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July 13, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:48
328 The Rise of Evil Part 3: Experiments

A theory about conditions for the inevitable escalation of evil

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Good morning everybody, it's Steph.
I hope you're doing well. It is 8.15 in the morning on the 13th of July 2006.
A little hard to shake yesterday's podcast, for me at least, but I hope that it was helpful to you.
Perhaps it's just me, but I'm going to continue on with the topic.
It is...
I had to have a nap.
I don't normally have naps, but I had to have a nap after the podcast yesterday just because...
It was quite a challenge when you really do think about how much in pain the world is in general.
It is quite a burden, right?
It's hard not to think of all of those children and people as a whole who are getting hurt and beaten and yelled at and humiliated and being put through the brain grinder of public education and being squeezed into the straight jacket of religion and Worshipping the bloodsport killers of war and brought up with all the patriotism and believed that they're good because their parents are rich or the belief that they're good because their parents are poor if they're on the hippy-dippy side,
but just not allowed to think for themselves.
Whatever does happen in life, that commandment is not ever allowed.
It's funny, even people who are well-meaning.
I had a job interview the other day with a very nice young man and woman who were running a company and were interested in bringing on someone as a partner.
And they were saying to me, they were lobbying all the tough questions, which is why I was enjoying the interview, because that means that they're smart and that's who I want to work with, but they were lobbying at me one question wherein they said, could you, or how would you deal with this issue that technical people always want to work with the latest tools and toys and always want to upgrade to the latest thing, and... Yet, we sort of have to produce product that people want, and how do you balance R&D with spending and so on?
And I said, well, I would do that the way I would make any other business decision, that I would put forward a projection of the costs and benefits, right?
How much is it going to cost me?
How much is it going to save me?
How much of my own money am I buying back by doing the R&D? And that would be my approach on how to deal with that question.
And they said, well, who would do that?
And I said, well, it would be the programmer who suggested that we do this would be the one who would have to say, well, here's how much time it's going to take.
Here's how much we have to spend on the new technology.
Here's how much it's going to save us.
And they put their signature by that so that they're responsible.
I mean, then we track it.
And of course, if we achieve, if they achieve their goal, right, if they spend X amount of hours doing whatever upgrade they think is a good idea, and it turns out that we save money, give them some of the money they save.
I mean, that's the incentive.
You know, I said at HP they actually do...
They're using a market technique to project sales, which is very interesting.
There's a little futures market in the accuracy of sales quotes, and they have found that by creating a mini stock market, people buy and sell the veracity of sales quotes, and whoever's holding the right one at the end of the quarter or near the end of the quarter gets some money.
Well, this, of course, is nothing more powerful.
The scientific method and the free market are the two great inventions of human beings.
The two things that I keep hopping on in one form or another, the two most incredible aspects of human life, because they both involve the true self, reality, empiricism.
And voluntarism, right?
So this is saying that the state should run like the free market and the state should run like the scientific method is really not that radical an idea when you see just that there's no other greater beneficial sort of thought structures in human life.
So it's really not that unusual an idea for me to say, well, we have this really unsuccessful thought structure called a state and we have these really successful thought structures called The scientific method out of the free market.
So, hmm, I wonder what we should do.
I mean, that doesn't take any...
I shouldn't say that. I shouldn't say it doesn't take any intelligence, but once you get it at that level, it's not really very difficult to figure out that this is the best way to approach things.
I mean, if I'd invented the free market or I'd invented the scientific method, then I'd be a really smart guy.
This is just saying, okay, well, there's lots of really smart guys out there who invented these two great things, so let's just assume...
That these two great things which involve human beings making decisions, and since politics is supposed to be about human beings making decisions, gosh, I wonder which principles we should apply to the government.
I mean, it's really not that...
Once you get it at that level, I hope at least it's not too, too complicated to figure out.
So I hope that that's a sort of little thought gem for you that you can have a look at and store away, and hopefully you can find useful.
But when I was talking at this interview about the lead programmer or whoever it was who came up with...
This kind of idea for using R&D tools to increase productivity that I would ask them to do a cost-benefit analysis and track it through, and they would get a share of the money saved.
And if it didn't work, of course, there would be some negative thing, right?
