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Aug. 14, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:43
369 Slaves, Statists And Children - Compliance Part 1

Ways to look at historical compliance

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. Let's staff. It is 8.50.
Yes, we've had some audio technical difficulties this morning, so we're going to issue the webcam, because the new webcam that I have only seems to accept as its input the...
The audio that comes from the webcam microphone, which as you can imagine, in a car traveling at fairly high speed, does not work as well as you would hope.
So instead, all we're going to do is we're going to...
And also, I can't even record using another program using another microphone.
It is only the one...
A kind of microphone that seems to take over the system, so we'll try and figure it out.
But if not, we shall simply go back to the old crappy webcam.
And for those of you who have not heard as yet, we have, or I guess I have, been putting together videos For Free Domain Radio.
And I guess the first one where I didn't use a webcam, so with a not-too-embarrassing level of video quality, is up now, videos.google.com.
You can just do a search for Free Domain.
You can also find them on the boards.
I've posted the location under General Messages.
And I don't know how often I'll get to do the videos because I'm...
Well, kind of busy, but I will certainly do my best to try and get them along because I think that they are a good way of communicating about ideas.
There's nothing kind of like eye contact.
You know, they say a good proportion of communication is nonverbal.
And so what I do use is a lot of hand signals, some smoke signals, and I occasionally will launch the odd carrier pigeon at the camera just to get the message across, which I think is productive.
Helpful and we'll keep all of the same people away from our crew.
Now, I'd like to talk this morning about normalization of moral absolutes or the denormalization of moral relativity.
You know, one of the things that comes up quite a bit in conversations about people who are trying to figure out the ethics of childhood, the ethics of their own particular childhood, one of the things that comes up quite a bit is confusion around parents and generosity and kindness and one of the things that comes up quite a bit is confusion around parents and generosity
And I wanted to talk a little bit about that because it's a tough topic to get a handle on psychologically.
At least it was for me, and it is for a number of people who are posting and emailing me.
And I'll talk this afternoon about a metaphor that I think would be helpful, or is helpful in this realm, but...
I would also like to talk about the general ideas around it this morning.
And the general ideas or the general issues that we have to deal with in this area are usually something along the lines of, yes, my parents did X, Y, and Z. That was bad for me.
Objectively, understandably, very few people, at least in any kind of enlightened or rational culture, are going to have any problem understanding that, say, hitting me with a belt was a bad thing to do.
But then, as one gentleman has put it, my parents, whenever I was sick, they would nurse me.
Whenever, at one point, I was being threatened to be held back in school, and they really went to the wall and fought for me to move ahead, and this and that and the other.
And I understand all of that.
I really do. I really understand all of that, and I sympathize with it.
It's complicated, difficult stuff to work out.
But what I would say is that...
As I've mentioned before, there's nobody who's all bad.
We've talked about Stalin's love for his daughter and Hitler's love for dogs and so on.
There's nobody who's all bad.
And oftentimes, narcissistic personalities will have an extraordinary amount of affection For those who are completely dependent.
So for a lot of people, people who are narcissistic and difficult with anybody who can challenge them, when they're around species, I guess you could say, that don't challenge them, but are sort of affectionate in a dependent,
a totally dependent and non-threatening kind of way, Then those narcissistic personalities will often have an extraordinary degree of affection for those people.
So the one thing that we know that is a cliché, and it's a cliché to some degree because there's truth in it, that a woman who is not able to sustain a relationship with an adult male I like cats, but they're a little bit standoffish for me.
But that has been sort of universally the case that you'll see that, and that's because you have a personality that can't manage or handle The ins and outs, complexities, negotiations, and so on of an adult relationship.
And this is not to say that the woman has to handle it.
Maybe there's just no quality men in her vicinity.
So I'm not saying it's always, always an indication of a dysfunction in the personality to not have an adult relationship.
It's an indication of dysfunctionality to not be capable of having an adult relationship and instead getting all of your affection from cats, right?
