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Aug. 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:24
375 Promises and Power

The ethics of compelled promises, and fantasy elf governments

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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It's quarter past eleven on Sunday, August the 20th, 2006.
Yes, from the slight echo, we're back in maid mode.
I'm going to be cleaning my bathrooms and doing a little podcasting on the side.
So it's always important to talk about capitalism while doing labor.
So I thought I would...
Try and bring it all together in one multimedia extravaganza.
So I hope you're doing well.
I just wanted to talk a little bit about our addiction to ethical concepts a little bit today.
But before that, I wanted to follow up on the video slash audio cast that I did on...
Loss, which was, I think, 374.
Sorry, deathbed, right?
The one that's about when your abusers die or are dying.
What's a way to look at that kind of situation?
I had a post back from the lady or gentleman who I originally did the podcast.
Four, who said, you know, thanks and all that, and said that he did go.
And the interesting, and I'm not trying to be Joe ethical nag here, because we all make these kinds of assumptions, and they may be valid assumptions.
I just wanted to sort of poke a couple of questions at one of the assumptions that this gentleman put forward that I thought was kind of interesting.
And I can certainly understand and sympathize with it, and he could be entirely correct.
About it, but I just wanted to ask a couple of questions as we just sort of pass this topic.
He said that he decided to go and see his grandfather, and one of the reasons that he did that was that he made a promise to his aunt, the one who was the real emotional bully, and he felt that it was the moral thing to do to honor his promise, to sort of honor his promise, to follow up on his promise, and so on.
Now, that's very interesting.
It's a very interesting perspective, and this is just sort of my thoughts on it.
I think there's some ways that you can begin to prove this kind of stuff, and I'll just touch on them briefly here.
But this question of promises and ethics with regards to basically non-reciprocity is a very, very interesting question.
Now... The way that I approach it, and not to say that this is any kind of universal right, this is just the way that I approach it.
I think it's worthy of a sort of slight discussion.
The way that I approach it is I would say to him that his promise to his aunt is not binding.
And the reason that I would say that is because His aunt is a historical authority figure, sort of somebody who has wielded significant power over him when he was younger, and is older in a culture which I'm sure he's embedded in where respect your elders is a very common Christian concept, one of the Ten Commandments, so I assume it's in his world fairly deeply, and this is what he was raised with.
So there's a susceptibility To, you know, based on sort of prior abuse.
And it's hardwired into his system.
And I know that I'm not sort of talking about this from a legal perspective or anything like that.
I'm just talking about it from a sort of personal ethical perspective.
That, you know, there are sort of three things in life or three approaches to...
Things in life in terms of their ethical content, right?
The first is that there are lots of decisions, like where are we going to have lunch, that don't have any particular moral content.
And then there are things which are wrong, but not evil, right?
So if I, I don't know, I lie to somebody, then, I mean, not about something that's going to cause them great harm or financial distress.
Let's just say somebody stops me And says, where's the local deli?
And I give them the wrong information because I'm feeling perverse, in a perverse mood that day or something.
Well, that's wrong, but it's not exactly evil in the way that we would call a war, murder, rape or so on.
Evil. And then there are the evil, the good versus evil actions, right?
Which is rape and murder and theft and so on.
And so, in this sort of particular context...
I would say that when you have this kind of historical stuff in your life, these kinds of historical authority figures in your life, I would say that as far as ethics go, you're going to have a susceptibility towards them.
And so here we're just talking about the second level, right?
Not the ones that are completely innocuous, but in terms of lying.
We have a problem if you sort of get phoned up by somebody and you're scared of them because of sort of historical hardwired kind of stuff, right?
I mean, you can be scared of someone without being a coward, right?
If they've had gross authority over you when you were a child, then you are no more a coward if you're scared of them than a soldier who comes back from a war...
Where, let's just say, he's been drafted to complete the childhood metaphor.
He comes back from a war and A bunch of fireworks go off outside his window and he begins to sweat and shake uncontrollably, right?
Because his body has been hardwired to associate that with imminent possible death.
So he's not a coward for his autonomous nervous system's response to light and explosions and so on.
He's in a war. It's not cowardly to be scared of this kind of stuff if you've been in a war.
I'm not even sure it's cowardly to be scared of it.
If you haven't been in a war, But it certainly isn't if you have been in a war, right?
So, if you've been in a situation where you've faced a lot of abuse from authority figures, Then your susceptibility to their emotional pressure, manipulations, bullying, and so on, is hardwired into you.
