And y'all are sitting around in bed in your jammies while WeekendX are up and running off to work.
And why are we doing this?
Well, we're doing this because...
200 years ago, we did not rise up and fight against our oppressor named George.
And this was, of course, a terrible thing, according to many Americans, that Canadians...
We still have the Queen on our money versus the Americans who only have presidents on their money.
and of course the Queen in Canada has far less power than, I mean, the Queen can't make us go to war, say, and the Queen can't fly terror suspects around to crazy allied countries like Egypt and Syria to get them tortured, say.
And so the fact that we have the Queen on her money may not be the end of the world relative to you all ending up with George Bush on your money.
Now, you, 200 years ago, did rise up against a tyrant named George, which I thought was a very good thing.
sadly as somebody has pointed out on the board It was not exactly the most successful revolution in that it only staved off the growth of the federal government and civil wars and the draft and hundreds of thousands killed.
By about 100 years, but it was a step forward at the time, and let's certainly give it credence for that.
But boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, was there a lot of anger in the Declaration of Independence towards George, George V. We'll talk about this a little bit more later on today.
Because you all had a George back then, you all have a George up now, who are all, if you look through the Declaration of Independence, The complaints all levied against King George of England would now, of course, be perfectly levied against Emperor George of America, and it would seem to me sort of sad, but kind of funny, how little this experiment against dictatorial powers worked in America.
It was the greatest experiment to date in the world, and we should give it all due respect for that.
But boy, oh boy, oh boy, does it ever not work to limit the government.
So... What I would like to do, though, today, this morning, is to talk about sympathy for George.
Oh, befuddled Georgie.
I think that there's a lot of anger against George Bush.
And that is a mistake, frankly.
It's a mistake to get angry at George Bush.
It's a mistake to get angry at the neoconservatives.
It's a mistake to get angry at Rove.
It's a mistake to get angry at Rumsfeld, at Wolfowitz, at Cheney, at the whole filthy crew.
It's a complete mistake.
In my humble opinion, to get angry at them.
Doesn't really make any sense.
Doesn't really make any sense at all.
And we'll sort of get into why.
And I would actually argue that it may be worth having some sympathy for them.
And I know that this is a bit of a stretch.
And I know that when you listen to this, you may be stumbling and bleary-eyed from your celebrations.
But I still think it's worth taking a moment to have sympathy for those caught in the net of tyranny on the commanding side Versus the non-commanding side.
Now, in your life, you are taxed 25%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%.
But you get to choose how you're going to pay those taxes.
So yes, it's true that a good deal of your life is spent working for the government, but at least you get to choose the occupation that you're working in.
And at least you get to feel that it is a negative thing.
It's a problem, it's something you feel disgruntled about, which is healthy and true.
So, at the end of your workday, you go home, you grumble about the government, and you sit with your wife or your husband, you play with your kids, and you have a great time.
Now, the people who are in the government, though...
They have to work their entire lives for the government.
Their entire lives are defined by the government.
Their entire interactions are defined by the government.
So you pay 20, 30, 40, 50, 60% taxation, but they're in a sense paying 100% taxation because their entire lives are working for the government directly.
Only a part of your life is working for the government indirectly.
So who's more free?
Who's less free? I would submit.
That the people in the private sector are far more free than the people in the public sector.
Now, if you've ever spent any time in the public sector, you know that the working conditions, the politics, the infighting, the backstabbing, the constant HR mess, and hostility, and accusations, and complexities, and inefficiencies, it really is a layer of hell.
The public sector really is a layer of hell.
And there's Deeper layers of hell like the military, and there are higher layers of hell like the Department of Motor Vehicles.
But overall, when you deal with a government employee, you're not dealing with a happy person.
Unless they're sort of retarded.
You don't ever get joy out of government workers.
You do get joy out of some people in the private sector.
People who've accepted sort of responsibility for what they're doing.
So that's another way in which people in the private sector are a lot more free than people in the public sector.
Now, the other thing is that the public sector has sort of three traps, which the private sector doesn't have nearly as much.
Now, the first trap is pay.
And by that, what I mean is that you get in the public sector, and this is more in Canada than in the States.
I don't know about the U.S. But I do believe that public sector employees are paid higher on average than private sector employees for the same jobs.
