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June 19, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:49
288 Culture and State Power
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is quarter past five on the 18th, I think it is, of June 2006.
We are recording in a low-quality audio environment because, my friends, my computer is acting up.
Having spent five minutes in the parking lot attempting to get to recognize my voice, I am going to switch to my trusty, creative, zen voice.
Vision M, which is a great product for those of us who like geeky audio and video tools.
So, I'm going to move to a discussion now of cause and effect in social circumstances, which I think is just a fascinating, fascinating topic.
A very dense and complicated topic.
I certainly don't claim to have any answers that are cut and dried, and I'm not sure if such answers even exist.
But I will say that it's well worth exploring and coming to some sort of understanding of the complexity of cause and effect in social circumstances.
And this is prompted by a discussion on the board around minority communities, I think particularly in Europe and the United States, and what's going on with those, and why is it, say for instance, that black ghettos in the United States are places where nobody wants to live, And why is it that the Turkish and other kinds of Armenian immigrants within Europe are causing problems, or the Arab hordes, as they're called in Europe, are causing problems, and so on?
Well, it's a fascinating, fascinating topic.
I think it's very risky to claim knowledge where there are too many variables.
Obviously, this is part of the debate that was going on on Sunday.
It's very difficult to claim knowledge where there's too many variables, to create Knowledge of certitude, I guess you could say.
So, let's say that there's a certain ethnic group, we'll call them bobsies, and bobsies do poorly within a particular environment, in just about every metric, economically or socially, educationally, however it is that you want to put it, that these people do poorly in these kinds of situations.
Well, of course, the main question would then be, well, why?
Why would these people do poorly in these kinds of situations?
And the answer is that we can begin to discuss the kinds of causes and effects that occur when we're dealing with ethnic groups or social groups.
We can only really begin to discuss what kinds of progress could or could not be made, or what kind of judgments can we make about these groups, only In the absence of a state.
Only in the absence of a state.
Because the problem with the state is it continually skews incentives and it is susceptible to the kind of fear-mongering and the kind of influence peddling and the kind of special interest manipulation that we see very often going on among minority groups.
So, wherever there's a problem, The state comes in and exacerbates that problem.
This is sort of what I was trying to make the case for, to some degree at least, in the podcast on Losing Ground Part 2, where I was making the case in a somewhat abstract manner.
I certainly don't claim to have proved it, but making a case at least for the possibility that poverty was about to be solved, so the state has to go in and cause problems in order to make sure that the problem doesn't get solved, because Every social problem that's solved is one less government agency that can justify ripping off the taxpayer, and so government agencies in particular don't want to solve problems.
And I'm going to go way, way, way out on a limb here and talk about the riots that occurred in the mid-60s, I think it was in the summer of 64, across a half dozen or so US cities in the black neighborhoods that occurred Just when the civil rights bills had been signed.
Now, whatever you think of the civil rights bills, and of course I would prefer that not that equal treatment be given under the state laws to all people, but rather that there be no state laws so we can actually get equal treatment from DROs, but that having been said, this is sort of what occurred, that a legal impediment for equality was taken away, and of course this didn't change slavery, it didn't change history.
But it meant that a sort of injustice had been, at least within the confines of the state paradigm or the state concept, had been actually eliminated or removed.
And what happened then immediately was you had the eruption of riots in cities.
Fascinating. And I don't know the story behind that, sort of why that occurred, but it does seem to me sort of coincidental.
That the moment these legal impediments are removed, or at least minimized, and historical injustice is dealt with to some degree within the problems of the whole state paradigm, but at least it's better than nothing.
You get this eruption of resentment and rage and the sort of burn-baby-burn, H-wrap-brown kind of approach to things.
And one possibility could be that as soon as a problem is solved, a state exacerbates another problem.
The kinds of groups that the government was funding within the black communities, right?
So a lot of the activist leaders, as I've talked about in way old podcasts, a lot of activist leaders get their funding from the government.
So are they going to get funding from the government if they say, you know what, things are going great.
The free market is taking care of discrimination as free markets are logically want to do to take care of economically inefficient discrimination, right?
