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Oct. 25, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:08
477 Soldiers Are Not Free
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Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. Yes, we're starting in the pit.
I finally got myself all set up and have decided to do that before going off to trundle around the universe trying to get everything up and running within my car.
So I hope that you're doing well.
I just had a fun day writing an enormous...
I've written like, I don't know, nine or ten white papers in this industry for the last...
Over the last week or a week and a half, and so my brain, she is a spinning with profit optimization, which I guess is also part of what I do, although the spelling is just a tad different.
Hang on, let me just shut down the color a little bit here.
A little too bright, draining my batteries in ways that we don't need to.
So, tomorrow...
We will talk about love tomorrow morning.
Had an excellent post from a fine contributing, almost a contributing editor, a co-editor of Free Domain Radio, the fabulous Greg.
And he had questions about love, which I will do what I can to answer.
And unfortunately, it's not self-love, so I'm not going to be very good at it.
But we'll do our best to try and see.
Now, I'm going to try the public roads.
Try the public roads. Oh, let's give it a shot.
See what happens. But what I'd like to talk about this afternoon is it's not exactly a topic which we haven't touched on before, but it's been a long, long, long, long time since we have touched on it, and we are going to have a chat about our good friends the soldiers.
Those trigger-happy, undereducated, over-propagandized, sociopathic defenders of freedom.
Not our freedom, unfortunately, and not their own, unfortunately, but the freedom to pillage the public person in the course of war.
And this is not a punishment podcast, although it could be considered one.
I've talked about this before, and a long-time listener has made a statement on the boards that I'd like to spend just a minute or two, or 30 or 35, talking about the idea of the voluntary aspects of...
The military structure in the United States, and I guess throughout most of Western Europe, throughout most of the world, the worst that occurs in the West or the sort of Western-style civilizations is that you have Situations where people are inculcated into the army for two years or whatever, sort of after they graduate from high school or whatever.
This happens in Israel. It used to happen in South Africa.
It's one of the reasons that my father taught occasionally at a university in South Africa.
And more than occasionally.
And so I could have got free university if I went to South Africa, but in exchange I would have had to squat in the sickly state trenches of military obedience for a couple of years.
And that really, even when I was 15 or so and looking into that and dirt broke, that wasn't going to happen anytime soon.
Or any lifetime like, you know, this one.
But there is still quite a strong idea within thinkers, and I guess non-thinkers too, that...
Sorry, let me try...
Concentrate! Concentrate!
There is a strong belief that there is something different, fundamentally different, about what is called a volunteer army I.e.
a non-draft situation, and a draft army.
And I'm here to tell you that there's really not that much of a difference between them.
And let me sort of go into why, and then you can tell me how I'm abysmally wrong.
Now... There are a number of factors wherein we really can look at things that devolve or diminish the capacity for people to experience or to exercise their free will.
Now, if it was a volunteer army and the voluntary aspect of it was a significant component, Of the army, then you would expect, if this was really the major thing that was occurring with volunteerism, that the recruits would be spread across racial, geographic, class, and income lines.
Sadly, of course, it's not the case at all.
I'm not just going to talk about the United States for the most part, but this is the only thing I have scraps of knowledge about.
And The one thing that is fairly clear or fairly easy to understand is that it's a preponderance of uneducated, young, poor, minority males.
They form the vast proportion of what goes on in the military recruiting areas, right?
To say that it's all purely voluntary, and I'm not saying everyone's saying it's purely voluntary, but to focus on the sort of voluntary aspects of it when this is really what's occurring, I think is a huge mistake.
Just because one aspect of it is not coerced by the state doesn't mean that the draft makes it 100%.
A universal draft would be 100%, the draft that comes in, the lottery draft is 80%, maybe coercion, and then the army that we have right now is maybe 70% in terms of coercion.
So I think it's important to understand the factors that go into getting people into the army.
Well, these aren't in any particular order, but I think it's worth having a look at them.
So first and foremost, of course, is the issue of propaganda, right?