I mean, there's just not a lot you can do.
You can fight it, right?
But the thing is that you're not allowed to respond to these people in an assertive manner, because they just get enraged.
Of course, you know psychologically that...
You're not in that same situation of dependence and danger, but our autonomous nervous system works a little bit less, it's a little less time dependent, right, and circumstance dependent, because it has to act very quickly.
And so the same way that the soldier knows he's not at war anymore, it doesn't really matter, because his autonomous nervous system is going to inform him, with no shortage of adrenaline and other juicy hormonal interventions, that Explosions and sky colors equal danger, right? So even though he may have not been at war for months or years or even decades, when the fireworks go off outside his window, he's going to freak out.
And who can blame him, right?
I mean, that's exactly the kind of...
Sort of deep level body intervention that kept him alive during the war.
So you wouldn't want to not have those and you can't turn them off when you leave the war.
It's not something because they have to operate below the level of consciousness in an autonomous kind of way.
And so you really can't turn those things off any more than you can fall asleep and turn off your breathing.
It just doesn't work that way.
So when you do face these kinds of authority figures in your life as an adult, it's very important, I think, to be gentle with yourself and to respect that not only are you not allowed to have any rational discussions with them, but you're also not allowed to show or express any kind of fear around them,
right? This is the grim and awful paradox that is involved in the abuse of children, that They have to obey because they're scared, but they're not allowed to show that they're frightened of their caregivers because the caregiver's vanity is not for that.
Now, there may be certain sort of abusive, and I associate this with fathers perhaps wrongly, but there may be certain kind of abusive fathers out there who are like, you know, you better be scared of me kind of thing.
But they want you to be scared of them out of a certain kind of respect, not out of, I'm scared of you because you're an evil, dangerous sociopath who might injure me and I'm totally under your control.
That's not the kind of fear that they're looking for.
They're looking to put the fear of God into you or the fear of acting badly and so on, but not fear of them as a kind of predator, right?
If you say to your dad when you're a kid, Dad, I'm scared of you because I think that you're going to beat me up, and I'm scared that you're just this crazy guy who enjoys bullying children, well, you're not going to get a very positive response out of that.
So you're not allowed to experience, or certainly to show, and of course in the long run this translates into experience fear in the presence of So abusers or people who abused you when you were a child.
So when your aunt, and this gentleman I think was, let's just not pretend that he's even a woman, this gentleman is in his early 30s now, and he's still not allowed to show that he is afraid of his relatives, right?
I mean, that's not... That's the vanity that they can't handle, right?
So when his aunt calls him up, he's not in a morally neutral situation.
In fact, when it comes to authority figures and elders, he will never be in a morally neutral situation where he can just say, yeah, you know, I'm going to make a decision about whether to comply or not comply in this or that or the other situation.
He's now hardwired. That's exactly what people want to do when they abuse children.
That's sort of the point. They want to hardwire you into compliance and confusion and fear and worry and self-doubt.
They want you to freeze up, to become paralyzed in the face of a particular kind of decision matrix.
They don't want you to be actively responding to their aggressions with aggression.
They want you to become paralyzed, right?
So they put you in this impossible situation.
The fundamental impossible situation for abused children is you are scared, but you are not allowed to show fear.
And that's sort of the fundamental disconnect, as we've talked about before.
So, given all of this, when this gentleman's aunt calls up And says, you better come to your grandfather's potential deathbed, and this, that, and the other.
Of course, it turns out that the man has had no impaired functioning of any kind, and he's doing fine, and it's just a whole load of drama, as you would expect.
But can't always guarantee, of course.
I mean, eventually nature is going to fell him like a redwood.
But if your aunt calls you up and brings a promise out of you based on a historical level of fear and adrenaline running through your system based on all the prior abuse that you've experienced, I don't consider that promise to be morally binding.
I think, like, I mean, if I make a promise to Christina, to me, that's morally binding.
But that's not something I have to will.
I mean, I want to keep my promises to my wife.
It's not something that I have to sort of say, well, you know, I said I was going to clean the bathrooms, but damn it, I just don't want to.
I don't want to, you know, earn her trust and keep her respect and all that kind of stuff.
So... I'm just sort of saying that I'm not sure that willpower in the realm of morality is as big a deal as people say it is, but we could get into that another time.
That's a fairly explosive topic, and we're going to try and prove all of that right now.
