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Oct. 6, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:44
449 Empiricism and Nonsense Part 2: State

A brief history of belief and disbelief continued...

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It's 8.37 on October the 7th, 2006.
Two. Two.
Well, I was so pleased I was doing the date correctly there that I guess I panicked and tried to say the year twice.
Anyway, it's Friday, and I hope you're doing well.
It's just before the long weekend here up in Canada, eh?
You know, there's that old joke, how did they come up with the name of Canada?
Well, they threw a bunch of lettuce on the ground.
They said, okay, we need a C, eh?
N, A? D, A? And I said, hey, you know, that works too.
For those of us from our Muslim friends in foreign countries, Canadians say A at the end of a lot of sentences, those of a certain economic and educational class.
And, you know, there's nothing funnier than the joke that's explained.
So, anyway, let's continue on with our chat about...
Empiricism and nonsense, or what have you learned for yourself, and what have you been told by others?
The present show accepted, of course, everything that I tell you is exactly the same as what you would come up with yourself.
So I am the only third-party empiricism.
Some people call me the sixth sense.
So you can definitely go with that as a standard, because we try to avoid all possible interpretations of cult-like standing here at Free Domain Radio.
So, let's continue plowing along.
For those of you who may not be listening to these directly in sequence, naughty spankings will follow, and a brief recap of the last go-round.
So, we were talking about the sort of Dark Ages, Middle Ages, being the heyday of the fantasy of religious virtue, the fantasy of virtue in the realm of religion.
All well and good.
And then we began to talk about the sort of end of faith in religion that occurred as a result of the endless centuries of religious war that followed the breaking of the monopoly of religious thought under Luther and the rise of Protestantism.
And then we talked about how every single person had been told throughout just about all of human history that the church was there to make the world better, to make life better, to make everything better for everyone.
And what happened as a result of the end of religion was that everyone began flourishing.
We used the chemotherapy metaphor because we're all about happy metaphors here at Free Domain Radio.
And then we finally ended up talking about where we were in the 20th century.
So the 20th century, of course, because we have the family at the core of people's sense of power and need for a hierarchy, We sadly, perpetually, end up with this situation wherein when one power is, when the ethics bleeds out of one power, one structure, then the ethics bleeds into another structure.
So people were not so bad getting rid of the kings, sorry, separating church and state as long as they could still remain enslaved to the church in ideological terms, in moral terms.
You know, we don't mind surrendering some of the direct power of a particular hegemonic structure as long as we get to still enslave ourselves to it from a moral sense.
The real danger in human society always occurs when the argument for morality fundamentally fails for a particular institution.
Then, of course, you end up saying, well, I can no longer believe in the ethics of that power structure.
But because, fundamentally, the power, the value of the family, the moral value of the family, has remained barely questioned throughout society.
There are a few systems of thought which have been skeptical about the ethical value of the family.
And, in particular, of course, I'm thinking of communism.
And communism was skeptical about hostile to the moral value of the family.
It viewed the family as a bourgeois structure of indoctrination, and they preferred, in fact, or in its place, a communist structure of indoctrination.
So, basically, the party was supposed to be your family.
That's why it's Big Brother, right?
That's why that metaphor works so well.
That's why it's become so famous from 1984, because he is talking about the family.
That's why he says Big Brother.
But... I don't think he was consciously talking about the family, but the man's life, if you get a chance to read his biography, is quite interesting and I think would be quite instructive about this kind of meta-narrative or this joining of the two, the state and the family, within the realm of imagination.
So, in the communist paradigm, one of the reasons that it was so savage as an ideological construct and as, of course, a power structure itself, was that...
It eliminated competing loyalties, right?
I mean, at least in, you could say, the later Middle Ages, you had the state and the church, and there was this debate about how much do you render unto God, how much do you render unto Caesars, and there was a sort of quite a strong debate about how you reconcile religious teachings with secular requirements, religious moral instructions with secular moral instructions that are often quite opposite to it.