You can't have a free market where you only gain if you win and don't lose if you lose.
There would have to be some negative sanction.
They would either miss a bonus, or depending on how you wanted to promote teamwork, and I'm very leery about this kind of stuff, but you may want to say, That you are going to...
Or that you could...
They could not participate in bonuses or there could be a group bonus that wasn't applied if everyone signed on.
Like, if everyone had to do it, then everyone would have to sign on.
And the people I was interviewing said, Oh, our programmers could never in a million years do that.
And I said, Really? I said, how long do you think they take in order to buy a new computer?
Do you think they just go and randomly buy a new computer, or do they spend days, if not longer, researching all the options, whether they're going to build it themselves, whether they're going to buy, what aspects they're going to buy, is it going to be future upgradable, do they want dual-core processing or anything like that?
Like, do they, or do they just sort of, and they said, well, no, of course, they spend days and days figuring out what kind of hardware they want to buy.
So I said, do you think that when it comes to buying a house that they are able to do this kind of cost-benefit analysis?
It's like, well, yeah. So it's like they can do it, right?
Maybe you don't know how to get them to do it within your business environment, which is fine.
I mean, it's one of the things that I can bring as a value add that I know how to motivate people to do this.
But it's saying that they can't do it, I think might be a mistake.
And I think it was a good interview.
I think that we're going to go to the next level, as is already the second round.
The only thing that didn't go over so well is they said, well, when programmers don't hit their deadlines, how do you fix that?
When you have a culture where deadlines just go past and people say, well, we couldn't make it and blah, blah, blah.
How do you fix that culturally?
And I said, well, the first thing to recognize, because I got some resentment in this tone about the programmers, those bad programmers who aren't Meeting their deadlines.
And I said, well, the first thing to recognize that since you're the boss, the issue is yours, not the programmer's.
The issue is yours, not the programmers.
And he didn't like that at all because I guess he's used to sort of taking the money but not taking the responsibility, which is true of a lot of bosses.
And he seemed like a very nice guy.
And he definitely was coachable in this area.
So, you know, all kudos to him.
But he didn't really like that.
So if you're the leader, right, it's your issue.
So I said I would sit down and say, okay, well, we have this, you know, we have this culture of Not missing deadlines, and nobody's contributed to that more than I have, right?
Because I keep saying we have deadlines, and then when we miss them, there are no negative repercussions, right?
We train people how to teach us, right?
Everything that we do tells people whether our feelings need to be taken into account, whether our word is important.
We teach them whether our standards are important, whether our commitments are important.
And so we teach people whether we show up on their radar.
Are we a factor in their radar?
The IRS or Canada Revenue Service or the taxman is a factor in everyone's radar.
You don't get that letter and go, but you get a letter saying you might be a winner from publishing Clearinghouse or whatever, and you probably toss it.
It's not really a factor.
But because, you know, you've got those before a bunch of times and haven't won, right?
So they train you to throw their stuff out.
I mean, that's an inevitable thing, right?
Advertisers train you to switch channels.
They're trying to train you to buy their products, and of course, it works enough that people do it, right?
Spammers pay you to buy questionable medical medicines over the internet because...
Well, they actually train you to purchase anti-spamming products, but you sort of train everyone.
And so if the deadlines are being missed in a relatively small company, then it's definitely the manager's fault.
The manager has trained the programmers to say, and I would sort of say, well, do they miss their deadlines for their mortgages?
Well, no. Well, do they miss their deadlines for getting to a movie?
Well, no. Well, so they have the capability to hit deadlines, right?
They understand time and so on. It's just that those have positive or negative reinforcements that are strong enough for them to adapt to that situation.
Please bring on the determinist emails.
I can't wait! That is something that is the positive and negative reinforcements are just sort of natural.
That's why the free market works.
And when they're calibrated in a realistic and positive manner, which is sort of an effective company within the free market, you don't have to have a free market within your company.
Right? This is sort of the great mistake that people make.
They say, ooh, we're a private company in the free market, but they don't, and they prefer being in the free market rather than, say, the government or the military, but they don't then reproduce everything that makes the free market so great in their own company, which is not a... Not so good, right?
I mean, if the free market works, then it works everywhere.
And it even works with children, right?