Suffice to say that this gentleman was bullied and panicked in a way that is completely understandable and not at all ignoble.
Any more than the soldier who panics when he hears the rockets going off, the fireworks going off outside his window.
And she extracts a promise from him.
That promise being, yes, I will go and see my grandfather.
And then he says, well, I went to go and see my grandfather because I've made a promise.
And that promise is morally binding to me.
Well, I certainly understand the sentiments and certainly respect the sentiments.
But I would argue that those sentiments are incorrect.
And in fact, not only are they incorrect, I think that it may be morally questionable whether keeping a promise to a corrupt and bullying person, I would question and argue strongly that that's not a moral position to take.
It's not a moral position to take.
Right? Right? If you make a promise to a corrupt person, and they get you to make that promise by bullying you, and then you feel that that promise is morally binding...
Then it's hard to see exactly how you're sort of adding to the ethics and goodness of the world because all you're doing is you're encouraging people to wring promises out of others through bullying them, right?
I mean, the whole circumstance and environment that led up to this kind of bullying was quite complex and quite lengthy, right?
You need to bully this person as a child and then...
You have to continue to bully him as an adult and you have to keep putting him down.
There's a whole complicated series of things that go on which result in somebody feeling powerless and bullied by authority figures who are less than noble, let's say.
And if the promises which are then wrung out of you when you are in a situation where you are Being bullied just as you were when you were a child, and then those become morally binding to you, it's hard to see how that does anything other than encourage people to bully children and manipulate them as adults.
Right? It's like, no matter how you get somebody to promise you something, even if you're holding, I mean metaphorically, even if you're holding a gun to their head, that promise is still binding.
So how you go about it doesn't really matter, right?
And of course this comes back to the distinction which we talked about some months back between seduction and rape.
So to take a rather extreme and possibly hyperbolic example from history, in the early 1930s Hitler went through a process of, of course, Indoctrinating and drafting all of the German youth away from their homes and families and so on.
And in that process, he got them to take a vow of loyalty towards the Fuhrer.
This is fairly typical stuff within dictatorships.
And so they were all lined up, I'm sure in some big area like Nuremberg or whatever, and there's footage of this, I think, that Rosenfall shot.
And so he said to them, well, you have to swear this oath of allegiance to the Führer, and this is now morally binding, and blah, blah, blah.
And of course, everyone did, right?
right, and the reason that they did, fundamentally, I mean, they had lots of stories about the world spirit and the Hegelian loyalty towards, you know, the spirit that moves nations and the destiny of the race and so on, and that's all fine, but it was all nonsense, of course, because you had but it was all nonsense, of course, because you had a gun to your back, and if you didn't take the vow, then you would get thrown into a concentration camp or shot, and you, of course, may prefer to get shot rather than be thrown into a concentration camp.
So here's an example of-- A promise that was extracted under threat of force, which is not morally binding.
Now, of course, it's perfectly valid to say, and I understand it, to say that this gentleman's aunt was not threatening him with any kind of force, and I understand that, but given that the body memory of the threat of force is pretty lengthy and deep,
then... I think that we can understand that it's not exactly a feeling of a non-situation of force when you are once more bullied by somebody who abused you and bullied you as a child.
So, I think that a strong case could be made.
That a promise that is extracted through an emotional bullying based on a historical willingness, a historically displayed willingness to initiate the use of force against a helpless child, or certainly initiate intense and bullying kinds of disapproval, which, as I've argued before, is the same as initiating force, right?
Disapproval to a child is force, because a child can't survive on his own or her own and needs help.
The authority figures to provide shelter and food and so on, and so when the authority figures in a child's life threaten to withdraw approval in a fundamental way, not just like I don't like it when you hit your sister, but in a very fundamental way, then that is the equivalent of threatening the child with death, right? I mean, we've talked about that before.
So, I hope that this isn't too long a way of saying that I don't believe that Promises wrung from you in an extremity of emotional distress by people who bullied you when you were a child are morally binding.
Morality, for me, is something that must be reciprocal.
And so, this is the fundamental root of the non-aggression principle, which is that if people don't use force against you, you can't use force against them, but if they do use force against you, then you are perfectly justified in using force against them.
And that's something that we all generally understand and appreciate, and I think respect as a principle, and the same thing is true, of course, of things other than Violence, physical violence.
If you are defrauded by someone, Then you have the right, I believe, to use either force or fraud to get your money back.
So, that's something.
