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Nov. 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:10:54
494 Call In Show Nov 5 2006 4pm
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Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us on this slightly abridged Sunday afternoon chat.
I'm presenting at a conference on Tuesday and going down to set up on Monday and leaving tonight.
So, of course, I need the 19 hours and I need to bring some chocolates and some flowers for the guards because I imagine with the security guards there's usually a high degree of intimacy.
So I just, you know, I like to feel that it's a little bit more romantic than it often turns out to be.
So I like to bring a card, some flowers, chocolates and so on, get to know the person a little bit.
And that's usually a little bit of lubricant also helps usually when going through this process.
So I actually have to reapply for my, I have to get a passport now in Canada.
I have an EEC passport, and then I got a landed immigrants card, and then I got a Canadian citizenship card, and now I have to go and get a passport because the world leaders are so interested in keeping free people free that they keep imposing more and more restrictions upon travel and the need for papers and so on. and now I have to go and get a passport But that's neither here nor there.
So it'll be a little bit of a short chat today, which I don't think will be the end of the world.
I spent about an hour and ten minutes on a speech that I gave at the Libertarian Convention yesterday.
So that's been posted on YouTube and also on freedomainradio.com if you'd like to check that out.
I think I certainly enjoyed myself.
Thank you very much.
I felt that I was right on the edge of good taste, but they certainly knew my opinions and asked me to come anyway, so I could only assume that they wanted to shine a different light on the same topics.
And that was very enjoyable, and everybody was very pleasant.
And the only thing that they said after I presented the DRO option for solving air pollution...
I wanted to take a stab, of course, at solving the greatest challenge in many ways of libertarian or free market economics, which is the solution to the problem of air pollution.
After presenting that, somebody said, well, this could coexist with the state, and I then had to finally fess up and say, well...
Not so much, really, for a variety of reasons.
And we talked about those for a few minutes.
And then the only mild reproof that I got was from the president of the Libertarian Party up here who was saying, well, this is just one of a possible solution.
There could be many other solutions.
This is just sort of one possible solution to which I readily exceeded, although I did not say...
Welcome to my show!
And not for an enormous amount of money.
So anyway, you can have a watch of that on YouTube or listen to it.
And I thought I would just sort of start off because this came up and I'll do a very brief intro here and then I'll turn it over to the intelligent people in the group, i.e.
the listeners. And I just wanted to talk a little bit about some history that may or may not be known by a lot of people.
Because, even in some fairly well-traveled libertarian circles, this question...
It still haunts people's view of history.
And this question is, I think, the only real time in history that nuclear weapons were used against a civilian population, or any population, really, for that matter, was, of course, as we all know, in August of 1945, when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think about 72 hours apart, no more than two to three days apart.
And I'll just give you a very sort of brief historical sketch Of what occurred.
This is all public record.
This is nothing particularly shocking.
Unless, of course, you've just got your history from state schools and so on.
But at least what I was taught was the standard mythology of the victor, which is that...
The Japanese, out of nowhere, with evil and inscrutable perfidy, in a day of infamy, attacked the U.S. with no provocation, with no warning, without a formal declaration of war.
The Japanese attacked America at Pearl Harbor and destroyed a good part of the fleet.
And then the... The United States declared war on Japan, and then I can't remember which treaty triggered it, whether it was the fact that there was a tripartite alliance between Germany and Japan, and Italy, of course, but because of that, America had war declared on it by Germany, declared war back, and that was basically how The United States got itself into the Second World War.
Because after spending ridiculous amounts of blood in the First World War, there was a great deal of skepticism as to the value of entering the Second World War in the American population, right?
So in the Wilsonian sense, Wilson was re-elected as the whatever, I can't remember what number, president in 1916.
And he was elected on the basic slogan, he kept us out of the war, right?
Because this war was not perceived to be a good or evil conflict, but Wilson stoked up the fires of anti-Germanic sentiments with a good deal of participation from intellectuals and from the media.
and there were all these ridiculous stories that were never verified.
In fact, there was a very large reward put out to try and get people to verify the stories that the Germans, when they went into Belgium, were cutting off the arms of people, and all the usual stuff, the atrocities that are always talked about in war as being always on the side of the opponent or potential opponent.
And so, of course, America then entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, which was ironic when you think about that they were coming into the war on the side of England, and France, which were the greatest imperial powers in the world at the time, which is not to say that the English which were the greatest imperial powers in the world at the time, which is not to say that the English and French democracies were but Wilson's major purpose was self-determination, not self-determination.
A free market, capitalist, minimal government kind of economy.
His basic approach to virtue in the world was based on national self-determination, which even by that standard would not paint the sort of autocratic powers of England and France and their overseas empires in very good light.
So America kind of went into the First World War and Spent an enormous amount of money, ruined the currency for some time, and I think 100,000 Americans were killed, and of course, some multiple of that were wounded.
And then what happened? Well, as the French Marshal Foch declared at the end, especially when he saw the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, one of the more prophetic statements in history, he said, this is not peace.
This is a detente for 20 years, which, of course, since the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, which was the official spark to World War II, proved quite accurate, although I guess the war ended in November of 1918, and I can't remember exactly when the Treaty of Versailles was about six months, so he was off by a few months, but that's pretty good in terms of being able to predict history.
There was no point that was viewed in America with getting involved in another European conflict in the Second World War, and so one of the things that occurred was that Roosevelt knew that he could not declare war against Germany and get away with it.
This was still back in the time when it was generally perceived that the president needed to get Congress to declare war.
There was still some historical reverence for some of the principles in the Constitution, which is not so much anymore these days.
So they basically blockaded Japan, and Japan, of course, being an island nation, knew that if it was going to have a war, It needed to do so before its stocks of oil and food were depleted.
And so this is, of course, why they attacked Pearl Harbor, because the United...
What on earth? What lunatic country would go and attack the United States?
I mean, the most powerful country in the world.
What... What madness would you do?
It's like being Woody Allen and going up and punching Mr.
T in the nuts or something.
I mean, this is not really what you would do.
You just have to be pretty desperate to do it, and this is where the Japanese were.
And of course, the Japanese society was pretty top-down and evil and so on, but nonetheless, then there was this bloody war, which we don't need to go into any detail.
And the island hopping towards the Japanese continent occurred, and then just towards the end of the war, the United States, Roosevelt put forward unconditional surrender.
Unconditional, you have to surrender with no conditions.
We will do with you what we will, said the Americans to the Japanese.
And the Japanese said, look, we're done.
We know that we're done. There's just no possibility that we're going to do anything other than draw this conflict out in a horrible kind of way.
