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Nov. 8, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:41
496 Forget About The Past Part 2

We will not find freedom by imagining that we were once free...

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well, it's Steph. Just after 9 o'clock on the 8th of November 2006, I hope you're doing fabulously.
Good night's sleep after the constant sleep deprivation situation that is business travel.
I actually had a fun time in New York, though.
I had originally bought a ticket to go and see a show.
It was Monday night, so there really wasn't a whole lot on.
And I went to pick up a sort of half-price ticket to go and see Forbidden Broadway, which is a show I've heard good things about, which is a takeoff on Broadway shows.
And then I was walking back from the conference with a colleague, and I was walking past Radio City Music Hall and saw that the Barenaked Ladies were playing.
And I really like the album Gorton, which was their first album, and I really haven't listened to too much of theirs since other than the radio play stuff.
But I decided to go and see them, and so none of my other colleagues, fuddy-duddies that they were, were interested in going to see one of these newfangled rock and roll shows.
So, I went to Radio City Music Hall and said, do you have a good ticket for the loneliest guy in New York?
The least popular guy in New York, because of course I was seeing the concert alone.
And fortunately, you know, Solitude has its benefits, as we occasionally talk about here on the show.
I got a ninth row center seat because they just had an odd number left over.
And they weren't expecting the pitiful losers to show up and come and see this show.
So I saw a great show.
Boy, I saw Mike Dowdy, though.
Not the best opening act in the world.
Flee if you can, but the Bare Naked Ladies were good.
It was the second night of playing, and I think they played most of their early stuff the first night, because there wasn't a whole lot of it the second night, but entertaining and a fun show if you ever get a chance to see them.
And man, as a mediocre amateur singer, boy, you know, it is really quite a privilege to hear someone really rip loose.
and the guitarist who sings sometimes on their songs has a better voice live, I think, than he does in the studio.
So it really was quite a treat and they did like two encores and it was a great deal of fun.
And then I did my presentation yesterday.
For those who are really fascinated with the little details of my little career, I did the presentation yesterday and I think I did a good job.
I actually did end up taping it, but I won't release it as a podcast because what do you people want to know about optimizing profits in the chemical manufacturing space?
Probably not a whole lot, but it was enjoyable.
people.
So, I wanted to...
I'm going to do, I think maybe this afternoon or tomorrow morning, I wanted to do a day in the life of a statist semi-slave.
Intermittent slavery. A day in the life of a citizen about all of the state interferences that occurred.
It turned out I could blame my delay on the state, but I'll do that a little bit later because I kind of wanted to finish off the murmur cast that I did on Sunday night about...
And apologies to Bill Bryce.
I think I mentioned his name in there.
Bill Bryce is an extraordinarily funny and warm author.
I've read two of his books, A Short History of Nearly Everything and A Walk in the Woods.
A Walk in the Woods has, for me at least, one of the best comedic lines that I've read in the last couple of years.
He's talking about people in Arkansas and their resistance.
I think it's Arkansas or Alabama, one of those states, about their resistance to the teachings of evolution.
And he says that the people in Arkansas are not so much in danger of being descended from monkeys as being overtaken by them, which I think is just a beautiful, beautiful witty line.
So if you get a chance to read his stuff, Mark Stein, S-T-E-Y-N. I think he even dropped the E because murmur casts are challenging.
And he was the guy who wrote the article.
And, you know, in hindsight, I'm really glad that I did it in the airport because...
I really, oh man.
The language that was scrolling across in my brain was...
Beyond unpleasant, so I'm really glad that I had the artificial restraint of a fairly quiet gate waiting area in an airport because, boy oh boy, when I read about these intellectuals who simply cannot find a problem that violence will not solve, there's simply no issue that a gun cannot smooth away, there is no disagreement that a knife to the throat I cannot solve these...
Oh, here comes the Edgar again!
These guys! Just cheap, state-kissing toady asses.
They just make my stomach turn, and they make me unbelievably angry.