If you have to lie to someone to get them to restore your stolen property, I think that we're all fairly aware that that's not something we would condemn someone for.
In fact, we might applaud it as a clever stratagem or ploy to get back what was owed to them.
So, in that same manner, A promise which is wrung from you by historical abusers is not a promise that is morally binding, right?
Because there is an implicit contract, one of the few in life, there is an implicit contract when you have children, which is something like, I'm not going to bully and abuse my children.
Something that's pretty fundamental to the nature of parenting and ethics.
And given...
That your parents bullied, manipulated, or abused you in some manner, they certainly broke their promises to you.
And if you bring it up with them in the present, and they don't offer to pay for your therapy and go into therapy themselves and go to anger management to try and figure out what they did wrong, Then they're breaking their promise to you, which was a little more explicit, which is that we are the moral authorities, we're doing this for your own good, all of the arguments for morality that your parents used.
People who abuse you when you're a child have broken just about every promise that any civilized human being could make to a helpless, independent child.
So, I don't believe that you're in a situation where you are morally obligated to Keep your promises to people who don't keep their promises to you.
So, it's a fairly lengthy way, but I think a fairly important topic and a fairly lengthy way of saying that I don't believe that you should lose any sleep about promising corrupt or people who historically abuse you promising them X, Y, or Z, and then not delivering it, right? Absolutely. I could say, if my brother calls me up, Somebody who abused me quite a bit in the past called me up and wrung a promise out of me.
I would just look at it as a survival strategy to get him out of my face in the same way that, right, let's say that you're in Thailand and you don't live in Thailand.
Let's just say that you go visit Thailand and some mugger comes up and says, I want your money and the amount of money you have on you is not enough.
I have to run this quick errand.
So what I want you to do is to meet with the ATM in three days so that I can rob you some more.
Sorry, business takes me out of town or anything like that.
Well, I don't think that any of us would feel particularly bad about, A, making that promise to this criminal, and B, leaving the country without necessarily fulfilling our obligations in that promise.
For me, it would be like, well, you know, if my brother sort of startles me, and I experience a lot of fear when he calls, which sometimes happens, or my mother, or my father, and I then end up making a promise.
I would simply view that promise as something that was wrung out of me out of the extremity, not something that I'm morally committed to, and not something that I... Needs to view as the same kind of promise that I would make in a situation of voluntary cooperation, no history of abuse, no problems with my alarm bells going off at a very deep sort of neurological level.
I just view that as a strategy to get out of a difficult situation and feel that there's no There's no dishonor for me in not keeping promises to prior abusers.
I don't think there's any dishonor in making them to get them out of my face, but I certainly don't feel that I need to fulfill them, because there's no moral reciprocity in the relationships.
I think that's not something that we need to worry about, but I'm certainly willing to hear arguments to the contrary.
I just don't view morality as a free-floating absolute, but more of a reciprocal relationship.
So, that's sort of the one thing that I would like to say in this area.
And in a completely separate and unrelated area, I would like to make another comment, or another series of comments, about how we view the ethics of conceptual abstractions.
And so, of course, I have a free subscription to a magazine, a Canadian magazine called Maclean's, which is sort of our equivalent of Time magazine in the United States.
It's just sort of a weekly news magazine.
I use the word news in the sense of pure status propaganda, but let's just call it news for the moment.
And, of course, we have now suffered as a nation 27 flagged draped coffins returning from Afghanistan.
And this, of course, has ended up with the population, the general support for the war dropping from, I think, the mid-50s to the low-40s in terms of percentage points of approval.
And this, of course, has got the chattering classes all up in arms that people are not understanding the value of what Canada is trying to do Because they're selfish and stupid and, you know, the same people who vote really shouldn't have, we can't let them have their own opinions that war might be a waste and might be negative and that people may be dying and murdering for nothing.
We can't allow the people to have those opinions, the same people who vote, right?
So we have to control and manipulate those opinions out of the populations.
That's as natural to the ruling and chattering classes as breathing is to everybody else.
And of course, I'm not going to read the article or anything because we all know the same bullshit that's in all this sort of nonsense.
But basically it's about how, you know, lots of good is being done in Afghanistan and we overthrew the Taliban and schools are up and running.
Women have rights.
Everything is going hunky-dory.
As if England didn't lose thousands of troops in Afghanistan in the 1800s for exactly the same kind of nonsense and as if Russia didn't lose 25,000 troops in the 80s for exactly the same nonsense and as if Afghanistan were not a problem.