So these impressionable and often not overly bright young men are stuffed into the state schools for 14 years in a row and are fed the most appalling propaganda about war and the heroism of it and the flags of our fathers and all that kind of crap.
They are not given a shred of truth.
They are given endless amounts of propaganda.
And so you could say, and I could sort of reasonably understand why you would, you could say that a soldier is voluntarily going into the army in the same way that a communist who's raised as a communist in Stalinist Russia turns out to be a communist.
Like a young man who goes through all of the Stalinist schools turns out to be a communist.
We really don't know what this human being would have turned out to be in the absence of propaganda.
And so, since we have 14 years of propaganda, and some of this propaganda is somewhat regional, right?
So, in the US, it's generally the South that provides the army, right?
I mean, this is the hangover of a variety of factors that we don't need to get into here, slavery not being the least among them.
But the South produces a preponderance of military men, and that's because in the South there's this sort of Confederate martial gun-loving, and by gun-loving that doesn't mean always Fourth Amendment-loving, but it means the...
The love of the military, the respect for the military, our fighting boys in green or whatever.
And this Semper Fi nonsense.
So there's an enormous amount of propaganda that goes on.
And this is not only, of course, in the schools.
But it is also, and sometimes more so as an adult, occurs through the media, which is a total slave to the state.
I mean, the media is, I mean, the general media, right, is a complete slave to the state.
And so all you ever get is Operation Iraqi Freedom, right?
I mean, this is what was emblazoned.
And these things are quite important, right?
Why would you name something?
The name that the government gives it, right?
As the media, everyone said, Operation Iraqi Freedom, right?
So, Iraq Freedom, good, good, good.
Let's go free Iraq. And I'm sure that Hitler had, you know, Operation Free Poland was the name of his blitzkrieg on Poland in 1939, but I have not yet read a single history book that has given the name of The despotic battles that occur.
I'm sure the Iron Curtain was like the curtain of light to liberate Eastern Europe in some of Stalin's phraseology.
But you don't really, unfortunately, you don't really see that kind of stuff.
It's very sad, but you don't really see this kind of stuff in history books where you refer to what is going on In the terms of those in power, when those in power are considered bad, right?
So you don't have Jews writing a lot of books on the final solution.
They refer to it as the Holocaust, although Hitler referred to it, I think, as the final solution.
And so if there was a...
If a media outlet were to talk about the Holocaust as the final solution, they would be decried as Holocaust deniers and evil and supporting Nazism and so on.
But of course, whenever it's our propaganda that's churning away, the media sort of gleefully swallows it and just lets rip with all of the nonsense that you would expect to come out of these kinds of arms of the government,
so to speak. So they get all of this stuff about supporting the troops and about loving God and country and service and honor and sacrifice and the ultimate sacrifice and all this kind of stuff.
And so they get all of this stuff and it really is not...
And all of this stuff is forced upon people, right?
I mean, they're forced to pay for state schools.
The media is pretty much held at knife point.
I mean, they don't seem to have too many problems participating, but that's also true of children in abusive parental situations, so we'll cut them a wee bit of slack.
But the media is sort of a hostage that's held at gunpoint, right, or held at knife point.
You know all those scenes in the movies where the phone rings and the killer is with the victim and the killer says to the victim, you know, act normal, pick up the phone and act normal like there's no knife at your throat.
And, uh... Of course, that's the role of the media, right?
They're held hostage by the government, and they're trying to pretend on the phone, you know, that everything's normal.
And we're all there going, oh, that's great, man.
Everything's normal. And so, based on public schools and of course the historical relationship with a lot of military families to the military where it just becomes an unquestioned thing about service and honor and valor and so on, and state schools, state hostage media and so on, you just don't get a lot of reality checks about what goes on in the military and what the purpose and role and moral nature of the military is.
So all of that stuff is forced and coerced and bludgeoned, and you have to pay for the state schools, and you have to pay for the people to hold the media hostage, and you have to do all of this sort of stuff.
So they don't get any exposure to anything other, or very little other than, a continual stream of bat-piss propaganda that comes out of the snout of the aardvark we call the state.
Oh, one too many metaphors, I'm afraid.