I mean, we can talk about this another time, but the free market is the way to organize every single human relationship outside of those who have violated the principles of the free market.
And even those can be dealt with in a largely voluntaristic basis, like those who violated persons or property.
Those can be dealt with in a voluntaristic basis.
So... So I wanted to sort of just mention that briefly, because in sort of questioning the cause or the root of evil, or the spread of evil, why evil spreads, the big problem in the world, of course, is conformity.
And so the question is, well, why are people so conformist?
Why do people conform so much?
And there's lots of answers.
I mean, I've touched on one, which I'll touch on again, because it's so fundamental, it's worth keeping in mind.
But human beings will adapt to their environment in order to survive.
And we don't need multi-generational, random stabs at adapting in the way that nature in terms of DNA and biology does.
We can adapt very, very quickly to changing circumstances.
So when a country slides from freedom to totalitarianism, relatively, right, and sort of Hitler in Germany in 1933, everybody doesn't die, right?
They don't sort of wake up one day and kill themselves, right?
They just adapt. And so human beings are very adaptable, and that's why the environment that they're in is so important, right?
I mean, if you want tropical fish to live, it's generally important to put them in a tank with fairly warm water.
That would sort of be my, you know, don't throw some ice cubes in and think things are going to be fine.
And in order for human beings to flourish, we need to be in a situation of voluntarism and property rights and all the things that are universal and ethical and so on, and in a system of voluntarism, right?
Because people's behavior degrades when people they deal with can't choose whether they deal with them or not, right?
This is why I keep talking about parents.
I want to make parents better.
If you don't see your parents because your parents are doing things that make you feel bad, Then your parents, there's some chance that they will adapt to act in a better manner.
If there's any hope at all, and if there's not, then of course there was no point ever being around there to begin with.
And of course, even if they don't adapt at all, it's going to make you a better parent once you've established the principle that your kids are not chained to you for life.
A ridiculous kind of slavery, that is.
Once you've established that principle in your own heart, you will automatically treat your own children better.
Because your children are going to find out that you ditched your own parents.
I mean, children just know everything about a family.
They know more about families than parents do, because that's their whole world, right?
It's just one part of your world, but for your kids, it's everything, right?
So, children know everything, and they'll find it out, and if you ever start acting up or treating them badly, they'll remember that, and they'll just dump you the same way that you dumped your parents, and you get that unconsciously.
You get that unconsciously.
This is why integrity improves all of your relationships, because it leaves you open to being questioned, right?
So every time you put out a rule or act on a rule, you're then open to being questioned when you don't adhere to that rule.
I get lots of emails about...
Selling to the government and so on.
All perfectly valid questions, of course, because if I can't live by my philosophy, what on earth am I talking about these ideas with other people with?
So I get a little impatient with the people who say there's no such thing as property rights and won't give me their wallet, right?
Or won't give me $10,000 or won't give me a kidney because it's not living by that standard.
And of course, if people have... It's the same thing with the free will thing, as we've talked about.
If you're not going to live by it completely and totally, then...
You need to stop believing in it, right?
It just becomes this sort of silly nonsense that you should just be abandoned because...
Because if you're not going to live by it, then don't.
Only speak out the values to others and only recommend the values to others that you've playtested within your own life.
I think that's why I have a little bit of credibility in this area, because everything I talk about, I think, I mean, maybe some instances where I'm more theoretical, but everything I've talked about as a universal ethical principle, I've really acted on, like really acted on, like ditched my friends and family and All that kind of stuff and, you know, found out if it worked.
As far as introspection goes, I've done it.
As far as recommending therapy to other people, I've done it.
And as far as authority, recognizing the perils of authority, having been the CTO of a company I started up and We're 30-odd people, then I have had some experience with authority from that standpoint.
I haven't had any experience with children directly with my own children, or as Red Fox used to say, I got some kids of my own out there somewhere.
But I have spent a lot of time around children, taught in a daycare and have two nieces and so on.
I have some exposure to an alien life form to me at least.
So yeah, that's just sort of an important thing.
Just live by what you preach and then you have some, I think, legitimacy to say to other people, yeah, I've tried this and it works.
So we are very conformist and that's why it's very important that there not be a lot of authority, brutal authority around us, unchosen authority around us.
