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Sept. 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:04
436 But the government and the church are so nice!
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well at stuff. It is five o'clock, and it's time for me to enter the backwater sledge of the public roads before getting to the hyperspace of the private roads.
I hope you're having a...
It's a little bit after the fact.
I hope that on September the 28th, 2006, you had an absolutely fabulous day.
And I'm going to talk...
Now, sort of a vague continuation of what we were talking about this morning with regards to these questions that come in from Christians.
And... The one thing that I find quite interesting in the realm of debating with people who are religious, who are statists, classists, Marxists, whoever believe in these irrational absolutes.
This is what helps you understand just how rough the roads are here.
Good God, it's like driving in Buenos Aires over a windstorm in 1922.
I know that for a fact.
And... The one thing that is constantly talked about in the modern world is the idea that, well, you see, the church isn't that bad.
What are you so mad at the church for?
Governments, they're not that bad.
There's no need to get so upset with governments and with churches.
They are not bad institutions.
Yes, okay, sure, the church went a little bit crazy there for a while, you know, sort of at the Close of the Roman Empire through to, say, the 18th century.
Yeah, okay, we had about 1,200-1,400 years of destruction, murder, mayhem, crucifixion, burning, witch-killing, and, you know, the crushing of all forms of human progress for 1,200-1,400 years.
Yeah, things got a little bit out of hand there, but now, see, the church is...
It's not so bad. It makes sales and does charity and, you know, it hands out sleeping bags to the homeless and it's right there with Katrina victims.
See, it's been taped.
It's been reformed.
It's nice. It's good. And this argument I get quite a bit from people.
Wherein it's so, you know, things got a little haywire for about a millennia, millennia and a half, but now things are a heck of a lot better.
And so, also, there are good states, you see, and there are bad states, right?
This is... This is the division that people have.
I mean, very few people who are sane, even by modern standards, would say, hey, you know what's really great?
It's Nazism.
You know, that was a real cream rising to the top, glorious sunburst of human possibility, and I just wish we could get that back again so that we could all be happy, dappy, hunky-dory.
People will say, yes, okay, Stalin's Russia, Lenin's Russia, Brezhnev's Russia, Khrushchev's Russia, bad, double plus on good, everything that came before in Russia, bad, everything under Putin and his mafia henchmen now, bad, most of the, pretty much all of the governments in Africa, bad, The Middle Eastern government's bad.
The Eastern European government's pretty bad.
But in some of the countries, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Western Europe, England, it's nice.
It's a pretty nice system.
There is a bad religion, right?
There's bad religion.
Very few people would say, gee, you know what I miss is a good old-fashioned witch-burning.
I just, you know, I have these sort of Satan marshmallows sitting there with nothing to roast them on, and I really do miss that old torture them till they confess kind of thing and burn them at the stake or drown them in water or whatever.
So people do recognize that religions and governments can do some fairly hairy bad things.
And they also recognize, I think, if they're even remotely honest, certainly more on the political side than on the religious side, they'll certainly say, you know, gee, I guess if I look across the world even now, forget about history, look across the world even now, You know, we have...
90% of the governments are like filthy, evil, corrupt, murderous, disgusting, torture, brutal regimes.
Barely... They're human pens, right?
They're pens for human beings.
I mean, if you kept an animal the way that Kim Jong-il keeps people in North Korea, you would be thrown in jail.
I mean, they treat them worse than you would treat a hated pet and not face legal repercussions.
So, just so people understand this, right, sort of my perspective on this and why it is scarcely credit to the state or religion that certain aspects of them have been tamed for a small or short amount of time, the The perspective that I bring to the question,
I mean, you can bring your own perspective or whatever you want to do, of course, but this is, you know, for want of time to fill up my commute, this is my perspective on how we might be able, and I feel that I might get a little testy about this one, so you might want to do the old volume normalizing before I begin shrinking into your inner brain and scaring your inner child.