So the first trap is money.
And the money shows up in direct salary.
The money shows up in vacation.
The money shows up in days off and sick days and loo days and option days.
And the money also shows up in pension.
So, once you've been working for the government for a couple of years, I mean, when you first start, it's like, "Hey, lots of money!" And I don't have much responsibility, "responsibility", so it's relatively okay to plug along.
It seems like a fairly easy job.
And I remember I roomed one summer.
I was putting on a play that I'd written, directing a play, and I was rooming with a guy who worked for a quasi-public, but nominally private entity called Ontario Hydra.
And he was there for the whole summer because he was taking engineering and this was his summer co-op course.
And we would joke literally every day.
Well, what did you do today? I did nothing today.
Well, what are you going to do tomorrow?
I mean, what's the plan? I have no idea.
They give me a bunch of manuals to read and no one ever talks to me.
I mean, this is how things work in the public sector, or don't work in the public sector as the case may be.
So you get trapped with all of these retirement benefits and they will contribute to your RRSP or 401k plan.
And it's quite lunatic.
And it's very hard to get fired.
You can get laid off, but it's very hard to get fired.
Even if you get laid off, you get significant benefits.
And so this lulls you into a sense of security.
It lulls you into a sense of security.
Now, the other thing that keeps you in the public sector, keeps you trapped in the public sector, is you get a lifestyle, and you have kids, and so on.
And once you have all of that, then you feel much less like letting go of all of these benefits, these soft-cell benefits.
Where you're in there, it's kind of padded, it's kind of comfy, it's got nice lighting, but when you try the door, it's really hard to open.
And you're pretty comfortable and vaguely drugged and dazed by all the political infighting and boredom.
Boredom is the other great trap.
Now, I don't know about you, if you are a manager or have ever been a hirer.
I've hired, oh, I don't know...
Probably 50 people in my career, and I've interviewed, of course, hundreds and hundreds.
And if I see public sector on the resume, I've got to tell you, I don't know that I've ever hired anyone out of the public sector.
I just don't think that they have what it takes.
And it's not even so much, let's say, I get a resume from some guy who worked in the public sector for 10 years.
Well, of course, I'll ask him why he left.
Now, if he said, oh my God, I was just dying in there.
It was so futile.
It was so impolitical.
And it was such a waste of my life.
Oh, then I'll listen a little bit more closely.
But of course, what I want to know is what led him into the public sector for 10 years to begin with.
What level of insecurity led him into wanting to work for the government for that amount of time?
I've never really talked about it with other employers, but there generally is a kind of joke that people know that the only reason you get interviewed From someone in the public sector, like somebody who used to work in the public sector, you will get interviewed with them for one of two reasons.
One is that they've been laid off, of course.
It's not that they've chosen to leave, which means that they went into the public sector.
That's where they felt their comfort zone was, which is not very impressive.
And then they got kicked out, and now they're out scrabbling around.
And the other thing that you know about them, if they've been in the public sector and come to work to apply for a job in the private sector...
Is that they don't have any contacts who want to give them work in the public sector.
And to a smaller degree, you also know that they were not high up enough or hadn't had enough clout in the public sector that they're able to be consultants for people who want access to people in the public sector.
So, you know that they weren't popular and weren't successful, and most times, like 99 times out of 100, they left involuntarily.
And they went into the public sector to begin with, when they could have at some point gone into the private sector.
Now, that's not really a very good...
I've never hired anyone from the public sector.
I'm partly concerned about their productivity, but I'm also partly concerned about their effects on my team's morale.
Because if I hire someone from the public sector...
And they then get shocked because sometimes we work quite a bit of overtime without extra pay.
And yes, you can take loo days, but it's not always the easiest thing in the world.
And quite a lot is demanded of you.
There's a lot of high expectations.
My concern is that they're going to stand around the lunch kitchen muttering and complaining about the overwork and stirring up trouble within my own team.
I mean, you get someone in who's muttering about, oh my God, I've never worked this hard in my life.
Oh, this is too much. I've got to go pick up my kids.
I can't stay here. I can't do this.
I can't blah, blah, blah. And rather than make the arrangements that he needs or she needs to deal with her personal life, and it's not her fault.