And they'd already had these horrible attacks upon Tokyo.
Wherein Tokyo was a city mostly made of wood, so when these incendiary bombs came down from the U.S. Air Force, you know, you'd get 100,000 people would die in a raid.
It was like the Dresden bombings and so on, and some of the more, the bombings that occurred over England, but to a greater degree.
So they knew they were toast, and the Americans said, unconditional surrender, or nothing's going to happen.
And they said, fine, we know we're done.
There's just one thing. We want to keep the emperor.
That's our thing. We're big on the emperor.
So Hirohito was his name.
There was a movie out, I think, over last year.
I didn't see it, though, but it was supposed to be dealing with this time frame.
And so they said, no, you can't have the emperor.
There's no luck for you.
You don't get the emperor. It's unconditional.
We can do whatever we want. We can ship all of your women off to pleasure domes in San Francisco if we so choose.
It's unconditional surrender, which is not a very intelligent way to go about concluding a war, but then war is not noted for its intelligent execution or conclusion.
And so the Japanese said no, and then the Americans lit up Hiroshima.
And the Japanese were suing for peace, and they said, basically, whatever you want.
You know, you have this weapon from hell that has just incinerated a couple hundred thousand civilians, right?
Peaceful civilians. They didn't have any vote about the war.
They didn't have any... They weren't behind the emperor.
That wasn't even the excuse that the Germans could be bombed for voting in Hitler, even though Hitler came in as a minority and then stole power.
But... The Japanese sued for peace, but of course the Americans then within 70 hours, which was not enough time for any negotiations to occur, lit up Nagasaki and another couple of hundred thousand innocent civilians went to the sky in clouds of ash.
And then the Americans said, and you may have noticed this if you follow the royal births in the modern newspapers, the Americans said, okay, well, it's over, but hey, you know, you can keep your emperor anyway.
So the whole sticking point, which was supposed to be what caused the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was whether or not The Japanese should be allowed to keep their emperor.
It turned out to be a point that the Americans, although they denied the right of the Japanese to surrender and then killed, murdered, really, a large number of Japanese civilians, that this turned out not to be something that they wanted anyway.
So, you know, it was completely horrific that this occurred.
And so I just sort of wanted to point this out, that there was this myth that I heard when I was sort of going to school and Knee high to a grasshopper that the invasion of the Japanese mainland was the only way in which the Japanese would ever surrender and therefore they had to go and bomb these people otherwise they would have had a million troops killed invading the Japanese mainland and so on.
It's just not true. I mean, it's not true.
And this is exactly, you know, war and these kinds of things is exactly where you should just believe nothing.
I mean, don't believe me.
Go, you know, go look this stuff up, right?
But, you know, this, of course, has many, many parallels to the war on terror that, you know, whether you accept the official story of 9-11 or not, the idea that people just out of nowhere came and attacked us, although we were doing nothing wrong, and these crazy homicidal Muslims were just out of nowhere because they hate us for being good or being virtuous and they hate our freedoms and so on.
They just attacked us out of nowhere.
And you need a sort of national mythology that we are innocent to just, you know, just minded our own business officer and this guy jumped out of the shadows and attacked us for no reason.
It's never the case.
It's never the case. You can certainly look at the amount of Death and destruction that the U.S. has rained upon the world in murderous foreign policies, overthrows of dictatorships, massive amounts of donations of arms to dictatorships and foreign aid which props up dictatorships and all of this kind of stuff, not to mention the half a million Iraqi children supposed to have been killed by the blockade of the 1990s.
It's never out of nowhere.
That's the important thing to sort of understand in this kind of stuff.
And there is, in a sort of passive-aggressive way, this is a meta-narrative of passive aggression in the way that you would look at somebody who is a bad-tempered person But has a surface kind of sweetness to them, right?
So they will then provoke you with a smile.
And there's a sort of parody of one of these women in Bridget Jones' diary.
But boy, there's a cultural stretch from Nagasaki to Bridget Jones' diary.
But this kind of approach is where you go around secretly provoking lots of other people, and then when somebody lashes back at you, then you act completely shocked and appalled and surprised And then you just go pound people into the dirt,
right? So the playground sort of scenario is you keep taking some kid's lunch money back behind the garbage disposal or the garbage dump that nobody can see, and this kid gets more and more upset and more and more angry but feels helpless because you're five times his size in that beautiful thing that happens when some people hit puberty a little sooner than others.
I was pretty chicken-chested at 12.
Some of the guys in my class had to shave the backs of their hands.
Really did make some leaps, right?
And so you keep provoking this kid.
You tease him mercilessly.
And then one day, the kid, you know, balls up his fist and punches you in the stomach.
And it's a blow that's painful.
And then you say, well...
I'm sorry, but this came out of nowhere, and bam, you pound the guy within an inch of his life, right?
That is the sort of scenario that this happens.
It's not to pick on America.
I mean, this is the same thing that occurs throughout history with governments.
We look upon the French as cowards now, but there's very little.
That needs to be known about brutal murder, destruction and desperate courage.
And if the French don't know it, it's really not worth knowing throughout their history.
I mean, through Napoleon, they almost took over all of Europe and a good chunks of North Africa and almost made it to Stalingrad or whatever it was in Petersburg back then.
So, yeah, we talk about them as being cowards now, but I think that's just because they've seen a little bit more of it than they care to.
And, of course, after the First World War, which was fought mostly on French soil, there's not a lot of patience for war.
And this will, of course, come back to America at some point, right, after your government goes crazy and starts interfering with the lives and fortunes of people overseas.
At some point, you know, you provoke the world enough and you're going to get hit back.
And then you can say, well, this has all changed.
The world is different. It's like, no, the world is now just mirrored a tiny little bit, right?
The world is just mirrored a tiny little bit insofar as Noam Chomsky says, not somebody who I agree with in terms of economics, but his analysis of empire is, I think, excellent.
It says that there was nothing new about 9-11.
The only difference was which way the weapons were pointing.
It's unthinkable that the countries which are supposed to be dominated and bullied and told what to do by the imperial power That they should ever strike back is unthinkable, right?
And the pride of the vain, glorious warrior, when one of the little vassal states strikes back, it knows no bounds, the pride and rage of actually striking back against somebody who's abusing and bullying you.
The rage of the people then knows no bounds.
And so I just sort of wanted to go over that as sort of a brief introduction.
This is not what the topic has to be today, but I do think that It's something important to put out there just in case people are sort of still stuck on some of the history.
This is not specifically a revisionist history.
Of course, the history that is written by the victors, it's barely even a history.