And I recognized that at one point I was a pro-Iraq war, but at least I had the decency to keep my opinions to myself.
And I have learned from my experience, but this guy, you know, in favor of the Iraq war, in favor of intervention within Mexico, in favor of foreign intervention with regards that he feels that more state is going to save us from The aggression of the Muslims, perhaps by substituting a more violent and waspy kind of set of rulers over us.
But I just sort of wanted to talk a little bit more about this question of, you know, where are we as a culture?
And I think, and it really came to me very solidly when I was reading this article and in the podcast, but this dream or fantasy of What would now be called an extreme libertopian society, which was really the foundation of the West.
The West came out of the paternalistic state.
The West came out of the welfare state.
The West came out of the military state.
So for us, like in our current situation, has been a complete boomerang and an accelerating boomerang back to the Middle Ages.
Really, really since the First World War, which destroyed Western civilization in the way that we traditionally think of it, you know, rationalistic and participatory and democratic and so on.
The First World War smashed that completely in a tangible sense, whereas the things like the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars to some degree, and most importantly, as I always say, the state control of education, that smashed The ideas behind the West.
Once the ideas are smashed, ideas are the greatest lever in the world, and once the ideas change, it may be a generation or two, but it is absolutely inexorable.
The argument for morality programs everybody's cost-benefits in a way that they're sometimes not even aware of, and the result is that what then rolls forward has all the inevitability of a rock rolling down a hill.
It may bounce a little, you may not be sure exactly where and when it's going to hit, but if you knew all the variables, you would.
But its direction and its end position is absolutely inevitable.
This is the closest I'll come to determinism, which is to say that the argument for morality without strenuous effort to the contrary is almost completely inescapable.
Or at least I can't think of a time where it hasn't been.
So when we look back upon history...
To associate the West with a minimal government, with the rule of law, with objective morality, with science, with democracy, with freedom, all of these sorts of things, you really have to go back a hell of a long way.
A hell of a long way. Certainly 100 years in practicality and 200 years or more in theory.
And it's my sort of general belief or my sort of proposition in these two podcasts that The West does not need to be rediscovered, but reinvented.
If we have this dream of ourselves as a liberty-based society that has something unique in the world, then we are really lost in a dream.
All we're doing is planning the economics of Hobbit Town, the Shire, or Mordor, or we're working through the regulations of the Romulans.
We're dealing with a complete fantasy world that didn't exist in the past.
This idea that there was this burst of great liberty at the end of the 18th century and that the West, you know, of course it was nonsense, right?
I mean, you still had significant I've talked about all this before,
but looking at a small slice of society that had a greater degree of freedom and then imagining that there was somehow some sunburst We're good to go.
In those who influence the government to be a liberty as a whole, right?
So if somebody different grabs the gun, it feels like a change, but the gun is still loaded and it's still pointed at, yes, of course, you and I, my friend.
So one of the things that occurred was that after the 14th, 15th century, when Aristotle was rediscovered by the masses and after the Bible was translated, after the religious wars, And after the rediscovery of secular Roman law which was required to run cities, What happened was the wealth began to shift from land to capital.
Wealth began to shift from land to capital.
Wealth in an agricultural society is the possession of land.
Land is fixed and immovable, and therefore, to gain wealth, you need military power to conquer, and you need military power to keep other people out.
So, of course, in the Middle Ages, the primary people who controlled the state were the aristocracy.
That sort of makes sense, right? Land owning, land is the source of wealth, and so on.
With the increase in agricultural productivity comes the excess food that is required to supply cities.
As agricultural productivity increases, the value of land goes down, obviously, because it's producing more than it did before.
And when you have this excess food that allows for the creation of cities, you begin to get the accumulation of capital.
And, of course, the capital accumulation in the Middle Ages was non-existent.
All excess capital was swallowed up by the local lord in the sort of manorial-surf relationship or was hoovered up by the church in the form of forced donations at the threat of real or imagined flames.
So no capital accumulation in the Middle Ages to speak of, but the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, you began to see the accumulation of capital.