It's just her personal life has been set up with public sector 459, I'm out of here, and off days and sick days and so on.
And so if I don't, since we don't have all of that stuff in the private sector, at least not as much of it, Then I'm concerned that this is going to hit her like a thunderbolt or hit him like a thunderbolt.
He's going to stand around complaining and not only not be productive himself, but contribute to resentment and unproductivity among other people.
I don't think that that would necessarily be the case, but to me it's too high a risk.
And there's probably lots of people in the private sector who feel that way about public sector employees.
And... So, they get trapped.
They get trapped, trapped, trapped, trapped, trapped in the public sector.
And boy, if you think doing your taxes is bad, imagine that you spend 30 years doing your taxes straight, no break, and that's going to be the rest of your working life.
I have no idea why these people don't put on some Leonard Cohen and open a vein.
It's beyond me, but then I don't really understand fundamentally the mindset of people who are depressed and don't act to change it.
I understand depression. I don't understand not acting to change it, but That's probably just a limitation on my part.
So, that's another way in which people are trapped in the public sector.
And there's something, I think, even more fundamental about why we should have some sympathy for people who are trapped in the public sector, who are trapped in the government.
And this is particularly true higher up, but it's true of everyone else.
Now, imagine. Imagine that there's somebody in the public sector, and there are probably thousands of people like this, Who has a really great idea.
And they really want to start their own business, but they have a tough time getting it going, that the public sector is sapping their will to live a little bit every day.
And they could be doing something really great with their life, but instead they're grinding away Writing futile little COBOL programs for the Ministry of Education, or they're grinding away doing futile maintenance on Perl scripts for the Ministry of Defense, or they're grinding away doing some damn nonsense, some huge waste of time, something that's come out of massive inefficiencies.
They're maintaining the vacuum tubes, believe it or not, that air traffic controllers in the United States still use, rather than, at least up here we have electronics.
So they're doing some damn useless, futile thing that's brought about by massive inefficiency that some engineer is involved in.
Up here we have some nonsense project.
I don't know what the status of it is.
It's been floating around for a while.
That they're building a bridge to Prince Edward Island.
It's a massive project.
So, basically, Dostoevsky said once, and I think it's quite true, if you want to drive a man insane with depression and self-hatred, you simply ask him to do the following.
You say, you give him a shovel, you say, I'd like you to dig a hole in the ground.
And he digs a hole in the ground.
And then you say, maybe it's, you know, ten feet deep or whatever, so you spend a day or two digging the hole.
And then you say to him, great, now I'd like you to fill it in again.
And he's like, okay, I guess you changed your mind.
And then the next day you say, okay, I'd like you to dig that hole again.
And then the next day after that you say, well, I'd like you to fill it in again.
And then those are hit orders for the rest of his life is to dig the hole and fill it in again.
And the reason that...
People go insane with self-hatred and depression in that environment is that it's completely counter to our nature.
Our nature is to progress.
And even if you get paid $100,000 a year for doing that, you are probably going to still want to quit or blow your brains out at one point because no matter how much you're paid, it's simply against human nature to do things that are completely futile, unless you get completely depressed.
And also, just one other thing that I've noticed about people in the public sector, they're really weird.
Like, they're really quirky.
They're really, really, really quirky.
And of course, this would seem to me to make sense.
Because, for two reasons.
One, only quirky and odd people go into the public sector.
And two, their quirkiness and oddness does not exactly get smoothed out in the public sector because they don't have direct relationship with voluntary clients.
Or even tertiary relationships with voluntary clients.
So there's always just something odd and unusual about people in the public sector.
They always have odd hobbies or they...
They're just strange, and part of it's the depression of being in the public sector, and part of it is just that their quickiness is never smoothed out through contact with voluntary people.
I just find that they're odd.
They're just odd people.
And that, to me, is very sad.
Because they could be doing great things with their life.
And I don't mean necessarily inventing a cure for cancer or anything like that.
But they could be doing great things with their life insofar as, at least when they come home at the end of the day...
They're saying, yes, at least I did something that satisfied someone today.
And it wasn't political, and it wasn't a waste of time, and it wasn't busy work that arose out of massive inefficiencies, and it wasn't putting out stupid fires that other people set just to cause problems, and it wasn't dealing with difficult co-workers who were never going to get any better because the whole system doesn't have any inbuilt efficiency principles in it.