It's more like a screenplay.
It's got the demons and the villains.
It's more like a religious text would be the way, I think, to look at it.
It's just sort of designed to...
Although even in the religious text, God is not particularly nice, whereas in the fairy tales that are written by the victors, of all kinds, right?
I mean, this is not specific to the West or anything, it's all governments, that the narratives that are written by the victors have almost nothing to do with reality.
And usually, if you want to know the truth, it's usually the complete inverse of what is generally said.
So... Oh, there was a question, what was Truman's motivation to drop the bomb?
Well, there's a number of sort of questions, which is that, you know, and nobody knows, right?
You can't interrogate the dead, and certainly people don't leave much of a record of this.
But one of the motivations that is often talked about is that he wanted to scare the Russians by displaying the power of this weapon and so on, but there's no real way to know for sure, and certainly the Russians at this point did look like a fairly significant threat.
The conflict over East and West Berlin was still to come, the Berlin blockade, but...
There's no way to know.
It's like saying, what is the motive for George Bush to invade Iraq?
I mean, there's no real way to know, and there probably never will be a way to know.
There's a certain amount of speculation you can put into it, but it's very hard to really sort of understand what that is.
Alright, well, that's it for that topic.
I'm going to open up the board now to anybody who wants to talk about anything.
As I mentioned, I have about another 50 minutes or so before I have to head to New York, but if anyone has any questions or comments, the board is now open.
A quick one on the last topic.
Sure. Sure. It seems like you're kind of suggesting that provocation is, in a sense, a cause of war, but more like a continuing fuel for it.
What... What would you suggest as a good way to defuse or short circuit this desire to continuously provoke each other into states of aggression?
Well, it's an excellent question, and I can't obviously do much justice to it.
Maybe even given a long time, I probably couldn't.
But what I will say sort of very briefly is that the key thing to my particular belief is that war is there is a certain amount of evil grandiosity and sort of malign megalomania involved in war and the declarations of war.
And sort of watching Robert McNamara in 1995 break down in tears when he was talking about his role in the madness of the 60s with Vietnam.
You know, 60,000 Americans killed.
You don't quite often hear as much about the 3.8 million Vietnamese who went to meet their makers.
But when you see people talking about that, there's no way that I can really conceive Of what goes on in somebody's psychology like that.
So I certainly wouldn't try to heal them from that standpoint or even talk about a heal.
But what I would say is that the fundamental thing that always occurs with war, as we can see going on with the Iraq war at present, Is a massive transfer of wealth, right?
And we've talked about this before, that the provocations, sure, the most violent people in history get the most press, right?
I mean, the most aggressive and violent people get, the most aggressive and violent American presidents are the ones considered to be the greatest, right?
Roosevelt and Lincoln and so on.
And Wilson. The most destructive people get the greatest press.
So certainly if you're trying to aim for the history books, the slaughterhouse is the way to go, for sure.
Because what happens, there's a certain amount of reaction formation and defensive formation that occurs when 100,000 of your citizens get killed, as in World War I. There's a natural tendency, once a human being receives a terrible blow, like the death of a family member, there's a sort of ex post facto justification that kicks into play, where people say, well, it must have been for something.
It must have been for something.
My father cannot have been killed for nothing.
My son cannot have been killed for nothing.
And of course, that's what governments want to do.
And again, I'm not sort of saying they sit up plotting this.
It's just a logic of the system that once you can get people killed, then you almost don't need to come up with a reason for war.
People will just sort of invent that stuff, especially if they're religious.
But... So there's that, but I think most fundamentally the reason that wars exist is because the people who declare them don't bear either any personal or financial liability for the destruction that they cause.
In a sense, if you sort of know the phrase, the externalization of costs in economics, it's the idea that you can get other people to pay for things that you should yourself be paying for.
Like if I could get my neighbors to pay for my car, then that would be externalizing a cost to other people that I should normally be paying for myself.
War is the ultimate externalization of cost because the leaders get to make thrilling and heroic speeches and go down in the history books while they themselves and their families, which is actually not quite true because Roosevelt had four sons in active duty in the war against Japan.
which I'm sure would say quite a bit about that family but let's not get into that now but the leaders themselves don't face either personal risk Or financial risk, or they don't pay.
The costs of war are borne by those who suffer from inflation because there's always a massive amount of overprinting of currency during wartime and selling of these liberty bonds and so on.
The soldiers, of course, get paid almost nothing relative to the private sector people.
And the people who make war materials and weapons and supplies, they make an absolute fortune, as I've talked about in one of my podcasts, as an example from World War I. So the fact that you can externalize the cost of war to taxpayers has an enormous effect on whether war gets prosecuted or not.
And there's some people who say if we stop worshipping warriors, then war will cease.
But I think that human beings are just a little bit more practical than that.
And sure, the leaders like it. The leaders want the war and the grandiosity and so on.
But they're certainly encouraged and funded sort of fundamentally by people who make profits from war at the expense of other people.
That would be my sort of... You just have to get rid of the state and then you can't externalize the cost of war to taxpayers through inflation or taxes or the future generation through deficits.
So without the apparatus of the state, there really is no capacity to continue to escalate.
But in a situation where we're kind of stuck with the state, all we can really do then is just sit back and wait for the vainglorious to satisfy their egos.
Well, it's like a stock bubble or like an economic bubble, right?
So it's like, you know, during the stock boom of the 90s, just as the housing boom of the current decade is going through its inevitable, you know, tulip south tea bubble sort of stage, right?
I mean, you can go out and say to people that housing prices are going to crash.
Not because you're some sort of genius, but because it always does.
So you can go out and tell people all of that, but wisdom holds very little sway against sort of mad and self-profitable illusions, right?
So megalomania is almost never touched by rationality.
That's sort of the definition of megalomania.
And when people have significant financial interests and megalomania, mere philosophy is, you know, as dust in the wind compared to those kinds of incentives.
I think that we'll find that megalomania will dip just a little bit, if not be removed from the public sphere with the absence of the state.
But no, this sort of orgy of violence, at least I've never seen a place in history or a time in history where people have been able to rein that in.
It has to run its course in the same way that Somebody who is a drunk or a drug addict or, you know, the power addicts and the war addicts, they have to just run their course.
When the society, in a sense, hits bottom, then the violence doesn't go away.
Like, I mean, it just gets subsumed into another area.
I mean, so France, I mean, obviously gave up on war even before the Second World War.
I mean, there really wasn't much of a spirited defense of France because they kind of got that nothing changed after the First World War, so why get killed again for something that isn't really going to change anything?