And so what happens is that...
The people who have capital, it's easier to collect the revenue in a city than it is to collect the revenue from the country.
It's sort of fundamental, you know, in the same way that a farmer puts a fence around his cattle, you know, he could let them roam free, but they'd be a hell of a lot tougher to milk.
A farmer likes to put his fences around his cattle, and in the same way, the tax collecting agencies really like to see people in cities, in the same way that they prefer electronic to cash transactions in terms of tax gathering.
And so really all that happens in the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and then sort of the late 18th century is the tax base from the bourgeoisie, the entrepreneurial class, the capitalists, the tax base from those guys begins to overtake the tax base from the landowners,
right? So obviously the government is interested in maximizing its resources, And so the government then begins to, you know, support tacitly or implicitly or explicitly the intellectuals who were talking about the transition towards more economic freedom.
Somebody pointed out on the boards recently that governments may not crash because, much like farmers, they manage their herd, right?
So, for instance, in Canada here, when the national debt got too high, Then they were paying sort of 40 cents on the dollar or more in interest.
So they stopped overprinting money and they sort of reduced inflation and there was a recession.
So they manage their flock, so to speak.
They make sure that the money keeps coming in.
And I certainly agree with that, but still, the demography.
But they only do that at a sort of immediate basis.
Next year, next couple of years, you don't see business plans for GE going into the next century, or GE, right?
People work on their own careers, and the demographics of the West is going to just destroy the economy.
It's going to tear the economies apart, right?
I mean, when you get an aging population going out of the range of producing taxes and into the range of consuming services from the state.
I mean, if it isn't already happening, and I believe that it is really underway, a variety of economic indicators suggest that the black marketeers are switching to the euro, and the Chinese are now not that interested in buying additional U.S. Treasury bonds, which means that the inflation rate is going to increase, which means that all the money people have borrowed on the imaginary increases in their house values is going to have to be repaid with real money.
And they won't be able to sell their houses and accumulate gains.
The money that you gain in your house is not real money because you can't sell it.
If your house goes up by $50,000, that's not real money.
It's not even remotely real money because you can't sell the house and gain that back because you need a place to live.
And if your house has gone up by 50 grand, everyone else's house has too, so if you sell your house and then have to buy a new house, you've gained nothing.
If you sell and go to rent, then maybe you're a little bit better off, but then you've lost the capital accumulation, so...
Again, all things are equal.
If your stocks go up and you can sell them, that's one thing, but the value that increases in your house.
So when interest rates begin to rise and a lot of people on variable rate mortgages, then...
Anyway, there's going to be sort of a crunch, to say the least, and that is inevitable.
But it is certainly true that when regulations pile up too high and taxes pile up too high, that people want to...
That people want to go and pillage other, that the amount of taxes that are being paid goes down, then sure, people will diminish, that the government will shift tax burdens around and so on, and that's natural, that's inevitable, but still, the general progress is towards greater government.
So you can shift rates like somebody going into debt, they'll pay off this credit card and then they'll reduce a bit of spending over here, but eventually, right, when your income exceeds your expenses, at some point, it all goes to hell in a handbasket, and that's for sure, What's going to happen, although I certainly agree that the state's The governments will attempt to maximize their tax gathering and pillaging of the population capacity.
But when the farmer realizes that his cows are not producing any more milk, then he's not a charity.
He'll just kill them. And again, that's not a metaphor I'm talking about that we're all going to get executed.
But the farmer will try and maximize.
But once he can't get anything more, then he won't bother it.
He just sends them to the slaughterhouse.
And of course the people in the government know an enormous amount more about economic indicators than the silly, foolish, ridiculous numbers that they give us.
And of course they have access to the money printing capacity and the inside scoop, and so they're simply going to just grab everything they can, and then it'll happen very suddenly.
But the Industrial Revolution, I think, is sort of important to understand that philosophy had its place, and I certainly don't want to deprecate the Enlightenment Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers.
But the real question is, why does the state listen?
Why does the state listen?
