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Oct. 6, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:43
450 Libertopia
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Time Text
It's time to see my baby.
Hope you're doing well, everybody.
It's Steph. Thank God for traffic jams.
I was having trouble getting this up and running.
And, of course, I don't exactly like to fiddle with the computer, but it's nice when you're stationary and can let the car behind you let you know with your horn in a nice way when it's time to move forward.
So, I had a fascinating post on the board today, which I checked in my five-minute lunch break.
And the topic or the question was...
There seems to be, of course, and I perfectly understand this, absolutely, completely, positively, totally, understand this desire to get moving, to get something done, to go and create Libertopia, to prove anarcho-capitalism works and how beautifully it works and this, that, and the other. And I totally understand that impulse.
It makes perfect sense to me.
I'm not even going to say that I don't, I wouldn't be excited if somebody went off and did it, but I'll sort of give you my thoughts, which is sort of related to this whole question of where I sit, in terms of shooting intellectuals, you know, the messy moral topic that I have been working over off and on for these, lo, these few weeks.
So I'll start with where I sit in terms of the intellectuals.
This is an argument from effect.
So I'm perfectly aware, I shouldn't say perfectly aware, I'm quite well aware that this argument is really not an argument for morality.
The argument for morality seems to me that you should have the right or you should not be subject to sanctions If you reason with someone and ask them to stop talking about irrational and destructive things that in a free society will result, oh my heavens, I just had another idea.
Wow. Okay.
Maybe there's another approach.
Okay. Rewind, scratch all of that.
Let's try this all over again.
Start again. Reboot, reboot, reboot.
Okay. So, I am now Linux.
Let's have a look at it from this way.
The whole question about the destructive nature of intellectuals seems to be entirely bound up with the existence of a state or The possibility of the state listening to intellectuals or using intellectuals' arguments to justify its violence.
And if the state does not exist, then it seemed to me that intellectuals would not really be dangerous.
Wow, that's That's a lot easier than I thought it was going to be.
This whole convoluted discussion lined up.
Well, thanks very much for listening.
Donations, hey. The shorter the podcast, maybe the longer the donations.
Who knows? Yeah, that sort of makes sense, though.
It's like, I guess maybe this comes out of what we were talking about this morning, that if priests get you killed because there's no separation of church and state, and the priests are urging the government on to do this, that, and the other, then the priests represent a pretty essential...
Cog in the machinery of general genocide, but if the separation of the church and state has been enacted, then There's nothing really so bad going on.
The priest can't really do that much harm to you.
So maybe this whole question of self-defense against intellectuals is predicated on the existence of the state to begin with.
And if there is no state, then maybe the intellectuals aren't so dangerous.
Now, the question is, of course, how do you get to a no-state situation?
And I'm clearly going to have to draw that second part out for quite a long time, simply because...
Well, I was anticipating on spending 20 to 25 minutes on the first part, and we've done it in a cozy three, four minutes.
So, on the boards...
Somebody said, well, why don't we just take over a piece of government land and set up our own country and prove that Libertopia and anarcho-capitalism, the free market and DROs and voluntary association and non-violence and individual and voluntary collective self-defense and all the other goodies in the wonderful Halloween bag of anarcho-capitalist ideas, that they're all going to work. And, of course, hey, if somebody wants to go for it, I'd suggest you go for it.
I certainly would be happy to be a consultant.
Or, as somebody said, after watching my videocast on YouTube, which you can get at YouTube, Y-O-U-T-U-B-E dot com forward slash free domain radio.
Somebody watched my videocast on YouTube.
Honesty in teaching, full disclosure in the realm of teaching, and have promised that I will be the Department of Education's first minister.
I'll be the Minister of Education when he becomes president, so I'll keep your fingers crossed for that.
A post I will never take from a man who will never get elected, but hey, it was certainly a nice thought, and I appreciate it.
If somebody was to go about that, they'd go up to Alaska or go to Iceland or some damn place where nobody wants the land, and you'd just go and take it over and set up your own society.
Well, first of all, that's not really how things have worked in the past.
That doesn't mean that that's how things have to work in the future, but generally I find it's worthwhile having a look at least a first pass at history to find out if You know, don't reinvent the wheel, right?
I mean, if you're going to start programming, pick yourself up a copy of VSO5 or a Java SDK or something.
You don't sit there and say, okay, I got some ones and zeros.
First of all, I need to write a disk accessing program, then a low-level operating system, then a character-based interface, and then the 40 million lines of code that go into Windows.
As of, I think, Windows 2000 or something like that.
And then I'll finally get to write the email application that I've wanted to write.
Well, you don't do that, right? You sort of try and leverage what's already out there in terms of human knowledge.
And, of course, there have been enormous leaps forward in moral progress in mankind.
And they're really founded on the arguments for morality and coinciding.
Like, the arguments for morality coinciding with the general exhaustion with regards to the status quo tend to be the two sort of alchemical mixes that produce this magnesium flare of human light and progress.
So, the exhaustion of the existing situation with constant religious warfare It coincided with the good arguments around science and individuality and the value of property rights and so on to combine the Enlightenment and separation of church and state, the founding of the American Republic, all those good things, right?
What we would consider radical minarchism should it be tried now.
So what generally tends to work in the past is there's a kind of exhaustion with a particular state of ethics or state of society or situational ethics.
There's a kind of exhaustion with it, and the exhaustion can lead to a kind of nihilism, right?