When we're children and we're growing up.
And to some degree, that's unavoidable because our parents are the primary unchosen authority.
But you really can survive your parents, even if they're bad, as long as you get out early.
Right? So, I mean, I got out at 15.
I got my mom out, rather, at 15.
And that helps an enormous amount.
That gave me a huge amount of freedom and relief.
And you can survive that.
I mean, you can't survive your bad parents if...
If you know them for like 50 years, right?
So if your parents have you when they're 30 and they live to be 80 and you've got 50 years exposure to them, that's a little heavy.
I mean, that's a little intense if your parents are negative.
50 years of wasting your time, your life, your energy, undermining your self-esteem, your capacity for happiness, all of the ethics that you could otherwise be practicing, all of the good relationships you could otherwise be enjoying.
Having all of that for 50 years rather than, say, the minimum 15 to 18 years is not really very productive.
And if you can milk your parents, great.
Like if they're bad to you but they'll pay for your university and then you don't really have to see them, fantastic, I would say.
Go for it, but that's a topic for another time.
But as soon as you can get out, then you get out, right?
I mean, you don't hang around jail after you get your release papers because your jailers gave you food and money.
It doesn't make any sense, right?
So you can't do much about that, because that's just the nature of biology.
You get born to a set of parents, you don't have much choice, and so on.
But in other areas, there's an enormous amount that can be done.
An enormous amount that can be done.
Primarily in school, of course.
The number of rules that I was subjected to when I was at school were completely insane.
And I didn't, I mean, boarding school obviously was a complete lunacy, but just as far as it went for even public school, just nuts.
I never liked math.
Never liked math. Never enjoyed it.
I do it now when I have to as part of my job, but I don't enjoy math.
Don't, don't, don't, don't enjoy math.
And yet I had to take math all the way for 13 years, hating it every step of the way, knowing it was never going to be part of what I did for a living.
Loved computers, couldn't take computers because there weren't any courses, although I did have one good math teacher who recognized my skill set and would let me escape to the computer lab rather than sit in a math class, which was great.
Loved English, loved writing, loved speaking, loved arguing, loved debating.
I was in the top ten in Canada when I was in university as debaters go, and I thoroughly enjoyed the travel and the debating.
Disliked a lot of the people in it because they were all heading into politics.
But it really was quite a wonderful thing.
And I knew this very early in my life.
I knew this from the age of seven or so.
I just didn't like math. Loved all the other stuff.
No need to be good at everything, right?
As an economist once put it, Michael Jordan doesn't do his own typing.
No need to be good at everything.
And there was absolutely no need for me to be good at a whole bunch of things and not good at one thing and then continue to have to take it.
I was never good at French, didn't like learning foreign languages, wasn't very good at it at all, and yet continued to have to do it for many, many years because, of course, particularly here in Canada, it's considered to be a very good thing because we have a bunch of surly Quebecois.
So, you really want to talk to them as much as possible and as easily as possible.
So, I had to do that.
I had to get up early.
I had to get up early.
I'm a night owl. Ever since I was a kid.
Ever since, I mean, my very first memories are pretty much associated with, certainly at boarding school by the time I was six, just being awake half the night and being trapped.
I had no choice about that.
I couldn't do anything about that.
I couldn't go to a school which was like 10 to 4.
I had to be there at 8.30.
I had to get up at 7.30 and it didn't matter when I went to sleep.
And there was no choice in any of that.
No choice in the pace of my topics.
Like, you have this sort of, quote, advanced section here.
It's nonsense. You're just there with the same dunderheads who don't really have any concept about anything important.
I mean, they'll learn, and they're smart, right?
Science was another thing.
I love science, but I'm not good at science, right?
I mean, that's not unusual.
I understand the theoretical underpinnings.
I love it from a philosophical standpoint.
But, of course, I'm not good at science as a scientist, right?
Because you need the math, for sure.
And you need a little bit more patience than I can muster for some of the more longer-term experimentation.
But love science.
Could I take a philosophy of science course?
No, of course not. It didn't exist.
Could I take any courses on philosophy or economics?
Nope. Love those things.