As long as you have a state, philosophers and thinkers are always going to be dependent upon the self-interest of those with the guns, right?
So I think it's sort of important to understand that The government simply started to listen to the bourgeoisie more than they listened to the aristocracy because the bourgeoisie was contributing more money.
Whoever pays the piper calls the tune and you dance with the mong that brung you.
So there was a certain amount of philosophy that occurred, but it was still all under the aegis of state self-interest, which is why it didn't work in terms of achieving freedom.
As long as you have the state, the philosophy that calls for a shift in state resources or a shift in state taxation and control, so away from property rights in land, which was the aristocracy, and I use the term property rights in the sort of Genghis Khan sense of seize and hold,
Away from property rights in land that were based on hereditary violence, and more towards property rights in land that was based on occupation and control, because that gave extra food, which was good.
And then it was more towards property rights in capital, and once governments realized, and churches to some degree as well, realized that once you were allowed to lend at interest, you could tax the accumulated capital.
There was a whole new source of revenue for governments And a whole new source of revenue for the church.
Then, you know, lickety-split, the moral absolute suddenly changed completely, and everybody's all real keen and hot and bothered to stop protecting property rights and capital.
And that's an important thing to understand.
It's a shifting of crop.
It's not the ending of farming.
It's just a shifting of crops that occurs.
And that is something that is just fundamental to understand, that as long as you have a state around, the only changes that are going to occur in a legal sense are the ones that benefit the state, those in power, the ones that benefit them materially or in terms of feeding their power lust, in the relatively short run.
That's sort of a very fundamental thing to understand.
That's how you track the sort of movements and growth in society, is you see what benefits the people in power And there is multiplicity in arguments, because there's lots of different people who want control of state power.
So there is multiplicity in the arguments that are put forward.
Some people say domestic programs, some people say foreign aggression, and so on.
But still, it's just a matter of who it is who gets to grab the resources for their own benefit, and what story are they going to put forward to the people who, quote, vote for them.
And now, of course, we've had a bit of a relief from increases in taxation.
In the West, but that's mostly largely because the combination of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have spent the last 20 years raping and pillaging the Third World by, you know, quote, forcing or bribing The sort of, quote, privatization of the resources that have been developed in the third world, the public resources, the government-owned resources, water and electricity and so on.
We're getting those sold off to private companies who then raise the prices because they have been granted an effective monopoly.
So there's been an enormous amount of pillaging of third world resources.
Over the last 15, 20 years, which has taken the heat off Western taxpayers just a little bit.
And the reason that they've had to turn overseas is because the policies that they put in place have caused a slowdown and then a slow decline in real wages over the past 10, 15 years. So they had to sort of go elsewhere because the state could not grow and it constantly needs to grow.
Because there's always new people who want at...
They're selling favors, right?
They're selling our high blood life and future and children.
So they went overseas and now that's drying up.
So then they went to war and then, you know, there's all this kind of stuff that's going on pretty continually.
And, you know, it is getting more and more panicked and so on.
So it will end.
But when we look back at the sort of 18th century, that sort of late Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, you know, Industrial Revolution phase...
We think that there was a great growth in freedom and so on, and there was.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm not sort of dissing it in any sort of general sense, but as long as you still have the state, it's merely just a shift of, you know, maybe the guns are pointed at fewer people, but the logic is still there about the forcible reallocation of resources and the funding of slavery by the slaves, right? And through taxation, you pay for the police who collect your taxes.
So, I think it's very important that we not look back at the past, you know, at the Constitution, right?
At the Republic, the dream of America, because it always was just a fantasy.
It always was just a fantasy.
And it always was inevitable that we were going to end up back here.
Because that's the logic of state, that's the logic of violence, right?
Violence increases until it collapses.
And it's like any addiction.
So I would sort of make the strong suggestion that the real weakness within the West is, like the most fundamental weakness is looking at the past.