But you actually get to come home at the end of the day and you get to say, okay, well at least I did something that satisfied some people, that they voluntarily wanted me to do and appreciated me doing.
Even if it's like I'm dealing with complaints at a department store, that job will grind you down a little bit, if not a lot, but at least you get home at the end of the day and say, well people had real needs and I dealt with them the best that I could.
Yeah, they're complaining. Yeah, they're whining.
Yeah, maybe they're rude.
But at least people had real needs, and I was dealing with those needs as best I could.
That at least is something. Something with your day has been a voluntary and productive interaction with people.
So, all the way down from those kinds of jobs, all the way up to things that people might do without this vast temptation of the public sector.
I don't think that people are destroyed and then they end up hiding out in the public sector.
I think that they're harmed, and then I think the public sector represents a great temptation.
In the same way that unions represent a great temptation for them.
So, I know a guy who works on the line at a factory.
A guy makes the same amount that I do.
I've got a master's degree.
I've been an entrepreneur.
I bought and sold major software products.
And I've sold huge software systems.
And, you know, learned all of that kind of stuff.
And, you know, I'm a really good writer.
I'm a pretty good communicator.
And... The guy makes the same thing that I do, so what's his temptation to push himself?
I mean, this is the sad, sad, sad, sad, sad thing.
All of the lost and wasted and destroyed human capital.
And I don't mean human capital like, ooh, they could make someone a lot of money, but human capital is value.
Not just economically, but personally, in terms of self-esteem and self-satisfaction.
I would always choose to do what I do for a living rather than work on a line because I would feel like I was wasting my abilities, even if I got paid less for what I'm doing than working on a line.
And within the trades here, because they're so heavily unionized and there's so much support for state monopolies, the people who are in the trades make a hell of a lot of money.
It's just that it's kind of brain-dead work, number one, relative to, you know, negotiating big contracts and so on.
Nothing wrong with the trades. Don't get me wrong.
I'm going to get flamed about some hatred of the blue collar situation.
But it's kind of brain-dead work.
And having done some work around the trades when I was in my teens, the second thing is you've got to work with people who are in the trades.
You're not going to sit there and discuss philosophy with somebody while you're fitting pipes or re-roofing something.
You're going to talk about concerts and you're going to talk about drinking and you're going to talk about maybe the goddamn government in a narrow-minded kind of way.
But the enormous amount of human capital that is destroyed, human value, self-satisfaction, happiness, self-esteem, competence, growth, self-assurance, value, not just economically but personally, the amount of value that is destroyed by the existence of the government is just staggering.
It is an enormous, near-invisible graveyard of hopes, aspirations, and joys.
And it is just a horrifying pile of dead dreams from people who are tempted by the government, who go into the government, and then for a variety of reasons find it almost impossible to get out.
And the worst thing is, of course, that the true horrors of the government are revealed to those in middle management.
Those are more at the top.
Yeah, they get all of the plaudits and they get all of the newspaper articles and they get their reporters thrusting microphones in their face and they get dinners where everyone pays to come and try and schmooze them for contracts and so on.
But in middle management, oh boy, do you ever find the true hell of government, because you have responsibility without authority, which is the worst thing in the world.
So the enormous amount of dreams and lives and possibilities that are just destroyed, because there is this massive temptation of the government, That gives people a good income and a secure job and just slowly crushes their soul every single day and destroys their capacity to be happy and productive human beings.
That to me is a huge graveyard which I just can't pass by without feeling sad and sorry for the lost souls within these soft cells.
I just find it to be just a terrible, awful, awful thing.
And this is true even at the very highest levels.
I mean, let's assume that the people at the highest levels of any particular administration...
I mean, politics fundamentally is blood theater, right?
The theater is the politicians, and the blood is the police and the military.
So it's a kind of theater, a dramatic theater, which people love, right?
They love, you know, we have prevailed against Iraq, like that was ever a doubt, right?
It's like, I have prevailed on beating up the kid in the ICU unit.
People love that theater, though.
They love the drama. They love the flags.
They love the empty, hollow drama of nationalism.
And it's sad.
It's sad, but it's just a lesson that human beings have to keep learning.