Didn't exist. And if they did exist, they would have all been about math and not about discussion, which is sort of where the real meat of philosophy and economics is.
So none of the stuff that I was good at, I knew that I was good at, I was able to...
To do. And all of the stuff that I wasn't good at, I was forced to do.
And that's just, I mean, that's just bad, right?
It's just the worst kind of possible education that you can, you can inflict upon a child.
And of course, I love to learn.
I mean, I love it when people give me corrections.
I love it when people give me new ideas.
I love to learn. But you have to just conform to everyone else.
You just have to conform to what everyone else tells you that you have to do.
And you have no negotiation capacity, no capacity for negotiation.
Everyone who's in authority has gone through some magical barrier, right?
This is why I remember thinking as a kid, and this is, I think, related to what we'll get to, which is Milgram's experiment and the problem of the spread of evil.
Because everybody's into this magical barrier, and this magical barrier is we now have authority, like we were children once too, and we now have authority.
And what does that mean?
It means that there's some magical place that you go through where you suddenly have all of this authority to tell children what to do or others what to do.
But you were once a child and you were the kid who was told what to do and wanted other things because, of course, if you wanted other things, there'd be no need for authority.
And that's the basic paradox, of course.
Authority exists because people don't want to do what authority wants them to do.
That's the basic fact of authority.
And authority around children is all the stronger the degree to which children do not want to do what authority wants them to do, those in authority.
Again, there's no detention where you get to eat chocolate and play video games.
Those are things that children want to do.
That's one of the many things that children want to do, including learn.
That's not allowed in public schools either.
What you're allowed to do is suck up facts and spew them out and thus destroy your capacity for integration.
But we'll get to that another time as well.
But authority exists with children, the degree to which children do not want to do what authority wants them to do.
So the more authority there is, the more that children don't do what those in authority want them to do.
That's sort of a basic fact.
Now, those in authority were once children, and since the authority stuff was set up prior to you entering the system, it had to be around where those people who were now adults were children.
So those people who were now adults and who were in authority were once children and were subjected and went through the same process that you're going through, right?
Otherwise, that authority wouldn't have existed.
And the process that they go through is, I don't want to do what authority tells me to do, and that's why you need all this authority, right?
And so that is a pretty bad situation.
And that's something that there's this magical barrier where you're a kid, you don't want to do what authority wants you to do, and then at some point there's this pop, and you suddenly become somebody who now wants children to do what authority wants them to do.
You've gone to the other side, you've crossed over to the dark side, and that was always baffling to me as a kid.
Because I could sort of always think of these people as children.
That was something that I always had an odd capacity to sort of picture.
And so when people had all these silly rules, I could only think of them as children and wonder what their experience was when they were children of these silly rules.
And silly slash brutal slash soul-destroying slash mind-numbing rules.
Well, what did you guys think of rules?
And if they all said, no, we loved all these rules, we agreed with all these rules, then it'd be like, well, who...
Who didn't agree?
Because these rules wouldn't exist if everyone agreed with them, right?
If everybody wanted to pay taxes, you wouldn't need a tax service.
You wouldn't need a gun in everyone's face if it was truly democratic, right?
The rules only exist because people, as Harry Brown used to say, rules only exist or laws only exist to force people to do what they don't want to do or prevent them from doing what they do want to do.
So, it's a little tricky to understand that, because all of these rules were in place, obviously, because children didn't want to do what those in authority wanted them to do.
And those people who are now the authority figures were children who didn't want to do what authority wanted them to do, and now are the authority telling everyone else what to do, so there's some magical barrier that you cross over where you become...
No longer a child who's being forced to do stuff, but an authority figure who is overjoyed to force children to do stuff, and who uses the argument for morality.
So the people who are in authority over children don't say, hell, I had to do it, I hated it, now you have to do it.
Because then kids would say, why?
That's not a very good reason.
That's a naked exercise of authority.
And that's not valid.
That's really not very valid at all.
So, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to take a short pause.
I'm going to just find out where my meeting is, and then we'll pick this up later.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
Oh my god, it is like 8,000 degrees in my car.
I accidentally left it while I forgot to close the flap for the inside flap for the sunroof.
And so now I can actually sort of glance down and watch my zipper melting.
So if I shriek a little bit, it'll be for, you know, different reasons than usual.