But then, of course, they all went socialist after the end of the Second World War, and so the violence still exists within French society.
It's just subsumed into the sort of welfare state and unions and so on, so taxation.
But at some point, you know, human beings will suffer enough, and I wish it didn't have to be this way, and I certainly would like to find a way to change this, but it seems to be fairly universal.
That people and cultures suffer, and that seems to be the only way to get rid of mass delusion, is through suffering.
I mean, I wish there was another way, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
Which actually kind of leads me back to another question I had.
This actually has been nagging me for a while.
You mentioned the sort of respect for the historical precedent of the The precepts of the Constitution in a situation where, you know, a guy like Roosevelt or Truman is willing to unload on the Japanese as a display of power for the sake of the Russians.
Why this desire to cling to some sort of pretense around, you know, the rules, you know?
Once they have the reins of power, what do they really care whether they're obeying the mandates of the Constitution or not?
I mean, why this kabuki dance around the Bill of Rights and all of that crap?
It just seems kind of like...
If I was a crazy madman, it would be kind of an inconvenience, a pretty inefficient way to run my government to have to assuage all of these warm, fuzzy feelings about human rights and whatnot.
I'd just say, you know, screw it.
I have the guns. I'm going to go do whatever I want.
Right, right, right. So we're working with sort of two fairly improbable hypotheses.
One is that the state would not want to be interested in this kind of propaganda, and the second, that you're not a crazy lunatic, right?
So we'll deal with the first one first, and then we'll get to the second one.
Well, remember, though, that the state rests on the obedience of the people.
I mean, the state rests on the obedience of the people, and what governments always want to do is to lower the cost of ownership for having taxpayers, right?
Just as a...
I don't know.
Maybe you could get good meat out of a lion as well as a cow, but a lion would be a little bit more risky to have sort of prowling around...
You know, maybe you could go and get nice milk from a female lion, but you're probably going to want to prefer to go and milk a cow because that's going to lower your total cost of ownership for your livestock, right?
I mean, so the more placid the animal, the cheaper the total cost of ownership when you're exploiting that animal as a resource.
And the same thing, I think, would logically be entirely true with taxpayers.
So... I think that, and again, I'm not saying this is sort of a consciously plotted plan, but it just would seem logical that if you can get people to believe that you should pay your taxes because you don't want the terrorists to win because they're evil and we're good, as I've sort of said, the motivation for morality is the greatest motivation in human life.
It's something that libertarians, again, I'm sort of pounding at them over and over to start using the argument for morality, but People's desire to be thought of as good and to obey the good is by far the most powerful motivation in human life.
It absolutely transcends survival.
It absolutely transcends people's desire to survive and propagate.
And we can see this simply because young men, many of them prior to family, if they are drafted, will go.
They don't go because everyone forces them to go.
They go. Because it would be considered cowardly not to.
It's what you do. It's noble.
It's this and that. So people's desire, and I have no idea why this exists biologically, and maybe biologists could tell me otherwise, but just sort of working empirically, and I really disliked this theory when I first began to poke around in it, but just working empirically...
Human beings will, you know, whatever it takes to think of themselves as good, as moral, it's a bizarre gene that we have, or a series of genes, but human beings will do anything to believe that they're moral.
And if they give up on the morality of a particular situation or ethic, Then it becomes almost impossible to rule them, right, as we sort of saw with Russia.
I mean, obviously Russia ran out of money in 1989, but, you know, just as importantly, I think it also ran out of any kind of faith in the ethics or belief in the moral virtues of planned economies and socialism and so on.
So, controlling the ethical debate is absolutely central to maintaining a power.
Of course, this is true in the microcosm of the family, which, of course, Christina rightly puts as the macrocosm of the state.
It is true that parents need to have their children believe that the parents are telling them what to do because the parents are wise and virtuous rather than that, say, if it's the case that the parents are sort of petty and control freaks.
But the belief that we subsume ourselves to power for the sake of virtue is very, very powerful, and therefore it really lowers the total cost of ownership.
I mean, if taxpayers really got, and they actually are beginning to get, I mean, I'm just amazed.
At the conversations that I'm having with people outside of the freedom movement these days.
And of course, this just occurred up here in Canada that these income trusts have just been savagely thrown into the tax prison and has just wiped out, you know, sort of $30, $25 billion worth of people's investments because there was a way to get out of corporate income tax or pay less if you moved your corporation to an income trust.
And several large companies were doing this.
And so the government was like, you know, the cows are getting away!
The cows are getting away!
And the They, you know, shot him in the legs so they could get him back and heal him up and milk him some more.
So I think that it's essential that the moral debate is controlled by those in power because that is just the greatest and most powerful lever in the human soul is the desire to be good.
And the leaders tell this themselves as well, right?
The leaders don't look in the mirror, I think, and say, you know, I am the most evil being that has ever lived, right?
They all have their own stories. As to why it is that they're so virtuous, but I think it seems pretty essential that you have to control the moral debate in order to control the people.
That's why if you look at the growth of state power...
It really accelerated a generation after the children were educated by the state.
Again, nothing conspiratorial about it.
It's just inevitable.
Human beings have a great, great instinct to control others, right?
Because it's a perfectly viable biological strategy, as we've talked about before.
And so if there's human beings to be exploited who will let themselves be exploited, then...
The world has never been short of people willing to exploit them, right?
No dictatorship has ever folded because they just couldn't find any torturers or sort of, you know, midnight raid, black Maria kind of policemen.
And wars have never ended because they just couldn't find anyone willing to run the war or be a general or shoot people.
So the price you pay for illusions is...
It's violence, right? Violence either in your personal relationships, within your society, and that's why if you want to reduce the world's violence, you have to try and teach it, I think, a kind of wisdom.
But that's very painful for a lot of people.
So, I mean, telling people that they're not as good as they think they are, it certainly was a brutal experience for me when I sort of began to really reflect on my life and where I was relative to my values.
Oh, it's ghastly. But it's, you know, it's sort of the fire that you need to pass through sort of to get to the promised land, so to speak.
So, in a sense, Jefferson's assertion in the Declaration is absolutely right, if we substitute out one word, that governments derive their powers from the compliance of the governed.
Absolutely. Absolutely. But, I mean, compliance, and I've used the term myself, and I sort of just want to spend a second qualifying it, because just the same way that I have to rely on a brain surgeon if I get some sort of tumor from too much podcasting, then I'm not going to sit there and say, well, I'll order a book on brain surgery.
I'll get a spoon, a saw, and a spittoon and go to town.
