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Aug. 15, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:43
370 Slaves, Statists And Children - Compliance Part 2

A metaphor for your childhood...

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Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well.
This is take two of the Statists, Slaves, and Compliance system.
And what happened yesterday was quite interesting.
I guess running this webcam, plus the screen didn't seem to turn off for some reason, maybe because the webcam was in preview mode.
And including that and everything else that the notebook does, I guess while it's churning away in the background, caused the notebook battery to have a shorter lifespan than a croissant in Pavarotti's hand.
And so it went into hibernation mode at about 26 minutes.
And then when it came out of hibernation mode, Windows told me that the screen resolution had changed and I'd lost my video capture.
And with the video capture, Comes, of course, the audio capture, which is, you know, kind of the point.
So, what I did was, in the continuing money sync that is Free Domain Radio, I went out and bought a power converter for the car.
To plug it into the cigarette lighter so that I can run the notebook with the webcam and the audio recording without worrying about the power running down.
So, I almost forgot my coffee, which actually would be very close to watching me with the power running down.
But that won't happen because we have the jubba jubba jubba juice.
So... To continue, I guess it was yesterday morning's chat about the question of compliance and how we feel about our compliance with our families when we were growing up, I'd like to layer in another metaphor to this situation.
Can you see that?
Is there light? No light.
Light. And the other metaphor that I would like to layer in is related to two sort of historical situations which, while sounding extreme, I think are somewhat analogous.
And I hope that you will forgive the metaphors and their extremity, but I think that they do help make the point.
The first historical situation is...
The people who were compliant with the Nazis in the concentration camps in the Second World War, sort of, I guess the concentration camps really started up shortly before the war, but Trablanca and Auschwitz and Dachau and places like that, that there was a certain amount of compliance that went on among the prisoners, collaboration with the Nazi guards, and we'll get into that in a moment.
The second somewhat parallel one, which we probably know a little bit less around, unless you've gone through the Solzhenitsyn phase like I have, is the Zeks.
Sometimes they were called those who would collaborate with the guards in the Russian gulag system, particularly under Stalin, though, of course, it was set up under Lenin right away.
It takes that person two seconds to make the left-hand turn, but I'm not going to use my horn.
It's a great temptation. You know, we jump on that thing like a fat kid on a smarty.
But it's nice to let people have a little bit of time.
And heaven knows I've sometimes been checking the screen and missed a left-hand turn signal and been startled by the wah!
And not felt too kind to my fellow man.
Anyway, so...
I'll go over just a sort of brief description of these collaborationists.
We could also talk about those in Vichy France and Holland and other places that were occupied by the Germans in World War II and talk about what happened to them and their communities after they were discovered to be collaborators or I guess they were known to be collaborators but were protected by the Germans and then when the Allies liberated the countries Then they were set upon with great violence by their own communities.
So, in the German concentration camp system, of course, there were the Jews, as we all know, and there were political prisoners, there were atheists, there were libertarians, free marketers.
Hitler's greatest enemy was classical liberalism, and he mentioned that several times.
And there were gypsies, mentally defective people, sterile people, lots of, you know, basically anybody who didn't fit into that very narrow blueprint of the master race.
Of course, blonde and blue-eyed wasn't exactly like Hitler fit the mold either, but there's probably some very good psychological reasons for that, which are probably not worth exploring.
And... Then when you were in those concentration camps, certain people or certain groups of people were given kind of like a choice.
And the kind of like a choice that they were given was to become, if they were men, to become sort of laborers for the concentration camp.
Right? So they were given the choice to do the grunt work that the concentration camp guards didn't want to do.
You know what's funny? Just by the by...
Hey, you get to see a tangent live, baby!
When I was watching the first video, I was really quite stunned at how many and how quickly the cars were that passed me, which I thought was quite fascinating.
I'm not a big speeder, not because I'm particularly afraid of getting tickets.
I've never got a speeding ticket, even though I've been pulled over a couple of times.
I crank up the accent and berate the colonists.