It may not be economically efficient for a Chinese restaurant that caters to hardcore Chinese people to hire, say, me as a waiter.
It may not be economically efficient from that, so they're welcome to discriminate me against that.
And if somebody wants to send somebody over to Japan to deal with imports and exports, I may not be quite the guy to do that.
But economically inefficient discrimination is always punished by the market.
And there's lots and lots of reasons for this, but very briefly, one of the main ones is that if I say, well, I'm only going to hire red-haired people, then I'm limiting my talent pool to only red-haired people.
Of course, my competitors aren't limiting their talent pool to only red-haired people, so they're going to do a whole lot better than I am in that situation.
And of course, if I limit myself to customers that are only red-haired, then I'm going to have that sort of problem and so on.
And so, there's no reward.
There's quite a punishment. In terms of economic efficiency, income, and the success of your company, not to mention the negative PR that comes from being perceived as a bigot or whatever.
So the free market deals with economically inefficient discrimination, which is really, I'm sure, the only kind that people really care about in a sort of moral or logical sense, other than sort of it would be nice if everybody didn't even hold the bigoted thought, that would be great. The free market will deal with the more tangible, external, and economically inefficient aspects of discrimination, as we talked about before.
And so, if the groups that are getting all their money from the government and also getting their money from the churches, right?
The churches are also based on causing problems of dissent in a lot of ways, right?
Organized religion, there's a reason why they're all fighting so much.
And so, if the money that comes to these community leaders is coming because there are problems then of course the goal of community leaders just as we talked about with bureaucracies in the podcast on losing ground part two the community leaders are going to gain income and power from exacerbating these kinds of problems so it could well be that once civil rights legislation had been achieved That it might be fairly relevant for certain groups to disband or at least reduce their efforts because they,
you know, kind of achieved what they wanted to achieve, right?
So you've got a woman's suffrage movement that wants women to get the vote.
Well, as soon as women get the vote, I guess they've got to find something else to do, right?
It's the same issue that we talked about with people who are paid good money to try and solve The problem of curing cancer, if they do solve the problem of curing or preventing cancer, then they are shooting themselves in the foot.
Economically, it's a simple incentive thing.
The free market would take care of that, of course, quite well.
As anyone who's designed incentive structures for employees will know, there's lots of ways to be imaginative and productive about how you deal with the problem of incentive for employees to get them to act in a way that is positive.
So, without a doubt, there is an enormous amount of state And sort of state-funded, state-sponsored community activism, quote, activism, that enormously profits from racial divisions, cultural divisions, class divisions.
This stuff all works out beautifully for the economic advantage of those who are paid well to drive wedges between people.
Would this happen without a state?
Well, yeah, of course it would happen without a state.
Anything can happen without a state, right?
A free market doesn't ban lunatics.
I can be some crazy head bigot.
And say that I want to fund a group which causes brunettes and redheads to fight, hopefully in bikinis in mud pits.
Actually, that might not be that eccentric, but we can talk about that another time.
The variety of business schemes that roll around in my head is probably not a relevant topic, for this podcast at least, but we can talk about this another time.
But if I wanted to sort of create animosity between redheads and brunettes and blondes, I was just obsessed with this, and I took all my life savings, and I put it to a group that was going to...
Well, yeah, would I have an effect?
Yeah, I would have a tiny effect.
You know, I guess, I eat Mexican, I'm going to contribute to air pollution, but it's not something that the framers of Kyoto are going to focus on.
Also, there's no profit in them from a political standpoint for that.
So, yes, there are going to be crazy idiots in the free market who are going to cause problems and create dissent, but that's nothing compared to what, of course, goes on with the state.
Where the state begins to fund groups which foment dissent.
And, of course, schools may get additional resources if their kids are doing poorly.
They may get additional resources if there's problems in the classroom.
And so the teachers won't have that much fun, but the bureaucrats and administrators who set up task force to deal with problems within schools aren't going to have nearly as much to do if there aren't problems in schools.
So I guess the point that I'm trying to get to Is that when you pay people to find problems, I think one of the things that you can be fairly sure of is that they're going to find problems.
So if you go over for your physical and you say, am I well or am I ill?