Anyway. So, when I look at the span of history, I look at, you know, the dawn of time, you know, 50,000 years ago, whatever, 100,000 years ago, the dawn of the species, and if you feel that's too far, and of course there's not a whole lot of historical records except for the Art Frozen guy, to be able to figure out what that was all about, but we do know that it was like hunter-gathering, living in your own filth, kind of horrible, barely above an ape existence.
Life expectancy was in the teens.
Infant mortality was, you know, probably 50% at least, even just to the age of 5.
This is a pretty miserable, dog-like, sick existence.
And then, you know, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the founding of recorded history 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.
And still, it's basically human beings that are living in a pile of shit.
And what's that famous line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?
Great movie if you get a chance.
Hey, he must be a king.
How do you know? Well, he hasn't got shit all over him.
It's fairly true.
I mean, read about the Middle Ages.
It's absolutely astonishing.
One of the kings of France opens up his staying in Paris, opens up the windows, and faints from the smell.
Because, of course, everyone's just dumping their shit into the streets, right?
I mean, horse dung and all this kind of crap, right?
But, so, you know, I'm not going to go through the mad sprint through human history, but when you sort of say or understand that the entire span, even if we just count it to like 5,000 years of human history, if we just 5 or 6,000 years, and we can say that maybe 10 to 20% of...
The governments of the world have been somewhat minimally restrained, and more than minimally restrained in the great experiment from our good friends the Americans in the 18th century, but maybe 10 to 20% of world governments, of governments within countries around the world, have been restrained for maybe 200 years.
Maybe 200 years.
I'm not even going to attempt to do the math in my head, but I just want you to let that simmer for just a little bit.
Let that just sort of cook around a little bit in your brain.
The 5,000 years of human history across the entire planet may be...
10-20% of governments have been somewhat restrained for about 200 years or so.
And if you count the 20th century, it's a great age of statism, if you count the 20th century, then the direction that the supposedly free countries have been moving in, In the last hundred years has been almost universally disastrous,
and you could say even longer, 100 to 120 years, since the institution of state, forcible state indoctrination of the children for 14 odd years, which started in the 1870s for most of the Western countries.
Let's just say then that for Things to be relatively free.
I don't count the forcible indoctrination of children for 14 years to have anything to do with freedom.
So I think we can look at the last 200 years.
We can knock off in a pretty fundamental way the last 100 years or so.
And from that standpoint, the only time that human beings have been sort of free-ish, not perfectly free, still import and excise taxes, still silly laws, still all this and slavery and all this, because my God, let's not even talk about the horror of the 19th century and earlier for the black man in America, right?
Let's just cut that whole damn thing out.
Oh, let's not cut it out.
Heavens, we're going for it.
So maybe 70 to 75...
Oh, wait, there's women. Women didn't have really property rights, the ability to inherit and manage.
They couldn't get educated. They couldn't work for themselves.
Birth control was forcibly held back by the church.
So, okay, all right.
Let's zero in on this a little bit.
So we've got about a 100-year period from about 1800 to 1900.
You could say a little bit before 1800.
Oh wait, there was the Napoleonic Wars that ended in 1815, so let's knock those out, as that took up good chunks of Russia and Western Europe at Napoleon.
So, okay, let's sort of zero this down and say that for about, oh wait, so it wasn't even a full century, So, 1815, the Napoleonic Wars ended.
Obviously, World War I, starting in 1914, would be the beginning of statism, but statism started about 40 years.
Before that is 50 years, as you would imagine, right?
You have to have state-educated children in order to have cannon fodder for war.
So, okay, let's go with this.
So, from 1815 to about 1870...
Right, so about 55 years, for most of the West, there was relative Peace.
Oh wait, there was a lot of fiat money going on in the middle of the 18th century, 19th century.
There also was, having to pay off all of the enormous debts accumulated by the Napoleonic Wars.
And of course, children who were raised by men maimed had problems.
Anyway, let's just say that for about a 50-year period, for about 30% of...
10 or 20% of the human race.
So we've got 5,000 years of history, even if we don't count the 100,000 beforehand, which I certainly would, because we all know it was shit, even if it was undifferentiated and undocumented shit.