I heard that keystone crack myself as well.
So that's sort of one aspect of it.
I don't get any kind of clear information about anything.
Now, the other thing that's interesting is that these people tend to be obviously fairly uneducated.
I think that the army has given up the requirement for high school, and I think now if you can lick an X on the paper, you're in, as long as you use your own tongue.
So now, what is also important to understand is that they're badly educated.
Not only are they educated in state schools, but they're educated in bad state schools, right?
And these are people who are spat out from state schools with no practical skills whatsoever, no capacity to do anything economically productive whatsoever.
I mean, you and I, you who have the language skills to listen to this, and me who have the language skills to fake a really verbose podcast, We really can't understand what it's like to not be able to fill out a job application, to barely be able to write a sentence, to be functionally illiterate, to really have no clue how to really interpret and follow written instructions.
But this is after 14 years of public school education, these are the kinds of human wrecks that are being spat out, these sort of destroyed, preyed upon husks of formerly competent human or potentially competent human beings This is the kind of stuff that's being thrust out into the marketplace from the state schools and from these horribly wretched,
backwards, welfare-ridden, crime-ridden, drug-ridden, rural idiocy kinds of communities that are all sort of created and fostered by the state.
State policies, as we know, have had enormous impacts.
on sort of destroying the family units, has had preventing marriage, common law stuff, single parents have, through the use of public housing, crowded together enormous numbers of barely functional, barely literate people in these sort of poverty gulags.
And so the kind of environment that produces the people to whom soldiering seems like a pretty darn good deal, it's kind of hard for us to understand Because we're just not in those situations.
I graduated high school with a...
I was reading philosophy.
I was doing all the... I bet you were the same thing, too.
Reading and not big prints, not pop-up books, but real books.
And... So you had all of these capacities just innate, right?
Maybe you came from a reading style of family or maybe you just have sort of innate intelligence or whatever.
But I would say that you and I have a tough time understanding what it's like to be this kind of human Jetson that comes spewing out.
From the public school system without the capacity to do little more than tie shoelaces and cheer for your local sports team and play video games.
That's sort of the basis of where these people are.
And all of that is a result of an enormous amount of herding and control and state policies and all the sort of socialized stuff that goes on in Western It's sort of directly to produce these judge-dread Mr.
Roboto fantasy war hero van damn idiots, right?
And idiots is a bit cruel because these are people who don't really have much of a chance, right?
I mean, the only thing I ever learned of value is the stuff I learned outside of school.
If you don't really have that environment or capacity or opportunity or innate ability, if it's not nurtured or anything, then it's going to be very hard for you to...
To be able to escape that kind of trap.
Now, those traps will exist in a free society as well, but to a much, much, much, much lesser degree.
And people who are on the lookout for talent will constantly be trolling the schools in poorer neighborhoods just to find the people who are going to enhance their own school's reputation in the way that Scouts from the majors and the minors go around high schools looking at people who have particular athletic abilities in the hopes of yanking them up and making money.
The same thing would occur.
So at least kids who have talent would get access to We're good to go.
Very few, almost a none, except for sort of the idiot animal strength in their backs.
They're sort of two-legged oxen capacities.
That's really all that they can bring to the table is, you know, hoisting and toting and this kind of stuff, right?
Which is... A pretty sad and pathetic life of never being able to move out of your parents' house and never being able to have a girlfriend and never getting anywhere and never seeing the world and facing a future of barely being a waiter for the rest of your life.
And that's all largely to do with an excess and consolidation and the destructive nature of state power.
So the next thing that has occurred, of course, is that there used to be a much stronger path to the middle class for the undereducated or the uneducated.
And that was manual labor, leading to either unionized or non-unionized, but fairly lucrative work.
And from there, you could at least put your kids through college, and you could have a pretty decent income and a blue-collar job.
That was your sort of route.
That's the traditional route for immigrants to get out of that sort of first-round immigrant experience.
Now, in very many sections of the United States, and in many other Western countries as well, particularly in Western Europe, That has largely been closed off.