The doctor's going to, you know, do his 20-minute test, take some blood work and say, yeah, you have pretty good health.
But if you say to the doctor, I'm going to pay you a million dollars to find an illness with me, then by golly, He's going to find an illness of some kind, right?
And the difference is that in this community-based or state-based or bureaucratic-based social helping mechanisms, you actually invent problems.
You create problems.
And you do that. I mean, there's lots of tried-and-true ways of causing problems among people.
You can say to them, you've been screwed out of X, Y, and Z. And the guys who screwed you are over there.
And they're laughing at you, you see.
They're laughing at you.
They screwed you.
They took your X, Y, and Z. They're over there, and they're laughing at you.
They're laughing at you, right?
That's going to stoke resentment in just about anybody.
Wait, I feel myself...
Oh, I'm biting my own forearm.
Okay, let's just pull back on some of these so that I don't get myself too jazzed and too juiced so that I cannibalize myself while driving.
Because I've got to think that even though it's not a webcam, the audio part of that...
is fairly unpleasant.
It's got to be unpleasant.
So, the next thing that you can do to stoke resentment in people is to say that your collective wealth or your collective opportunity has been shafted and that the problem is these guys and their forefathers did it to you and their forefathers and you've been Screwed out of your righteous inheritance and they're laughing at you.
You've got to sort of throw that stuff in.
They're laughing at you.
And you can invoke state policies.
This is constant, right? You create state policies that impoverish a certain group and then you blame everybody but the state for this, right?
This is sort of the fundamental issue that I would like to sort of sky-right above The black community who really is focused on the state as the solution to their problems.
Let me sort of say this sort of briefly and then we'll move on because it's important for me to get flames through email and on the boards as often as I humanly can.
So what I would say to every black person who is interested in solving problems with the state, who do you think was responsible for slavery?
You know, that would be sort of a question that I would ask the black community who says that we need Government programs to do X, Y, and Z, that our salvation lies in positive discrimination, and our salvation lies in state funding of our special interest groups, and salvation lies in all of these sorts of affirmative action programs and so on that go on.
I would just like to ask them who they think enforce slavery to begin with.
That would be fairly important.
And if they weren't so interested in slavery, then maybe you could ask them, well, who was it that Who was it that enforced the Jim Crow legislation?
Who was it that created the separate but equal clause?
Who was it that separated you from drinking fountains?
Who was it who enforced in restaurants that you all had to sit in different spots?
Who was it who made you sit in the back of the bus?
Sure as hell wasn't the bus companies.
Sure as hell was not the bus companies that made you all sit in the back of the bus.
It was the state.
The bus companies didn't want to piss blacks off because blacks were poorer.
They took the bus. They'd be much more comfortable pissing off Donald Trump than poor people who take the bus.
And the bus companies actually fought this kind of discrimination, because they know which side of the bread is buttered.
So, if you think that the state is your salvation, I would just like to ask you, who the hell kept you down for so long?
Because I don't think it was the free market, I don't think it was, you know, generic whitey, but it was the state This agency of hell that you are trying to get to do your bidding to make you free was exactly the same goddamn agency that kept you all enslaved and down and are keeping you down now.
That would be sort of my statement to minority people who feel that the state is keeping them down because I think that by looking to the state for their solutions rather than, you know, the free market, self-reliance and all that kind of stuff and recognizing that the state Did not change its nature from the days of slavery to now.
The state has not changed its nature.
It hasn't suddenly become an agency of peace, cooperation, goodwill, and voluntarism.
The state is the same bloody, bespattered, brain-bit, coating, muzzle of a gun that it's always been throughout history.
It hasn't changed its nature.
And so this gun that was pointed at you for so long, trying to wrestle it to point at others, It's not going to do anything other than go off.
It's not going to do anything other than go off in your hand, right?
Everybody who tries to use the state to advance their cause, causes that cause to decline.
And I'm trying to think of another way that I can use the word cause more often in a sentence, but nothing's come to me right now.
So, that would sort of be my major message to minorities.
Stop trying to use the state to become free, because that's what kept you down and is keeping you down Already.
So to take an extreme example that's probably going to be slightly less controversial to people listening to this, let's look at Native Canadians, Native Americans, all of these poor bastards that we herded onto reservations and so on.