I find that really helps.
I just find that it's kind of annoying for me to speed because you can't just sort of pick a lane, pick a speed, hit cruise control and relax.
You've always got to be looking for the next entry and there's been a lot of studies that have shown that it doesn't really matter if you jump.
If you jump lanes, then you're just going to end up getting there about the same time as somebody who picks a lane, picks a speed, and sticks with it.
It's just a hell of a lot more stressful, a lot more prone to accidents, and frankly, a lot harder on your car to be accelerating, decelerating, to go high speeds consumes more gas, you've got to brake more.
So, you know, it just seemed like a sort of pointless thing to do, but it's kind of funny.
It's like watching somebody go on impulse power with the warp flotilla race all around them.
So... That's kind of funny.
Anyway, so back to the concentration camps.
In these concentration camps, you had these people who were offered these jobs, and some of the jobs were vile and unpleasant, of course.
Almost all the jobs were vile, but even more so than we would imagine.
So some of the jobs involved in the German concentration camps after they piled the corpses up or after they killed everyone in the supposed shower stalls with Zyklon B, They had to go through, you had the job,
you could have the job if you were a prisoner, of going through and pulling out the gold teeth from the bodies, so that you could also have the job of cutting the hair or shaving the hair off for use as a war material or a war resource.
And you could also have the job of...
Getting the, you would check the anal cavities of the prisoners for diamonds or gold or whatever they, maybe not gold, but whatever it is they were smuggling, jewelry and so on.
You would check that.
You know, the imagination staggers at how unpleasant all of this could become.
One example, of course, is that you could also be given the job to cull the human skin that some of the really sadistic German gods preferred to have as their lampshades.
Some of them like to read through the light of human skin.
There's just an enormous amount of wretched moral horror that went on in these concentration camps, as there is when the state grows proportional to the growth of the state.
And so, when you're in those situations, you get off the train at one of the concentration camps, or in Russia, sometimes you built your own concentration camp, and you would then possibly,
and I don't know the mechanics by which this occurred, I can certainly imagine the mechanics by which this occurred for women, Which was that, you know, those who were attractive would be offered the role of a slave concubine by the prison guards, and I would guess not even offered the role, but that role would simply be taken and probably interned, so just another one of the enjoyable aspects of state power.
And... Somehow, though, you would be singled out.
Maybe you were younger, maybe you were prettier, and if you were a woman or if you were a man, then a gay guard would look upon you as his potential, sort of, quote, girlfriend.
Or maybe you looked stronger than most, and so on.
But you were given this choice, or you were offered, not even so much offered, it was like, do this, or we'll shoot you right where you stand, to start collaborating with the concentration camp guards.
And... You would do this work, this horrifying work for them, and what would happen to these people was very horrible psychologically, and it happens to a lot of us who've gone through bad childhoods.
What would happen to them is that they would lose after the war.
They would generally be incredibly and roundly and, I think, horribly unjustly rejected by their own communities.
So the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in the concentration camps were...
Just often just completely disowned, right?
People who said, well, you should have just chosen death.
You should have just chosen this honorable death rather than what it was that you did do, which was, you know, participate in the slaughter of thousands of your fellow Judaic brethren and so on.
And... So they kind of ended up with no community and they also lost or had a kind of short circuit in their mental processing regarding the moral crimes of the Nazis because they felt that they had participated in those moral crimes.
Now this is very interesting psychologically and well worth spending a few minutes on in my view because it has something to do with the degree to which some of us felt complicit with our own families as we talked about yesterday morning.
And it really is quite fascinating when you think about the parallels.
And we'll get into those in just a moment.
Not that we participated in murder or things like that, but I'll get a little bit more.
I'll work the metaphor out a little bit more in a minute or two.
And they had trouble condemning the Nazis as pure evil.
Because they themselves had participated, sort of quote, participated in these crimes.
And this question of participation in these kinds of crimes is really, really quite complex.
And it was recognized in the Nuremberg trials in the post-war period that the rank-and-file soldiers were not charged with the crimes.