And it's been largely closed off due to sort of union slash state, slash health and safety, slash environmental regulations, slash ridiculous trade laws, mercantilist policies for larger organizations, the draining of resources towards the military-industrial complex combined with the high barriers to entry for those military-industrial concerns.
And so you sort of put all of that together.
And you can, I think, get a fairly clear sense that not only has public education gotten immeasurably worse over the past say 30, 40, 50 years, But, in particular, after the early 70s, when it basically became impossible to fire teachers, I mean, the public school educational system has gotten immeasurably worse.
And you and I, I mean, assuming that you're over, I don't know, 30, I mean, we're really 25 or 30.
We can't even figure out how bad it is now, because at least we had the momentum of the teachers who existed back then, who sort of kept on with their same way of doing things the way that they had learned before.
So, we, I don't think, have a very strong idea at all just how bad things have gotten for a lot of people.
And, of course, if you're in some, you know, one shoelace rural Alabama kind of town, then...
It's even worse because the teachers don't want to come and teach there.
I mean, there's not a lot of people who graduate from Teachers College in Manhattan who want to go to, like, you know, Bumhole, Alabama to go and teach in the Blue Mountains or whatever, the bluegrass, blue hills, something to do with blue and vegetation, those mountains, those places. So, you know, Jiminy Hicksville is not where you want to end up.
And so, generally, it's the rejects, the retards, the lowest of the low, the emotionally abusive, the drunk, the sexually assaultive, the violent, the vile.
All of these people end up out in these kinds of places, right?
I mean, normally what would happen, of course, in a free market situation, the rents for these places would be a lot lower, and the salaries for skilled professionals who were required in these communities would be higher, and so you could make a fairly good case for...
It would all end up being equal, right?
It would just be a matter of a lifestyle choice, right?
You like the open hills, but you get paid a lot more, right?
Whereas at these places... Living conditions are worse and the salaries are lower, right, as opposed to how it would be in the free market where it would all balance out.
In the free market, it always just ends up being a matter of lifestyle choice.
It's never a clear-cut thing one way or the other.
That requires state intervention to stack the deck that way.
But this sort of path through manual labor to sort of foreman to Some low or maybe even mid-level manager.
That role or that career path is done, pretty much, for the most part, unless you know someone who can get you into a union and you're willing to do even more brain-dead work during the apprenticeship programs that last 12 lifetimes longer than they should.
This kind of path is cut off, right?
So these people are, their brains are ground into a fine statist paste full of propaganda and retarded chanting slogan idiocy and pro-statist, pro-warfare kind of, sorry, it could be anti-statist, but it would definitely be pro-military kind of propagandistic fog.
They're spat out with virtually no viable economic skills into a marketplace where there's almost no leg up.
There's no entry for them into any kind of position.
And this is all the result of status power.
It's all the result of status power.
So then, you know, Billy Joe Bob Two Barrels is strolling around the mall, got nothing to buy anything with, got no future, can barely read, can barely write, has no clue what's going on in the world, is living a life of base animal, moment to moment, lust and anger and disappointment and boredom and frustration and anger and lust.
I mean, it's a moment by moment, kaleidoscopic, base, biological, prick of the spine, electrical cord kind of stuff.
And no one's ever paid any interest to him.
No one's ever put any investment in him.
He's never been mentored. Nobody in authority.
Nobody's ever wanted to talk to him.
I mean, it's a pretty sad, depressed, lonely existence.
And likely he doesn't have a father.
And he wants to make something of his life.
He wants to do something with his life.
He gets a sense that his capacities and his possibilities are all just kind of slowly, slowly, slowly slipping away.
Imagine a statue made of sand in a high wind.
It blows away and erodes and goes into the wind and goes into clouds and goes into dust and goes into nothing.
That's how he sees his future.
And that's how he experiences his present.
That it's all just kind of fading away into nothing.
Ooh, going to the fast lane.
Well, it's public roads.
It's not that fast. This is the experience of these people.
And then, of course, one day they're out there at the mall and somebody walks up to them and calls them son and is friendly and gives them all these promises, promises all this great future.
You'll get money for college.