So human history as a whole, 5,000 years of recorded history, and we have about a 50 to 60 year period where people who were white and male...
We're sort of, kind of free to pursue lives independent of significant government control.
Right? So, white and male, not a sharecropper and not bound up in mercantilist crap.
So, you know, I guess we're looking at a pretty tiny slice of human history Wherein there was some degree of freedom.
Now, of course, the people who grew up, who were adults in this time, were raised a lot of times under undue state influence or religious influence.
And, of course, there was lots of religious influence, if not direct control, over children during this time frame.
So, you know, we could whittle this thing down from a redwood to a goddamn toothpick.
But let's just say, from my perspective, right?
This is sort of the argument that I'll make.
From my perspective, when we look at the A mondospan of human history.
We get like a 50-year period where for like maybe 10 or 15% of the country, the sort of population by landmass or by government, and about 30% of those people had some degree of freedom.
That I would consider pretty good.
Pretty good relative to today.
Certainly, after the institution of government-run indoctrination camps, or what we call public education, that freedom became inconsequential, and of course we all know what the 20th century was like, and the staggering expansion of state power and debt and control.
I mean, just about every Western We're good to go.
From the government to get it done, right?
I mean, I just bought my car.
I finally paid it off and I had to get a whole bunch of government forms to transfer ownership, right?
I can't transfer ownership from the lease company to me because the government has to get its hand in and I have to pay them off, right?
So everything that you do...
Requires government a form and a bribe, right?
A form and a bribe is sort of the basis of government as a whole.
A form, a gun, and a bribe, right?
The form covering the gun.
It's like paper, rock, scissors, right?
Paper, you know, conquers the rock.
The rock is the gun. Oh, that metaphor almost worked.
Anyway. So, just think of, like, the entirety of human history...
As a three-dimensional pie.
Maybe a nice rhubarb pie.
Tart and sweet and yummy.
So we got 5,000 years in the entire population of the world, sort of in this pie.
And then for...
What is it?
0.1% of that human history.
So 50 years... Some damn rocket in my window there.
Probably a heckler.
Oh wait, it's a Christian! Nope, just a statist.
So, for 5,000 years, we have this three-dimensional pie sort of floating in our brains.
For 0.1% of that time, for 50 years out of the 5,000 years, for 0.1% of that time, there is a relatively decent degree of freedom For about 30% of the people, right? Which sort of knocks it down to, what is it, 0.0333 infinity percent.
0.00, 0.03 percent.
0.03 percent.
Three people out of a thousand throughout human history.
Can be said to have had some degree of freedom.
Now, they were kind of passing through slavery to slavery, but for about three people in a thousand, it can be said to have some degree of Our freedom.
And of course, I know that I'm not in jail.
I'm aware that we have some sort of civil rights here and so on.
But the fact of the matter is that, you know, half my income is taken by force.
Everything is regulated.
Everything is controlled. Everything that I do is monitored.
And, you know...
Even if you get rid of all of that, and you just want to look at the fiscal stuff, there's enormous, massive national debts being piled up, sort of, quote, on behalf of any of us, although I certainly won't pay a goddamn thin dime if anybody ever comes to me asking for the money, because, like, hey, I didn't vote for it.
I don't approve of it.
Go deal with your own bills, you international banking bastards!
So, you have three people out of a thousand Who lived in some sort of state of freedom throughout human history.
Now, as far as religion goes, I would say that it's probably about the same proportion, and I don't want to labor...
Who am I kidding?
Of course I want to labor at the point. Actually, no, traffic's moving well, so I don't want to labor at the point.
But every...
Everyone in history is pretty much subject to the same kinds of religious freedom or problems with religious freedom.
In fact, it might even be less.
But if you count sort of modern Western Europe, which is infinitesimally less religious than the United States, say, then it's probably three, you know, five, you know, whatever, people out of a thousand in human history who have not lived in living terror and abject slavery.
At the hands of the state or the church, right?
