victim in my particular understanding of it. | |
| Of course, she is a victim to the degree that she was victimized as a child. | |
| But as she gets older, if she continues to not examine her own history, to justify it, to normalize it, ends up with an abusive guy, stays around, exposes her children to it, It's a little hard to see how she's still a victim in the same way. | |
| And so I know, I know that it breaks down the self-esteem of the woman or the man to be abused and all that and that and that. | |
| I understand that. I went through it as a child, and so if I can survive it having gone through it as a child and emerge a strong and confident human being, then it seems to me that it's somewhat likely that a woman who is an adult... | |
| Who has a lot more options than a child might actually have the wherewithal to get up and get out of that kind of relationship. | |
| So in that sense, I wouldn't really say that it's a strong victim situation for there to be, say, you know, your spouse is nagging at you or beating up on you or whatever. | |
| However, of course, children are always the victims, and whatever happens to you as a child is not your fault. | |
| The worst that happens to you as a child, the more you can be proud for achieving a noble soul as an adult. | |
| I look at my own past as not something to be ashamed of, but something to have been proud to overcome. | |
| And so, children are always victims. | |
| Now, let's have a look at this idea that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and that citizens are responsible for controlling the growth of the state. | |
| I find it an absolutely fascinating idea. | |
| And I would take that idea with a great degree of seriousness if it came from just one person. | |
| Just one person is all I'm asking to tell me about this idea. | |
| And the one person that I want to tell me about the idea that the size of the state is the responsibility of the citizenry, the one person who will have credibility who will tell me this idea is the person who's figured out how to do it. | |
| That's all I'm asking for. | |
| I'm not asking for the world here. | |
| I'm not asking for people to levitate or to Throw a lasso around the moon and pull it in. | |
| I'm just asking for somebody who says that it is the responsibility of citizens to control the size and power of the state. | |
| I would just love for that one person to be somebody who'd actually achieved it. | |
| That's all. If you've got this theory, all I would ask is that somebody show me how it's ever been achieved. | |
| That would be great. Of course, this is never the case. | |
| Never, never, never the case. | |
| Wherever you have an enormous power disparity, the capacity of the victim to effect change is diminished thereby, right? | |
| So, if I'm one pound heavier than you in a wrestling match, then we can be said to have more or less a fair fight. | |
| However, if I am, I guess, my 210, 215 pounds, and you are four years old, then it might be said that it's not the fairest wrestling match in the world. | |
| So... It really is the case that where the greater the power disparity, the less the moral injunction on the victim, on the receiving end, on the diminutive end of the power seesaw, the less is the responsibility of that person. | |
| Now, there are, of course, three great power disparities in the mental and physical world. | |
| Three, count them, three great power disparities, all of which are interlinked, as I have been saying, lo, these many podcasts. | |
| The first, of course, is parent to child. | |
| The second, of course, is state to citizen. | |
| And the third is God to man. | |
| All of these power disparities are absolutely ginormous in ascending order. | |
| They are, in terms of the least power disparity to the greatest power disparity, the least power disparity is state to citizen. | |
| The greatest power disparity is God to man, and the one that's in the middle is parent to child. | |
| It's only because God is infinite, all-knowing, and eternal, and can cast you in hell for eternity. | |
| All these things that parents just don't have the power to do. | |
| And of course you outgrow parents, but very few of us seem to have had the ability to outgrow God. | |
| So these three power disparities are absolutely enormous. | |
| Now it is true. that the least power disparity in the world is that between the uh the state and the citizen assuming of course that the state doesn't have the citizen in jail but sort of uh and assuming of course it's not a totalitarian dictatorship And assuming that it's not a small tribe where you can't get away. | |
| There's lots of factors, right? | |
| Wherein you might have parenting that is less restrictive than the state, right? | |
| So you might have parenting in Russia under Stalin where the parents were relatively benevolent and kind, whereas the state is just out and out, savage, murderous, virus, destruction and all that. | |
| So I would say that the state and the parents intermingle. | |
| In general, though, the state has less power in a relatively free society. | |