You'll get trained. You'll get a profession.
We'll give you a proper education.
We'll give you cash. You'll get respect.
You'll get something great for your resume.
You'll get a network of people who want to help you.
You can choose to stay in the army and retire at the age of 40.
And you can do this and you can do that.
And there'll be buddies and there'll be friends.
There'll be a place to go.
There'll be hot meals.
There'll be travel.
There'll be excitement.
There'll be, you know, all of this kind of stuff.
And, you know, for most of this kid's life, he's been told to sit in the back and shut up and not learn anything.
And he's been bored and he's been resentful and he's been lonely and he's felt underappreciated.
And he's felt that nobody gives a rat's ass about whether he lives or dies.
And now suddenly somebody's wooing him and taking him out for lunch and telling him what a great guy he is.
And then the whiplash effect of propaganda comes up, coils him, fastens like a sick cobra on the back of his neck, injecting the venom of...
Virtuous bloodlust into his brain and he gets all these images of charging up the hill and being a hero and everyone's going to respect him for the rest of his life and there's going to be chicks who dig him because chicks dig the military man.
I love a man in uniform and all this kind of stuff.
And it's kind of heady for a guy who's never had anyone pay any interest or attention or give him a time of day before.
And he's lied to. Let's not forget that, right?
Oh, if you don't like it, after six weeks of basic training, you can cop out.
Nope, not so much. Got to keep going.
Oh, after a year, if you don't like it, you can cop out.
Ooh, sorry, stopgap measures are in.
Now we've got you for the next 20 years.
So there's not really quite as much voluntary aspects to that as you might at first glance think when you're comparing that kind of process or that kind of procedure.
to a draft situation.
And of course, well, Noam Chomsky supports a draft army because it's one of the things that began to bring Vietnam down, was of course when the draft began snatching away the beloved sons of middle class and rich.
I don't think the rich ever had it occur.
But when it began to snatch away the beloved sons of the middle class, then suddenly everyone got all hot and bothered because it wasn't just like anonymous black southern retarded kids who were out there getting killed, but things became horrible.
Ooh, just a tad more immediate than they had been before.
So, that's not really exactly what you would think of as sort of a purely voluntary kind of situation, and that's sort of what it is that I'm trying to get at here.
Just to look at, you know, to try and empathize with the people who are going through these kinds of choices.
Now, I know you can send me all these emails if you want and post on the board as freely as you like to tell me, Steph, how come are you talking to these people that are evil sociopaths and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, I get all of that.
I get all of that. But people respond to incentives.
And yes, it is a particular kind of person who's going to end up responding to these incentives.
I don't think it's good that they do it.
I think the foundation of the military is one of the greatest evils, if not the greatest evil of an ethic, which is the hitman ethic in the history of the world.
But the basic fact of the matter is that people respond to incentives.
And I think that it's a failure of empathy.
Not that I'm saying this is true of anybody in particular.
But I think it's a failure of empathy.
If you say, well, it must be voluntary because I wouldn't do it, but people are doing it, and since I choose not to do it, me comfortably tucked away in an arts degree at a nice college, since I choose not to do it, it must be voluntary for other people, well, I don't think that's the case.
I think we kind of need to put ourselves in the, you know, horrible Iraqi-baked hobnail boots of these people and see how the hell they got there.
Why would people end up making such wildly divergent decisions?
And wouldn't it be the case, really, since we've talked about this in the recognize your own capacity for evil situation, that if you and I were born in butt-plug Alabama, then we may well end up in the military thinking we were the biggest, bad-assest kind of heroes ever to walk the face of the earth.
And we would be back slapping, adrenaline pumping, hearty maladies kind of people as well.
And then it would be an important thing to understand that that was possible.
So that we can understand how people end up where they are.
And we can understand how the power of the state...
And the power of public schools and propaganda, all the same thing really, and the church to some degree, the onward Christian soldier stuff, how the power of the state, how the power of centralized violence, snakes into, destroys, corrupts, undermines, and idiifies, turns into idiots, just about everyone, to one degree or another.