So the corruption of the Roman Empire combined with the nihilism of early Christianity, like death to this world, glory in the next, come on, I want Simba to come and eat me, That kind of nihilism combined with the general corruption, mercantilism, and statism of the late Roman Empire combined to produce the Dark Ages.
Now, of course, the Dark Ages, there's lots of debate about whether that should be appropriately named the Dark Ages.
Of course, it was the end of Rome, but the end of Rome was quite a bit of liberty for the rest of the world, right?
I mean, so, sure, you might be a serf grubbing away on your two acres of land with one wizened old mule as your source of income.
But it still beats getting hauled up for 20 years of military service under the Roman Empire and then being taxed to the hilt to pay for the next round of recruits, quote, recruits slash indoctrinees.
Inductees? Draftees.
So, if you have an exhaustion with a particular situation, which in this case would be the Roman Empire, and this was both a fiscal but fundamentally philosophical or moral exhaustion, combined with a kind of nihilism, So exhaustion plus false moral argument equals a slide into a horrible negative difficult situation.
And for me, the Dark Ages was that relative to what could have been, which was a reform of the...
Of the Roman Empire without Christianity, which would mean that it would fragment into more autonomous kinds of states or city-states where the competition for citizens, given that Roman was a pretty universal language at this point, the competition for high-quality citizens would have kept taxes low, and we might have had the Industrial Revolution in the 5th or 6th century AD, and right now I guess I'd be not so much driving a car as working the controls of an FTL spaceship.
Anyway, enough rank speculation, enough rampant speculation, let's get to my normal topics which are slightly less rampant speculation.
If you look at Nazi Germany, of course, you also see an exhaustion with the Weimar experiment.
The Weimar experiment basically started in the 1870s under Bismarck when he put in all of the apparatus of what we would now call the modern welfare state.
So he did all the juicy stuff like put in unemployment insurance, old age pensions, welfare, all this kind of stuff, and in general all the mechanics of state apparatus.
And that lasted for about 50 years, right?
This stuff tends to last about 50 years.
It doesn't really matter how productive the economy is, because the more productive the economy is, the more people grow, the more the state grows to feed on it.
So, you know, the greater the food, the greater the appetite.
So the size of the economy doesn't really matter.
Everyone says, ooh, the American economy is so productive that blah-de-blah-de-blah, but that just means that there's far more predation.
On the American economy than there would be on a smaller economy, so it doesn't last any longer, it just feeds more parasites until it goes down.
So, actually, it would be closer to 60 years.
If you look at sort of the 1870s and the Weimar Republic really began to fall apart in 1923-1924, there was a 1920-21 depression that was pretty savage.
There was a massive amount of printing of money in order to pay for the reparations, which caused this hyperinflation in Germany, which caused the destruction of the middle class and the destruction of the savings ethic.
Which caused a radicalization.
There was, with the destruction of the economy, of course, in the 1920s in Germany, with the destruction of the economy came a significant lack of jobs for young people.
And a lack of jobs for young people didn't cause any sort of immediate panic as it would have normally, right?
I mean, normally there would have been reform, but there wasn't.
And there wasn't reform in the Weimar Republic because of welfare and the unemployment insurance schemes, which meant that the youth did not riot for change, but simply sort of festered in these basements and one-room apartments, three or four to a room, lounged around, smoked and drank and did nothing, what we would call in Britain laddism or laddish behavior, laddish behavior, like, you know, that sort of soccer hooligan behavior.
They didn't agitate for change because they really weren't desperate.
They were just getting more and more depressed and radical.
And so in the 1920s, the unemployed youth hated the system but didn't feel any real compunction to get in there and change the system as they would have if they weren't drugged with this sort of narcoleptic morphine drip of welfare and unemployment insurance, of which, of course, large amounts of the unemployment insurance and welfare that were going towards the young people actually ended up in the hands of the Nazi party, right?
It's one of these grim ironies of history that the middle class is forced to pay for their own murderers, right?
I mean, the Jews are forced to pay for their own murderers.
The Nazi Party survived largely on donations that were given by youths who were on unemployment insurance or welfare, who were taking the money from the state, forced out of the hands of the taxpayers.
And then they turned that money over to the Nazi Party, and that's really how the Nazi Party got going.
The same thing was similarly true in Italy, though the welfare state, I don't believe, was nearly as large.
But there, of course, you have an exhaustion with the existing system.
The Weimar Republic was considered to be decadent and corrupt and non-pure and polluted by foreign elements and Jewish and so on.
And so there you have a sort of revulsion with the existing system combined not with A true argument for morality, but with a false argument for morality, i.e.
this Hegelian idea that Germany is the world spirit and we are destined to rule the world and, you know, let's fill our boots and sharpen our blades and lock and load, let's roll!
So when you have an exhaustion with the general system combined with a nihilistic philosophy, Then what you end up with is a pretty desperate and dire situation of totalitarianism.
You can see this also occurring, though, with some help, of course, from the Germans who shipped Lenin off via Finland to Russia in 1917 to bring about the Russian Revolution and so take Russia out of the First World War, thus liberating Germany from the hell it always faces, which is a two-front war.
There was a little bit of a push and a nudge from Germany in this regard, but if you look at Russia, throughout the early 20th century, there was an exhaustion with the existing system.
There was the liberation of the serfs, I think, in the 1880s, sort of pseudo-liberation.