| The state has less power over the individual than parents do, because you can always move away, you can go off the grid, you can work for cash, all these sorts of things. | |
| You can minimize your taxes. | |
| Of course, I pay 50-60% taxes, actually about 60-65% taxes from my income, but I feel just about infinitely more free than I did when I didn't pay taxes as a child and was under the thumb of crazy mom. | |
| Crazy dad and, as I got older, crazy brother. | |
| That was always under his thumb, but it wasn't his moral responsibility until he got older. | |
| So, I mean, just going by my own subjective experience, I would rather pay 65% taxation and be free... | |
| To live with Christina and have a great life and play sports and do free-domain radio and so on, read books, without fear of emotional or physical abuse, I would rather have that than to have lower taxation if I would like... | |
| I would rather have that than have no taxation but be forced to live with my mom. | |
| I mean, that would be just my particular moral calculus. | |
| I would rather work hard and spend less than have more money and be under the thumb of a crazy mom. | |
| I would say that in a relatively free society, the state has less power over you than your parents do when you're a child, but, and this is a fairly significant but, there's still no capacity for the average citizen to even remotely affect the nature and policies of the state. | |
| No chance, no way, no how. | |
| If you want to run a tax revolt and see how well you do against the IRS, the police and the military, I would say that that would be an irrational thing to do. | |
| Citizens have, at best, A pistol, an automatic weapon, maybe an AK-47. | |
| Governments have hundreds of billions of dollars of military hardware. | |
| They have SCUDs. | |
| They have nuclear weapons. They have weapons of mass destruction. | |
| They have aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines. | |
| They really are not going to have any trouble overwhelming any recalcitrant aspects of the civilian population. | |
| So it's a little tough for me to understand what is meant by the idea that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. | |
| In other words, that you have to keep watching the state and make sure it doesn't grow. | |
| Because the state, of course, is always founded on the principle of taxation, whether it's a small amount of tariff and excise tax, taxation as went on in early America, or whether it's more, who knows, but the fact of the matter is that the state is predicated on the power of taxation, and the power of taxation herds a lot of money to the state, where it then disappears from view. | |
| Nobody can track what is going on with state finances, and the couple of people who try, at least up here in Canada, regularly go quite mad trying to figure out where the money is all gone. | |
| I mean, there's no receipts, it's all lies, I mean, it's just a slush fund. | |
| The whole of government funding is a slush fund. | |
| So, once the money gets transferred through the power of coercion to the government, it's really hard to sort of figure out why... | |
| I'm not sure how it is that a citizen can affect what the government does with it. | |
| I'm not sure how the citizen can affect what the government does with things like the Fed. | |
| Can you and I stage a protest to get the Fed to change its interest rates? | |
| Can you and I stage a protest to end the war in Iraq? | |
| I mean, we saw the biggest anti-war protest in the history of mankind on the imminence of the war in Iraq in 2003, and they did precisely squat. | |
| So, it's a little hard for me To understand what it is that people mean when they say that citizens need to control their government, and if the government grows, it's the fault of the citizens. | |
| What I would like to offer is, for people who have this idea, what I would like to offer is a sort of test case, like a test bed. | |
| You know, you don't want to take on the state all at once. | |
| What you want to do is you want to try and take on those things which are closer to you, those things which are more accessible to you. | |
| So if you feel that human corruption is sort of controllable by your words and stirring speeches and whatever, and that you can somehow make the state a better place or a less abusive social agency through your letter-writing and pamphleteering and stirring conversational abilities and so on... | |
| I think that's great, but I would say that it probably is not a good idea to start with the state. | |
| I mean, that's a pretty ambitious thing to do, in my opinion. | |
| I think where you want to start is, first of all, of course, you want to make sure that there's no corruption in your own personal relationships. | |
| That would be sort of the lab. | |
| That I would start with. | |
| You know, you start off small, you know, baby steps, so to speak, before you take on the entire mammoth infrastructure of the nearly omnipotent state. | |
| Just start with your own personal relationships. | |
