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Nov. 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

26:25

495 Forget About The Past Part 1

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	Good evening, everybody. It's Steph.
	Hope you're doing well. I'm stuck at the airport, so you get a podcast.
	Not only because I'm stuck at the airport, but also because I have read a review of this book by Mark Stein, S-T-Y-N, entitled America Alone, The End of the World as We Know It.
	And I feel fine.
	And his basic idea is that Western civilization is fighting for its life, and the critical struggle is between ideologies and their adherents.
	Mark Stein says, and this is the latest in a series of conversations that people have about the decline of the West and so on, and I just sort of wanted to mention a few things that popped into my mind while I was reading it, because it really was quite enjoyable to see the grand depth of illusion that intellectuals in the West are.
	The full title is America Alone, the End of the World as we know it.
	He says, Western civilization, this is not, this is a review, By Rebecca Wahlberg.
	This is from the Weekend Post, Saturday, November 4th, 2006, from the National Post.
	All right, so this will be a shorter review.
	He says, Western civilization, or the reviewer says, is fighting for its life, and the critical struggle is not between armies and guerrillas, but between ideologies and their adherents.
	The West has embraced cultural relativism, rejecting its own tradition as fast as any enemy could destroy it.
	And it's stagnating demographically with unprecedented low birth rates.
	The only Western nation with self-confidence and a self-renewing population, barely, is the United States, and even there, the highest birth rates are found largely in the Red States.
	As Stein notes, quote, The salient feature of much of the progressive agenda, abortion, gay marriage, endlessly deferred adulthood, is that, whatever the charms of any individual item, cumulatively, it's a literal dead end.
	The themes of demographics and ideology run through the book.
	France and Sweden, countries synonymous with socialized government, have incurred phenomenal costs in their provision of cradle-to-grave benefits.
	When every generation was larger and wealthy than the last, these debts could be deferred.
	But as Europeans have grown dependent on the stage, they have become reluctant to take on dependents of their own.
	Stein draws a straight line from this profound social shift to the burning cars outside Paris and the neighborhoods in Sweden that police fear to enter.
	That's the Muslim neighborhoods The combination of record immigration, immigrants who seek to assimilate their hosts, and a native population more concerned with comfort than survival is proving incendiary.
	Nobody there...
	One second.
	Okay, we've got 20 minutes.
	I'd like to blame the government, but I'm not sure I can.
	Legitimately. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd just like to ask you to please have your broadcast...
	Alright, so he says, nobody there is asking what it means when a Stein says, quote, the fastest growing population on the planet is a group that, to put it at its mildest, has a somewhat fractious relationship with the characteristics of a free society.
	The identity of ever greater numbers of recent Europeans is Islamic, not Western.
	Many Canadians, scrupulously careful not to offend, I've been persuaded that Islam as a tile in the multicultural mosaic is beyond criticism.
	So, anyway, I think you sort of get the general idea.
	Politically, Islamists exploit Western welfare states and legal systems while holding them in contempt.
	Culturally, Islamists insist on being treated with deference while preaching hatred against other regions, ethnicities, and ways of life.
	Demographically, Islamists are increasing their numbers through conversion and high birth rates while moderates and liberals Of all persuasion are on the road to extinction, blah, blah, blah.
	So, this is sort of important, I think.
	This is a grand illusion.
	This guy thinks he's pointing something out and solving an issue, which is not the case at all.
	What he's doing is part of the problem that people are just unable to see.
	He says, Europe, by the end of the century, will be a continent after the neutron bomb.
	The grand buildings will still be standing there, but the people who built them will be gone.
	Osama bin Laden famously pointed out that, quote, strong horses draw the most supporters, and Europe is becoming the reductio ad absurdum of weak horses.
	A London sheik states his desire for an Islamic flag to fly at 10 Downing Street, and the English flag is removed from jails, out of sensitivity to the Muslim inmates who dislike crosses.
	The children of Danish journalists are threatened at their elementary schools, and the EU Commissioner for Justice reassures Muslims that, quote, we are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression...
	Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so I think you get the idea.
	And this guy, of course, trumps it up by saying that we really need to intervene in foreign governments, right?
	So, shockingly, absolutely shockingly, this guy who says that Western liberal democracies are in a great deal of difficulty is now saying, ends up, by saying that we need to go and invade and take over other democracies and so on.
	So, he says, for decades, the United States...
	Let Mexican politics run their course, intervening rarely, as its southern neighbor grew increasingly corrupt, bankrupt, and chaotic today.
	California, Arizona, and Texas have large populations of Mexican illegals who, quote, as fine upstanding members of the undocumented American community, have, quote, no exit strategy at all.
	I'm not sure what that means. India, by contrast, fell on the aegis of the British Empire, which undertook to spread its brand of education and political culture throughout the subcontinent.
	Oh my god, it just makes you sick.