I mean, still the same amount of shrieking, but it'll be a slightly different cause.
And if you do hear a sort of hissing or sizzling noise, it's not rain, it's just my hands burning on the steering wheel, so it's really quite toasty in here.
It's kind of what I'm getting at.
So the infliction of authority preferences on children in the absence of any kind of feedback from them or any kind of individuation to them in terms of their preferences or habits or opinions or beliefs has pretty specific results, and those results have been kind of exposed in a series of worldwide reproducible experiments which were quite powerfully originally performed by James Milgram from some university In the early 1960s,
1961 I think it was, and Peter Gabriel has a great song on the album, is it So?
I think it's So, whereas Milgram's 37.
And the experiment sort of went something like this, and I'm sorry if I don't know the, we don't have all the details, but this is sort of from my memory of Psych 101, I don't know, a couple of hundred years ago.
The experiment went like this.
So, James Milgram invited a bunch of people to come in and said that they were going to participate in a learning experiment.
And in that learning experiment, they were to listen to people read from a book.
And every time people got the reading wrong, they would push a button to apply an electric shock.
And then every time...
If people continued to get things wrong, they would escalate that shock to what were eventually fatal doses.
And they could see, both see and hear, the people who were receiving these electrical shocks and could hear them screaming in agony and begging and not to be hurt or killed or whatever.
And so the real question was, if a man in a white coat who says he's going to take all responsibility for these actions Stands beside you and tells you to up the voltage and apply this dosage, how many people would end up going to the fatal voltage, which I think was around 400-450 volts?
And you would normally expect that very few people would end up, if they're told to, would end up pushing a lethal dose button rather than just saying, this is completely immoral, I'm not going to do this.
In other words, people would have their own individual conscience and not just do what they were told by people in authority.
This would be people who think that there's somehow something innately different between Germans and everyone else or Chinese or the Russians or Japanese in the sort of mid-century, mid-20th century period.
Now, the results, which have been in a fairly worldwide sense, have been pretty universally replicated, is that everyone goes past 300 volts, which is near-fatal or extremely damaging.
It can result in various neurological disorders.
Everyone sort of blows past that.
And, you know, some people are pretty uncomfortable and so on, but everybody blows right past that.
And 63-65% of people will administer the lethal electric shock.
And this is a fairly revealing thing, right?
Is this human nature that we simply defer to people in authority, or do we have to be trained?
To defer to people in authority.
Well, as I mentioned before, we know that human beings do not naturally defer to those in authority because we have to train them for 20 years to defer to people in authority.
It's not a natural thing.
If it was a natural, like puberty is a natural thing.
And so we don't need a whole lot of classes for 10 years on you really ought to do puberty.
Right? That doesn't really occur.
Because that's a natural process.
You don't need a whole lot of classes saying, you ought to achieve language, you ought to have a sex drive, you ought to enjoy sweets.
You don't really need classes in that, because those are innate to human nature.
You don't need a whole bunch of classes that say to people, if someone snatches your toy, you should try and hang on to it and complain.
You don't have to have a whole bunch of classes which says if you feel that something is unfair between yourself and your sibling, you ought to raise a stink about it, right?
But those things are an aid to human nature.
But you do need 20 years of propaganda in order to do, like a couple of things, right?
In order to put the group ahead of yourself, you need all this propaganda.
In order to obey arbitrary authority, you need a lot of propaganda.
I don't need propaganda to obey my doctor because my doctor is a legitimate expert, and so I don't fight him on everything he says.
But you do need a lot of propaganda to get people to obey authority that is simply telling them what to do without any reasons, or the reasons that they give are patently ridiculous.
So, after 20 years of this kind of propaganda, which is the complete opposite of human nature, because there's, I mean, I don't want to labor this point too much, but it's because there's intervention, we know it's not natural.
Because there's propaganda, we know it's not natural.
Right? You don't need propaganda to say, you know, pretty much, you should get a job, keep what you make, maybe buy a house, maybe have some kids, maybe get married.
You don't need propaganda for all this kind of stuff, because it's kind of what people want to do.
Now, you do need endless amounts of propaganda to turn people into communists, or to try to turn people into communists, or to turn them into Nazis, because, of course, the first thing that these dictatorships do is set up all this propaganda.