Like either people sort of look to some sort of socialist model or some sort of additional government control model or some sort of, you know, either domestic programs in the socialistic sense or foreign conquering in the fascistic or communist sense, the imperial sense. Or they look at that expansion of state power and say, that's where we need to go.
Or they look back in history at a fantasy libertopia that never existed and say, that's where we need to go.
So either it's irrational, false, and fantastical, to go back to the Constitution or the smaller government and the Harry Brown model, or It's fascistic or communistic and imperialistic, which means that we have to get more aggressive, right? That strength is somehow equated with aggression, right?
The reason that the Muslims are so aggressive is because we're not aggressive back, right?
So this is the old, the bully punches you, you punch the bully back harder.
But, of course, the state relationship with the Muslims, our government's relationship with the Muslims, is a little bit more complex than little old, weak-kneed us are picked on in the playground.
I mean, they've armed the Muslims, they've invited the Muslims over, they've funded the Muslims, the welfare state pays for a lot of the Muslims and other people, which are talking about the Muslims so far.
So, it's a little bit more complicated and reciprocal, not to mention all of the preferential policies that are put in place to attempt to Maintain the flow of oil and the balance of trade and so on.
So, you know, it's a little bit more complicated, our state's relationship with the Muslims than, you know, little old us just sitting away in our towers and their planes come out of nowhere.
But the great danger is sort of to look back into the past and say, we need to go back to something that worked in the past.
That is a grave danger.
And that again does not trounce the fundamental premise of state power.
That whole approach of saying back to the future is the way to go.
The only way that the West is going to invigorate itself is to look forward without the prejudices or fantasies or imaginings of the past.
In my humble opinion, to take what works, what is proven, what is proven efficacious and practical and moral, to take what works and apply it consistently.
It's not that hard. It's not that hard.
It's like if every time I eat iron shavings I get very sick, maybe I should cut out at least some of the iron shavings.
That's not that hard, right?
The West needs to move forward to a truly free society, not look backwards at a society that was never free and imagine that recreating it will somehow not end us back in the same situation.
And it is to the future and to a new set of ideas, or rather an expansion of existing ideas that work, rationality, empiricism, proof, the scientific method, and so on, and expanding those, and then the market, free market, of course, expanding those to their just universals, right? I mean, and so...
I would say that a really fundamental weakness of the West, the reason that we're so enervated, is that we either take on some bizarre fascistic model of foreign conquering as our, quote, strength, which of course it isn't.
That's merely bullying and posturing and carves out the health and heart of a nation, and conscience and soul and empathy of a nation.
Or, you know, we talk about needing to pay off people who might even remotely be discontented in the form of welfare programs and foreign aid and so on.
Both of which are fundamentally about reallocating resources towards those in power.
I don't fundamentally, and call me crazy, I don't fundamentally see that as any kind of strength, that to pay off the people in power and to give them the additional money to fund additional weaponry, that that is any way to solve the problems that we have in the West.
We cannot look to the past.
We cannot look to the Enlightenment.
We cannot look to the Renaissance.
We cannot look to historical philosophy.
Because historical philosophy got us exactly where we are today.
We need to look to the future.
We need to look to the future.
We need to reinvent ourselves as a culture, which means that we need to stop being a culture.
We need to invent ourselves as thinking beings and not lean on history for our solutions.
We have to challenge all assumptions We have to re-examine historical evidence in the light that there is a direct line from 1776 to now.
There is a direct line and it really wasn't very long.
It really wasn't very long before Wilson had the power to enter into a European war and begin the final end of the Republic, to nationalize the money, nationalize the brains of the children, all that kind of stuff.
It really wasn't very long.
A hundred years, right? Those ideas led forward.
Going back to those ideas, A, is impossible.
And B, even if you could, you'd just end up right back where we are.
So we need to stop ferreting around in this imaginary past for our future salvation.
And we need to throw away all of our history save the lessons of that history.
We need to discard our past and extract the principles.
In the same way that if you have a scientific experiment that does not work, you don't go back and say, well, if I redo it, I'll get a different result.
No, you learn the principles of what didn't work and adjust your theory.