It was like the liberation of the slaves in the south of America, pseudo-sudo.
But you have an exhaustion and a revulsion with the existing system, which you can see growing up quite a bit in the 1870s and 1880s and 1890s, which I write about in revolutions, of course.
But as this begins to grow, this revulsion with the current system, Emotionally, people begin to feel the real need for a change, right?
They really are desperate to have a sort of fundamental kind of change in their lives.
Ah, we're slowing down and we're slowing down.
Why? Yes, people, because everybody's going to their cottage this weekend.
Everybody in the office is like, hey, I'm going to my cottage.
Ooh, I'm going to my cottage, which I think is a wonderful thing as long as you don't actually have to maintain and upkeep your cottage.
But hey, that's just me, man.
Anyway, So, when you have this kind of exhaustion and revulsion with an existing system, it's absolutely crucial what's out there in the general intellectual mix, because that's what determines where you go.
I mean, if you're dead drunk and broke and you've impregnated the four hookers that I talked about before, If you don't have any place to go or any idea of what to do with yourself, then nihilism, either suicide or a life of crime, is going to become your natural result.
When you're sick of who you are and how you are and all your relationships and everything that's going on in your life, when you're sick of all of that, And you don't have any place to climb to, then you really just let go and fall.
And this is a form of cultural suicide that occurs with rather depressing regularity.
I mean, the French also did it when they were sick of the Ancien Régime in the 1790s, or I guess throughout the late 18th century, when they were sick of the Bourbons, The Louie's, the endless series of Louie's, and they were sick of the corruption and the obvious waste of money that was the Palace of Versailles and the let the meat brioche from Marie Antoinette and so on.
We have no bread, right?
Let the meat brioche. A lot funnier than let the meat cake.
Brioche is a kind of sweet bread, I think, quite a delicacy, so it's quite a bit funnier in a horrible kind of way.
But when they're sick, right, sort of look at the difference between America and France at this time period, right?
America was sick of the British, but they had within their culture, for a variety of reasons, I'm not even going to try and guess at here without putting some more thought and research into it, but they had British empiricism, British logical positivism, British skepticism, British anti-statism, British logical positivism, British skepticism, British anti-statism, and so on, which France just didn't have.
France was still a very religious country relative to the UK, to Britain, and so in America they turned to freedom when they were sick of the existing culture, and in France they turned to hellish, reign of terror, blood-soaked streets, guillotine, happy revolution.
Which is very sort of important.
And it's sort of my belief that you have a pretty significant choice as an intellectual, as a philosopher, about what you put into the mix in society.
And a lot of times it's not that crucial.
Because a lot of times society doesn't hang between either a rise or a fall as we are doing right now.
Right now we're sort of like there's the upward arc where we can finally get rid of all of this shit that has so bedeviled mankind for the past 50,000 years or freedom is going to vanish for generation upon generation upon generation.
And it will take a significant rediscovery to bring it back about.
And this is something very important to me.
If we lose freedom now, then freedom will achieve a kind of moral status akin to slavery, which nobody really says, hey, let's go back and revive anymore.
So that's pretty important to me.
This is kind of a do-or-die moment in the history of the species.
This really is do-or-die.
This is, we've finally put the stake through the heart of this beast, the state, the family, the church, or...
We're absolutely overwhelmed, and it could be hundreds of years or more.
I remember some book, I can remember years and years ago, talking about the after-history of 1984.
It said that the party had a 9,000-year rule.
For some reason, I sort of remembered that.
I mean, I'm not saying it's going to be that long, but it will be an enormously long time, hundreds of years, if not longer, before freedom comes back, because it will be such a significant process of rediscovery and re-education.
That the nihilism that naturally occurs, like when you have a false argument for morality floating around in your culture, and people bleed and die and get murdered by the millions and the hundreds of millions and die and get taxed and lose their lives and their children get turned into little state-serving robots in the public school system and there's just such an incredible amount of human suffering associated with the pursuit of this ideal,
that when that ideal falters and fails, nihilism I mean, the kind of nihilism that makes Nietzsche look like Pollyanna.
Nihilism is the great temptation.
Nothing is real. Nothing is true.
Nothing is valid. Nothing is good.
Existential horror of the kind that Sartre wrote about is really the fundamental next step for a society that loses It's belief in its moral story, in its moral backbone. And we are at that place, as it talks about.
We're really at this place.
Nobody believes. It's become like a sports game, right?
Who wins in government?
It has no more moral relevance than...
I mean, some people, especially older people, find it very hard to give up on this kind of stuff.
I mean, whether the Democrats or the Republicans or whoever's local to your community, whether they get in or, you know, who gets in, it's about as morally relevant as who wins the Super Bowl.
Yeah, people get all excited about it, but not because they think it's good or evil.
This happens to be their historical, localized, emotionally insane preference.
It's their scar tissue, right, like most of culture.
So we don't believe in those gods anymore.
We don't believe in those gods anymore.
And so when the core of a society's moral beliefs begin to fragment, it's like you think of a huge bridge just slowly beginning to give way.
And it's incredible.
The cracks, you have to listen closely for the cracks.
Actually, you don't have to listen that closely anymore.
But there's this huge chasm, and the bridge is beginning to give way.
We can either scurry to the sides and build a new bridge, or we just are going to And fall into a black night of perpetual or general or certainly lengthy enslavement of the species and a hatred of all virtue.