The rank-and-file soldiers were not charged with the crimes.
They were following orders. It was generally the civilian leaders who fell under the greatest punishment.
because it was sort of recognized that they had a choice that the average guard sitting there freezing his ass off at Dachau did not have the same level of choice Wittgenstein had some choices a guy watching his toes fall off in the Russian winter in 1942 during the invasion did not really have that much of a choice And so the concentration camp guards were usually,
of course, people who had no education, because people who were educated would tend to be aimed at the officer ranks, people who had no education, who had no real possibilities in life, who were taken from their farm or their factory job, and usually it was the farm, Who were drafted,
who had been subjected to a dozen years of state propaganda and had been raised in this poisonously pedagogical style of German raising or German child raising, which I believe is still continuing to this day.
And they were basically told, you are now going to go and run this concentration camp or we are going to shoot you.
So you run the concentration camp, or you're in the concentration camp, or more likely you're just taken out back and shot.
And so you have a strong positive incentive for these concentration camp guards, which is to say that they've been taught since day one that the state is everything and they are nothing, and they serve the state and they have no questions and morality is defined by the state, and so on and so on and so on.
And so if they don't do it, even if they face no punishment, they would consider themselves to be selfish and bad.
And this is, you know, the argument for morality trumps just about every other thing in the world.
But also, just to sweeten the pot a little, if they don't obey, then they are shot and their bodies are dumped for the dogs to eat.
So, it's sort of hard to say that the guards are pure...
Causeless evil and it's hard for these people who went through as collaborationists to get fundamentally enraged at the guards partly because they now understand the guards motivation a little bit more which is that it's better to live than to die and even if you have to do evil to live I would not condemn that moral choice There are certain moral choices that I would not make.
I would not shoot Christina in order to live, because I would not find life to be worth living without her, or at least with that on my mind.
But I would not condemn anybody who made the opposite choice.
When you've got a gun to your head, as I've talked about before, morality is unimportant.
It's irrelevant. It's irrelevant.
You're in a state of nature.
It's kill or be killed. You're out of the civilized world and into the jungle.
And morality is a species of nutrition and exercise advice.
Right? You don't say to somebody who's having a heart attack, you should change your diet and get some exercise, because they're actually having a heart attack.
So what you want to do is get them to the hospital right away to try and get them stabilized.
You don't lecture them about their lifestyle.
But if somebody has a history of heart disease and they're 25, then you can lecture them about their lifestyle.
And the whole point is to prevent that situation where they get a heart attack.
And the whole point of ethics is to prevent the situations where you end up with Sophie's choice or with the choice to die or do evil.
Because what would morality conceivably mean in that kind of situation?
It wouldn't mean anything.
What's the right thing to do?
Well, if the right thing to do is not use violence, then you're still less wrong than the person who's initiating it.
So if there is a moral condemnation to occur in those situations, then it would definitely be the person who's got the gun to your head and not your moral choices.
You'd be way down on the chain.
Because across the world, there are tons and tons and tons and millions and millions and millions of people, hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people, who are perfectly willing to put a gun to other people's head to force them to do what they want, and mostly they're called parents.
So, these people had a great deal of difficulty condemning the Nazi regime, the Nazi philosophy, drawing a clear moral demarcation, because they felt that they had been complicit.
And through that complicity, they gained a kind of unholy empathy with the gods.
And the reason that I call it an unholy empathy is not because the gods themselves were perfectly guilty.
And for me, the only people who are perfectly guilty are the intellectuals.
The intellectuals who come up with these kinds of systems, who have the intelligence and the ability and the language skills to introspect and to deal with their own histories, to deal with their own childhoods, as John Stuart Mill failed to do, as I talked about somewhat recently, and as just about every other philosopher, including Ayn Rand, failed to do, to deal with their own histories, to deal with their own pasts, and to stop projecting their own trauma on the world as philosophical systems.