As Janine Garofalo, a fine comedian, says in The Truth About Cats and Dogs, something like that, it's okay to love your pets.
Just don't love your pets.
And there's that sort of aspect.
You also see this We're good to go.
And this was many years ago.
And I remember feeling that really there was no way to compete.
You can't compete with Jesus in terms of loving, caring, concern, intimacy, empathy, or anything like that.
You simply can't. Jesus, since he doesn't exist, was whoever this woman wanted him to be in the moment.
And would perfectly wrap around her sort of, quote, needs, because...
She could just turn him into...
And he had no needs in return other than a sort of blind kind of affection or obedience or obsequence or something like that.
And so there really was no way to compete.
I was a man with needs and desires and complexities, and there were times when she was going to have to wrap around what I wanted the same way, and that sounds a little bit more coarse than I intended, rather than the other way around.
And so I became sort of clear that it was not going to be a relationship that was going to be very satisfying for me, for sure, and probably was going to be nothing but chafing for her, because she had this other kind of relationship with God and Jesus, that I simply couldn't...
I mean, there was just no way that that was going to work out.
Everything that I needed, that wasn't part of her narcissism.
And of course, you can never talk about her narcissism because it was projected in the form of a god, right?
So criticizing her narcissism would be criticizing god and vice versa.
So it's a perfectly well-formed defense structure.
And it would be...
I would be viewed with a kind of hatred for...
For asking her or suggesting that it would be beneficial for her to withdraw her projections and to deal with her own emotional energies internally rather than projecting substantial parts of her personality out into the world in the form of a deity.
That just didn't seem like that was going to work out well, so unfortunately we never did get to the dating phase, although she was a very interesting and intelligent woman.
For sure, that wasn't just going to work out.
And of course, I was at least aware enough of psychological truth at that time in my life to realize that you're just not going to have good sex with a Christian.
I hate to say it, but it just is the case.
If you want really bad sex, intermittent sex, sex laced with emotional eruptions of the not-so-pleasant kind, then just start having sex with a Christian.
You can have lots of good sex with a relatist, and apparently, though I don't know for sure, I've heard rumors that communists are like rabbits, but I guess it's that whole free love, no property thing, but Christians for sure, and I would imagine this is the case for other cultures that are very religious as well, you don't get good sex with the Christian, and that seems like a pretty substantial thing to give up in your life.
It's one of the, you know, you have to pay taxes, but you get to have sex.
It's one of the consolations So, this question around parents and treating you well, treating you badly, they did good things, they did bad things, is a complicated one.
It's experiential sense, right?
So the fact that you experienced your parents doing good things and then bad things, this is all complicated from an experiential sense.
I do totally understand that, and I have a metaphor, I think, this afternoon, which I mentioned on the broadcast yesterday, which unfortunately my computer failed to record.
It said that it was recording it, but there were no files when all was said and done, which was a shame.
It was a good show. If anyone out there has recorded it, I know a couple of people used to, just let me know and I'll be happy to take over the file, fix it up and post it.
But I'll chat more about a metaphor that I will be clarifying, but in a general sense, in a general sense...
The way that it's useful to approach how you feel about your parents is...
I know that this sounds odd, but it really I think is the case.
The way to solve it is to end up with the situation where you're looking at your parents and their behavior towards you in a historical context.
And I've used it before.
I'll use it again, I'm sure, because it's just something that we all agree on, so it's an easier thing.
If you just look at the institution of slavery that was being ended, and let's talk about the ending of it in the British Empire throughout the 18th century.
We can understand that if you're an abolitionist and you're in England and there's a bunch of people, your parents own slaves and other people own slaves, lots of people you know own slaves, and you're trying to convince them that it's a bad thing, and they say, well, yeah, but, you know, when the slaves get sick, we send them to the doctor.
When the slaves are going to have children, we make sure they have the best midwife.
We teach them to read and write.
And in time...
We would be more than happy if there was not slavery in the future.
It's just that right now it's too early, right?
I mean, we just pulled them like 20 years ago.