It's like a spoiled child.
It's like a really spoiled child who eats too much candy, gets sick, and then says, well, that's it, I hate food.
It's like, no, just don't eat that much candy.
Of course you're going to get sick. So when people have a false argument for morality, which proves...
False, over time, as all false arguments do, especially moral ones.
When that argument proves false, people don't say, wow, I guess I believed some stupid things.
They say, there's no such thing as truth.
My error, you see, was that I was too optimistic.
Not that I was a corrupt and ignorant fool.
But my only flaw was that I was too optimistic.
You see this kind of shit floating around with Marxism.
Well, human beings just aren't good enough for Marxism.
You also see this with Christianity.
Human beings just aren't good enough to be Christian.
Human beings aren't good enough for socialism.
Human beings aren't moral enough.
And you also see this with the welfare state, right?
Well, I don't want to pay my taxes.
Well, people won't pay taxes voluntarily because they're too bad, right?
People aren't good enough for freedom.
People aren't good enough for communism.
People aren't good enough for socialism or the welfare statism in general.
And so these assholes, frankly, in general, when they...
When they can't play with their stupid toy, they just want to throw everything against the wall.
They just want to smash up everything.
Like, if I can't play, nobody can play.
If what I believe turned out to be false, nothing is true, right?
Because if something remains true, but what you believed in was false, then what you thought of as virtue for your life was mere prejudice.
I mean, it's very important.
This is what people can't stomach.
This is why they can't make it across the to philosophical truth of freedom.
They just can't make it across because they believe that what they believe is true.
They believe what they believe because they have honestly evaluated it and found it to be virtuous.
I believe in the welfare state because I care about the poor.
I believe that capitalism is evil because I don't like injustice and slavery.
They believe all of these things, and it's sheer intellectual laziness.
And as I've said before, these people really should not talk philosophy until they could at least sort out the 2 plus 2 is 4 a bit.
And it's so close to everybody's surface.
It's so close to the surface for everyone.
Anybody who debates with you is saying, I prefer words to guns.
Words, not guns. But then when they debate you and want the state to solve problems, they're saying guns, not words, right?
It's so obvious, it's so close to the surface for everyone, that it takes a real act of willpower to not see this stuff.
It takes a real focus to not see this stuff.
And so because people think that they have reasoned through things, and that's why they believe what they believe about virtue, I can't take this light.
Sorry for those who are listening.
I'm trying to light this well, but I'm just completely blind.
I'm driving straight into the sunset here.
So I had to cut the lighting out by moving this flap up.
So sorry if now I'm just a brightly lit talking mouth, but hey, you know, video quality is absolutely essential.
But people believe that they've reasoned through these kinds of things, and that's why...
They hold the moral positions that they hold.
So if those moral positions, they prove to be completely false, these people can't say, wow, you know, I guess...
I guess I thought I was virtuous, but I was just mouthing platitudes that were bigoted.
I was just trying to look cool.
I was just trying to say what everybody said.
You know, I was trying to pretend I was some sort of moral individual thinker, and it turned out I was just another mouthing empty cliche conformist who was, through vanity and through fear of criticism, through cowardice, through conformity, I mouthed all of these things.
People's egos that are so starved and eclipsed by this approach to the truth, they simply can't handle that.
Their egos aren't even remotely strong enough to look in the mirror and say, yeah, I guess I was a hypocritical, mind-screwing, false, cowardly, conformist claiming all of this virtue for my whole life.
I mean, people who would look at that without a strong enough ego...
And it's hard. I had to do that seven years ago or so, six or seven years ago.
It's a really hard thing to do, to look at yourself in the mirror and say, hey, I've just been bullshitting my way through this, claiming it to be virtue.
And it's not true, any of it.
And most people, if they actually face that and they don't have the ego strength, they just kill themselves.
Thank you.
They would just kill themselves and so their body wants to keep them alive and so it just keeps them on with this illusion and has them fight with vicious hatred any kind of truth that comes their way.
It becomes an absolute enemy virus to be attacked at all costs.
So that's one of the reasons I say let's talk to the young and so on.
But fundamentally this Revulsion at the existing situation means that people have to change.
They can't stomach it another day.
The system is just too revolting, too repulsive.
Human beings always want to be moral, and when the immorality of what people claim to support becomes so obvious, then they kind of have to stop supporting it.
And we've inherited a lot of these virtuous things from the Enlightenment, from the Western...
Rationalism and anti-state thinking.
So we can't go the German route, where people just say, oh, let's just obey the state and everything, and so on.
I mean, Britney Spears can, but that's okay.
Her punishment is her husband, so don't worry about that too much.
Sometimes hell is in the here and now, and most oftentimes, as Sartre wrote, hell is other people.
But anyway, we're trying to rope in the tangents a little bit here.
You know, when the traffic's slower, as it is right now, I'm actually on the private road, but crawling along.
We have time to chat.
Which we will. So, what's up?
What else is new? What's going on?
What's going down?
What's going on? Alright.
So, the question is, how does society change?
Well, society gets sick of the way it is, and there's a better argument for morality that fights hard to oppose the nihilism that threatens to suck everybody into a complete living hell of a society.
And so it's very important that we put out, of course, as many ideas and argue as ferociously and as strongly as possible and provide as much emotional certainty as possible.
Again, this is back to the whole flashlight thing, right?