So, when people say to me, oh, there are good governments, oh, there are good churches, well...
Look at the proportion, for God's sakes.
You know, just look at the proportion.
Have a sense of history. And for Christ's sake, have some empathy for all of the people around the world who don't even have the freedoms that we have, who live in absolute wretched, abject, horrifying, brutal, miserable slavery for their entire lives with no hope of release from their sort of countrywide prisons that we call most governments.
Have some empathy for them.
So, you know, three out of a thousand?
I don't think those are very good odds, right?
It's been a while since I've rolled my d20 to hit a black dragon, but I just seem to recall that one in three in a thousand are not very good odds.
Not very good at all.
And so when people say to me, There's this poison which you can take and, you know, three times out of a thousand, you'll get, you know, a bellyache. It won't be that bad, right?
Which is the people who live in the sort of mid-19th century freedom who weren't women and who weren't slaves and who weren't impressed into the military or the navy or whatever.
And, of course, who weren't suffering under the mercantilist power that still operated at that time, and who weren't allowed to unionize in sort of free and legitimate ways.
You know, so on. You could whittle this down to almost nothing, but let's be generous and leave it at three parts per thousand.
So, three times out of a thousand, it will only give you a stomachache.
You know, for the rest of your life.
And, you know, for every other time, it will basically...
Cut your lifespan in half, right?
Which is kind of what being taxed at 50% does.
Cut your lifespan in half.
It will make you sort of constantly nervous and on edge, right?
Which is what statism as a whole does to the general population, right?
It makes us all kind of nervous because we never know what the hell is happening next.
It's very tough to make plans and so on, right?
So, and other times, it'll just kill you, right?
270 million times or more, like not even counting wars per century, you know, just get killed.
I wouldn't say, you know, that's a, that's not a bad poison.
That's good in that poison, right?
I would say, you know, I don't want the poison at all.
I gotta tell you. I'll take my chances just breathing air.
Thank you. I think I'm okay without the poison.
Now, the interesting thing for me, when statists and religious people say to me, oh, the church isn't that bad, oh, the government isn't that bad, of course, I understand why.
I mean, the German people, who were sort of wasps, who, you know, to some degree voted in Hitler, or at least supported his policies to the degree that he could get in without a general revolution, or people sort of fussing about it at all, Well, you know, when they did a fair amount of, they got a fair amount of goodies coming out of the enslavement of the Slavic population to the east, and their economy wasn't doing too bad for a little while there.
You know, lots of stuff was pillaged and moved to Germany, so they got lots of capital equipment without investment.
Of course, it was all misallocated because of the statist central planning, but, you know, millions of Slavic slaves and Polish slaves, they were doing okay, right?
It wasn't the end of the world.
So for a lot of people, you know, the Hitlerian Germany wasn't the end of the world, right?
You know, it's just that if you ask sort of the Jews, the gays, the gypsies, the intellectuals, the professors, the political people, the writers, the thinkers, you know, whoever, then, you know, not so good for them.
So people will write to me and say, yeah, you know, religion's not that bad, and I can understand that it gives them a place to go, and it gives them an instant set of empty-headed buddies, but frankly, if you are, say, the average Iraqi with his head blown off because of the war,
which was started because God told George Bush to go and kill Iraqis, You know, you might not feel quite as sure about the innocuousness or benignity.
It's just a possibility, right?
I mean, if you're holding your head in your hands, or, you know, your child's limb, your child has been hit with a bomb so hard that her limb has embedded itself in your torso, you might not sort of feel that religion really isn't so bad, right? Because this war is a religious war, right?
It's a fundamentally Religious war, which we can talk about another time, but it certainly is unarguable that George Bush says he prayed to God to find out what to do about Iraq, and I guess God said, go butcher the Muslims, so off he went on the new crusade.
So you might not feel that it is really a very beneficial thing to have religion, should you be dead by this war.
I mean, this is just one of countless, countless examples, right?
If you are a child who was molested by one of the 5,000 Catholic priests currently under suspicion or investigation for pedophilia, you might not feel that since you were repeatedly raped as a child, maybe not so much with the plus religion good.