And so at least you could choose your loyalties throughout the West, right?
I mean, there was a free market in brutality, if that makes any sense, with sort of the Democrats and the Republicans or the two major parties being the state and the church.
And so, of course, for the sons of aristocracy, that really was your choice.
You couldn't go into business because both business was considered a filthy underdog of scurvy intentions.
But you could choose between the clergy and the military.
That was really the choice.
So you at least had opposing moral rules or opposing moral paradigms that engendered some debate about the nature and the relationship of ethics and power.
But, of course, you don't have that in the Muslim world.
And you also don't have that in communism, so that's why these two systems are so particularly brutal.
And the oath of loyalty within Nazism, of course, was to the state, not to the family and so on.
So there was really just a complete religious cult-like worship of the supposedly secular leader, although there was a lot of Christian symbolism wrapped around the top of the Nazi hierarchy.
And there was quite a bit of debate, actually, about creating a Nazi church to supplant, or as they put it in that case, of course, enhance the sort of emotional power or the faith-based power of Nazism,
and by the by, the We're good to go.
Profiteering off abstract entities just as the military and the police and the politicians and the bureaucrats and the teachers do.
So that's just sort of a by-the-by if you get a chance to look that up.
Look up Clergy Nazism Opposition and see the one webpage which says there was almost none.
In fact, they lined up to support.
And of course, I have a character in Olmos who represents this kind of situation.
But in the 20th century, you began to have ideologies unrestrained by the competition of the church.
And basically, I mean, there's lots of ways to look at it.
The way that I generally approach it, you know, whether you consider this ideological or not is up to you.
But the church collected its own money.
It had a tithe in the Middle Ages.
And for a variety of reasons, throughout the 20th century, the tithe became less common.
I mean, there's the Mormons and so on.
I think that Donny Osmond donates some money, and I think Marie donates a few tooth bites to the Mormons, 10% of income.
And there's some churches which get away with this, but it's not really because the monopoly of the church exists.
And the instruction in terms of virtue became broken, right?
So you then had a free market in getting into heaven, which meant that if you didn't like one church...
When you have a church that has a monopoly, they can charge you 10%.
And if you believe in the whole heaven and hell thing, they've kind of got you by the short and curlies.
When a church begins to fragment into different denominations, then you can choose how much you pay.
It's a breaking of a mercantilist income structure when you get competing denominations.
Especially after the separation of church and state, if you didn't particularly like the whole tithe thing, Then you could end up just going to a denomination where the donations were voluntary, right?
So you had a competition for the greatest benefit and the lowest money, right?
So the entertainment value of religion went up considerably and you began to get this sort of...
Demonic, messianistic, speaking in tongues and singing and shaking, right?
Because remember, when you have a monopoly, you have terrible service and high prices, right?
I mean, that's inevitable. And the same thing is true of religion as any other sphere of economic activity, that when you have...
In the medieval church, they droned on and on at you in Latin, and you couldn't even get your hands on the original text.
You had to wait for the printing press for that to really happen, and the printing press was pretty central to the rise of Protestantism or Lutheranism or the schisms within the Catholic Church, because once people got their hands on the original text, then it was like, oh, that's what they said!
Well, that's got nothing to do with what the hell you people have been droning on about, so you're just wrong.
You've corrupted the one true faith, blah blah blah, right?
So... When you get the rise of competing denominations, then those denominations, A, have to become more entertaining, so you didn't get a whole lot of denominations in the breakaway sects from Catholicism that really droned away at you in a language you didn't understand and never let you have a look at the actual book, because heaven knows you couldn't actually...
You couldn't be trusted to actually read the book, you see.
You have to have our interpretation, which basically means give us your money.
And, of course, the question of money and poverty was one of the central reasons why Catholicism broke up, right?
I mean, this whole idea of selling indulgences, indulgences being that the Catholic Church had an excess store-up or a sort of big vault of excess virtue, right?
Obviously, Jesus and the saints did far more good than they ever needed to do to get into heaven, and the excess good sort of went into a...