That that is not going to save the world from nihilism arguing about flashlight beams and its relationship to the non-aggression principle.
It's not going to save the world from the balrog of nihilism that is currently smashing down the fellowship on the bridge to Khazad-dum.
I think that's Star Trek, isn't it?
Anyway. So, in the past, that's how things have been solved.
I don't really believe that it's possible to go, in the absence of winning this argument for morality, I don't think that it's possible to go and take over some existing state lands and create Libertopia there and have it sort of work out peachy keen,
hunky dory, good to go. I think that you will absolutely be aggressed against and you won't be viewed as valiant people nobly defending their freedom, right?
You'll be viewed as like David Koresh wannabes and people will probably get killed.
Now, we only, as I've mentioned before, we're only going to get one chance at this.
Only going to get one chance at this, right?
Like, the bear is coming, and we've got one bullet, right?
So, we better wait and use it right, in a totally metaphorical way, of course.
And what I mean by that is, if people are still stupidly addicted to all of the bullshit that is drummed into them by the state and by the media and by all of the statist, slavist, intellectuals and so on, if people are still enslaved to all of that, then the spin that's going to be put on The founding of Libertopia, the foundation of Libertopia, the society without the government, the society full of reasonable people.
First of all, a lot of crazy people are going to get drawn to it because it won't be very well understood.
They'll just be like, hey, no rules, right?
Great! And of course, what will happen is, even if you're successful, and I've worked a lot of this stuff out in a novel that I'm occasionally working on, or haven't been for the last little while, of course, because it's kind of tough when you're working full-time and doing this, but...
I've worked some of this out. Let's just say you could do in Alaska, right?
What would happen is a bunch of people who wanted to grow drugs would move to your libertopia, right?
Let's just say you turned Alaska into libertopia.
A bunch of people who wanted to grow drugs would go there.
And they would start growing drugs.
And they would be growing them perfectly legally because, of course, it was libertopia.
And there would be other things.
But we'll just focus on the drugs thing for now, right?
And so... What would happen is they would then start shipping all of these drugs to Canada and through Canada, where they don't really care that much, to the United States.
There'd be this big flood of cheap drugs coming in from the new Libertopia that was off of Alaska.
And so what would happen is America would say, I'm so sorry, even if they said, we fully respect your libertarian experimental society.
We think it's wonderful, but we have laws against drugs.
And we don't care that you don't have laws against drugs.
The simple fact is the fact that you don't have laws against drugs are causing massive inflows of drugs.
And, of course, the media would jump all over this and saying, you know, this radical new community which allows drugs to be grown and sold and doesn't make children go to school.
They live a completely hedonistic, devil-may-care lifestyle with no rules, and they'll show pictures of orgies, and they'll show pictures of guys with submachine guns walking down the street, this new Wild West.
I mean, they'll just put every kind of slant that they conceivably could put on this.
To make it look like as nightmarishly shitty a society as you could conceivably imagine.
And then the government, the U.S. government, would simply say something like, you know, you're going to have to shut this down or we're going to shut it down for you.
You're going to have to shut down these people with all these greenhouses growing grass or we're going to shut them down for you.
And then they would whip up this war frenzy and then they would say, this is not me making stuff up, right?
Just look at what happens in Colombia, right?
They just go and napalm the fields, right?
So what would happen is...
They would then just attack the country.
There was an attack in Napalm, and they would come in and take over, and they would have all of this stuff so that you would end up with all of these people making up stories about how terrible things were, how they're coming in to save the population, and so on, and it would just be a complete nightmare, and it wouldn't last more than Two to three months, I would say.
Maybe six months, because it would take people a while to set up shop and get their drugs grown, right?
And so, yeah, that would be how it would spin out, and that would be how everyone for the next ten generations would remember the great libertopian experiment.
So I don't think that doing it now would do anything.
I think it would absolutely, totally discredit the whole approach.
You see, what you need to do is not liberate land and go and live there, but liberate people and stay where you are, right?
That's sort of my basic approach to liberty.
And it's sort of how I'm living, right?
So, I mean, it would sort of be hypocritical for me to say otherwise.
But, I mean, I really do believe it.
It's not up to us to run to the ends of the earth, to set up society somewhere and try and live free there, despite the fact that the more successful we were, the more we would be undermined by every society in the world.
Honestly, don't even imagine that they wouldn't do stuff like this.
They wouldn't do stuff like... Introduce a, you know, a virus to the water supply, people would get sick and they'd say, ah, you see, this is what happens with freedom, that people just get sick, right?
Because they're not regulated, right?
That whole state thing, right?
So, I mean, all of this stuff absolutely has happened in the past.
Political leaders get assassinated.
They napalm drug crops.
I mean, they invade countries for no provocation.
All of this stuff would absolutely occur.
And so, while you still have a general belief in the virtue of the state, Which is crumbling but not gone, then there's simply no point going to start off a free society.
It'll be premature.
It will fail. It won't fail because the society itself won't work, but due to interference and blockades, you know, if it's an island, then they'll simply say, well, sorry, you keep shipping drugs into our country, we're just going to have a blockade around you, right?
It'll forbid people to trade with you, like Cuba, and then what will happen is your economy will become pretty wretched because nobody's going to be allowed to trade with you by their host governments.
And... So your living standard will be terrible, and then people, of course, won't be able to put that together because they're still mindless state sluts produced from state schools.