Well, they're a tribal structure and we don't turn them loose, we don't make them a separate country, we keep them in these gulags.
And if you ever want to see human horror, if you ever want to see The absolute dregs and pits of the human condition.
Just go into any one of these reservations, with the one or two exceptions of those who've managed to wrestle their way free of government handouts.
Just go to these groups and have a look at the lives of the children, have a look at the lives of the women, have a look at the lives of everyone involved, and you'll see, of course, incarceration rates are dozens of times higher.
They have third world standards of Infant mortality and longevity and it really is just a little pocket of absolute hell in the middle of relative freedom.
And this, of course, is the state having the greatest amount of control.
If you want to see the welfare state to its final extreme, then you simply have to look at reservations where everything is free and people drink themselves to death with photocopying fluid.
This is an absolute hellish thing.
I've seen some of these things when I worked up north.
Kids wandering around with no clothes on at 3 o'clock in the morning.
And I remember picking up an Indian woman who was walking by the side of the road.
And she was sort of bruised and bloody and her skin was torn.
And I ended up having to drive her.
I wanted to drive her to a hospital.
She wouldn't let me. But I ended up having to drive her back into town where she was going to get a ride back to the reservation.
And so I asked her, well, what the hell happened?
And she said, well, I was in the back of a truck with, you know, four guys, and they wanted blowjobs, and I wouldn't give them blowjobs, so they threw me out of the truck.
They didn't even slow down. This is a highway.
It's a gravel road. They just threw out of the goddamn truck.
I mean, this culture is absolutely destroyed and is hell on earth.
Absolute hell on earth. And almost nobody gets away.
Like, almost nobody survives.
And so the complex relationship between...
Incentives and disincentives and social rewards and voluntarism and coercion and so on.
The system beats almost everyone.
This is something that's very important to understand.
It's true of the family systems, it's true of political systems, it's true of religious systems.
The systems crush almost everyone.
This is why you have to fight systems rather than people.
This is why you have to try and liberate people from a false belief in the virtue of systems Rather than try and fight them about, you know, what they should do.
The belief in systems that crushes and distorts and turns rancid and evil the soul of mankind.
The system beats just about everyone, right?
So, in Russia, there were a couple of nice guards.
And if you read or listen to the Gulag Apikalago, you'll get Solzhenitsyn talking about some of these.
Yeah, there were a couple of nice guards.
There were a couple of decent places.
But... The huge and horrifying fact of reality is that everyone pretty much who got into those systems as a god became a brutal and sadistic murderer within like 20 minutes of showing up to work.
So the system crushes just about everyone.
People conform because biologically we want to survive, not be virtuous.
You don't get any points from being virtuous and getting killed.
Biologically you won't reproduce.
We have a tendency to conform to systems rather than get, say, killed or castrated or raped or maimed or whatever.
We generally will conform for the sake of our daily bread because violence works, right?
The world over, violence works in terms of keeping people down.
The system crushes just about everyone.
And the system is skewed incentives and disincentives, right?
So in the gulag, you become a guard, right?
You have no job opportunities.
You're going to starve to death. You're going to become a thief or a bandit and get killed.
Or you go and become a guard because there's no free market.
You can't start your own company or anything like that.
So you're doing all this, that, and the other.
And you go and become a guard.
If you don't show up for work, they'll come and kill you.
And if you show up for work and then don't beat the prisoners, then you'll become a prisoner, which means you'll have no freedom.
You can't go back home for your wife or your kids.
So people, you know, someone hands them a club and they go and club people, right?
I mean, this is what happens at Abu Ghraib.
This is human nature, right?
We aim to survive.
We aim to survive.
We don't aim to be moral.
I mean, of course, the great thing about the free market is that the two generally are synonymous, right?
To survive in the free market, you have to be peaceful, you have to be productive, you have to You have to flourish in your personal relationships.
You have to provide value because nobody's ever forced to deal with you, and so you have to provide value in a voluntaristic sense.
And that value, not to sound overly prudish, right, that value could be I'm a dominatrix, right, I'm whipping people that they want me.
So what? I mean, it's still voluntary, right?