A virtue vault that only the Catholic Church had the keys to and so if you did something bad you could buy chunks of this virtue and they would sort of sprinkle it over you in this imaginary and frankly quite hilarious way.
They would sell this virtue to you, this excess virtue from the virtue vault, and that was how you would end up having your sins washed away.
This was fairly central, of course, to the religious incursions into armed violence in the realms of the Crusades and so on.
So, of course, murder is bad, but if you do murder for the sake of the church, it's good.
And if you have any continuing doubts about it, we'll sprinkle some imaginary pixie dust on you from our excess virtue vault, And charge you a couple of shekels, and away you'll go, and you'll get into heaven.
And then, of course, what happened was, towards the end of this fairly revolting practice, the church began to sell these indulgences, as they were called, in advance, right?
So you'd say, hey, I'm going to go away for a filthy weekend with my mistress and three altar boys.
And they'd say, well, that's pretty bad, but we'll sprinkle some of this pixie dust on you of imaginary virtue and charge you, you know, 12 gold pieces, and you will be indemnified in advance from the evil that you're about to do in the future, right? So that is sort of where it ended up when Luther went kind of nuts, right?
So... Once people got their hands on the Bible and actually realized that Christ said to his followers, all who would follow me, give up all your possessions and, you know, go barefoot and, you know, barely have a thong on and so on.
They began to look at the wealth of the Pope and the wealth of the clergy, who were in general, except for the kings, the most wealthy people in town, and they began to sort of say, okay, well, okay, we still believe in God, but the way you're doing it is bad, right?
So this is the way that the ethic attempts to survive, right?
Religion has no problem sloughing off existing forms and surviving in another form to give it some sort of anthropomorphism that may or may not be appropriate.
Religion just, okay, well, if you don't like what these priests are doing, here's some new priests, right?
It's the same thing, of course, with the state, right?
Oh, if you don't like what George Bush is doing, here's John Kerry.
Because, of course, it's the priests as a whole who can switch denominations, assuming they're not physically sanctioned for it, but the priests will switch denominations in order to keep their jobs.
They want your money, right?
I mean, they want your money and they want your obedience.
They don't particularly care whatever form of belief structure you need in order to continue paying them.
They really don't care. They really don't care.
It's like if you're on some subscription service to, I don't know, like an online music service or something, you're paying them 20 bucks a month and their name is like Nazi Music Incorporated and then people find that out and they go, holy crap, that's really offensive, right?
They're going to say, well, we're so sorry.
We didn't realize we offended you.
In hindsight, it was totally wrong.
We're absolutely going to change your name, right?
Because what they want is your 20 bucks a month.
They don't have any particular allegiance to the name, right?
I mean, they're not going to stick by the name and go out of business, right?
I mean, they're going to just change.
I mean, that's capitalism, right?
And in a sick kind of way, that same feature occurs in religion, right?
They want your money. And whatever they've got to do and say to get your money, people mistake this for some sort of absolute statement of belief or something like that, which is, of course, pure nonsense.
It's got nothing to do with that.
Whatever magic words they have to say to get you to hand over your money, they will of course say.
And the same thing is true, as I'm sure you're getting the idea, the unholy trinity of family, state, and church.
Politicians do exactly the same thing.
People think that the Democrats and the Republicans being so neck and neck is something to do with a divided nation.
Well, it's not to do with that at all.
It's just that if one particular party comes up with a policy that is so popular, That the other party begins losing adherence, then the other party will simply adopt that policy too.
That's why they stay neck and neck.
Whatever is popular will be adopted in one...
I mean, change the language or whatever, but it will be adopted in one form or another, right?
So if the Republicans say that the ultimate Americanism is to paint your forehead red, white, and blue, in my case with a roller, then...
and everyone says, wow, that's so great and patriotic, that's what we're going to do, then, of course, either the Democrats will say, well, that's the ultimate evil, In which case they will prevent people from going over to the other side.