So they're going to look at this society and say, holy crap, are you kidding me?
Like a GDP of $2,000 a year per person, which is fantastic for a market economy that's not allowed to trade internationally and doesn't have a whole load of natural resources.
Any place with good natural resources is going to be protected by a government.
But people will then look and say, oh yeah, I remember that whole Libertopian experiment.
They had to give it up because they couldn't make any money.
The economy didn't work.
This is all that people will remember.
And then we will end up with having to explain...
People in the future will have to explain why libertopia failed with reference to states and really boring reams of statistics and ancient laws in the same way, of course, that we have to try and explain that the Industrial Revolution was not the hellhole portrayed by most social critics and social thinkers and novelists at the time.
I mean, that's just one of the very many great deal of possibilities that could occur.
The other thing, of course, that will occur...
Is that in a place with no income tax, in a place with no capital gains tax and no sales tax, no property taxes and so on, people will simply start to move their money to your accounts, right?
So people will just move all of their money to your offshore accounts.
And you won't be paying anybody off because there won't be any government.
It'll be totally private. And so what will happen is that your friendly DEA or IRS or whatever will phone you up and will say, Dear Libertopian dudes, right?
Whoever happens to be at the other end of the phone.
The bank, I guess.
The Libertopian bank dude guy.
I'm sorry to inform you.
I regret to inform you.
But, you know, 80% of the money that you have is the laundered money proceeds of criminal proceedings here in the United States.
We need that money to come back to us.
And, you know, a lot of it is drug profits.
A lot of it is tax evasion money.
A lot of it is these damn PayPal accounts and so on.
And they will say, you are holding a sovereign U.S. currency in your bank account, which we need to have returned to us.
And what's going to happen?
Well, Joe Libertarian guy, the bank manager or bank owner, he's not going to say, sure, right?
I mean, it's the whole reason he's got all this money is because he doesn't have a state to prey upon it.
So he's going to say, forget it.
I'm not going to send it to you guys, right?
And then all that will happen is the U.S. will whip up through the government, will issue all these dire warnings, the media, like the obedient, blood-soaked poodle lapdogs that they are, We'll end up chasing and chattering and talking about the theft of money from the mouths of the American children, which is now being kept in these offshore accounts and how evil it is and how this new society is profiting from drug money and is just evil and corrupt and this is like nothing but the mafia and Americans can't prosecute their own criminals because they can't get their hands on the funds and blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And that at some point they'll just say, I'm sorry, we're going to have to come in and get this money, right?
We're going to hold this bank hostage until you release these funds.
And they'll do it in a very nice way with about 5 million Marines, and they'll be polite, and they'll be...
Right, but this is going to be viewed as a police action.
I mean, there's so many different ways that governments are going to interfere with the creation.
I mean, this is the fundamental nightmare of people in government, that a society that is without government is going to be created and flourish and succeed.
So they don't want that at all.
That's the ultimate nightmare for these people.
So they're just not going to let it happen.
I absolutely guarantee you they're not going to let it happen.
The moment it shows any chance of success, as long as it's trundling along miserably, you have to hide it all, right?
But of course it's going to start flourishing almost immediately.
It's going to have, you know, GDP growth of, you know, 10%, 12%, 14% annually.
It's going to eliminate poverty at that rate within five or seven years.
I mean, we're only five or seven years away at any time from eliminating poverty.
That's the maddening thing about 50,000 years of human history.
We're going to have five to seven years at any time of eliminating poverty for all but the people who choose it, who want it.
And, you know, the government doesn't want that, right?
I've talked about it before. When people begin to get out of poverty, the government intervenes and immediately freezes those numbers with the welfare state.
That's what it does.
It doesn't like competition. Capitalism getting rid of the poor lowers yet another reason for the state to exist.
Every time capitalism tries to solve a problem, the state will exacerbate that problem so that it continues to have its justification for its power.
Now, that's going to absolutely occur with a libertarian society or libertopia as well.
Governments are going to interfere with it.
They're going to refuse to take the currency.
They're going to attack it for harboring.
Criminals are going to go there as well, right?
There's not going to be any extradition treaties.
So somebody's fleeing tax evasion.
I mean, maybe a murderer. But it's no government, right?
The DROs might with a murderer or with somebody who has, you know, really committed a crime.
But of course, given how brutal prisons in the Western world are, I mean, I know not compared to others, but compared to like decent societies, Compared to how brutal these prisons are, it would be unconscionable to send people back to this kind of situation.
You can't send people to be tortured even in the West, and given that being stuck in a rape room for 20 years is definitely torture.
Repeated rape, repeated anal rape is definitely, I would say, pretty much torture.
So even a murderer and so on, a libertarian society, would be hard-pressed to justify morally sending someone back.
They'd say, well, we'll try them and we'll put them to work in our DRO camps here where they'll get education and they'll get money and they'll be enclosed.
But for things like tax evasion and victimless crimes and drug convictions and prostitution and stuff, for the victimless crimes, there's no way that...
Even if there was a state in a libertarian society, there's no way that the state could, in good conscience, send these people back because they haven't done anything wrong.
I mean, everybody talks in horror with understandable feelings about this Jewish, the ship full of Jewish people that went around the world trying to find refuge for themselves and for other Jews that could have followed from the genocides in Nazi Germany and nobody took them in.
Right.
I mean, but, you know, these people obviously didn't.
It's not a crime to be Jewish.