And... So that's sort of another aspect or an area that I think is very, very important to understand about the military and how people end up there.
And how you and I, under mildly different circumstances in many ways, a hundred miles from a town, if we'd been born there instead, we may very well Have ended up in this kind of situation.
So let's have empathy for the forces that have acted on to such a degree that they end up in these kinds of situations.
And that it is a very long journey of statism that dumps them into a Humvee and dumps the Humvee over an IED, especially those new...
Shrapnel armor-piercing IEDs.
It's a long status journey that gets people from A to B there, or A to Z. And I would say let's have a little bit of empathy for the circumstances that put people into this kind of decision matrix.
And yeah, I think it's still wrong to choose to go into the military, because if you ask these people, should you shoot people just because someone tells you to, they'd say, no, this is different.
I'm following orders. Because, you know, when you change the language, reality changes.
You know, when I call the sun the moon, everything goes dark.
It's pretty cool.
I'd do it right now, but my pupils have just relaxed into the night, and I certainly would not want to find a groper ram for my sunglasses.
Otherwise, I would. So...
Let's talk about the final sort of component, and there's many, many others, but let's talk about the final component that's the major one, at least for me, in this sort of, quote, voluntary nature of the military.
And that, of course, is you and I. We few, we happy few, we slowly getting fewer taxpayers.
It all comes down to demographics, right?
That's one of the reasons why the Muslim world poses such danger.
But we, as taxpayers, are the fundamental driver behind this whole situation.
It's a very, very important thing to understand.
You and I, as taxpayers, are the reason that there is a military.
Without taxes, there is no such thing as the military in any way that we would understand it.
There is no such thing as the military in any way that we would understand it in the absence of taxation.
So you could, if you wanted to forego all of the conclusions and say, BASDEF, that's just a bunch of influences, everyone's still responsible, it's voluntary.
Well, we could debate that.
But still, all of that fades and fails before the final criteria, which is that you can call the soldiers voluntary, but the taxpayers, taxpayers are always drafted.
There's always a draft for the taxpayers.
So, that's an important thing in its sort of essence to understand about the military and to understand about the state and its relationship to warfare.
I've written, I think it was on antiwar.com, I've had an article published, the state is the health of war.
It's this old statement that war is the health of state.
Well, the state is the health of war.
That without the state, you simply can't have warfare.
You can have defense against idiot aggressors, but you can't have warfare in the way that we understand it.
And the growth of the state that occurred after the state figured out what fat cows ripe for preying upon the Industrial Revolution had produced in the 19th century, the wars of the 20th century, were ample evidence of this, that when you become rich as a culture, When you become prosperous,
that's when you begin to really lose your freedoms because that draws more and more statist assholes to prey upon the wealth of the increasingly complacent sheep chewing away on their imaginary cut of democracy and imagining that they're just about to be asked to sit down at the farmer's table to decide what's going to be on the plates for dinner.
But you can't have...
the existing kind of system of even as a sort of quote voluntary army without coercive taxation so there is almost no voluntary aspect to what occurs in the existing military I think thinking of the military in terms of draft versus non-draft is a specious and frankly quite dangerous distinction Because I think it creates a dichotomy where one doesn't really exist.
And it's like saying, well, the guy in the maximum security prison is a real slave.
Boy, that's terrible. But you know the guy in the medium security prison?
It's totally different.
Well, it's really not.
And the people who are always perpetually enslaved in the welfare state are always, always, always and forevermore, you and I, the taxpayers, And we're the ones who are drafted.
And... Oh, my phone.
I'll grab it in a moment.
Ooh, look, we finally have some music for Freedom Aime Radio.
That isn't me yelling away into the microphone.
Anyway, I hope that this helps at least explain where it is that I'm coming from in terms of understanding and analyzing.
How we can look at voluntarism versus coercion within the realm of the military.
I think it's a very fruitful topic, and I look forward to your voluntary, non-drafted, non-coerced anarcho-capitalist donations to the course.
I really appreciate you listening.
Thank you so much, as always.
I will talk to you soon. Oh, and welcome to the new commie board member.
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