So it's very clear that somebody who grows up with a brutal and domineering, and in Germany often Lutheran father, most of the philosophers had Lutheran fathers in Germany, somebody who grows up with that kind of father, It's obvious and clear that when they talk about the need to obey the Führer that they're not talking about anyone other than their own father and they're projecting,
they're trying to normalize their own childhood experience by Projecting it as a universal ideal and thus inflicting it on other people.
And that's part of the rage we talked about that abused people have towards those who never ended up trying to help them, or at least who never ended up trying to denormalize their experience.
And my whole struggle here as a communicator about family history, my whole struggle, if you wanted to sum it up in a nutshell, is to get you to stop normalizing your histories, is to get you to stop thinking that what you went through was not so bad, To get you to stop thinking that it could have been worse.
To get you to stop thinking that your parents did the best they could.
Because we need to denormalize our experiences relative to reality, not relative to social norms.
Normalizing your experience relative to social norms Would mean that you would never be able to get rid of slavery.
You would never be able to get rid of the aristocracy.
You would never be able to separate the church and state.
You need to normalize your experience relative to philosophy, logic, truth, reality, empiricism, the scientific method, and all of that stuff.
Normalizing your experience relative to the truth...
Sorry, normalizing the truth relative to your own experience leads you to believe that the world is flat and the sun and the moon are the same size and they both spin around the earth.
When of course only one of those is true.
So the only people who are truly guilty for me are the philosophers.
And they're more corrupt than evil.
Putting out bad ideas is not evil.
But the bad ideas inflicted upon children endlessly by the state and by parents result in titanic evil.
And in that situation it's very hard to come up with very clear moral judgments.
It's not impossible because everybody still has choices.
The God could choose to run away and to become a refugee in America, and that would get him out, and you could find some way to do that.
So there's still a choice.
We still have a nature, no matter how long we are propagandized.
We still have a human nature that appeals to us, which we can listen to or not.
But this problem of complicity is a significant one, and it was a significant one for the people who went through as collaborationists, either in the Russian or the Soviet or, for that matter, the Pol Potian or the Cambodian, whatever.
I mean, whatever concentration camps, there are always people who are going to collaborate.
Now, to finish this metaphor off in a way that I hope will connect with you about your own history, let's picture the following.
You, as a Jewish child of four or five years old, you could be a gypsy child if you prefer.
It doesn't really matter. Or you could be the child of one of us.
One of the free marketeers, the rationalists.
We went straight to the camps as well.
We were the people who go to the camps no matter what.
So if you're a communist, you will not send another communist, even if he's an atheist, to the camps.
It'll be harder to do it, or you won't have the same impulse to do it.
So the religious person goes to the camp in the communist system, and the atheist does not.
And we go to the camps in every system, because our philosophy is opposed to the camps fundamentally.
But let's say that you arrive at the concentration camp at four or five years old, and you're a pleasant-looking child with a nice smile, and people seem to like you, and the gods are taking a shine to you, and this, that, and the other.
And you are given these jobs to do, right?
They decide to divert you from the Zyklon B ovens, and they give you these jobs.
And they separate you from your family, saying you can be reunited with them later, don't worry.
And they ask you to polish their shoes and they'll give you pieces of chocolate and they'll put you up in a bunk, you know, separate from the other prisoners and you become sort of like their pretty little pet as a child.
And they're pleasant to you and they're nice to you in their certain way.
There is always this vaguely implicit threat and something very wrong going on in the environment as a whole.
But you kind of like the chocolate, and when you sing for them and dance for them, they laugh, and they tousle your head, and they tell you what a good boy you are, and you end up kind of going along, and you kind of like them, right?
You kind of like them, these German gods.
They're pleasant to you.
They're away from their own families.
Maybe they have children, and they miss their children, so they play with you, and maybe they're nice.
Now, yes, they're off doing all these terrible things, but And maybe you get beaten once in a while when you get sort of apri or whatever.
But it's a relatively tolerable existence.
You're doing the jobs they ask you to do.
You're complying with them.
You have some fun times with them.