The sad thing is that it's innocent lives that usually end up...
The cost is lives.
If you want to figure out how human beings to some degree got rid of moral relativism, which was very much the vogue in the late 19th and early to mid 20th century, if you ever want to figure out how people rediscovered evil and got rid of moral relativism, at least as a concept, and went towards more natural and positivistic law...
Then all you have to do is look at the 40 million who died, or who were murdered, in the Second World War.
And then, once you get the trial at Nuremberg's, you start to get the resurrection of some kind of objective morality.
It doesn't last very long, but that's the price.
The price of the illusions of relativistic morality is millions upon millions upon millions of people killed.
And those people who were killed are not those who created the idea of relativistic morality.
But perhaps they subscribe to it.
It's likely that the vast majority of them did.
And so, to that degree, they had a hand in their own deaths.
But this is the price that human beings have to pay.
This is the price that the species has to pay for illusions, is we get pretty much up to our noses in blood, and then we begin to drain them with objective values, and then people start lying to us all over again, and we go, hey, that's great!
Nationalism in Germany was evil.
Obeying the government was evil.
For that, we have the Nuremberg Trials.
Invading a country is evil.
It is the international crime of aggression and should be punished with the death penalty.
So everyone's like, they wake up from this mad dream of obedience to the state, and then because they're just like human beings, virtually killed themselves as a species, because we had nuclear weapons at the end, So there was a genocide, self-genocide of the species, based on illusion, and then at the end, people sort of pulled back and went, okay, well I guess we do want to survive, so let's get back to basics and say perhaps that there's no such thing as relativistic subjective morality.
And let's get back to basics.
And so you do get some growth and some more rational kind of life in the 50s and early 60s, but unfortunately it doesn't last more than a generation, if that.
Before, we're all the way back to let's obey the president, as Britney Spears, the eminent philosopher, once said.
And trust him in everything that he does.
And her punishment, of course, for statements like that is being married to Kevin Federline, which I can't imagine would be much of a worse punishment for somebody trying to raise children.
It's really hard to say, and I'm not sure that I spent too much time thinking about it.
But this is the price that we pay.
We just have to keep relearning these horrible lessons over and over again.
And of course, my goal, as somebody who likes to talk about ideas, and I think I have something of value to offer, is to simply say, let's not do that again.
Let's not do that again.
And part of what we need to do in order to get away from this is to stop getting angry at the individual.
It's not George Bush's fault that people are handing him all this power.
How many human beings could say no to that kind of power?
To perpetual riches for generations, for the power to command armies across the whole world, for the power to have your will imposed upon hundreds and hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Who could say no to that?
And who could say no, given that he's not the sharpest tool in the shed, so to speak, And who could say no to that level of exposure and publicity and people hanging off your every word and everybody trying to convince you of this, that, or the other?
Who could say no to that? Maybe ten guys the whole world would say no to that kind of power.
So it's not George Bush's fault that we all believe in his power.
It's not George Bush's fault.
Yes, it's our parents' fault to some degree.
Yes, it is our school's fault to some degree.
But once we get to be adults, well, I'm sure you know whose fault I think it is.
It's our fault. It's not George Bush's fault that we believe he's some kind of living man-god who can wield such horrifying degrees of power with impunity.
That's not his fault.
It's like if you hand over your soul to Satan without even getting anything in return, is it Satan's fault forsaking it?
Of course not. That's what Satan does.
Is it George Bush's fault that he is wielding the kind of power that Congress gave him to declare war without congressional approval?
Well, of course not. Given that he wanted to declare war in Iraq, and given that Congress didn't hold him to any kind of constitutional standard, What is he going to do?
Is he going to say, no, no, no, I do want to declare war.
I know it's the right thing because this voice in my ear is telling me, this big, deep Charles Heston type of voice is telling me that it's the right thing to do.
So I'm going to go through all of these constitutional loops and try and get Congress to do this out of the other, and I'm going to be honest about the amount it's going to cost the American people and what it's going to do to our oil supply and what it's going to do to create additional risks to the war on terror.
All of this stuff is completely... That's what he's going to do.
And again, there's maybe 10 people in the world who wouldn't do that.
Maybe. It's not our fault that he takes our money, because that's at the point of a gun.