| Now, if you can change people's minds, if you can make your family, your extended family, your neighborhood, your friends, your co-workers, your lovers, whatever, if you can make all of those people Give up corruption and be moral, rational agents. Fantastic. | |
| Then what I would do is just start a little bigger, right? | |
| And then start to your neighborhood, like a couple of blocks, maybe your school. | |
| You just start small. And then, if you're able to pull all of that sort of stuff off, the next thing that I would take on, if I were you, would be organized crime. | |
| Well, you could start off with criminals as a whole, but assuming that you've maybe gotten the good majority of the thieves and rapists and the disorganized criminals, right? | |
| I mean, let's say, but I would go if you really want to sort of figure out whether you can, just through your words, right, just through protests, just through writing articles or whatever, right, just through making speeches and interacting with people, Then what you need to do is you need to take on the Mafia or the Hells Angels or something, and you need to sort of go in there and make your speeches, and you need to tell them about how they need to relinquish their evil power. | |
| And if you can do that, like if you've eliminated all of that in your life and in your neighborhood and in your town and in your province or state and your country, if you've managed to talk everyone out of being corrupt, But you still have the state to go, then I for one would like, I would be all, all, all ears to hear about that. | |
| I think that would be absolutely fascinating. | |
| It would be a wonderful thing to hear about. | |
| It would be something that is the Holy Grail of philosophy, the ability to change people's minds in a predictable manner through a mere conversation. | |
| It's the Holy Grail of Socrates and every one of us who's come after him. | |
| So I would just be fascinated to hear about that. | |
| Because even if you decide that you can't use weapons, which to me would be a reasonable thing, so if you can shrink the Mafia significantly, like if you can make the Mafia smaller, By talking to them and by, you know, the eternal price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but forget about the state. | |
| That's like a long way down the road. | |
| Deal with your friends, your family, your neighborhoods, your local criminals, and then deal with maybe the police a little bit, but maybe that's too much like the state. | |
| Maybe wait until later. | |
| But the real key one for me would be, obviously, your family. | |
| I'd be fascinated. Wonderful. | |
| I mean, if you could figure out a way to make your family rational, moral agents, and not be corrupt or mean or negative or abusive or withdrawn or hostile or sarcastic or nihilistic. | |
| If you can do that, I mean, I'm all ears already. | |
| But the one that will really impress me is that if you can talk down the size of the mafia significantly, then I think you are an absolute god among men and I will worship you until the day I die. | |
| But if you do have a little bit of trouble, say, talking down organized crime and converting people away from being drug dealers and being extortion artists and gamblers, if you have trouble talking down the size of the mafia if you have trouble talking down the size of the mafia which is far, far, far, Less well-armed than the state is. | |
| I mean, the Mafia doesn't have nukes and scuds and aircraft carriers and atomic submarines and so on. | |
| So... If you're having trouble talking down the size of the mafia, then it seems to me a little hard to understand why you then say that where we should start is with the state. | |
| The state is the biggest. | |
| The state is the goliath of social institutions dedicated to violence. | |
| The mafia is absolutely inconsequential relative to the state, even though the mafia at the moment gets an enormous amount of encouragement from the state. | |
| I've never had any problems with violent crime, other than from my family, but I am having 65% of my income stripped from me, so it's a little hard for me to worry too much about the Mafia. | |
| So the Mafia, relative to the state, should be a cinch, it should be a breeze, it should just be a huff and a puff and down they fall. | |
| But if somebody is sort of balking a little bit at taking on the Sopranos and talking them out of being criminals by force of words and personality alone, if you're hesitant about doing that, then it's a little hard for me to understand what the hell you're talking about when you talk about citizens controlling the state. | |
| Also, of course, the mafia doesn't have propaganda, right? | |
| The mafia doesn't sit you down for 14 years and tell you about how wonderful the mafia is and how all the mafia is concerned about is all the good, sweet, nice things in society. | |
| And so it's... | |
| It should be a complete walkover compared to the state. | |
| Yet, I don't really see that people start who have these ideas, and there are lots of people out there. | |
| This is one of the addictions of minarchism, in particular. | |