We pulled them from the dark jungles of the dark continent in Africa.
And now they're just starting to get the hang of Christian civilization.
And it's way too soon, maybe in a generation or two.
We'd be more than happy. I mean, the whole point of this is to proselytize and to convert and to save their souls.
And we have to look upon them as kind of like children, these slaves.
They're not capable of running their own lives.
They're not capable... I mean, they're capable sort of in an abstract sense in the future.
It's not that they're physically incapable.
Like somebody who's retarded.
It's just that you don't pull someone from the jungles of prehistoric ignorance and set them up to be an honest merchant in London town within a decade or so.
It takes at least 20 years to civilize a child, for God's sakes.
How on earth is it going to take less?
And that's with constant and initial exposure to Christian Western civilization.
How could we conceivably do this with a savage and ignorant man pulled from the depths of blind and stultified intellectual history?
So it's all well and good to say that they should be free, which is the same thing as saying, well, it's all well and good to say that homeless people should have a roof over their heads, but it seems unlikely that That you are going to be the person to go to the homeless person and say, Dude, come on over!
I've got a couch.
I'll put you up. We'll give you some nice breakfast.
I'll set you on your feet.
We'll get you a job and turn your life around and blah, blah, blah.
And the reason, my friend, I'm just sort of playing the anti-abolitionist part, the reason that you don't want to do this to a homeless person is because the benefits are going to be a long time long.
In the future. And they're not really going to accrue to you other than the not inconsequential benefit of feeling like you really helped turn someone's life around and so and so and so.
So that's very nice.
That's a good thing. And it's not an inconsequential or immaterial benefit.
I mean, that's a real pleasure and it's a genuine pleasure.
But it certainly is a pleasure that is going to be a long time in the coming.
The material benefits aren't going to accrue to you, but to somebody else.
It's going to cost you a fair amount of material resources.
And all of that is certainly doable, and that's part of what people feel in terms of charity.
But more significantly, this person could be a psycho killer, could be a kleptomaniac, could be a rapist, could be...
I mean, we don't know why they're homeless, right?
They could be homeless because...
They're evil, right?
And their conscience can't take what it is that they've done and part of their self-punishment, part of their self-flagellation that the conscience is inflicting on them is a kind of a wretched existence that is the cost or the price of their crime.
And if they confessed and if they took their punishment and made absolution and then they might have a better life, but giving them a couch to sleep on isn't going to cure them of the evils of their history.
It's possible That this person is like that.
It's also possible, and in fact can be quite likely, that this person has a significant mental illness, which institutionalization cannot help, right?
You can't keep someone locked up forever.
It's not a crime to sleep out of doors, no matter what the temperature.
And so you giving them a couch isn't going to solve their problem.
It could also be, and it's not unlikely, that they're a drug addict, in which case they're just going to grab whatever they can from your house, leave in the middle of the night, go sell it on the street, and get stoned or get high.
So, it also could be the case, of course, that they are a prostitute.
He or she is a prostitute, in which case the pimp might find out where they are and come and liberate them in very unpleasant ways.
There's lots of costs, right?
And yes, it could be that there's somebody who just needs a couch, a couple of weeks, some setting up, some time, signing up for welfare or whatever, or getting to charities, getting cleaned up, getting a job.
It could be that they just need a month or two of that and then they'll be fine.
But there's not long odds on that, I guess you could say.
So in the same way that it's nice in the abstract way to say, well, yes, we should give these homeless people a couch in our living room to turn their life around, there are pretty significant risks associated with it, and the rewards are somewhat abstract and accrue to others.
And in the same way, slavery...
The slave population is composed of people who have only recently been liberated from the most abysmal, titanic kind of ignorance and brutality.
These people were cannibals.
Constant warfare.
No family, no god, really.
I mean, these primitive shamanistic kinds of gods, but no sort of healthy Christian religion, no healthy Christian ethics.
No sense of property rights, no sense of government, no sense of duty, obligation.