It is our fault if he takes up any of our emotional energies, because he's merely a symptom.
He's merely, merely, merely a symptom of the problems of power.
And if it's not him, it's someone else.
There's never been any shortage of people who are corrupted by power who are more than willing to tongue-kiss the devil of power And there's just never any shortage of people like that.
And George Bush was an inevitable consequence of that.
The guy is not that bright.
He's a good public speaker insofar as he obviously can believe a whole load of tripe and put it across convincingly.
Yeah, he's an irritating and supercilious guy.
But what does it matter?
It's not his fault.
It's not his fault. And just think, without the temptations of government, he could have ended up running maybe some used car lot somewhere, or he could have ended up running some small company somewhere where his narcissism and egotism would have been restrained by not wanting to drive away customers and good employees.
And he would have had a middle class, a pleasant middle class life where he was actually Adding some value, rather than turning into this hyper-pompous, ludicrous, over-inflated puppet of power who is out there strutting and strolling around, honestly believing all of the nonsense that he's fed, and honestly believing that he's so important because everyone's all breathless and waving mics in his face, and honestly believing that he has something of relevance to say.
That's a miserable life.
That is a miserable, miserable, miserable existence.
It is not something that brings you happiness.
It is not something that brings you peace of mind.
It is not something that brings you contentment.
And no, he does not have blood on his hands.
The man has not gone and killed anyone.
All he's done is he said, I'd like us to go to war.
I want us to go to war.
I've signed a piece of paper.
I can do all of that in my car.
Funnily enough, you know, hundreds of thousands of troops don't go to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
So it's nice just out there waffling and pompasing around and prancing around, doing that little laugh that John Stewart imitates so well.
It's not his fault, and it's not ours to get angry at.
I think to get angry at George Bush is to miss the whole point.
It's like throwing yourself off a building and getting angry at the ground rushing up.
Well, it's the fact that we infuse this rather banal little man with all of these powers, and the powers are also the power of hatred, right?
Once we hate someone, it's because we feel that if they were to have acted differently, better things would have occurred, and they chose to act badly.
And yeah, he is choosing to act badly, but that has no effect on you, except for the power that exists within the state.
And he could have had a much better life, a much more productive life.
Yeah. He's not a strong enough character by a long shot to be able to say no to that kind of power.
But the fact that it's there has tempted him away from a life of petty productivity and value to people, right?
People need used cars. And it's put him into this ridiculous and very public humiliating position.
And the history books are going to be very clear about him.
It's not even like he's gotten enduring fame.
The history books are going to be very clear about him and about all presidents, right?
Because the real history of the future is going to be written by anarchists.
And they'll look at these kinds of people like...
We look at slave owners who are out there publicly saying, you know, slavery is moral and required.
We'll just look at these people like, what kind of drugs were they on?
How evil can you be?
And it's great that this stuff's all out there in full color so you don't get that weird kind of thing when you're looking at footage of the First World War where it feels kind of disconnected because it's grainy and jerky.
But it's out there in full living color so people won't be able to distance themselves emotionally and the fashions aren't too extreme at the moment so you won't even get that thing like when you're looking at something from the 80s like, who are these people with the big shoulder pads and the...
The pipe-stem pants and the little narrow leather ties and the high-heeled snakeskin boots.
But people in the future will look back and sort of see the face of evil in a way even that we don't get with people like Hitler and Stalin because there won't be the language barrier, at least for those of us in the West.
So his legacy is going to be one of mere instruction in the face of corruption to future generations.
And so from that standpoint, he's going to be His life has been a completely negative waste.
So I would say this is a temptation, a power that he had no capacity to resist, as very few people would.
His life has been destroyed by it.
The people I'm most sad for for people in the public sector is their children, because they bear the brunt of their parents' dissatisfaction, and it's miserable and exhausting.
It's depressing to be the children of people in the public sector.
And so when you see this kind of stuff, you basically see lives that are completely being wasted.
And they're being wasted because of the existence of two things.
One, the power, the physical power of the state.
But more important than fundamentally, it's the fact that we invest the state with any emotion whatsoever.
And we need to save our emotions for those people a little bit closer to us than George Bush, where we actually can affect their level of corrupt power within our life.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
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Thank you so much to those who sent in some money.
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