	As a result, India is today the world's largest democracy and has the most populous middle class.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, anyway, of course, he's saying that we should do this in the Middle East, go in and, I guess, blow people up and kill them and convert them to democracy and culture model.
	I'm going to just have a minor rant here and be happy that I'm at an airport where I can't raise my voice because, boy, I'd like to...
	But this stuff is just too hilarious.
	The people who built the West...
	The people who built the West have been gone for so long that mistaking any of the current situation for anything that had anything to do with how the West was founded or built or the ideology behind the West is absolutely, completely and totally incomprehensible.
	You have to studiously avoid Knowing even the slightest shred of history to imagine that a modern liberal welfare state or democracies have anything to do with where the state came from, the ideal behind the state that was fought for since the end of the religious wars in the 17th century.
	The idea that the state is a dangerous servant, the idea that the state is...
	Sorry, a dangerous servant and a terrible master.
	The idea that the state is a devil to be feared, the idea that the government should be limited in its functions to a little bit of currency printing, a little bit of national defense, some law courts and a few prisons, you know, what libertarians would refer to as a sort of minarchist ideal.
	I mean, my friends, I mean, there's nothing anywhere close to that.
	The people... Who talk about the West, they're completely missing the point.
	This has been dead and gone for generations.
	The West that they talk about died in the First World War.
	I mean, this is a death coming on for a century old.
	And in many ways, the West that this person dreams of, the West that tamed the aristocracy, The West that separated the church and the state, and the state and economics, which was even more important than separating the church and the state.
	The West that ended slavery, the Enlightenment, the West that founded the Scientific Revolution.
	I mean, these people are all dead and gone.
	I mean, their last gasp was the American Revolution.
	Right? Their last gasp was over 200 years ago.
	The American Revolution, the rot set in almost immediately.
	The rot set in almost immediately.
	Wars over taxes, the Whiskey Rebellion, you had slavery, you had no rights for women and children, no rights for entirely too many people in society.
	But it just is amazing that people think that the last gasp of a more rational, a more secular, a more deist society, a more logical and scientific philosophy, that...
	That this has anything to do...
	It was decades only after the end of the American War of Independence that you had...
	I mean, you still had slavery and all that, but you had fights over national banks, and then it wasn't 70 years until the war between the states broke out, murdering many, many, many people, and then it wasn't 20 years after the War of the States that the state took over public education...
	And it wasn't more than a generation after that that you got the revolution of 1905, 1906, the progressive movement.
	I mean, this stuff has been dead and gone for generations.
	I really get sick and tired of people looking at the West as if where we are now has absolutely anything to do with the kinds of heroic philosophy that went on in the late Middle Ages.
	The dream that it has anything to do whatsoever With what we have right now is an absolutely deranged fantasy.
	It's like late Elvis looking in the mirror and thinking, my, what a gymnastic and trim form I have the day before.
	He chokes down his quaaludes and passes out and dies on the toilet because he hasn't taken a shit for four days.
	Because he's so hopped up on drugs and bloated and sick.
	It really is astounding that the degree to which Western intellectuals look into the mirror and have some fantasy that there is any sort of democracy, that there's any sort of liberal stuff, that there's any sort of free market left to any but the most vestigial kinds that are currently outracing state control or state power and are currently generating enough revenue that the state requires the innovation be there in the computer industry.
	But it's just as amazing to me that people look at something like the Muslim world and see there's a fundamental divide between the Muslim world.
	I understand that the Muslim world and the Western world are very different in their forms, but we're really, really living on the husks of the past.
	We are jackals feasting on the bodies of people dead.
	Hundreds of years and calling ourselves hunters, you know, or anything like that.
	We're parasites. I mean, as a culture, we're parasites.
	There's not been one sort of fundamentally powerful and positive intellectual idea that has moved political freedom forward in any way.
	I mean, I can't even think of the last one.
	It wasn't Hayek.
	It was, I mean, in terms of practical effect, it wasn't Hayek.
	It certainly wasn't Freud.
	It wasn't Vietnamese as brilliant, all these people were, but what did they do to advance the cause of freedom?
	Nothing. I mean, freedom has not improved in any way.
	The acceleration has barely slowed, for all we know.
	And Spencer didn't do it, Kant didn't do it, Ayn Rand didn't do it, Murray Rothbard didn't do it, Milton Friedman didn't do it.
	Who has really taken a positive and sensible stab at this question of what is human freedom and how is it achieved?
	Certainly the people who worship the military are mere...
	They're sort of the moral equivalents of the voluntary slut harlots who service the praetorian god in the Roman age.
	They are the equivalent of...
	Of these sorts of people, and they just sort of walk around praising the military, like lick-spittled toadies who used to sidle up to bullies, hoping that as the bullies shook down the weaker kids, that the weaker kids would drop some change on the floor, that the bullies wouldn't need or stoop or bother to stoop to pick up, and these people would then pick it up for them, and give them some back, and just keep a few shekels for themselves.