| The idea that we should somehow blame citizens for the growth in power of the state with no recognition of the power disparity, the propaganda, the violence capacities, the gulags, the weaponry, the self-interest, the corruption of politicians and police force and military and all that. | |
| The idea that it somehow is... | |
| The fault of citizens that the state grows and becomes more dominant and brutal to me is sort of exactly the same as saying that it is the fault of a four-year-old if his mother is an alcoholic. | |
| And to expect that the citizens are able, or should be able to, or should have a moral ideal of controlling the growth and power of the state is to me very similar, as I mentioned on the boards, to demanding that the four-year-old discipline the mother. | |
| It's absolutely a lunatic idea. | |
| You and I have no capacity to affect the state. | |
| At all. What you and I can do is to spread as powerfully and passionately and positively as we can, we can spread the truth about the state, because the only thing that is going to bring down the state in the long run is the argument for morality, and so we keep working and working and working at that. | |
| But the idea that we can have a state and not end up in this state is completely delusional. | |
| It's just completely delusional. | |
| I mean, as I've mentioned before, the great US experiment in Minarchist government lasted less than 100 years before descending into... | |
| The War of Northern Aggression, as it's called. | |
| I mentioned that it was a civil war, which drew some umbrage from those in the South who said that it was not a civil war because it was not a united country as yet, and that the right of succession was in the Constitution, and blah, blah, blah. | |
| So, perfectly happy to correct that. | |
| Sorry for trivializing it or giving it the wrong label. | |
| That's force of habit, I guess. | |
| But the idea that we have any capacity to control the state is just mad. | |
| There's no history in the world of anyone ever being able to control the state. | |
| You can't! How could you conceivably control the state? | |
| The state has the power of taxation, pays the military, pays the police, has the law courts, has a monopoly on the prison system, can throw you in jail and throw away the key pretty much for the rest of your natural born life with barely any particular process, a due process, especially now in America in particular with the Patriot Act and Patriot Act II. So, it's sort of hard to understand how it is that we're supposed to be the tail wag in the dark here. | |
| It's a little sort of... | |
| I mean, people sort of make this during speeches, you know, the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of tyrants. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's great. | |
| You know, it's a nice sermon, but, you know, we are talking a little bit about the real world here, and so it's a little hard for me to understand how people can blame citizens for the growth of the state. | |
| Certainly, it's... Something I've been opposing for 20 years, so it's hard for me to say that I'm somehow morally culpable for the growth in state power. | |
| Now, the real question, of course, then becomes, why would people have such a silly idea? | |
| Well, I would say, because everything is related to the family, as you may have heard me mention a couple times, The reason that people have this idea is because they take ownership for having violence or emotional or physical abuse inflicted on them as children. | |
| So they have taken to an extreme degree personal responsibility and used it, used an extreme and perverted sense of personal responsibility to attempt to overcome the moral horror of experiencing abuse as children. | |
| And so they do not recognize that victims exist because they themselves were such a victim and They themselves have rejected their own victimhood irrationally, right? | |
| So when they were a kid, they sort of, I tufted out, I had a stiff upper lip, or maybe they don't believe there was any abuse at all. | |
| But fundamentally, they have an enormous blind spot in their personality regarding victimhood, legitimate victimhood, and children are always, always, always legitimate victims. | |
| And so because they have no capacity to understand victimhood, or to empathize with their own victimhood, victimhood does not exist for them. | |
| There is no possibility of being a victim in any interaction. | |
| And so, when the state is growing, there are no victims. | |
| And so, if the state is growing and there are no victims, then the responsibility must be the citizens, because the citizens can't be victims of this growth in power, because there's no such thing as victimhood. | |
| And so it's blame the victim because the victim, there is no such thing as a victim, right? | |
| So you may have heard this sort of phrase, oh, you just love playing the victim, playing the victim, right? | |
| I mean, this is a pretty common psychological scare story that people sort of throw out to get other people to sort of kowtow, to bow down to their irrational absolutes. | |