You do need propaganda to get people to sign up the military and go to war.
That's why you have all of this nonsense going on.
And you do need propaganda around the family, around the innate value of the family or the church.
You do need propaganda about religion, because it's not natural to people.
So whatever children have to be taught is not part of human nature.
And I don't mean like 2 plus 2 is 4.
That's just knowledge. I'm talking about ethics.
I'm talking about the argument for morality.
I'm talking about the basic conformity that is required.
Teaching someone 2 plus 2 is 4 is not demanding that they conform to your will, any more than me saying to you that the government is an agency of violence.
I'm not asking you to conform to my will.
I'm just stating it as a fact.
Einstein didn't dominate people with the theory of relativity.
He just said, this is my theory and here's the proof.
Believe it or don't. If you believe it, it's not me dominating you.
It's just you accepting reality, right?
We all need to submit to reality.
That's sort of what we're designed to do. We also know that human beings will conform to brutal authority.
We know that for a fact. There are a few minor exceptions, right?
But for the most part, violence works beautifully in terms of controlling human beings.
Very few people have any kind of problems with their violence as far as conforming with it.
Just about everybody does. They have problems with it, but they will conform.
So, when you start putting all of this kind of stuff together, you begin to get a fairly good picture of what human nature is by what is attempting to be driven out of it.
So individual conscience, absolutely part of human nature.
Universal arguments for morality, absolutely part of human nature because that's what's leveraged and that's what's undermined and that's what's attacked during all of this process.
And so the result is that you end up with people who have been so beaten up and bruised around and yelled at and demanded of conformity and punished and rewarded in these grudging kinds of I'll give you a B-plus kind of way from authority figures that when someone says, go kill this guy, They'll do it.
Now, they'll feel pain, right?
No, but very few, like 1% of the population said, I want to turn this up and kill them.
That was very... The number of sociopaths was very small.
But when you've had 20 years or 15 years of being trained to obey arbitrary authority on pain, and this starts with the parents, goes to the school, and culminates in the state, right?
I mean, that's sort of this unholy trinity of conformity, right?
Parents, school, state. Or parents, school...
Military. Or death, disapproval, death.
It's the death sandwich. If your parents don't want you anymore, you die as a child.
You starve to death, whatever. If you disagree with the teacher, then you get enormous amounts of disapproval and punishment, which will then lead to your parents not liking you, which will lead to death.
Or, if you don't pay your taxes or obey your government, then you will get shot.
The disapproval one is the intermediate step.
And this shows you just how dangerous training human beings into conformity is.
The fact that human beings all the world over are willing to kill other human beings when those in authority tell them to, everyone from a marine to the policeman over in Saudi Arabia, Everyone, there's no shortage of people who want to kill others or who are willing to kill other people for pay if someone in authority will tell them to.
And some of the people who were in Milgram's experiment even promised to sort of return the money.
I want to get paid for this experiment.
I'll do it, but I don't want to get paid anymore, right?
Some people will have, and very few people enjoyed.
They were all like, oh, I don't want to do this.
I feel bad. And even the people who went all the way through to the end, they feel the agony, right?
They feel the agony of basically destroying their own souls through conformity to authority.
It is the world, right?
They have no options. They have no conception of what exists, right?
To disobey authority is to die.
And since everyone says, don't worry, I'll take the moral responsibility for this, I am the decider in one form or another.
Then people will hand that over, but they won't feel happy about it.
Those people don't want to be part of the experiment.
And in another experiment I've mentioned on the podcast series before, Milgram divided college students into sort of, quote, jailers and, quote, prisoners.
And this was supposed to go on for a month or two, but he had to stop it after a couple of days because the prison guards, the sort of people who were assigned on one side of the fence as prison guards, were all torturing and beating and starting to rape the prisoners, and the prisoners were all sort of, they had to stop it very quickly because the power disparity caused almost immediate abuse.
And is that part of human nature?
Well, I doubt it. I doubt it very much because you have to teach people to be this cruel and you have to do it over the course of many, many, many years.
Because people adapt to states of freedom without propaganda.
When the Industrial Revolution came along, you didn't need all these propaganda camps to teach people that now they were free, they could go to the city.