Because the British government, in one of its massively wonderful colonial divisions of countries, put a line right down the middle of Afghanistan and put everyone on opposite sides, who was sort of on the same side and put everyone on the same side who was actually on opposite sides.
The same thing was done with Iraq.
So the idea, of course, that Something like Afghanistan arises out of history just as this blindly evil country, not a country that's been exploited for hundreds of years by a variety of colonial powers.
And then the fact that when Russia went in, lots of people fled over to Pakistan.
And then when Russia withdrew, lots of people fled back after the entire social infrastructure had been destroyed.
And As if there's not this constant wave of state power rolling over Afghanistan that has put it to where it has ended up.
People with no sense of history can never understand these things.
You just have this mysterious cauldron of evil over there.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, with no sense of the history that brought it about.
So, of course, we don't paint people with the same brush that we would look at ourselves in.
We get to alienate them, look at them as something foreign and other, without sort of understanding that if we'd gone through the same kind of history, history of brutal state power being deployed in the region, we'd kind of end up the same.
You know, it's always funny to me that people think, like, it's amazing to me that people think that there's some massive difference, right?
There's tons of historical examples of the contrary.
You look at something like Japan.
Or Germany in the post-war period?
Well, Japan, when the emperor was, well, not quite overthrown, but when the existing government was changed and people went to a free market economy, well, by golly, the Japanese people, who were stone evil not months before, managed to make the transition just fine, thank you very much, when state power was withdrawn and when the guns were withdrawn from their foreheads.
They managed not to be so loyal towards this emperor or this government, And they manage to, once the guns are withdrawn, make the transition to a peaceful population.
Pretty easily. Because we all think that everybody's so loyal to all this nonsense when all it is is that they've got guns to their heads, right?
To me it's just kind of funny to think that we would make different decisions if we'd sort of gone through the same history, but that's perhaps a topic for another time.
So we're supposed to be doing all of these wonderful things in Afghanistan, making the world safe for democracy, protecting ourselves from insurgency and the war on terror, and all this kind of stuff.
That the only reason we would question this is because we have a failure of courage, or a failure of nerve, or we want to cut and run, or we're not willing to make the sacrifice to make the world safe for the poor Afghanis, and so on.
And it's really kind of a funny argument when you think about it.
And it's a very common argument, of course, I'm bringing this up in the context, or in relation to, The United States in Iraq and pretty much every other country that's ever invaded any other country for the supposed good of that country, and this is a very common thing.
You look at the Nazis, it was all for the good of the people that they invaded.
Same thing with the British and the French and the Portuguese and the Spaniards in civilizing the Native Americans and so on.
Funny post on the board today.
Illegal immigration or illegal aliens have always been a problem in America.
Just ask any Native American.
It's pretty funny. But to me it's just remarkable.
And I'll just sort of touch on this briefly because I think it's a very interesting topic.
But let me know what you think. So people actually have an experience with their government, right?
I mean we all have direct experience with their government.
And we have that in the form of You know, the kind of education that our children are receiving and in the post office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and the licensing and tax increases and all this kind of stuff, right?
And our fear of the IRS and our fear of, you know, you get a letter from the government, right?
I mean, you don't ever open it thinking, hey, yay, free money!
I guess if you're a farmer.
But anyway, we all have this sort of direct experience with the government and And know sort of what it's all about, right?
I mean, we're all frightened of the government and frightened of where it's taking us and frightened of, you know, the society as a whole and what the government is doing.
We're frightened of getting any kind of attention from the government and frightened of getting audited.
I mean, you get the idea. We're generally terrified of the government and irritated with the government, all these silly rules and all these silly regulations and all the hypocrisy, right?
So this is the government as we actually experience it.
And then we have this magical elf alternative reality government.
And that's the really fascinating government, to me at least.
So we have the government that we experience that we're frightened of.
Harms our interests, bullies us and treats us like retarded and evil children and so on, right?
And that's the government we experience that we actually have day-to-day existence with.
And then...
There's this magical elf alternative fantasy government where up is down, black is white, and the government that can't educate the children, and can't deliver the mail, and can't protect its citizens, and can't stay within its budget, and can't do anything right, suddenly has the magical power to transform other countries into virtuous, wonderful, democratic entities.
And that's really quite fascinating when you think about it, right?
So we all know what the government does at home, which is, you know, protect the corrupt and, you know, steal money from the virtuous and give it to the dependent and corrupt.
And, you know, I mean, we all know what the government does at home.