So the smallest conceivable state in the history of the planet, with the greatest philosophy behind it, Did not get rid of slavery, did not create rights for women, did not universalize property rights in any stretch of the imagination, and grew back to a festering fascistic dictatorship in about 50 to 70 years.
That's not something that we should go back and attempt to recreate or reproduce or re-energize.
We need to change our assumptions, challenge our assumptions, and shed our history.
Shed our history. Shed the dream that we can find our way to the future by going back and imagining the past.
That is not going to happen.
That is not going to work. If we understand, as every alcoholic and drug addict and sex addict needs to understand, that we cannot, as a species, rationally or morally or historically or logically handle the brute power Of enslaving people and forcing them to pay for their slavery, if we recognize that we cannot handle that.
Human beings have power addictions.
Human beings have a desire based on base amoral biological maximization of resources to control others at the point of a gun and have them pay for that gun as well.
That we simply cannot have a society where this power exists any more than a drunk can have a couple of drinks.
Any more than a heroin addict can just take a couple of hits, or a sex addict can go to just a few orgies.
Once we get, as every addict needs to get, that we cannot handle that stimuli, that we cannot handle that power, that no human being can handle that power, that no society can survive that power, once we get that final illusion out of our heads, That power, violence, centralized, hegemonic, coercive, hierarchical control leads to anything other than the destruction of a society at the expense and enrichment of the few.
Once we get that fundamental proposition, then we really do have a chance to overcome our addictions.
But the drunk fools himself into a self-destructive pattern, even after he's hit bottom, by saying, hey, I can handle a couple of drinks.
Maybe I'll just be a social drinker.
Maybe I'll, you know, I can do it now.
I haven't done it for a while, so I can handle it again.
Boom. Right back they go.
Right? The drunk going back to drinking is one drink.
And the cycle and process begins all over again, and it's almost inescapable and unstoppable until such time as the drunk hits bottom again.
And that's really all that happens in society, if you look at history.
It's a massive power binge that initially has a kind of giddy I'm going to use overly technical terms here.
And then it sort of looks less fun and less fun and less fun.
And then there's a hysterical binging in an attempt to recreate the former funsiness.
Then there's a crash.
And then there's a horrible hangover, the destruction of all that is good and worthy.
And then the drunk sort of picks himself back up and doesn't drink for a little while.
And then says, alright, well, I can handle it.
You know, I haven't drunk for a couple of months, so I can now handle my drinking again.
And the whole cycle sort of begins over and over again.
And if we want to escape that cycle, then we need to get that we just can't drink.
We need to kind of give away, give up that idea that drinking or drug use or promiscuity is good for us.
And that we can handle it.
And once we get that idea, then we just stop drinking.
We just stop drinking.
But until we get that idea, we're going to be trapped in this cycle of addiction.
Over and over and over again, this is going to happen in society.
So for us, we're like the drunk who's on a bender and is about to crash, looking back and saying, you know, when I was 16, I could handle my liquor.
I had a couple of drinks a week and I was good.
Without recognizing that because we're fundamentally addicted to alcohol, just as human beings are fundamentally addicted to power, That those first few drinks led inevitably to the current state of dissolution, despair and self-destruction.
That it's a continual, unbreakable, unswervable line from the beginning of our addictions to the crash at the end.
When you take the first few drinks, you choose...
You know, wrapping your SUV around a pole with your kids getting thrown out the windows because you were drunk.
The first few drinks implicitly include that because we're addicted, because we're alcoholics.
A minarchist state implicitly chooses the warfare welfare state, the military-industrial complex, the destruction of the middle-class savings and the extreme risk of dictatorship that arises from that.
There is no way to not get that.
Because human beings are addicted to power.
Once we get that, we can stop dreaming about the past and start actually building a future that's going to be different from the past.
But the first thing we need to do is to actually and genuinely learn those lessons from the past and learn them real.
Learn them for real this time, rather than imagining that a reduction in our drinking is going to stop us from being alcoholics.
Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to your donations.
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