	This is a moral equivalent of where people are in this sense.
	So the idea that there's any sort of West that can be defended in its current state or in any of its current trends, to me it's just absolutely, it's a remarkable, remarkable, remarkable thought.
	And it takes a real effort of will to look at the sort of decaying corpse of the sort of limited state and the free market The decaying corpse of any sort of citizen control over the government and any sort of citizen control over the increasing power and predations of the government.
	It takes a real act of will to look at the West as it is.
	Maybe it's because this guy is not an economist and doesn't have much of a sense of the deferred liabilities that are all sort of hanging over us.
	But to look at this and say that we have the state control over half...
	The life of the citizenry and all of their lives as children and that the state has made the old age pensioners completely dependent upon state largesse and that we have wars that can be declared and fought costing hundreds of billions of dollars with no congressional restraint or control.
	I mean, you know the litany.
	I don't need to go into it once more.
	But... I think you can sort of get where I'm coming from.
	If we look over at the Muslim world and think that we must somehow rouse ourselves and reassert our values in order to fight off the admittedly morally horrifying and logically insane Islamic world view, it's incredible.
	It's incredible. That society That society that we dream of in the West, that we dream we have some sort of relationship to or some sort of grounding in, but that society is dead.
	This is like giving CPR to an Egyptian mummy to think that we are going to revive that dead, bloated, state-crushed, theologized into Adam's corpse.
	It's absolutely astounding.
	We're not even trying to commune with the dead.
	We're trying to give birth to the dead.
	It's astounding. There is no way to our future as a culture, as a society, there is no way to our culture or to our future through a grim ancestor worship, thinking that they're here with us today, love affair in a fetishistic, fatal attraction kind of way with the past.
	There is no way to the future through reverence to the past and thinking that the past has any connection with where we are right now.
	It's absolutely inconceivable.
	We cannot worship the Founding Fathers whose vision we have completely, utterly and totally corrupted and destroyed.
	And if they came back from the dead and they saw imperial Roman presidents praying to God and invading foreign countries that have never uttered a threat against the United States and saw the vast array of bureaucratic taxation, control, strangling...
	Brain murder of children, rampant religious and political hysteria, terror, washing back and forth, a war on terror, endless.
	As somebody pointed out recently, a war on terror is a ridiculous thing to say anyway.
	Terrorism is a military strategy, like a blockade.
	It's like saying America is now involved in a war on blockades.
	It doesn't really make any sense at all, other than from pure propaganda.
	And... That people don't do anything.
	How could they?
	How could they? They've been taught that any of this stuff is wrong.
	And if they saw that the armed might of the United States was so heavily involved in preying upon, undermining and destroying the sovereignty and freedom of people around the world, the amount of foreign aid, the amount of loans, the amount of enmeshing, the fact that here we are invading one country for the potential Because it may have had weapons over.
	There was some fantastic belief that there were weapons of mass destruction that would invade Iraq and getting all up and fired about North Korea because they had a little bomb.
	China's got the frickin' nukes and America is in hock to China up to its eyeballs.
	The entire US economy is kept alive by the Chinese buying US treasury bonds and loaning Money to Americans to buy goods from China.
	It's a complete shell game.
	If the Founding Fathers realized what a beast they had unleashed on the world, they would have given up the revolution and said, what the hell would we do this for?
	Why would we risk our lives?
	Washington would say, why would I look like such an idiot standing up in a boat?
	Why would we risk our lives and kick off the British only to create this predation monster That drops atomic bombs on the cities of innocent civilians and does blockades that kills hundreds of thousands of children and gets involved in wars that kill hundreds of thousands of people and overthrows democracy, democratically elected people.
	The founding fathers would say, my God, we will detonate this continent and destroy it and send it smoking into the sea like Atlantis rather than create such a Hellish beast to let loose in the world.
	And I know that I'm speaking strongly here, and we'd be happy that I'm in an airport committing sedition, but I'm really, really keen.
	Not that we see America as a collective entity, as a country, as some sort of satanic Gomorrah or something, but rather that we get a sense of how far that dream is dead.
	And it is many, many, many, many, many decades dead.
	And that we are, in associating our current system with any kind of fundamentally vital growing system, even if we were at the nadir of government power and we were only slowly becoming close to wrestling it in and bringing it down and we were slowly reining it back in,
	we would be centuries away From really getting back to even where we started as a culture, it was at a minimal state.
	And again, I'm taking the greatest example of this, and all praise to those who made it in the 18th century, who made that come alive.
	I'm talking about it would be decades or centuries before we would wrestle the state back to the size that it was when it started.
	And here we think that we are sitting on some immense treasure trove of freedom, Of course, this is the dying gasps of our culture.