Maybe if you were a witch, real or simulated throughout most of history, or an unbeliever, or somebody who thought for themselves, or somebody who questioned the edicts of the church, or somebody who was interested in science, or somebody who was skeptical of religious bigotry, or somebody who, say, wants to ask questions in a modern Muslim madras, I mean, you may not sort of think that This whole religious thing is so good, right?
And let's be perfectly honest.
There are certain things which is just basically religious in nature, right?
Certain moral things in society, all bullshit aside, we just know.
If you deep down and basically and fundamentally, it's all religious in nature, right?
Things like stem cell research, of course.
If you're not religious, you're like, just use the damn things, right?
I like Christopher Reeve. You might want to walk again.
You might want to reverse Alzheimer's and so on.
I mean, there's lots of things that you might want to do with stem cells that you can't do because of religion.
Abortion, again, not saying that I think it's a good thing, but it is fundamentally warped by a religious sensibility.
You know, the war and so on, of course, we've talked about that.
Faith-based initiatives, the constant distraction of people from anything important by the question of whether to hang Ten Commandments or not in a judge's chamber or in a courtroom, you know, stuff like that.
Maybe you're in jail for the war on drugs, and let's get right down to it, right?
The war on drugs is fundamentally a religious crusade, because the severity of the drug war is almost directly proportional to the religiosity of the country, right?
So, drugs are fundamentally...
because they're pleasure, right?
I mean, the religions are all against pleasure, right?
Whether it's sexual... Or drug-based or whatever, right?
Pleasure is bad, right?
Pleasure in the things of this world.
And of course, this is strongly supported by countless instances of religious texts throughout the world, right?
But you can't really get into sensual material pleasures here because you're supposed to be worshipping the big eye in the sky guy.
And not so much focusing on the material things.
So, you know, if you're in jail for minor drug possession and 10 years of being brutally raped and traumatized and terrified and locked in a tiny cage, maybe you feel that religion and so on is not so benign if you're dying of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or, you know, things that stem cell research could probably do quite a bit if you'd like to get out of your wheelchair.
But because of religious beliefs, that's just not allowed, you know, because the religious people, see, they're so interested in protecting the lives of fetuses and of stem cells, right, of potential human beings, but real Iraqis, they could give a flying fuck about, frankly. I don't see a whole lot of Christian protests against the war, because Christian violence is as old as the hills, right?
So, So, we could talk about the same thing to do with the state.
I'm sure you get the general idea.
But so, when people say to me, the state is nice, the church is nice, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, there is a slight reduction in the rate of murder.
There is a slight reduction in the rate of, you know, say, I mean, God, can you imagine...
What the pedophilia was like in the Middle Ages?
I mean, can you imagine?
It was deranged, beyond imagining.
Beyond imagining.
We have laws against pedophilia now.
The priests are actually subject to secular law.
Can you imagine what it was like when the priests ran everything?
Can you understand why human society couldn't evolve because of the constant preying upon children that the clergy seems to have a bit of a thing for?
Right? So... I gotta say that when you think back 100,000 years in human history or even the 5,000 years, we could have solved all of these problems 5,000 years ago, right?
We could have been flying.
We could have gone to the moon and back.
We could have hyperspace. We could have cured cancer.
We could live for 500 years.
Whatever it is that we wanted to do, we could have done if we just hadn't had all these people defending these rotten, sick, disgusting institutions like the state and the church.
Now, That having been said, and I doubt very much that I'll finish this topic just now, but that having been said, it is undeniable that there was, for a brief time, a blink, a star, a single star in the night sky's worth of time, there was a slight lifting, and to a large degree a significant lifting, particularly in America, of the heel of the state from the neck of the species, right?
So that's good, right?
That was nice. And the question then becomes, well, what caused this, right?
What caused this?
How did it come about?
Kind of an interesting question, right?
And, of course, it's a big, long and complicated answer.
And I'm not going to try and cover it all.