And that's our experience with the government.
We sort of know what that's all about.
But then we imagine that there's some sort of fantasy, alternative, platonic, ideal, magical government that's out there that can do all of these wonderful things.
So our direct experience of the government is that it is brutal and corrupt, serving its own self-interest, not interested in the welfare of its citizens and so on.
But then we imagine that there's some alternative government that's out there that exists in the land of words and intentions and professed virtue and so on, which doesn't have anything to do.
With the existing government. And we believe in that government.
Right? We believe in that government.
Because if the government is capable of, you know, bringing peace and civilization to Afghanistan and no other agency is capable of doing it.
I mean, it's like the argument, you know, says, well, if the government is capable of educating our children better than the free market ever could and no other...
Social agency could ever conceivably educate the children and make for a peaceful society and this and that and the other.
Well, I mean, who could ever disagree with that?
Why would there ever be any debate about it, right?
I mean, it's just kind of funny.
I mean, if you stack the deck so much and say, well, obviously education is important, right?
Yes, yes, education is important.
And only the government can provide education.
Without education, there's war.
Want and, you know, class warfare.
We descend into, you know, dogs eating cats and so on, right?
Then, no other social agency can provide this.
Only the government can. And the government provides it perfectly and beautifully compared to everyone else.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, of course, of course you could end up supporting the government, right?
But that's just like such an obvious argument that you know that it's just there's something wrong with it, right?
So, the real question then becomes...
Why do we believe in this other government?
This fantasy elf government where the intentions get realized, the goals get achieved, highways come in under budget, there's no corruption.
They actually do protect the citizens from drug use and danger and all that sort of stuff.
This fantasy government...
I think that the genesis of it is quite interesting.
I'm also going to put forward a theory here, which is related, of course, as we try and tie everything together back to the family.
So, for instance, we have our experience with our parents, our authority figures.
And it's a direct experience.
We know what they're all about. We've spent years or decades or more.
Maybe not hundreds of years.
We've spent years or decades. In the presence of our ever-loving parents, and we know what they're all about.
So, we know our parents do X, Y, and Z. We know their relationship to open-minded discussion, to intellectual integrity, to curiosity, to virtue, to love, to honor, to whatever, right?
We know all of that sort of stuff.
And that's our sort of direct experience of their behavior.
And yet, for just about everybody in the planet...
There's this alternative fantasy world wherein parents have, as I talked about in the deathbed podcast, where parents have this kind of magical value and ability to provide comfort and hold over our happiness,
i.e. that if we don't spend time with them or see them on their deathbed and sort of Magical beyond the grave ability to curse and blight our happiness from now until the end of our mortal days.
Well, to me that's all kind of related, right?
That there's our actual direct experience of people in the world.
What they actually do, not what they say, not what their intentions are.
What they actually do.
It's fascinating, right? It's the basis of the scientific method.
Forget about the theory. First of all, start to look at the facts.
And then build your theory from the facts.
You can't have a theory which is in direct contravention to all of the observed facts, right?
So, if your parents don't do stuff that makes you happy and you don't have a relationship with them that brings you joy and peace and comfort and so on, then assigning them value independent of their actions is completely irrational.
It's frankly medieval and the worst kind of religious scholasticism, right?
And of course, the... Relationship that people have with the world, and it's obviously amoral, biological basis, right?
I mean, that rubella can strike a virtuous child as well as an evil adult, and so on.
The world is obviously not run by a moral agency, and bad evil people prosper, and good people die like dogs, and so on.
And... People die in the World Trade Center and Dick Cheney gets a raise, right?
I mean, obviously not a world run by a moral agency, right?
So there's a direct experience of the ethics in the world that no angel swooped down to protect children being raped or women being murdered or honor killings or child abuse of every kind, people beating up on paraplegics and abusing old people in government run or even privately run Retirement homes that no angel swooped down to protect these people, that evil people prosper and good people die like dogs and so on, The innocent are not protected by any moral agency.
That's our direct experience with the world, right?
But then people, of course, love to come up with these ideas that there's some sort of magical alternative universe that you can focus your attention on, which directly contradicts the actual experience of the world that you live in.
So you can imagine that there's some ever-loving, all-knowing, all-good, all-powerful, interventionist type of deity Who is secretly controlling in...
There's virtue in something despite every appearance of evidence to the contrary, right?
But see, this is...
I mean, it's in more than these areas, right?