| Oh, you love playing the victim, always playing the victim. | |
| Well, it's true, of course, That as an adult, in one's personal, voluntary, choosable relationships, that it's hard to say that somebody is a complete victim, as I said at the beginning with the woman whose husband beats her. | |
| It's pretty hard to say that this is just a total victim. | |
| And it is certainly the case that she is probably going to play the victim and pretend that she has no options when, of course, she has far more options than when she was a child. | |
| But, of course, it's also, I think, understandable to see it as being the case that... | |
| The woman did not learn how to be assertive as a child and was victimized as a child, was never taught how to process it, never learned how to process it, never chose, you could say, of course, to process her victimization as a child, and therefore she loses, has no fundamental capacity to choose freely as an adult, so it's complicated. | |
| I mean, definitely it all goes back to childhood abuse, which is why it's so important to focus on the young and not so much on those who've been ruined by childhood abuse and not have taken the steps. | |
| Necessary to recover from it and to heal themselves, but As children, it's always the case that we're victims. | |
| As adults, it's complicated, but in general, it's hard to say that we're victims unless it's a specifically medical ailment that's causing visibly corrupt behavior. | |
| So, if people don't see that there's such a thing as victimhood in their own childhoods, then they're not going to see anything as victimhood as adults. | |
| And this is the sort of, you can do anything! | |
| This is the empowerment stuff that... | |
| It's sort of empowering people like holding up a light bulb and it gets struck by lightning thinking that it's just going to glow brighter rather than explode. | |
| There is such a thing as too much empowerment. | |
| For instance, I try not to take any responsibility for getting older or being bald. | |
| I mean, it's just going to happen as a biological thing, and I don't take any, you know... | |
| I like to sing, and I'm not a bad amateur singer, but I'm not going to go out there and claim the stage at the Met, despite the fact that I might feel empowered to do so. | |
| I have lots of limitations on these sorts of things, and so there's such a thing as too much empowerment, right? | |
| It's going to be limited by reality, which is important, I think. | |
| So I would say to people who believe that it's important or morally justified to blame citizens for the growth in power of government that if they don't really like the idea of taking on a much smaller entity like the mafia, | |
| then they might use that fear that they have of taking on the then they might use that fear that they have of taking on the mafia and maybe not throw out so much bravado about how brave they are relative to the state, which they know isn't going to listen, can't budge and paste, shows them no particular personal danger because they're not doing They might want to sort of imagine that they're going to take on the mafia verbally, unarmed, and cause it to become a good institution. | |
| And then if they feel a certain amount of trepidation about that, then they can use that trepidation to begin to empathize with their own fears that they experienced when they were children and were dealt with in a brutal or unproductive manner. | |
| That would be my suggestion. | |
| Of how to approach that kind of stuff. | |
| And I think that if you do that, and you begin to have some empathy for what you experienced when you were a child, then I would say that you're probably going to be in a much better sort of frame of mind to begin the process of understanding why you can't morally blame those who have about a bazillion guns pointed at them for handing over their shekels. | |
| And that the only way to solve this is not to blame the helpless and relatively disarmed taxpayers, but to focus on the core moral sinew that holds up the state, which is a core power sinew which holds up the state, which is the false argument for morality. | |
| If you focus on that, then you will have a great deal of, I think, power and effect, but you will have to give up justifications for state power, and you will have to give up blaming those Who have been victimized by state power. | |
| And I think if you're able to do that, you'll have a much more productive time of things. | |
| Plus, you know, to empathize with your own experiences as a child can, I think, be enormously beneficial in terms of helping you be happy and free and loving and affectionate as an adult. | |
| So, I hope that's been helpful. | |
| I'm going to stop a little bit early here. | |
| I feel like I've exhausted the topic, if not your patience. | |
| So, I look forward to your responses. | |
| Please come by. Thanks. | |
| Got another donation today. | |
| $25. Very nice. | |
| So please drop by freedomainradio.com and hurl me some yen. | |
| I would really appreciate it. | |
| And I will talk to you soon. |
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