Or, more likely what they'll do is they'll say, well, we kind of oppose it because we've got to seem different, like the war, but sort of under the table we'll continue to approve it.
Although in this case, since this is not about communication to other politicians, but directly to the population, they will...
They would likely be about it up front.
They certainly wouldn't lose any adherence based on principle, because the whole point of having adherence in politics is to have money and power.
It doesn't matter so much if you're in power because you still get lots of money.
But that's the point.
The words are like the little skeleton key that you use to unlock the route to the voter's wallet.
You just keep whispering these magic words.
It's like that scene in Lord of the Rings.
Speak, friend, and enter. You want to get into that door and you'll just keep...
Speaking all of these words until, ka-ching, you magically open up this guy's wallet.
So you have no adherence to any principles.
You're just looking at whatever is going to work for that person emotionally and get them to give you all their money, right?
That's sort of the basic idea behind the church and behind politics and, of course, behind family.
A family will say anything to keep you in their orbit.
But the one thing that's different with family, which is why I think that family is the key to undoing the whole mess, Is that your family is dependent upon you personally.
Your parents are dependent upon you personally.
The state is not dependent on you personally.
You become some sort of tax refugee.
You go live in a cave in Montana and end up with your beard twice as long as you're here.
The state will survive.
And if you decide not to go to church, the church will survive.
Because they're always getting new adherents from their propaganda camps.
From Sunday school and public school, they're always getting new adherents.
New people are coming into the workforce.
So as abstract entities, they're not dependent...
It depends upon you personally, but your family is dependent upon you personally.
Your parents, when they're old, can't have more children and have those children grow up fast enough to take care of them and give them money and time and resources when they're older.
So, your parents are beholden to you in a way that the state and the church is not.
You actually can do something about that.
They don't have this infinite set of alternatives.
Also, the state can print money and the church is always getting new money.
So, that's not such a big issue.
So, sorry about that slight tangent, but where we were coming from...
Well, you know, for me, maybe that is slight.
Well, where we're coming from in terms of understanding the power structures of the 20th century is that when religion began to...
When religion became a non-monopoly, when it fragmented into different cults, when the big cult fragmented into smaller cults, then competition for parishioners became intense.
So what happened was the tariff began to diminish as a compulsory thing.
I could start a church where I say the tariff is 100% and you have to live in my basement, but that's not going to work too well because people don't want to do that.
Certainly to start off with, right?
I mean, maybe after you've got to five generations of people thinking this is the ultimate virtue, then you can do that.
But to start off with, to lure people away from their existing cult, you have to come up with some other differentiator.
And one of the things is that, you know, and you've got to cloak it in morals, right, all the time.
So when somebody's got a 10% tithe, you say, I have no tithe.
I have no tithe because God has said, thou shalt not tithe.
And tithing is evil. It is an instrument of the devil.
And blah, blah, blah. So people will say, well, geez, I don't want to be an instrument of the devil.
Plus, I get to voluntarily choose whether to give money to these guys.
Fantastic. So they start to flow over, right?
And they'll cloak it in all the moral nonsense because the argument for morality is the most powerful thing in the world.
But... It simply is a set of competition.
So what happened was, religion began to get worried about its income.
Its income was no longer...
And of course, then when communism came along, there was a huge drop in income for the church.
So the church had no choice but to begin sidling up to the state again, to get its money.
Because again, the church doesn't care where it gets its money.
But... I mean, if you work for a huge corporation, you don't care which deals contributed which and whether they're ethical or not.
You just want your paycheck, right?
I mean, it's not necessarily evil in and of itself.
It's just that if your whole basis is an argument for morality, as is the state and the church, then it might behoove you to actually live those ethics a little bit, but we can never expect that.
That's why these things have got to go.
So the church had to begin sidling up to the state because the church began to get money and power from the state, right?
So it's at the very least exclusion from typical income tax requirements.
Property tax requirements were waived.
So basically the state began to overrun the church, right?
And you can certainly see this happening in America.