You get this stuff with lovers and husbands and boyfriends and so on, but we sort of just talk about the family to begin with, right?
That there's value in your family despite everything that they do.
That there's some magical, free-floating, conceptual cloud of value that attaches itself to people, I guess, like a remora to a shark jaw or a lamprey to your leg.
It sort of value attaches itself to people completely independent.
Of their actions, right?
And of course, if it is completely independent of their actions, then it can't be...
If value is just attached to your mom or your dad, then it's got nothing to do with morality, right?
If somebody is just better because they're six foot tall rather than five foot tall, then they can't claim that they're better in any kind of virtuous way, right?
The only thing they can claim is that they're taller, right?
But they can't say that height equals virtue because height is not chosen.
It's just inherited, right?
It's like saying, I'm a great entrepreneur because I'm a trustafarian who inherited mommy and daddy's estate.
Not really the same thing as earning it yourself.
Nothing wrong with it. It's their property.
They can do whatever they want with it.
You can't really say that you earned it if you inherited it, right?
So, of course, there's no value.
It's impossible to have value in the family because the moment that you assign value on an unchosen biological basis, it can't be valued because it's not earned, right?
So, that is a sort of fundamental problem with this whole sort of idea that people don't work scientifically.
They just say the government has value.
The government can create peace in Afghanistan, despite the fact that the government can't even deliver a letter on time.
Despite all of that, despite the fact that the government can't even run the road system in any kind of efficient, cost-effective, or pleasant kind of way, consumer-friendly kind of way, despite the fact that the government can't do something as simple as run a road system efficiently, despite the fact that every single government project From war to the big dig,
is wildly over budget, wildly underachieves relative to its stated objectives, is wildly lied about, and of course in Canada, right, we've sort of said, oh, this is going to be just like the Balkans, where no Canadians died, we're not going to be in combat.
And of course, that's completely incorrect.
That's just how you sell things to people, right?
The government always lies, as we've talked about it before, to get you to agree, and then after it's got your agreement, doesn't really care, right?
It's already got the guns to your head, and you've already gone through the whole debate phase, so you're totally out of control of the situation.
But to me, it's all really fascinating.
I mean, people just talk in this magical platonic fantasy land where intentions count, history doesn't matter, direct empirical experience doesn't matter, and yes, it's related to the government, and yes, it's related to religion, but most fundamentally, it's related to the family.
Of course, my whole Basic argument boils down to value must be earned.
Value must be earned. Money, respect, loyalty, trust, all of these sorts of things, they have to be earned, right?
You don't assign value to people just because they happen to be related to you.
I mean, you can, but it's completely illogical.
Because if they have value because they're related, it's not earned and doesn't mean anything.
You're just making something up.
And intentions don't count, words don't count, right?
What matters is, you know, It's a radical thought, but what matters is what actually happens in reality, not what people say, not what you would prefer, or anything like that.
So, to me, if you believe all of this kind of nonsense about governments can create peace in the Middle East, when, of course, the entire result of war in the Middle East, or discontent, or violence in the Middle East,
results entirely from the existence of governments, both historical and current, The idea that one mafia group will bring peace where another mafia group has failed is just such a fundamental Miss or ignoring of empirical reality, right?
People say the government's capable of doing all these great things and then you say, hey, you got a letter from the IRS. They're terrified, right?
It's really quite funny when you think about it, right?
The kids' education is always not positive and they have to use FedEx and so on because they can't get their letters delivered by the government.
In their actual day-to-day existence, they recognize the government can't educate the children, can't deliver the letters, can't run the roads, can't run the healthcare, can't run the military, can't run the farm system, can't do any of these kinds of things.
So they recognize that in their sort of day-to-day life.
But then they enter into this parallel universe of language and intention and spaced out kind of wishful thinking, wherein suddenly the government is transformed into this magical, wonderful, benevolent, godlike, powerful agency that can create all the virtue in the world when no other agency is capable of doing that.
The free market can't do it, and individuals can't do it, and charities can't do it, and so on.
And that's all kind of funny.
And the last thing that I'll say about this, of course, is that There's, along with this, there is this kind of pretend debate that goes on, right?
So, now, in Maclean's, they are trying to make, in this magazine, they're trying to make a case for the war in Iraq, right?
Now, that's kind of funny, right?
Canadians did not get to vote on the war in Iraq, and of course, even if Canadians did get to vote on the war in Iraq, let's say it was some referendum, well, they don't get to keep voting every day, right?