They give you some chocolate. When you skin your knee, they might even kiss you on the forehead and put a band-aid or a sticky plaster on your knee.
They take care of you.
They smuggle you some extra rations.
They, you know, whatever. They have their picture taken with you.
And so, when this child...
Let's just imagine, if you don't mind, we have to sort of switch to Russia for this one, because those gulags went on for 70 years.
But imagine then that you are now sort of 15, and you've lived this life in this camp.
You kind of got into it, and you were kind of friendly with the gods, and you did their bidding and so on.
But of course, you never knew any other life.
This was... I mean, this was life to you.
You can scarcely remember anything before, other than a few images maybe.
You can scarcely remember anything that occurred before you went to this concentration camp.
And so, let's just say that you're a 15-year-old and you're liberated from the camp.
And almost unwillingly, you find out what happened in the camp.
And I mean, you knew some of it kind of deep down and so on.
Well, what is your emotional reaction going to be?
Now, let's flip personas, if you don't mind, and let's say that you and I are sitting down with this 15-year-old child of the concentration camp or child of the Gulag who collaborated with the guards and had some fun and had some affection for them and so on.
Are we going to say that this child was evil for collaborating?
Well, of course not. Child was just doing what it had to do to survive, with almost no points of reference other than a very dim and subterranean kind of conscience that simply said, something very wrong is going on here, but it is my entire world, and it's common throughout the world.
The reason that I didn't say born into a concentration camp is because we do have some evidence within our own childhoods in the real world.
Those of us who grew up in the West and had bad childhoods, we do have some evidence of other types of life.
And so I didn't want to...
That's what I wanted to do with you have some memories beforehand and so on.
Because this child's not going to have access to media or see other kinds of families or whatever.
This is the entire world. They can't leave the concentration camp.
Do we say to the child, you are wrong for collaborating?
No, of course not. The child had no choice.
If the child had said, I don't feel like doing this anymore, I'm going to leave this concentration camp and go find my family, well, he would have found out the nature of his captors or his friends, so to speak, very quickly.
They would have just shot him if he tried to escape.
And they would have done so with regret, and they would have had to find a new pet, but that would have been the situation.
So we're not going to condemn this child.
We are going to be perfectly sympathetic, I believe, to this child and the experiences that this child has gone through in this concentration camp.
We're going to be quite kind, I think, about this child and what has occurred for this child.
We're going to be sympathetic and understanding.
And we're going to be able to say to this child, what was done to you was evil.
What was done to you was evil.
Not because you collaborated.
And it's not you that was evil, and what you did to others in this situation was not evil.
But what was done to you was evil because you weren't given a choice otherwise.
Nobody said to you, hey, you can either stay at this camp and sing and dance for these blonde sociopaths, Or, you can leave this camp and go and we'll pay for you to have a fun ride on a ship over to America where you can rejoin your family and go back to school and start living a normal life and have friends, have sleepovers, have playdates and whatever, go to Chuck E. Cheese and all these kinds of things.
Where I don't have tangents, I like to have historical inaccuracies.
You know, just to keep the quality of the show consistent.
So... The child is not given that choice to leave.
Now when you're not given the choice to leave, whatever you do when you stay in a violent or degrading environment, if you're not given the choice to leave, then whatever you do to stay is immaterial.
It's completely and totally immaterial.
It doesn't matter one little bit what you choose to do when you're not allowed to leave.
You can march into the chambers with your head held high thinking that you're striking a blow for truth and justice in the Jewish way or you can collaborate or you can kinda collaborate and kinda not collaborate or you can say this or you can say that.
It doesn't really matter.
You're way beyond anything to do with ethics at this point.
Ethics is about choice, consequence, circumstance, understanding, prevention.
Ethics is not about cure.
Ethics is not about cure.
Ethics is about prevention. And so, as I'm sure you're aware, my goal in this podcast is to try and help prevent what will inevitably occur without some fairly strenuous moral and philosophical efforts from people who have the capacity for this kind of conversation.