You know, they were living like two-year-old children in adult bodies.
And so to say that we should just turn these people loose is exactly analogous to saying that we should grab a homeless person from the street and set them up on the couch in our house.
Yes, it's certainly possible that a couple of the homeless people might actually benefit from that and turn their lives around.
But the majority, if not the vast majority, will end up in a much worse situation See, it's all about timing.
It's all about timing. If you're kind to the homeless person, and the homeless person ends up stealing from you, then the homeless person now has not only the misery of his homelessness, but now also has the moral and emotional misery That is a result of having stolen from somebody who was attempting to do him a kindness or her a kindness.
And that's a pretty significant issue.
That's a pretty significant problem to deal with.
You're adding fuel to the fire, so to speak.
So the homeless person is miserable.
They're homeless. There's lots of danger.
They obviously left a home life that was pretty wretched.
And now, on top of that, because you've acted too soon in terms of your charity, they now have the guilt of having stolen from a good person who's trying to help them.
Well, that's not good, right?
You actually have made their life worse.
What's going to happen to the next person who tries to help them?
Well, their guilt is going to rise up, there's going to be problems, and now you've given them an additional sense of guilt and self-hatred because you tried to act too soon before they had had some rehabilitation, you tried to free them up, and now you've just made the situation worse.
You've given them a crime in addition to their mere homelessness.
So, this is obviously a pretty bad and wretched situation.
And that's because you've acted too soon to free people who can't handle it.
And in the same way, yeah, there are a couple of people, and you probably know a couple of them, who are slaves who are perfectly capable, for whatever reason, of operating in a state of freedom to the benefit of themselves and society.
And it's a real desperate shame that these people are caught up in the net of slavery, along with all the other people who couldn't conceivably handle a free situation.
And in the same way that there are homeless people who absolutely would benefit from having your couch as a place to sleep and would benefit from having a couple of weeks to turn their life around and would in fact turn their life around.
And it's a desperate shame that these people get caught up in the net with all the other people who are risky and dangerous and scary to have them come and live on your couch.
But the fact of the matter is that there are people who are desperate and dangerous and scary, and who have not been rehabilitated to the point where they can handle freedom, and a lot of slaves, not because they're bad people or they're ignorant through their own stupidity, but simply because of where they came from, yanked from the darkest corners of the African jungle.
And now dumped in Londonderry or Manchester, and there's just no way that these people can just be turned free right now.
It would be criminal irresponsibility to turn them free.
But I'm sure you get the idea of the general argument.
And so here we have a situation where restraints in discipline and violence...
I mean, let's not forget that the basis of slavery was state violence.
Theoretically, the abolitionists could have bought the slaves and freed them when that became legally possible, which was a couple of decades before they were freed legally, sort of quote, freed quote legally.
But... They could have done that, but they recognized that with the state supporting slavery, then the cost of owning a slave, right?
I mean, slavery, as I've talked about before, was a state-sponsored phenomenon, a state-supported phenomenon, because the cost of retrieving a slave who ran away was not borne by the slave owner, but rather borne by the taxpayer, and in a sick kind of way by the slave himself, right? The slave was underpaid relative to his labor, and the profits were kept by the slave owner and paid in taxes.
And so, in a sick way, the taxpayer was paying for his own enslavement in the same way that the soldier through reduced salary pays for his own enslavement as well.
But... That is the case where the slave owners are taking care of the slaves.
If they get sick, they make them healthy, they teach them to read, they're trying to educate them, they're doing everything and being nice to them, and when they have to beat them, it's with regret, and this hurts me more than it hurts you, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then, of course, when the slaves are free, the slave owners are pretty pleasant.
They're pretty pleasant. When the slaves become free, which is analogous to a child achieving physical maturity and having independence from the parents, when a slave becomes free, then the slave owners are going to be a whole lot nicer, right?
I mean, when you have the entire weight of the state behind you to control and brutalize your slaves, and you can have them tossed in jail, you can have them flogged at a moment's notice, and they have no legal recourse because they're property, like a mule, and you can flog it.