I don't think I even could in the car without pretty extensive notes.
But the question is, of course, was it the state and was it the church that brought about a limiting of the power of, say, the state and the church?
Well, I don't really think so.
Not even close.
Not even close.
The genesis, so to speak, of the limitations of power built from the church of the state.
The limitations of these powers We're the result of sort of pretty powerful and complex interactions that occurred in the realm of philosophy, and particularly the reaching back from Christendom to pre-Christian philosophers,
the pre-Socratics, the Socratics, and the Roman philosophers, particularly in the realm of Roman law, the reaching back to find far superior, far superior Thought and writing and arguments.
The Christian period, I mean the period of Christian dominance for Western civilization was functionally retarded.
Like as far as the intelligence and the output, it was functionally retarded.
And you can see from somebody like Thomas Jefferson in the past to a religious person like George Bush in the present, religion lets retarded people have a field day.
It's all about faith and manipulation.
It's not about rational argument and the subjugation of your bigoted will to a more consistent and higher standard like empirical rationality, verification of scientific method, and so on.
So, you know, for over a thousand years, the West was sort of functionally retarded.
Brain dead. Barely above brain dead.
And how we managed to sort of overcome this retardation and rediscover the capacity of human intelligence, I mean, it's a long and complex story.
But I can tell you this.
It sure as hell didn't come from the priests.
And it sure as hell did not come from the politicians.
Because they're kind of retarded.
Right? I'm, ooh, I know the, ooh, you know, ooh, Bill Clinton, he's just so intelligent.
It's like, that's just a load of nonsense.
That's like Al Gore being intelligent.
These people are pretty retarded, right?
I mean, I've heard Bill Clinton speak.
I've actually read his autobiography.
The man's retarded. Everything's just manipulation and play, right?
He's good at language and manipulation.
I mean, that's his skill. That's his strength.
That's what he does, right?
So, It demands a moron.
You know, from where I sit, right?
I mean, maybe you feel that's judgmental, maybe you feel that's vain.
Well, then you're a moron too.
Just kidding. I love everybody who listens to this show.
I love them all. You're all brilliant.
It's true. It's true.
I really do believe that. But...
You can't get any kind of intelligent stuff out of a priest or a politician or a statist.
I mean, you just can't. There's too much fundamental contradiction and nonsense at the root of things for them to come up with anything that's worth anything.
So, from that standpoint, this stuff didn't come from internal to these power structures, right?
Any more than, you know, the reform of the military is going to come from the military.
There's no way that the military is going to say, hey, you know what?
We need a military that is about 1 50th of the size that we have right now, and I'm going to work really hard as a modern major general to bring all of that about.
As the field marshal of the guards, I'm going to bring about a 50 times reduction in the size of the military.
Not really going to happen, right?
And when you look at the difference between medieval feudalism and America, the government's like, I'm just making this up, so please don't ask me to give you a reference, but it's pretty close to this, I bet.
The government's about 1 50th the size.
The governments were effectively 80 to 90 to 100% during the times of feudalism, and then the governments retrenched to a very tiny, no income tax, no respect for property rights, unless you're white or black or whatever.
Or an Indian, Native American, in which case your views didn't matter too much because you were too busy inhaling smallpox from the blankets that the Christians gave you.
Anyway, so, although there's no particular evidence that it was genocidal in its purpose, as I talked about in a podcast last summer.
Anyway, so, from that standpoint...
It's important to understand that these reforms did not come from anywhere within, right?
So when people say, ah, the church and the state aren't that bad, then, you know, yeah, they're not that bad now relative to what they were, say, 500 or 300 or, you know, 250 years ago.
But, uh...
What made them not so bad?
Why are they not so bad?
They kind of come from internal to the state and the church, so what happened?
I think that that's an important thing to understand, and we'll talk about it a little bit more.
Don't limit that.
I hope you're having a good, good, good, good, good, good, good day.
Thank you so much.
Still no donations.
I'll have to sing the next podcast if I don't get some money.
Thank you so much for listening.
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