It's still voluntaristic. So the system in Russia is you have no capacity for private property, you have no capacity for reaping the rewards of what you sow, and if you don't, Go and abuse people in the system, then somebody else will, and you'll end up being in prison for the rest of your life, or killed, or whatever.
So, who is going to become a dead person for the sake of an abstract value that nobody's ever going to hear about?
And, you know, the answer is certainly not me, right?
Certainly not me. I may choose to die rather than be a soldier, But I wouldn't necessarily take that choice up front.
I would try and find some way of not being at least out in the battlefield if I were drafted, because I'd want to try and find my way back to Christina at some point, so that would be my major motivation.
But if I knew that I was going to end up on the battlefield and have to kill or be killed, I think that I would choose to go to prison or be killed instead.
But who knows, right?
That's sort of my feeling. It's hard to say until you're actually faced with that choice.
But the system gets everyone.
I mean, this is something to understand.
So when we're looking...
When we're looking at disparities between cultural groups, yeah, well, it could be the case that the Turks are like this, and the Muslims are like that, and the blacks are like the other, and the Irish are this.
Yeah, yeah, it could be the case, absolutely.
Sure, why not? But you can't even remotely approach that until we get a stateless society for a couple of generations, right?
So if after a couple of generations of a stateless society, Black ghettos are still awful hellholes that nobody ever wants to go to, then, yeah, okay, we can begin to say, wahoo, maybe there's something about this community that is something sort of fundamentally problematic and it's not based on the state, it's not based on a skewed incentive structure and so on.
It's based on something else.
But we can't say anything like that now, anything like that now at all.
Everything that's going on in the black community, from slavery to the Jim Crow, to the public schools, to the public housing, to the funding of divisive and incendiary groups, to the partial funding of their churches through tax deferrals on property, through...
I mean, you name it! You name it!
And the black community is or has been subjected to it throughout their history in the United States.
And it's all been based on the state.
So, when we're looking at the black community, my humble opinion is that we're looking at a mass of scar tissue left behind by excessive and brutal state power.
Excessive being the wrong word, sorry.
Any state power is brutal and excessive.
But when we see self-destructive black youths, when we see that black-on-black violence is huge, what we're seeing is scar tissue from state violence, both past, present, and anticipatory, based on sort of welfare calculations and so on.
Into the future as well.
We're seeing people broken on the wheel of state power.
We're seeing a culture broken on the wheel of state power.
And it's the same thing when you look at the Native Americans, Native Canadians, the Indians.
You're seeing exactly the same thing.
You're seeing a culture that's broken on the wheel of state power.
And nobody gets away.
Yeah, okay, one guy in 10,000 maybe gets away.
One guy in 1,000 maybe gets away.
But they can't come back and rescue anyone else.
So this is just something very, very important to understand.
When you're looking at communities, you're looking at the scar tissue of state power.
You're looking at the scar tissue of state power.
Looking at Christina's family, this is very clear, right?
So they have to flee Greece because Greece is socialist, right?
Greece almost turned communist in the post-Second World War period.
Greece is socialist and Greece is incredibly corrupt.
And there's no opportunity, so they have to come and live in frickin' Winnipeg.
I mean, how bad does your economy have to be that you're going to leave the Aegean and come and live in Winnipeg, of all places?
And so that's of a huge warping effect on their personalities.
And, of course, the culture that grew up in Winnipeg was huddled and small and frightened and not open to the kind of social changes and not affected by the kind of social changes that occurred in Greece as a whole.
So, I mean, if you look at this community, it's all the results, all scar tissue, that's the result of state power.
They all had to flee, and then they didn't change, and they had to try and Get their kids to continue to be Greek even though there was, you know, very little cultural reinforcement in that area, so they're over the top and they're over nationalistic and all these sorts of things.
I mean, this is all absolutely typical.
It's all absolutely inevitable.
It's all scar tissue that comes from state power.
All scar tissue that comes from state power.
You see these little Indian kids wandering around 3 o'clock in the morning, no pants on, lost, vacant, empty, wounded, broken looks in their eyes, the soul seeping out from their very pores as you watch.