	And we're basically asking.
	And when we look at sort of the young, brutal, evil vitality of the Islamic creed, of course we are looking at a monster and a beast.
	But it's a monster and a beast that we simply create through our addiction to our own history and thinking that it has anything to do with the present.
	I mean, if I am in fact...
	Not well. Let's just sort of say, try out a metaphor for science, see if it makes sense to you.
	If I'm not well, and I think that I am well, I have some sort of, I don't know, some sort of bone osteoporosis, some bone-weakening disease, right?
	And I think that I'm Muhammad Ali, and I get into a ring with somebody who's a decent fighter, well, of course I'm going to get my ass whooped, of course I'm going to feel weak, of course I'm going to feel helpless.
	Because I think, well, gee...
	You know, 20 years ago, I was strong and powerful, right?
	And so, you think that you still are, and you get in, of course you're going to get your ass beaten, you're going to feel helpless, and then it becomes a vicious circle.
	If you continue to believe that you are vital and powerful and young and healthy and don't take into account your disease, you know, get to a doctor, get yourself sorted out with, go and exercise, and then get back in the ring, and you'll do just fine.
	But as long as you're addicted to this idea that you are strong when you are in fact weak, and that you are youthful when you are in fact middle-aged, and that you are healthy when you are in fact sick, then of course it's going to be completely helpless.
	You're going to be completely helpless in this situation.
	Now, of course, I'm not suggesting that there's any sort of violent conflict will solve anything between Islam.
	But, my God, I mean, can we just forget about the goddamn Muslims for a little while?
	And focus on our own freedoms?
	Oh my God, freedom is always over the next hill.
	Freedom is always in some other country.
	As soon as we defeat these people, as soon as we throw down this government, as soon as we manipulate this election, as soon as we blockade these people into submission, as soon as we win this war, as soon as we get poverty under control, as soon as we get drug use under control, as soon as we have no evil in the world, as soon as there are no bad people on the internet, I mean, my God, it's always later, later, later, over the hill, down the road, somewhere down the road.
	That we think that is the route to our freedom.
	Right? That we think that the route to our freedom involves defeating Islam.
	We think that the route to our freedom...
	I mean, we're bringing Islam here.
	I mean, of course they're going to come here.
	Of course they're going to come here.
	We have a wealthier economy, some vestiges of the free market, we have this massive welfare system, free education for the kids.
	Of course they're going to come here.
	And of course they're not going to change.
	Why would they? We're paying them to stay the way they are.
	I mean, it's funny that we think that the problem is the Muslims.
	The problem is not the Muslims.
	If you walk down Central Park, dressed in a three-piece suit at two o'clock in the morning, holding a big clear plastic bag of money, you're going to get robbed.
	And yeah, you can say, ooh, these thieves are so bad.
	What bad people, that's just terrible.
	And yeah, okay, it's wrong that they robbed you.
	But what kind of fucking moron does that?
	And we set up this situation, or this system, where they can come here, they can be free from the brutal dictates of their own imams, they can avail themselves of all of the easy sensuality of the West, they can get money, free education, free healthcare, of course they're going to come.
	But the problem is not with the Muslims, it's the problem with our systems.
	This shit for brains here, Bill Bryce, whatever his name is, he's saying that, well, you see...
	The Mexicans, you see, have come to America, and that's a really bad thing.
	You see, all these Mexicans, undocumented Americans, they've all come to America, and that's a really bad thing.
	And why have they come to America? Well, because, of course, America's rich, and Mexico is poor.
	Well, that's, of course, quite true.
	But America also has free education, has Medicare, has Medicaid, has Social Security.
	I mean, America is not the country that everyone imagines it is.
	Right? Right? You don't want to be the guy who's 90 years old who thinks he can do the gymnastics of his youth.
	That's not a rational approach to take to the world.
	So, we set up a system that invites these lunatics here, that pays them to exist, that pays them to flourish, that pays them to breed, while at the same time putting our own youth,
	of course, in this perpetual adolescence of It's taking forever to graduate as a semi-retarded illiterate from high school and then to go to university to learn a trade that will gain them very little productive employment when they graduate, for the most part, and so that they're in their mid-twenties when they start...
	The human race is...
	That would be an old man by many standards throughout the human race, and here they have barely begun to live.
	And of course there's all these problems with demographics and, you know, it's very simple.
	The problem is not with the Muslims.
	The problem is not with the suicide bombers.
	The problem is not with anyone except our own readiness and willingness to put up with brutal oppression and imagine that we're free.
	This guy imagines a West that has some sort of recent or vital history of freedom and then blames other people for coming along and causing problems.
	But the central problem is that us clowns like this talk as if the West has anything With which to oppose despotism.
	And says that the solution to suicide bombers in the Muslim world is for us to go and invade other countries and blow them up.
	Astounding! Alright, I'm going to take a break.

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