What is going to occur for us as a culture is totalitarianism after the state runs out of money.
I'm trying to avoid that, and that is going to require A fairly strenuous conversation, like the ones that we've been having for the past couple of months.
And that's my goal, so there's something around prevention.
But once, hey, I mean, if the totalitarianism comes, well, first of all, I'll be dead, so it won't really matter.
I'll be on the list, I'm sure.
But if I'm not dead, I'm sure as heck going to stop podcasting.
And then it's every man for himself, because then we're in a situation where the truth equals death.
Honesty and freedom equals death, and that's not a choice I'm going to make.
I would rather live. A diminished life, you know, they say I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees.
Well, that's a nice stirring sentiment, and certain sociopaths or people without any empathy for themselves will do that.
But certainly the vast majority of people will obey totalitarian rulers rather than strike out for freedom, because you can't win against a state.
I mean, the state has the military, and you could in the Middle Ages maybe, but you certainly can't now.
So, from that standpoint, I don't condemn the child.
I understand and fully sympathize with the child's Conflicted nature regarding complicity, and this, of course, is not about the child in the concentration camp, but about you and your own history with your parents, and possibly with your siblings.
I don't blame the child for what the child did.
I think that the real essential growth of the child is to denormalize the whole damn experience, and to forget about the little details of, oh, I was nice, and they had a good day, and my parents, they fought to keep me from going back to grade, and I was sick, they tended me, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Forget about all those little details and look at the big picture that you were in a situation of coercion and subjugation.
You did not have a choice.
You did not choose your parents or your family any more than this child chose to end up in a concentration camp.
And so it's just important for me to look at the big picture and to understand the big picture.
And not to fuss too much about the details.
I understand the details and so on.
I had good times with my brother from time to time.
He's very funny and could really make me laugh.
But it doesn't really matter because it's the big picture that counts.
It's the big picture that counts.
If you beat your wife up, buying her flowers doesn't make up for it.
So, if you can understand that metaphor of the child in the concentration camp, I think that you can understand your own emotional process or history or experience in this kind of situation.
Or in the kind of situation that you had with your family.
And so I would really say that to worry overly about...
Moments of pleasure, moments of fun, times when your family was good to you, ways in which they took care of you.
Just think back to this kid in the concentration camp.
Yeah, there's a certain amount of affection for him from the concentration camp guards.
I understand that. There's a certain amount of affection.
They like him. They find him funny and cute and endearing and adorable.
And he makes up for a lot of lack of...
He makes up for a lot of lack of affection and family in their life and so on.
So yeah, there's affection, but by God, that affection evaporates if you disobey.
I mean, that's just a very important thing to understand, right?
Tony Soprano can be affectionate as well, but you just don't want to cross him, right?
So I would say just look at the big picture.
You didn't choose it. And if somebody had given you the choice when you were a kid, right?
If you got to see your life with this family and somebody said, would you like to roll the dice and maybe choose another family?
Or I'll give you like 50 choices of families to choose and opportunities with which you can, you know, birth yourself into.
You know, you would take, you would roll the dice.
You'd say, well, I don't know what I want for sure exactly, but I know that I don't want that, right?
I mean, you eat a bitter berry in the woods.
It's like, well, I'm not sure exactly what I want to eat, but I know that I don't want to eat that, right?
And so I would just say that to think about this kid in the concentration camp because I think it's a very useful and powerful metaphor for you to be able to understand your own history and for you to be able to have empathy towards the very difficult choices that you had to make when you were a kid and not to feel that any kind of immense rebellion was in the works.
It wasn't going to happen because you were a child and completely depended on your parents.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
Thank you so much for listening.
I got two donations yesterday.
I really appreciate that, to keep the continuing expenses of this whole thing going.
I absolutely appreciate that.
And I look forward to talking to you soon.
On Google Video, you can search for Freedom Main Radio.
We're coming along fairly well there, I think.
So I hope that you're enjoying these new video podcasts, and I will talk to you soon.
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