On the war with Iraq, right?
So it's like you get some product on TV, right?
Some sort of exercise equipment that says, you know, for 30 seconds a day, you can get the body of an Olympic gymnast, no matter what your age, right?
And you say, hell yeah, I want some of that.
And then it says, earn a money-back guarantee, right?
Because you don't really believe it, but you say, earn a money-back guarantee.
And so you buy this thing, and of course it doesn't do anything remotely close to what it promises or claims that it can do.
And then you're discontented and you want a refund, but then you find out, of course, that no, actually we really don't give refunds.
Now you're stuck with it, and by the way, we're going to continue to bill you with it three, four, five, six, seven times what we originally promised it was going to cost.
So this thing that you ordered that's supposed to make you wonderfully healthy and well-off and physically vital and so on, Ends up pulling your muscles, cutting your groin, giving you a headache, and putting you into an unconscious state briefly.
And it does great harm to your health rather than helping it.
The cost turns out to be five, six, seven, eight times.
What was anticipated and they get to keep billing you forever and you never get a chance to have a refund.
Well, we wouldn't necessarily say, even if we got the option to buy that thing to begin with, we wouldn't necessarily say that that was a freely chosen and beneficial interaction, right?
Because all these promises were made and were broken.
So even if Canadians did get to vote about the war in Afghanistan, it wouldn't really mean anything because, you know, we were just lied to about it at the beginning, right?
In the same way the Americans were lied to, American people were lied to about Iraq, right?
So... It was supposed to pay for itself.
It was supposed to be over in a couple of months.
Mission was accomplished. Everything was supposed to be fine.
The death count was supposed to be very low.
And so even if you had got to vote to begin with, which you didn't, it doesn't really matter because you don't get to keep voting on it.
So the idea of having a debate, it's kind of funny, right?
It's kind of funny. It's like a...
I kidnap your child and demand $100,000, and then keep demanding, hang on to your child, don't return it even if you pay the money, and then I continue to debate with you why it's a moral thing for you to give me the $100,000 a year that I ask while I refuse to relinquish your child even though I've promised to relinquish your child back to you.
The idea of having a debate in that kind of situation is kind of funny, right?
So let's say I'm the kidnapper, and I say, well, let's have a public debate about the virtue of paying me this money, and so on and so on, right?
It would be really insulting for you, right, for me to pretend to debate with you when I actually just kidnapped your daughter and keep taking money from you.
So for me, it's kind of funny.
The Canadian people didn't get to vote for the war.
And don't continue to get to vote for the war, that the money to pay for the war, which is actually going to endanger us rather than save us, of course, or make us safer, that the money that is going to pay for the war is taken from us by brute force, right?
Because it's very bad for there to be a dictatorship that doesn't respect the rights of the people, and so we must have our property stripped from us at the point of a gun in order to protect human rights.
This is kind of funny fundamentally, right?
And last but not least...
If we try and oppose the war in any meaningful context, then we will get thrown in jail.
In other words, I want to stop paying my taxes because I don't agree with this murdering of Afghanis.
And last but not least, they pretend to have a debate with us about how important and valuable it is.
It's just purely insulting.
I mean, it's insulting at one level and it's funny at another because it's so inevitable, right?
But the idea that there's any kind of debate going on is just kind of funny, right?
It's in the same way that your parents are going to say, well, we loved you and we took care of you and we want nothing but the best for you and this, that, and the other.
It's all just kind of funny.
It's all just kind of like a joke, right?
Because all of that stuff is way in the past, and there is no value in intentions.
There is no value in words.
There is only value in actions, which we all have enough information on to make basic decisions, and we just have to resist our own tendency to slide into this fantasy camp of some sort of alternative leprechaun existence where the things that are claimed by those in power can ever be achieved and recognize that There's no intention among any of these people.
I mean, there may be some vague intentions of freeing people in Afghanistan, but their real intention, of course, is to tax us and to frighten us, right?
So, just so you understand that, that's the same thing with your parents, right?
Your parents' sole intention is to keep you subjugated and to get you to give them resources whenever they want it, and never to question their morality.
That's the fundamental thing that your parents are trying to do, and they'll use just about any argument they can imagine or think of to achieve that, But it's nothing to do with your welfare.
So, of course, the first thing to do is always to withdraw your sanction.
Thank you so much for listening.
I got some donations yesterday.
I really appreciate it. I guess I will chat with you guys at 4 o'clock, and I will see you online.
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