No. In the same way, people do generally assume that there are experts out there who are philosophers or who have defined virtues and values, and they really don't have the capacity to invent ethics for themselves.
It's a brutally hard thing to do, as we know through these conversations.
So, I mean, I do believe that there's a betrayal of the people by the intellectuals that's pretty significant in this.
But, of course, the vicious circle is that the government, that people believe in the virtue of the government, and therefore the government can take money from them with relatively little effort because they believe it's virtuous.
And with the money that the government takes from the taxpayers, it sort of pays a small number of policemen to patrol and to haul in the occasional malcontents, and it pays an entire army of propagandists to convince the people that what they're subjecting themselves to is virtuous and that there's these abstract entities called the government and the country and the state and the nation and the history and the race and this and that and the religion.
Which, you know, they must sacrifice themselves to.
It's nothing personal and so on.
So I don't think that people really...
It's not quite obedience, if that makes any sense, just because I'm not sure for a lot of people that there's much option, because you simply can't be good at everything, and philosophy is just about, I think, just about the hardest thing.
It's maybe asking too much of the average population, just as it would be to ask someone to be, you know, a great lawyer and physicist and doctor and, you know, businessman and so on.
That the specialization that occurs within life is pretty powerful, and I think people just kind of assume that the philosophers who are around, whoever's defining the values, have some sort of reason behind what they're saying.
Right. It's a resignation, really, to just...
You shrug your shoulders and say, well, somebody must have figured it out, so this has to be the right thing to do.
Yeah, it feels wrong, but hey, you know, it feels wrong that the world is round, but people tell me it is.
You know, like, people's emotions, when it comes to ethics and philosophy, are not always reasonable guides, right?
Just as they're not reasonable guides, just as sort of direct sensual evidence isn't a reasonable guide about the shape of the...
Of the solar system, right?
Whether the world is flat or the earth goes around the sun or vice versa or whatever.
So yeah, it's definitely economics and philosophy and to a large degree physics are the counterintuitive sciences, right?
Which is why they take such discipline.
Which is another reason why people have no problem calling the French cowards while at the same time calling ourselves courageous for...
Oh, sure, absolutely.
The history of France is filled with many more wars than America's even remotely been involved, even overseas, and the amount of slaughter that the French have experienced within generations still living is something that, or people still living, is something that Americans simply can't imagine.
And so, you know, if somebody has come back from some ghastly, god-awful war experience, and when a car backfires, you know, they cower and sweat with an autonomic nervous reaction, and it doesn't bother me at all because I've been sitting home comfortable sipping my pop and, you know, flipping the channels around on the TV, for me then to say, hey, how come you're so jumpy?
That's pretty cowardly. I mean, it just represents an abysmal kind of contempt for And lack of empathy for others, which, of course, is pretty much required of an imperial power, right?
I mean, America has inherited the arrogance of the Western Europeans, the French and the British, which is that we're better because we're more brutal, but we can't say that, right?
You can't say, America, we're number one because we kill people, right?
Nobody says that. I don't know.
Maybe Tony Soprano says that.
Oh, because we kill the bad people.
See, that's why. Well, sure, sure.
They do say that, but even that is not directly focused on.
They'll say we defended ourselves against the bad people and regrettably there was some collateral damage.
But people don't say, you know, we're better because we're the best killers around, right?
We use violence the most effectively and the best.
People really can't stomach that, but the brutality remains very real in the unconscious.
So when you say that we're good and the unconscious knows that you're good because you're brutal, you have no choice, logically and emotionally, but to make a virtue out of brutality, which is where you end up calling other people cowards and foreigners gooks and all this kind of stuff.
And having no empathy for...
The poor masses of Muslim slaves who grew up in these horrible, brutal, you know, rapey, honor-killing, child-abusing kind of theocracies and then just can't imagine why these people are sort of volatile and crazy.
Although, of course, if you and I were put in the same situation, 99.9% likely we would end up exactly the same way as would every American I find,
actually, though, that... Oops, I had it muted.
I find, though, that actually it's kind of a sliding scale, and it slides around inside even one single person's head.
I've got one brother who actually does think that because we're the best at the whole special ops thing where we can go in and kill you in 15 different ways, Without you even realizing we're there, that that's what makes us great.
And then I've got another brother who's of the, you know, well, you know, if we didn't have to kill these people, we wouldn't, but they're evil, so we have to, right?
So there's kind of a sliding scale of goodness that different people kind of land on.
I find that, you know, that people aren't all in one camp or another, that they kind of And depending on the situation, too, right?
Well, I would say, though, that the similarities would be much greater than the differences, and I'm sorry to have to use your brothers as an example here, but if somebody says, yeah, it's great that we go and strangle these people in their sleep and we come as shadows over the wall and we leave, you know, this Genghis Khan thing, you know, that the...
There is no joy greater than the slaughter of your enemy, this kind of stuff, right?
I mean, if you've got that kind of, you know, semi-homicidal view on the world, then that is...
Traditionally, you could say that's sort of a masculine kind of approach to conflict.
And then there's another more passive-aggressive approach to conflict.
You know, so there's the dad who'll beat you with a gleam of sadism in his eye and, you know, will get all sweaty and excited with the opportunity to beat his child.
And then there's the more controlled sadist who says, well...
This is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you.
Regretfully, you have brought this punishment on yourself.
I don't relish it, but it is the right thing to do, and I can't control your behavior.
I can only react to it, and therefore, I'm afraid you must be beaten.
I'm not sure who's more scary.
Probably the second guy, for me.
Because when you say that we regretfully have to go around killing bad guys, It's not as obvious, therefore it's harder to combat, if that makes any sense.
Well... Again, this is not specific to your brothers, because I just want to drag them in, but if you just sort of take the example of the child beating loony dad or mom, I think that if you get the...
If you're going to get beaten as a kid, you want the person who's going to scream out the name of seven devils from another world and You know, like, you want them to be crazy so that you can go, holy crap, this person's insane, right?
But, you know, if you have one of these military-style dads, you know, who's socially accepted and it looks like the norm, I mean, I think those kids end up a lot more messed up in some ways.
Right. Take your punishment like a man, all that crap.
Yeah, you know, I'm sorry to have to do this to you, son, but it's for your own good.
It's like, can you just be some crazy lunatic guy who's in a cult?
Maybe it would be a little easier for me to identify and save me some money on therapy down the road.
So then what you're saying is that because the second order is capable of sort of twisting around the nature of morality, that it makes it more difficult to unravel on the other end.
Yeah, I mean, it's the Catholic thing, right?
Once a Catholic, always a Catholic, right?