Like sand blowing off a dune, they're just vanishing into nothing, into scar tissue and hateful, self-abusing and abusing of others, broken souls, horrible people.
This is all just the scar tissue of state power.
Human-on-human abuse, parental child abuse, all of this is a scar tissue.
And some of it's to do with state power, some of it's to do with family power.
I don't want to sort of say everything state power because I mean, I'm sort of aware, and I want to stay consistent with the fact that I've also said that, yeah, some of it, of course, a lot of it is that state power cashes in on family power, parental power, abuses thereof.
But when we're talking about cultures as a whole, right, when we're talking about the human condition, when we can talk about the family, when we're talking about cultures, then we're talking about state power, because that is the thing that affects culture the widest, right?
That is what a culture is.
Culture is generally the responses to political power, right?
That's what culture is in general, is responses to political power.
So, in England, for instance, the culture in the 19th century was, you know, the Battle of Waterloo was one of the fields of Eton, and there was all of this stuff around, you know, the noble, strong, stout-hearted British warrior, I regret that I have only but one life to give for my country.
And, you know, this was all, of course, scar tissue around the need for kids to go out and kill other people for the sake of the empire, right?
So you have to give this sort of stout, we're bringing the lamps of civilization to the benighted blah blah blahs of the earth.
Well, so the culture right there is just a response to the political situation, right?
Culture is just...
It's the way that people in power train the sheep so the sheep will run happily into the slaughterhouse, right?
I mean, for the sake of further aggrandizing state power, right?
Culture is a scar tissue that's inflicted on people so they will further serve state power, right?
So then this martial horror of British sort of cultural education went on through the First World War, to some degree to the Second World War, and then you get socialism, right?
So in socialism, everyone has to be portrayed as pathetic.
Because now you're not getting money through war, but you're getting money through income transfers.
So then everyone has to be conceived to be pathetic and hopeless and unable to fend for themselves or organize their own lives.
So, boom! Immediately you get this complete swing around of cultural imperatives from the stout-hearted, noble British warrior guy to this kitchen sink, look back in anger, pathetic, weak, need, hopeless, pathetic, It's a person, right? It becomes the new British thing, right?
People who just can't manage their own lives, can't do anything right.
This sort of extreme naturalism you see in drama and in novels and so on.
The Lucky Jim stuff by Kingsley Amos, which is a great book, you'd read it.
So you get this kind of stuff, and you can see this all over the place, right?
Rugged individualism for America in the 19th century, because that was less state power there.
So that was a little bit more around the demands of the market.
And then you start to get in America, you start to get, you know, the blank-eyed, violent CIA operative, the alias-slash-missing-impossible kind of guy.
I mean, sort of going to two extremes.
There's lots in the middle. But sort of what we call culture is just the scar tissue that's inflicted on children through propaganda by the ruling classes so that we'll continue to be slaves.
I mean, that's why you get all this nonsense about patriotism, right?
America's the best, or England's the best, or whatever.
I mean, it's all... The most ridiculous nonsense, of course, and it all comes out of the need for the ruling classes to have people believe bullshit so that they'll continue to serve the interests of the ruling classes, right?
So this is sort of very important to understand that the culture that you see, the culture of entitlement or the culture of self-enslavement or the culture of anti-family or the culture of anti-pacifism or the violent culture, the gangster culture, all this, it's all scar tissue.
That's inflicted on children by the family, by the state, by the church, by the community activists, by everyone, in order to further help the situation translate into a further requirement for state power.
I mean, this is absolutely inevitable.
So I, for one, would recommend or strongly recommend that extreme caution be applied to the problem of judging cultures in any sort of way, shape, or form as anything other than the scar tissue of state power.
That's what I've always felt culture to be and so I would absolutely recommend that people withhold the temptation of making statements about cultural groups in the absence of understanding the degree to which those cultural groups are incredibly formed and shaped and brought into existence and maintained in the state that they are in as a service to government power and the sort of methodologies by which that occurs we can talk about another time but This is just something to understand.
Good portions of who you are and what you believe has been implanted in you, like a virus, in order to help you to be susceptible to the requirements of state power.
I hope that's helpful. I hope that you enjoyed that.
Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it.
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