It's just sort of irrational.
And the societies just didn't didn't didn't take them.
Right.
So.
But if they had, it would have been sort of reasonable to say, yeah, come over here.
Same thing is going to happen.
People who are imminently going to be arrested for tax evasion or for drug possession or any of the other sorts of nonsense, violations of licenses or regulations that are crap and all regulations, they're going to go to Libertopia.
They're going to take refuge in Libertopia.
And then the foreign governments are going to say, we need this person.
And if you don't give him to us, we're going to come and get him.
Right? So the DROs are going to have to sort of figure this out.
Are they going to get this guy? Are they going to hand him back?
Are they going to not? And, of course, the state doesn't care about the guy, right?
All they care about is having an excuse to send troops into Libertopia and screw it up, right?
I mean, so that they don't... So people go, oh, yeah, well, that didn't work.
Remember how bad that was? They wouldn't even turn over the murderers back to the governments that were justly prosecuted them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So there's just about six million different ways that existing governments will screw up a libertopian society.
And that's why I say we don't run to the ends of the earth to create freedom.
We don't colonize land and go live there and be free.
We colonize people's minds and stay here and be free.
And if we can't colonize people's minds, then we eject them.
We extradite them to the land of illogic, which is just wherever it is.
It could be down the street.
It's just not in our house, not in our rooms, not in our mindsets, not in our social circle.
So, look, I fully, fully understand the desire, the urge to get something done.
God, let's stop talking about it.
Let's just get moving. Let's get something done.
Let's take action. Let's march.
Let's protest. Let's have signs.
Let's go colonize Alaska.
Let's do something. Well, it's a very bad idea.
It's ready, aim, fire, not fire, ready, aim, or ready, fire, aim, or, of course, as these people feel, which I don't think is true, aim, aim, aim.
I mean, I think, fundamentally, this conversation is very new.
This conversation around the family, the family that, I mean, the state and the church that we talked about and lots of competent people talked about.
What I think that is coming to the mix that's new is this whole concept of personal liberty all the way from the gold standard down to my personal relationships with my mother and my father and my siblings and so on.
I mean, that's the new part.
And that's the only reason I'm doing this stuff.
I mean, I really do love and care about the philosophy and the economics and all the big picture stuff.
That's juicy for me, and I've got lots of experience in reading and talking about that.
But the stuff that really works for me, the stuff that is really interesting and worth doing because it's new, is the top to bottom, like the universal field theory of hegemonic power structures, right?
The single rule, the one rule to bind them.
That's Tolkien Day or something, right?
The one rule that explains everything.
The argument for morality.
And, of course, we do need to try a different key in this lock of liberty, right?
I mean, we've been jamming this for the last, you know, for the last 400 years, we've been trying to jam freedom, this lock, and open this up and have it open and step through to a new land of freedom, and it hasn't worked.
It hasn't worked. I mean, don't idealize the founding of America too much.
Always been mercantilist. It had slaves and women couldn't vote.
Women had very little, very few property rights.
Mercantilism and state control of industries, state subsidies of industries, tariff walls, all there, right from the beginning.
That's the fatal flaw that caused the nightmare that is America now.
But... We do need something new.
This conversation, I mean, look, this is like 10 months old.
If you look at when we really got things going with the website and the board and so on, that's like six or seven months ago.
Philosophy of freedom's been around for Count Socrates and not so much, maybe, and Aristotle, thousands of years.
We've got a conversation here that's six or seven months old.
Out of thousands of years, we're in the modern realm since the Enlightenment, 400 years, six or seven months.
It's nothing. It's tiny.
It's baby steps. I think we've covered enormous, enormous and powerful ground.
And I can see this amazing thing happening.
As I said before, with the people who donate, but also the people who spend and invest a lot of time and energy into this conversation, it pays off.
It pays off.
Liberty in your lifetime.
Not later. Not down the road.
Not maybe for your grandchildren.
Not enslave yourself to freedom to win it for others.
But liberty in your lifetime.
Freedom in your lifetime. In your social circles right now.
This is a very new conversation.
With due props to Harry Brown and his book, I've really got to order and read it, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.
Haven't read it. Love the Brown.
We're down with the Brown. But this is a very new conversation.
How people go from...
I haven't heard about personal freedom in this kind of context.
Freedom from your family.
Freedom from corrupt historical relationships.
Freedom from unchosen obligations in your personal life first.
Personal freedom before political, economic, social freedom.
Personal freedom. Personal freedom. Prove that liberty works for you.
Prove that you can be your president of your own libertopia and then we'll take over Alaska or something.
But of course, people want to avoid acting on a personal way by focusing on their frustrations on acting in a general way.
People want to avoid the problem of having to actually free themselves from their own personal embedded slave relationships.
Because as I've said, I would rather be paying 50% taxation and be free in my personal relationships than not be taxed and be embedded in a corrupt or boring or non-valuable familial relationships.
I am more free paying 50% taxation and being free of my family and all unchosen relationships and all unpleasurable and immoral or amoral obligations.
I am more free in this libertopia that I live in Than I would be if I lived in Libertopia but was beholden to my family, which will certainly happen.
It's far more freeing to simply just have to pay off the government and not be beholden to my family.
It's sort of revenue neutral.
You end up giving all your money to your deadbeat family and taking care of your parents when they get older and so on, which they haven't earned or deserved.