If they get you, if they get their hooks in you about ethics, I mean, there's one advantage that I had, you know, it's stretching the word advantage fairly thin, but in the violence I experienced as a child, certainly from my mother, there was never really a moral aspect to it.
It wasn't like, I hate to laugh about it, but there really wasn't a moral aspect to it.
It was just, you know, I'm in a bad mood, you know.
It was never really like, you know, for the sake of saving your soul from eternal Satan, I must, you know, set you on fire or something.
Not that it happened to me, but...
You know, if it's just crazy people venting, then you can denormalize it.
But if it's controlled and normalized social violence, then it's very hard because then you have to not just reject your crazy parents, then you have to reject society as a whole, which is a lot harder for people since we're sort of socially constructed in many ways.
Yeah, and then imagine having both orders in the same household.
Do you mean in terms of both parents or...
Both types of mentality in the same household.
Well, you know, and that's not uncommon, right?
The irrational, crazy person and the cold, calculating, sadist...
Right. Well, I mean, I'm still waiting for my parents and my brother to listen to these podcasts, but that was certainly my family history with my mother, who was the crazy person, and then my brother, who was sort of the colder, more calculated, this is for your own good kind of stuff.
So, yeah, no, I've had sort of some experience with both, but the sort of primary...
Gee, dare I use the name, caregiver?
The primary boss was not that way.
So I think we've all had experience with it one way or another.
Of course, teachers are sort of past masters of the horrible, soul-destroying lecture on morality.
I mean, I just had so many of those when I was a kid.
And I was a pretty good kid.
I didn't get into any real trouble.
But... The number of times you'd get these grinding lectures from petty, bureaucratic little teachers about what it means to respect school property and what it means to respect your fellow students and so on, right?
And we're all herded in there like cows to slaughter, you know?
It's like, I mean, the word respect really wouldn't come out very much in that context, to me at least, but it seemed to certainly go a long way with some of the other people.
But, I mean, nobody really believed that kind of stuff.
It was mostly just nonsense. I think it was perceived that way.
So, in a sense, then, that's why we have such a hard time seeing our leaders in a negative vein, is because they can kind of juxtapose themselves against, you know, compare George Bush to John Wayne Gacy, for example, and say, well, you know, I'm not this crazy lunatic like you think, because look at that guy, you know, he just...
Randomly slaughtering people on the street.
I'm doing what I have to do for the good.
Yeah, and I'm dressed in a suit, and I, you know, people cheer me, and I'm, you know, if I was a criminal, why wouldn't I be in jail, right?
I mean, why would I get ticker tape parades and go down in the history books, right?
But it's the people in suits that get people killed, right?
I mean, this is the great, I mean, you know this, right?
But this is the great lie about anarchism.
It's like, well, what about all these crazy people?
It's like, you know, look at the death toll of the 20th century, and it wasn't John Wayne Gacy who was killing people, right?
I mean, it's the guys in suits, right?
It's the guys with Palaces.
It's the guys with Rolls Royces.
It's the guys who are really normal.
And by the time you become a taxpayer and they start taxing you, You have to have already gone through this process where you can no longer experience being exploited.
You simply can't.
The whole system would break down.
It wouldn't work at all.
You simply can't send the police over to go and collect money from people.
It was said that the labor costs would just be far greater and the resistance capacities of people to shoot back would be too great.
You have to be broken, body and soul, by the time you get out of I mean, you have to, and your parents, of course, have a good deal to do with this as well, but you simply can't think of yourself as an equal to those in power.
I mean, you simply can't. I mean, it has to be unimaginable for you that you would disagree with someone like George Bush and that it would mean anything.
I mean, you're Your own opinions have to mean absolutely nothing.
And the only value that you can gain is getting, you know, some food pellets and hopefully avoiding the electrical shocks of those who are so unimaginably more powerful, virtuous, and great than you that you should just be lucky to get some, you know, crumbs of cheese and lucky if you don't get thrown in jail and lucky that taxation is only 40%.
And, you know, you should count your blessings that your great masters have decided to let you, you know, have decided to ignore you And of course, a lot of this comes back to religion as well.
How large are we relative to the greatest power?
But, oh yeah, you have to be completely broken.
I mean, if the population woke up tomorrow and said, who the hell is this George Bush guy?
I mean, what the hell does he have to say to me?
I mean, why is my opinion so much less important than his?
Why does he get to take half my money and I don't get to take any of his money?
I mean, the whole system would collapse like by noon.
So there's a whole series of steps that are pretty finely tuned after so much human history, pretty finely tuned to make sure that people never think of themselves with any real self-esteem and never think of themselves as truly equal.
All men are created equal.
That's the perverse dictum of every single hegemonic hierarchical structure in society.
All men are created equal.
But don't you dare even remotely think of comparing yourself to your leaders and saying that I have as much value.
I mean, the whole thing would simply not exist.
But there still has to be an association there.
I mean, otherwise, you know, because in some sense, you know, a lot of people who I talk to, especially like the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, is that They can't bear the thought that their government committed an evil act because it implies that they themselves and the society that they live in and everything around them is evil as well.
So there has to be a certain amount of association there, right?
Well, I think that this is why I try to be so sensitive as best as I can when I'm talking to people either on the board or in person about these ideas.
Everybody knows. Everybody knows.
The reason that people don't want to hear about doubts about what happened at 9-11, and the reason that people don't want to hear about the underfunding of Social Security, and the reason people don't want to hear about the failure of the war on drugs, and the reason people don't want to hear about war and don't want to talk about what happened, the reason that people live in this moment-by-moment situation where they have to talk about nothing but Empty useless trivialities and they have to get involved with their sports teams and they have to run around thinking that the important thing is the next SUV. The reason that people live such trivial empty lives of quiet desperation is because they know right down to their absolute and total core the final complete and total truth about their society.
They know in the same way that a child knows every single hypocrisy and corruption and evil and falsehood within the family Everybody knows the exact truth about their society.
I mean, if somebody came to me and said, hey, did you know Genghis Khan had a predilection for disco suits?
I'd say, really? What's the evidence?
I mean, I've never heard of that before.
That's quite fascinating, right?
Because somebody would be telling me something that I didn't know.
But when you tell people about their government, people don't want to know because they do know.
They don't want you to...
It's like, we don't go there.
We don't talk about that because we know.
It's like that elephant in the room with that old metaphor that everyone has to step around.
They're stepping around it because they know there's an elephant in the room that they just can't talk about, but they keep edging around it.
The elephant in the room dictates Everybody's thoughts and decisions.