You didn't need a whole bunch of adverts from the American government in the 19th century to get millions of people to emigrate there.
People in a state of freedom will gravitate towards self-advantage and peace and freedom and all that kind of stuff.
So in order to turn people into compromists...
You have to work pretty damn hard.
You have to blow their brains out the sides of their ears for dozens of years before beating them into submission.
To the point where two-thirds of them virtually will kill a guy because someone tells them to.
And just about everyone will administer near-lethal electrical shocks just because there's a guy in a white coat who will do it.
Now, they also found in subsequent refinements of this that Harvard labels would get more compliance and then Bob's University would get fewer people who would kill and so on.
But any philosophy which demands submission of the individual conscience is genocidal in practice.
And that's why I really have a problem with philosophers or teachers or thinkers or social workers or government workers or anyone who espouses a philosophy particularly towards children that is conform or die.
So all this sort of stuff comes down to conform or die.
It is the root cause of genocide, right, is these kinds of philosophies.
That's the root cause of genocide. This is why hundreds of millions of people get killed.
No question, no doubt, direct causality, you can see this very clearly.
But you are never allowed to make your own decisions, although you desperately want to.
As a child, you desperately want to make your own decisions, but you're never allowed to make your own decisions, and the reason for that, of course, is because...
If you get to make your own decisions, you don't get to be bullied by people in power, and you won't choose them to be in power over you.
The reason that people in power bully children and bully employees is because in a free, voluntaristic situation, those people would not be chosen.
So they have to eliminate choice because they wouldn't be the choice.
A guy who abuses his wife has to keep her down because if she ever figures out her own self-esteem, she sure as hell isn't going to choose him.
So all of this kind of stuff is very important to understand.
It is a power grab by people you would not choose in a state of freedom.
That's why they beat freedom out of you.
That's why they beat choice out of you.
That's why they beat yourself out of you.
Because you would never choose them to have authority over because they have no legitimate authority.
They're bullies. And they use false arguments for morality and guilt and manipulation and cruelty and viciousness and exclusion and violence to beat you down.
It's pure parasitism.
And it's stone evil.
And the people who do that to children...
Create the genocidal murderers that plague the world over.
This is the root of evil in this particular way of approaching it, sort of the third, and I think I'm going to stop here because I find this very difficult stuff to work with emotionally, so I'm going to take a break from it.
But the root cause of evil is any time you do not consult a child on his or her preferences.
It doesn't mean that you accede to them.
It means that you consult them. Anytime that you say to a child, you can't do this, I am the authority.
Anytime you put forward arbitrary authority towards a child, you are contributing to the mass murdering, genocidal crazies that litter the planet and destroy the world, right?
As far as parenting goes, this is crucial.
Homeschool your children. Put them in private school where their opinions are solicited.
Do whatever it takes to keep them out of the public schools, if you can, in any way, shape, or form.
And if you do end up having to have the public schools babysit them for whatever reason, deprogram them at night.
And it's going to be tough, and it's going to be painful.
But change is tough, and change is painful, right?
I mean, not a lot of us say, when we look back in the abolition movement of the 18th century and 19th century, not a lot of us look back and say, I mean, we all feel sympathy for our own parents if we end up having to ditch them because they're corrupt.
We all feel sympathy. Oh, but our parents, our parents.
But we don't look back in history and say, well, the slave owners were, what about their economic interests?
My God, it must have been tough for them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, of course, that's the same thing with change here, right?
So it's tough on us. It's tough on our kids.
It's tough on our parents. It's tough on our siblings.
Well, so what? It's just a natural fact of life.
There's not much you can do about it.
Other than not change at all, right?
Which is, if you've come this far, that's not something that you're willing to countenance.
So you don't want to be the deadweight ballast of human life and just bend around feeding everyone else's evil as well as corrupting your own children.
That's probably not what you're here for if you've come this far.
Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it.
Have a look up at Milgram's Experiment.
It really is quite a fascinating thing to see.
There were documentaries. They're a little hard to find now.
Donate, donate, donate! Come by the boards.
Sorry I haven't been on the boards the last couple of days.
I've been very busy. I will get back on them hopefully this afternoon or tonight.
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