So for me, I'm more free and I could be more wealthy By living in my libertopia than in the Alaskan wilderness of libertopian fantasy land all free all the time.
People want to focus on...
Nobody mentioned Alaska, it's just my story, right?
People want to focus on what are we going to do?
Let's go make freedom happen somewhere politically in the outside world.
They want to do that because that's where they want to focus their energies rather than looking inward and saying, how am I not free in my personal life?
You are libertopia.
It's a state of mind and a state of non-relationship, a state of non-relating, too corrupt, negative, boring, dismissive, abusive, indifferent people, manipulative, control, all the things you know I've talked about a million times.
You are Libertopia.
You don't have to wait for an island to rise to the sea or for a government to leave a large patch of land unprotected for a couple of hundred years.
A, it won't work and B, you don't need it.
You can be free in your life.
You can be free and in love in your life.
Yeah, I got to pay off the government.
Much rather pay off the government with money than have to pay off both time and money to my family.
Family of origin, not my beautiful family with my wife.
That's freedom. And Libertopia is not going to grant you that.
It's true that Libertopia will only be achieved when people have a certain skepticism towards the innate value of family, and of course a complete skepticism to any value in religion.
So yes, there'll be fewer people, but there'll still be lots of people who are enslaved to their families in Libertopia.
So, I don't care that much about Libertopia.
That's not going to signal the kind of freedom that I'm talking about.
Yeah, you won't have to pay taxes, but so what?
That's just money. Just pretend you're really bad at your job.
Pretend you've got a gambling habit that you don't even have to go and do.
Forget about the taxes.
Even forget about the... It doesn't take up much time compared to being beholden to a corrupt family structure.
That's time. That corrodes your relationships.
I can have a beautiful relationship with my wonderful wife and be perfectly happy while paying taxes.
I cannot have a beautiful relationship with my wonderful wife if I am in touch and see and allow to infiltrate into my life my corrupt family.
Paying taxes doesn't destroy my capacity to love and to be loved and to experience joy and to experience real freedom.
Paying taxes doesn't do that.
Having corrupt people in your life does that.
Kills your capacity to love.
Kills your capacity for self-respect, for self-esteem, for honor, for dignity, for looking in the mirror and feeling proud about who you are.
Paying taxes doesn't diminish that.
See, that's coercion.
I don't surrender a shred of my self-esteem to people who point guns at me.
Yeah, fuck, take the money. I don't care.
I don't care. Take the goddamn money.
Take the fucking money and leave me alone.
Right? But family stuff is voluntary, so you're morally culpable for surrendering your integrity to your family.
You have a choice.
Your family's not going to shoot you.
The government will shoot you, so pay the goddamn taxes.
Who gives a shit? You still get love.
You still get freedom. You still get podcasting.
You still get reading books.
You still get great debates.
You get everything that you want.
You just got to pay off some assholes with guns.
And you have no moral culpability for any of that because they got guns.
But the voluntary relationships in your life...
That you keep...
Despite the absence of coercion, those destroy your soul.
Those enslave you in a way that 99% taxation could not.
In a way that 100% taxation could not.
Assuming they mail you an oatmeal bar every once in a while so you can live.
In a way that homelessness...
Does not destroy your capacity for love.
Ultimate poverty, riding the rails, sleeping in barns, that does not destroy your capacity to love, to be loved, to feel joy, self-respect, self-esteem, compared to having voluntary, non-coercive, and corrupt relationships in your life.
Libertopia is you.
It's your relationships.
It's freedom from all uncoerced and unproductive and amoral or immoral obligations to everyone, to anyone.
That's Libertopia, and we don't need to colonize another country.
We just need to assert our own space.
A country is always bigger than you are, right?
You just need to have a country around you of like 50 feet, 20 feet.
That's all you need. You need to be a roving country of 20 feet.
That's your libertopia. Or maybe 100 feet if they've got powerful lungs.
Very loud. That's your libertopia.
Your libertopia is a roving country, a circumference, a perimeter around you through which corrupt people do not get to come into.
They do not get to relate to you.
They point a gun at you.
Fine. Fuck it. Give them your money.
What do you care? Give them your money.
Whatever's left over with, use it for the cause of freedom.
Great. But that's a gun.
There's no moral responsibility for you than that.
That's just the way it is. Just do it.
Doesn't matter. Don't ring yourself up in knots about what you do when people point guns at you, because it doesn't matter.
What does matter is when people aren't pointing guns at you.
Can you be free there?
Can you be free there?
Can you be free in the absence of coercion?
Because if you can't be free in the absence of coercion, then coercion...
Doesn't matter. If you can't be free in the absence of coercion, then getting rid of coercion will not make you free.
Getting rid of coercion will not make you free.
If you can't be free in your personal life, a stateless society will do you no good.
A stateless society will do you no good whatsoever.
If you cannot be free in your personal life, it's the most important thing.
If you only get one thing out of these billions of podcasts, get this.
This is the only important thing that I say.
The rest of it is jovial filler.
This is the only important thing I have to say to you.
If you can't be free in the absence of coercion, a stateless society will do nothing for you.
Forget politics.
Forget economics.
It's really all about philosophy and psychology and action.
And that's really all that I've got to say in this realm.
That's the only thing. Replay this 50 times.
It will pay off. Really, you need to do this.
Because this focus on how we're going to achieve Libertopia is completely, utterly, and totally missing the boat.
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