The omnipresence and growing nature of the gun in the room within our society is dominating everybody's thoughts and everybody's interactions.
And it's growing. And everybody knows the truth about everything.
And I guess this is the question about...
They can't really, really figure it out.
And they can't figure out the value of going to the place that nobody wants to go to.
The dark side, the side of complicity with corruption and our own participation in the bloodlust of war.
And the virtue or the vanity of being associated with an imperial power or a Western country to think I'm better because I was born here and I'm accidentally free.
People, they know everything there is to know.
Right? Libertarians aren't telling anybody things that they don't know.
And Christina and I have noticed this, right?
We were at a party a little while back, a couple of years ago now, and, you know, we're talking about the government as violence, right?
People, you know, they'll give you a certain kind of resistance, but very quickly, it's like, okay, it is, but it's the right thing to do anyway.
It's justified. Like, they know this.
Libertarians, we're not inventors.
We're archaeologists, right?
We're like therapists, right?
In that we're not telling people what their childhoods were.
We're saying, you need to deal with your history, right?
But these people, they know their history.
They know the effects. They know, right?
They know in their gut that That the current system can't go on.
They know that the government power continues to increase.
They open the paper and everything they read is about yet another government disaster and yet another increase in government power.
Everybody knows it's completely unsustainable.
People aren't stupid, but they simply will the knowledge away because they don't believe it's solvable, right?
Sorry, it's more than they don't believe it's solvable, but that's the most charitable thing that I could come up with at short notice.
Right, but I do think that there's two classes of thought out there.
The people who say that America is good because it's powerful, which is one of my brothers, and the other one who says that America is powerful because it's good.
Sure, favored by God, and so on.
Well, sure, absolutely.
And then, you know, but the thing that is axiomatic in both is that America is powerful, and that that should be the case, right?
And the question to ask, I mean, not that I'm suggesting you do this, I mean, unless you want to give up your ribs forever, but...
Why should the American government be powerful?
Why should George Bush have all of this authority?
That's sort of the basic question.
This is the huge thing that everybody's life is designed to avoid asking and answering.
Are my parents good for having sex and breeding?
Well, no, of course. Then every guppy is, you know, a moral prince, right?
Are my parents virtuous for having sex and having children?
No. I mean, the simple act of breeding, which is performed by everything from an amoeba upwards, and cancer, right?
The simple act of replicating is not grant somebody a moral status, right?
I mean, people just, they know that deep down, but they don't want to talk about it.
Is a government virtuous because it wields power?
The real question is, why does it wield that power?
Why is it that George Borch or Tony Blair or, you know, Mokadar El-Sadr or whatever his name is, why is it these people have the right to tell everybody else what to do or throw them in jail?
I mean, that's sort of the basic question.
People spend their whole lives. Lives are emptied out in the avoidance of this basic, basic question, and it doesn't take Any real intelligence to pursue that, but it is incredibly disturbing to people, which is why it's very important that we deal with these issues within our own souls before we go around talking to other people, because you can't free people if you're still dragging around your own chains.
Your underground railroads are going to be pretty short, right?
Actually, I had somebody suggest to me the other day, power doesn't corrupt.
Power itself is corruption.
Yeah, it's very interesting. It's very interesting.
When you think about it...
Yeah, and certainly, I don't think corrupt...
Like, people who aren't already corrupt don't want power.
Right. I mean, it's like a...
So it's not the fact that they've already identified with power as a goal to be sought.
Right. Right.
And what a ridiculous, useless, and empty life it is.
Not so much the exercise of power, but the posturing that all accompanies the exercise of power.
It's just, I mean, the posturing and the emptiness of people's lives who are in power is just horrendous.
Absolutely horrendous. There's an enormously ugly toll that is taken upon people's souls by the exercise of power because they have to lie about it all the time.
And they know, even more so than the general population, the lies and hypocrisies of power.
But they have to keep...
We all think they're in charge, right?
But what is George Bush doing?
He's running around, kissing babies, making speeches.
Every moment of his day is scheduled for him to make an appearance to sway some people with some rancid bullshit that causes them to kowtow to those in power.
I mean, how free is he?
He's not free at all. Right, to constantly remind people of how good he is and how what he's doing is the right thing.
Yeah, I mean, the man doesn't exist except as a tool and a reflection of people's need to believe in something or to avoid that sort of basic question of, you know, if we're all equal...
Why are some of us so much more equal than others, right?
That basic animal farm question, right?
If all men are born equal and we're supposed to give our consent to our leaders, then why is it that they get to do whatever they want?
It doesn't make any sense, right?
Right, as long as they pay homage to the rules.
For sure. Now, let me just open up in case anyone has any other questions before I have to begin my toodle-doodle on exit strategy.
So the board is open.
If anybody has any other sort of questions, I'd be more than happy to talk or ask or answer or listen.
Hello? Hello.
Yeah, this is Lachlan Perks.
Alright, one split second.
You know, it's nice not to have all of these people with their, you know, the people phoning in from discos and, you know, I don't know, hiding in the bowels of airplanes or something, but go ahead.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Skype is, let me just try this.
I'm so sorry. Can you start that again?
Yeah, you were speaking earlier about FDR, World War II and Truman, etc.
I was just wondering, in your opinion, if the US had not entered the Second World War, how do you think it would have turned out?
Do you think the Allies would have lost or would the Allies still have won?
Oh no, the Allies would not have lost.
It would have been impossible. I mean, the moment that Hitler went into Russia, he was doomed, just as Napoleon was before him.
So yeah, no, without a doubt, there's no way that the Allies would have lost.
But what may have occurred, of course, is that the war would have ended sooner, just as the First World War might have ended sooner without America lending all of this money, and America did lend money to both Germany and England in the First World War, and of course without the sort of lend-lease situation and so on.
There's no way to really know for sure, but everyone who's ever gone into Russia has been destroyed as a result.
It could have been possible that they would have lost.
It could have been possible that they would have won.
And, of course, for me, as a philosopher, once you get into situations of war, you know, the time for philosophy is long past, right?
I mean, so I certainly recognize the value of the question, but once you're in a situation of war, the philosophers can do you no good at all, right?
As I've talked about before, it's like once you've got lung cancer, somebody telling you to quit smoking doesn't.
It doesn't really do you as much good.
The whole point of philosophy is prevention rather than cure.
I think that what could have occurred in the Second World War, because I would certainly argue in the general sense that even though The Allies sort of, quote, won the war, but they didn't win the war, right?
Because the war was not against Germany, right?
I mean, at least that's not how it's portrayed.
It's not like we don't like people with big mustaches and beer steins.