You're going to be pretty brutal.
But then, when the slaves have been freed by the edict of the state, and you're kind of staring up the nose of this strapping black fellow who's got a good 40 pounds of muscle on your lardy white slave-owning ass because he's been doing physical labor and you've been sitting around counting your profits, You're not going to beat him then yourself, are you?
Once he's got the right of self-defense, once he's got the right of recourse to the law, and once he's protected by the same laws that used to humiliate him, then are you really going to take up the whip and start to beat this newly freed slave?
Well, of course not, because he's going to beat the shit out of you, and you might even get killed, and the state won't prosecute him because now it's in self-defense.
So this is how it's important to understand your parents.
Right? I mean, childhood is slavery.
At the moment, childhood is slavery.
And there are certain ethics to say that it's not, and that beating children is bad, and so on.
But it doesn't really matter if there's no dispute resolution organizations that protect children, if there's no organizations or efforts within society to really protect children.
And, of course, fundamentally, children are enabling and supporting and sanctioning The evils of their parents by continuing to see them and spend time, energy and resources with them as they get older.
This is something I've sort of been saying since the beginning, that for society to change, it's going to be far easier for you to stop seeing your parents if they were corrupt and brutal, or manipulative or destructive, or if you just don't enjoy their company.
It's far easier for you to stop seeing them.
That's a personal revolution than it is to overthrow the state, which we ain't going to do.
We ain't going to be able to do it.
They've got nuclear weapons.
So that's not going to happen.
But if you really want to overthrow the state, what you need to do is to get rid of the myth of parenting, the myth of the power and the universal ethics of having been a parent.
And, of course, these same arguments that we would not accept from people who are statists, we simply have a tendency to accept with our parents, which is not the case.
You should not accept arguments in one sphere that you reject and oppose or don't accept in another sphere.
You should stop arguing about these things until you work it out, in my view.
So a minarchist would say, or a statist would say, well, sure, but the government does give us roads, and the government does give us health care, and the government does give us education, and the government does give us pensions and welfare, and it's trying to do its best, and this and that and the other.
So how can you say it's an evil entity?
Well, because arguments from effect are immaterial, and intentions don't count.
Yeah, everybody in the welfare system might be absolutely and totally concerned with helping the poor.
For sure. But it doesn't really matter.
Because the effect of welfare is the destruction of the poor.
Everybody who's a teacher, I'm not saying they are, but it might be totally conceivable that he, she, they are totally concerned with educating children in the public system.
But it doesn't matter. The intentions don't count.
Because the results are that children's minds get destroyed in the state system.
Just as capital gets destroyed in a state-planned economy.
Just as healthcare gets destroyed in a state.
Because violence produces horror.
Violence produces destruction.
You can't get a good effect from a bad cause.
And the state and slavery and all of these sorts of things are based on The initiation of the use of force, compulsion, and over-control.
And fundamentally it's based on violence.
I mean, I've often thought, though I don't think it will ever be possible for biological reasons, but I've often thought that the way to solve the problem of parental power is to have a free market in families.
I mean, I know it's a crazy idea.
It's just a mind game.
But you should be able to get to choose your parents, and they should make a bid for you, and you should get to change who your parents are at any moment.
That would be a very interesting phenomenon, right?
Because it's the same thing that what makes insurance companies better, and I'm not talking about insurance companies in the present because they're all state-regulated and state-controlled, what makes insurance companies better overall is the competition in insurance.
If you get to choose your insurance company and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And yes, I know people will say, well, then children will just choose the most...
The parents who give them the least discipline and then everything will be miserable and so on.
Of course, that's not giving children a lot of credit.
Children are not retarded adults.
Children are incredibly wise and smart if you listen to them and you give them.
And children see and notice everything.
And they know what's good for them as well.
And a child who overeats is overeating because of depression and self-hatred.
It's not overeating because children have no control over their appetites.
That's nonsense. You're blaming the child for what's been inflicted by the parents, which is very, very common in child psychology.