There's faith-based initiatives and funding that goes to churches and all this kind of stuff.
It's enormous and significant.
And at the very least, of course, every time that, if you just look at some place like America, if the church ever began to get shirty about the expansions of government power, then the government would, A, begin to stop funding it.
And B, would begin to start charging at income and property tax, and C, would begin to deny donations to the church.
You would get rid of the charitable deductions, right?
And of course say, well, the separation of church and state has to include deductions or has to include charitable donations to churches.
We have to get rid of that in all good conscience, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, you know, the churches would be, you know, royally or, you know, holily hosed, so to speak, right?
I mean, they would be in total shit fest there.
So you don't have to worry about the church speaking out fundamentally against the state.
They might disagree with certain policies, blah blah blah, but they won't ever raise a cross against the state.
You are never going to get libertopia coming from religion.
It's far too beholden to the state, which occurs after the monopoly of religious belief is broken.
The competition means they can't get money from parishioners through force.
So they have to, you know, cozy up to the state, you know, right behind the intellectuals and the bureaucrats and the recipients of largesse, the people on welfare, more importantly, the corporate welfare recipients, the teachers, the doctors, and the HMOs, the AMA. And defense industry and all the income redistribution recipients, right?
There's a whole load of people cloying at the state, which is what the state loves.
Because, you know, it just means there's a unanimity of opinion about how wonderful and benevolent the state is.
So, in the 20th century, the focus for ethics began to shift or shifted pretty violently from religion to the state, right?
Because nobody still had questioned the family fundamentally.
And the only people who did question the family were those who did not feel that the exercise of immoral power was wrong, but were jealous of the competition that the church and the family represented, right?
So, with something like a guy walking along the side of the highway.
How interesting. So, in the situation of communism, right, communism hates the family and hates the church, not because it hates the rational abuses of authority, as we can see from the entire history of communism, but it hates these institutions because they are competitors to its mercantilist desire for a monopoly on power, right?
I mean, that's sort of inevitable, right?
And... So, the 20th century was all about eliminating competitors to power and focusing all of the energies and the loyalty and devotion to the family transplanted to a larger social entity, which was a worship of the state.
And this occurred throughout the world.
This was not a localized phenomenon.
As the power of religion waned, of course, a lot of people simply moved from religion to politics.
I mean, a lot of people Who normally would have gone into a situation where they would have been a clergyman or just simply went into government instead.
And the people who would have been bureaucrats in the church simply went into the government, right?
I mean, the church and the state are like the state of the mafia.
You can kind of move between the two fairly easily.
So... The entire moral fervor and moral energies of mankind began to be heavily focused, heavily, heavily focused on a worship of the state as opposed to a mere worship of religion combined with a reverence or an obedience for the state and so on.
And we are now in the process of failing to believe in the virtue of the state.
The idea of the virtue of the state is fundamentally absent from the world.
They are recognized as lying, corrupt thugs.
There's still belief in particular constituents, right?
So people hold out the hope that the state can be...
the predations of the state can be ameliorated by my team is better than your team, right?
Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, NDP, like wherever it is that you are, right?
All these different factions exist to give you the fantasy.
It's the good cop, bad cop, right?
They exist to give you the fantasy that virtue can...
That can exist within the state if only my team gets in.
Catholicism is bad, but Calvinism is good.
That's the fantasy that people go through and live with.
So, but the fundamental belief, it's really quite remarkable, and it's really been over the last ten years, and in a way, more concentratedly over the last five years, the belief in the virtue of the state has almost completely evaporated from the intellectuals that I talk to, not the ones who are paid by the state.
But when I say intellectuals, I simply just mean intelligent, well-read, literate people.
They simply don't believe in the state anymore, and it's really, really quite amazing.
It's quite remarkable. They don't believe in the virtue of the state.
They don't believe that the state can solve problems.
This is fundamental and common to just about everyone.
Of course, if you've got a son in Iraq, Iraq as they always say, then you are going to feel differently, but that's just because you're beholden and sucked up into state power and have something really at stake in this.