That wasn't really how the war was portrayed.
The war is portrayed as we are against despotism.
We are against centrally planned economies.
We are against dictatorship, right?
So... If you're against dictatorship and you're against socialism, then you would really logically think that if you're going to fight a war against socialism and dictatorship, then your government would not continue to grow in size after you have defeated an enemy who is an enemy because the government is too large, right? It's like saying, I'm very much against cancer, and I hope to get something that's not quite as bad as cancer, but sort of a low-grade leukemia after I fought cancer, right?
I mean, that wouldn't really be a victory.
You've bought yourself a little bit of time, but you're still heading in the same direction.
And so the institution of socialism, particularly in the UK, but of course, after the Second World War, America had a standing army, and since the creation of the military-industrial complex has all occurred, and we know what's going on, and it really didn't take very long,
right? It was really, I mean, after the Second World War, then in the 50s, the US went into Korea, and then in the 60s, the US went into Vietnam, and caused millions of deaths, and You know, for no purpose whatsoever.
So I don't really view the Second World War.
The Second World War, the only entity that won was the state as a whole.
The state won.
The state always wins the war.
The citizens don't win.
Freedom never wins because governments are always bigger after and there's a huge amount of national debt and so on.
I wouldn't say that the Allies won the war.
I would say that governments around the world gained an enormous amount of power from the war and not just because of the execution of the war but also because of the mythologies that accompanied the execution of the war.
Like, you know, there was this Great Depression that was caused by capitalism and then the government saved it and the government could do all these great things like defeat Nazism and put a man on the moon and so on.
You know, that's just a belief that people have that's not based on any evidence And the price that they pay for that is a continual diminishment of their civil and economic liberties.
So I wouldn't say that the citizens won the war.
I would say that the governments won the war and taught everyone how virtuous they were.
And England, as you know, the whole generation lost to the socialist malaise and so on.
So I wouldn't say that victory is a hard thing to talk about in terms of war.
But certainly, freedom didn't win the war, for sure.
Freedom's been on the retreat ever since the First World War, so, you know, freedom continually loses and the state continually gains.
Yeah, yeah. Just another quick question before we go.
Someone once told me that they thought the only, well, libertarian, inverted commas, wars in American history are The War of 1812 against Britain and the Revolutionary War again against Britain.
Would you agree with that?
Well, I'm not much of an expert on the War of 1812.
I know that we Canadians went down and burned the White House, but I really couldn't tell you what it was all about.
I don't know. I mean, it's tough to say.
To me, a libertarian war is like a philosophical gunfire.
To me, it's just an oxymoron.
I mean, let's use the word war sort of metaphorically to say we're battling ignorance and deceit and delusion and fantasy and so on.
I don't think that you can have a good outcome from a violent conflict.
I think that the trauma and the scars that it creates are enormous.
I would say that if you were to look at the Revolutionary War from the standpoint of a middle class white guy, In New York, then yeah, I would say that he was a little bit more free for some time after the war.
If you were to ask any of the people who got killed in the war on the American side, they were obviously free to do nothing but decompose.
And if it really were a libertarian war, then it would have enshrined property, voluntarism, and of course it would have ended slavery.
And of course it would have given some economic independence and equality to women.
And it might have recognized the rights of children to some degree.
So I think it's, you know, not wanting to totally diss the American experiment, which is a wonderful leap forward in many ways, but it really was a very small subsection of the population that gained.
And you can't really think I say that we've, you know, we've now established a libertarian society in which slavery and the subjugation of women is perfectly legal.
I wouldn't say that that's a very libertarian conflict.
And again, I can't really speak much to the War of 1812.
Okay, if I remember correctly, I think 1812 started because, well, at the time Britain was at war with France and Napoleon.
It's usually a safe bet, yeah.
So I think the British Royal Navy was press-gagging all American sailors into the Royal Navy, so that's why I think America declared war against Britain.
Yes, yes, it's vaguely coming back to me now.
Yeah, the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, and I do remember hearing about this sort of reading somewhere, I can't remember where, about this sort of press ganging of Americans and so on.
So, yeah, for sure.
I mean, that's very important.
But, again, this may sound a little cynical, and I sort of don't mean it that way, but in the sort of larger scope of history, despite the fact that there was some great philosophy behind the American Revolution, To me, it's like a bunch of ranchers fighting over a herd of cattle, right?
I mean, the ranchers, whoever wins, the cattle ain't gonna win, right?
And that seems to me, when you look at the American experiments and what shook out of it, which was freedom, some increase in freedom.
For certain middle-class white people, I would not say that there was an enormous amount of freedom.
Except, of course, there was greater freedom for the people who immigrated in the 19th century to America.
One of the things that caused a great weakening in Eastern Europe in particular was the fact that people could flee to America.
It was obviously more free than many other places in the world.
A very fascinating step forward, but it's not...
Not to be forgotten that it wasn't 70 years later until, you know, 2% of the American population got slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands in a war about the exactly, well, far greater taxation than had ever been imposed by the British, which was the taxation that was being imposed by Lincoln.
So, yeah, I would say that libertarian war is a...
I know where people are coming from, but there's...
It's just important not to look at the words, but to look at the actual deeds, right?
And they certainly kept property...
out of the Constitution, and it wasn't long before the amendments came in to allow increases in taxation and the government control of currency.
It was 100 years then the government began to control the schools, and it was another 120 years until the government had complete control of the educational system and the currency system and then began, well, as it always had, but really began in the sort of Wilsonian crossing of the Rubicon to begin to meddle in overseas wars, And so it was a massive failure.
I mean, insofar as the liberties that were established by the American Revolution did not last nearly as long as liberties established by the Roman experiment, right?
So it definitely was a step forward in that it had some great language behind it.
But, you know, one day we'll have a revolution which is more in the mind and in the personality than it is in the rhetoric and in the politics.
And then I think we will take a real step forward and bring everyone with us.
Yeah, yeah.
I agree with that.
Thank you.
All right. Well, I will.
I don't want to drag this show on if people are.
I know it's been a little bit of a dark topic, and I certainly appreciate that.
It's getting colder up here in Canada.
Maybe that's got something to do with this Ibsenian kind of approach.
But I'm certainly willing to entertain questions or anything like that.
If people have anything else that they wanted to ask or offer, feel free to do so.
Go ahead. All right.
Well, thank you so much for listening.
I really, really appreciate it.
I'm sorry that it was a little dark, but hey, you go where the soul strikes, right?
So thank you so much for listening.
Have a great week, everyone.
I'll try and do a peppy podcast early in the week, maybe from New York.
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