And so from my standpoint, I would say that if you reject the arguments that, well, the state gives you education and the state does all these good things and this and that and the other, and if you would reject the argument that slavery may be a good idea in the abstract,
but it's not really a good idea now because the slaves don't have the capacity to manage themselves, and also that the slave owners take care of the cuts and bruises of the slaves, and they do this, that, and the other to make sure that the slaves are well fed and well taken and the other to make sure that the slaves are well fed and well taken care of and exercised and so on, right, in the same way that a farmer does
If you reject all of those arguments, then the only reason that you would reject all of those arguments is not from the argument from effect, and not only these things, not from intentions.
You would reject these arguments about the benevolence of the modern state and the justification for slavery, You would reject them based on one fundamental premise, which is that violence is bad.
It doesn't matter if you take care of your slaves and pay for their medical bills.
It doesn't matter if the state is really, really interested in educating you.
Because if the state is really interested in educating you, if the government was really interested in educating children, then the government would set up a lab and have a private system running simultaneous with a public system and figure out which one produced the best results and then liberate education accordingly.
And of course, the government will never do that because the government knows exactly the results that will come out of such a competition.
And the same thing is true, of course, of slavery, right?
That you would free a number of slaves and see how they did.
If the people who made this argument were really interested in finding out whether it was true or not and not just using it as a justification for greed and brutality, Then they would set up a situation with a free number of slaves and not free enough to see how they did and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they'd find out very quickly that the slaves would be just fine and there would not be a tidal wave of violence and destruction within society.
Well, if you reject those arguments, you can only reject those arguments based on the fact that You're not asking the children being educated and you're not asking the slaves what they want.
And fundamentally, it's because the whole system rests on violence.
Public education rests on the violence of taxation and slavery rests on the violence of imprisoning slaves who run away.
The violence of enforcing property rights on living, breathing human beings is a fundamentally evil proposition.
So if you reject the arguments for the state, and if you reject the arguments for slavery, based on the fact that intentions don't count, nice gestures don't count, none of that counts, what counts is whether or not violence is at the root of the interaction, then that's where you stand relative to your parents.
And again, we're talking about physical violence, obviously sexual abuse is a different situation.
We don't say to the rapist who says, oh, I just wanted to seduce her.
Well, that's okay. It's sad that it ended up as rape, but we understand that you wanted to seduce her, and therefore your intentions count rather than your actions.
Well, we would never say that. We would say, get thee to a jail, oh, evil, evil rapist.
And so that would be the case with sexual abuse.
With emotional abuse, well, emotional abuse always rests on the threat of physical abuse.
Always, always rests on the threat of physical abuse, and for children, the withdrawal of parental affection is a threat of physical abuse, right?
If I throw somebody in my basement and lock the door and just decide not to feed him, do I not get charged with assault?
Well, of course I do, even though I haven't lifted a finger to harm the gentleman.
I still am going to be charged abuse because I'm not feeding that person.
And for children, the withdrawal of parental affection fundamentally and biologically equates to the destruction of the body, to death, because children simply can't survive without a bond with the parents.
You can't go out and till your own wheat and wait for it to grow when you're three or four or five years old, or even ten.
So, if you reject those other two arguments, then you really are going to have a problem sustaining the argument, well, but my parents were nice sometimes.
My parents did this or that for me.
It's not going to work, right?
Logically, it doesn't make any sense.
If there was violence or the constant threat of the withdrawal of affection...
Then you have exactly the same situation as the state and its slavery.
And if you can see that clearly, then you've got a long way forward to bringing down the state in the long run because you've gotten rid of evil contradictions within yourself.
Sorry, contradictions about evil within yourself that render you a lot more clear.
And I'll put a metaphor forward this afternoon that hopefully will...
Clinch the case, at least from my perspective.
Thank you so much for listening. I got one donation today of $1, and it's been a couple of days since I've had donations.
I would really appreciate it if you would throw a couple of shekels my way.
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