But to people who are objective and looking at things clearly, it's just amazing.
It's just amazing.
They absolutely don't believe in the virtue of the state anymore.
And not even like, I don't think that the state should do this or do that, but the whole mess.
People just fundamentally don't believe in it.
Now, if, and I have no idea how this is going to all end up working together, but if the next step is going to follow the pattern of the last steps, then people are going to get sick and tired of this.
Now, it's not going to happen.
Before a crisis.
There is no example in human or personal history where people change without some sort of crisis or, at the very least, in the absence of a crisis, a crisis that is provoked by a sustained attack upon a false argument for morality.
That's really the only chance that you have of creating change without somebody almost dying of a heart attack.
You have a sustained attack upon a false argument for morality which provokes a sort of moral crisis for people and that has some value or some use in being able to change without horror, right?
That's sort of the point of philosophy as is the point of nutrition.
Can you get people to change before they have a heart attack, right?
And that's sort of part of what's going on in what I'm doing is, right, can I get people to change without society having to completely collapse, right?
That would be, I mean, that's sort of the goal of what it is that I'm doing.
But, you know, collapse or not, what's going to happen is that people are not only going to disbelieve in the state, but once they see that there's a viable alternative, then they will start to dismantle the state.
It will simply occur, and it will occur very rapidly.
And it's almost impossible for us to understand this because the state looks so overwhelming.
The state is not overwhelming at all.
The state is a fantasy based on a false argument for immorality, and, of course, it fundamentally is economic.
When people believe in that argument for immorality, Then they are easy to rule, and the economics make the state possible.
When people no longer believe in the argument for morality that the state is virtuous, then people become economically impossible to rule.
They don't want to pay their taxes.
They don't want to obey the cops.
The price of rule goes up, really, and that's what the false argument for morality is all about, is keeping down the cost of ruling people.
But the state is subject to economics like every other entity in the universe, and therefore when the cost of ruling people goes up, when people realize that it's actually immoral to pay taxes, then what will happen is the state will collapse very, very quickly.
And it will be absolutely remarkable, and people will look at this supposedly ferocious paper tiger and go, like, what the heck were we afraid of for so long?
And then what will happen is society will have an enormous flourishing, an enormous, incredible flourishing And then people will get it.
People will finally get it, and mankind will be forever free of this sick fantasy.
But it's going to take a pretty intense intellectual effort to get these ideas across, which of course is why.
And I think that time is of the essence.
So on Sunday I was pretty harsh with some people who called in on the show who were asking me the question, do I believe that shining a flashlight in somebody's eyes is a violation of the non-aggression principle?
And I consider that we don't have the time for these kinds of conversations.
And these kinds of conversations, if they spill over to other people, are going to be pretty wretched for us.
For those of us who are really focused on important work, of which the question of the flashlight is not.
It's a completely academic, esoteric nonsense kind of question.
What's going to happen is people are going to get the impression of libertarians as those who talk about completely abstract and obtuse topics for mere personal entertainment and don't take ethics seriously at all, which means that it's that much tougher for everyone.
For people like me working in the field, it becomes that much tougher, right?
And... You know, somebody's going to be around those conversations and then they're going to roll their eyes and say, libertarians, what a bunch of scholastic intellectual masturbation kind of whack jobs.
What a complete waste of time that is, which makes the job of everyone else who comes around that much harder.
So I'd say, you know, if you're not going to be working on the important issues, you know, write essays and file them away in your drawer.
Don't get involved in conversations with people.
It will absolutely direct their attention to the wrong kinds of things.
And we really don't have the time.
Sure, in Libertopia, let's discuss these things to our heart's content.
But right now, there is not a lot of time.
There is not a lot of time, and we have a hell of a long way to go.
So don't waste people's time in this area.
It's really a negative thing to be doing, and I strongly, strongly recommend against it.
So anyway, I've made it to work in relatively good time.
Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you soon.
Donations welcome, as always.
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