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Nov. 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:08
526 The Livestock Flees
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Steph, hope you're doing well.
A friendly, friendly, brotherly and sisterly, to those who are on the sisterly side of things, shout out to our good friends who are suffering through Thanksgiving weekends.
This is American Thanksgiving weekend coming up, and I think the day tomorrow is off for most Americans.
This is Thursday night or the 22nd or something like that.
And I know if this is your first time without seeing your family that there's a lot of sadness and heartbreak involved in that, and my sympathy in general, and in specific to you, going out.
It's a very hard process to go through, and I just wanted to, for what it's worth, the admiration that I feel to those who are making the world better in a pretty fundamental way by refusing to associate with corrupt and dangerous people, despite the personal cost, It is a great sacrifice.
And I don't mean that in a way, the word sacrifice has gone through a lot of permutations, particularly in the libertarian movement because of the influence of Ayn Rand.
And I don't believe that it is a sacrifice in a fundamental sense in the long run.
It's not sacrificing higher value for lower value.
But I do like the word sacrifice insofar as it connotes the putting aside of a major and immediate pleasure for the sake of pursuing a maybe possible pleasure out there that is defined in the realm of philosophy and integrity.
In other words, it's...
You look before you leap, but then that leap, I swear to God, it never seems like, at least it was for me when I first eat food and when Christina first eat food.
You look before you leap, and then you leap, but I swear to God, it really, really looks like it's far too wide a canyon to get across.
And the leap is, it is a leap of faith.
Even though there are those on the other side, those of us who are on the other side of this process, saying, you know, there's beauty and treasure here which there's no other way to get to.
And that we welcome you into the community of those who have made this transition with open arms, with all due recognition of the scars that it takes to get here.
And it is an extraordinary challenge to overcome The habits of the tribe and the sentimentalities of the corrupt.
And so for those of you who are spending time with loved families, I think that's wonderful.
But do spare, if you can, a thought for those whose families are beyond redemption and who have to take a staggeringly lonely pilgrimage to a land of freedom that you maybe take for granted.
I say this not to cast a cloud over the celebrations that you're having with your family.
My goal is always to have a richer and deeper experience for the people that I can touch in any way.
And my goal is not to have you cast a cloud over or not to cast a cloud over your Thanksgiving celebrations, but really to have you truly love and enjoy and cherish and relish the relationships that you have with your family because it is rare that you are in such a fortunate position.
And there is just as you don't want to take the virtue of your family for granted If you believe it's the case that they're virtuous without reason, you certainly don't want to take the virtue of your family for granted if they are in fact virtuous.
So spare a thought for the many souls who are taking a lonely trek this weekend.
To a better place or a different place and really do that so that you can further cherish and enjoy your own family which is really a great source of pleasure if it is an honorable and virtuous place to be.
Now, I'm still kind of reeling, in a way, and I'm not sure exactly why I'm reeling, but it's quite an emotional topic for me, which I'm not sure why either, so I'm going to play around with this topic to see if I can't sort out what might be going on.
According to a UN report, I don't know if it's true or not, I don't have any way of verifying this, but even if it's twice the size or three times the size, the number is still staggering to me.
The UN report says that 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country every day.
I can't remember. The population of Iraq is something like 30 million.
So 100,000 a month, they've got, what, 300 months, 30 years.
They better start populating again or there's going to be a significant depopulation.
But I just am reeling at that statistic, and I find it quite emotional, and again, I have no idea why just yet.
So we'll see what thought bubbles the true self is sending up through the emotional layers so that we can figure out the source of what's going on, at least for me.
And maybe the statistic was shocking for you, but I just...
I really find it quite an emotional...
it's a heartbreak.
It's a really heartbreaking feeling to think of all of these families streaming over the border in a mad stampede.
There is no civilized way to exit a country 100,000 people at a time.
And the depopulation of this entire region, which is pretty significant, and of course is achieved not only through the deaths of the Iraqis, but is also achieved even more powerfully by this depopulation and streaming. but is also achieved even more powerfully by this depopulation And of course, it's not like there's any place for them to go to that's particularly welcoming around them.
and it's not like the countries that are surrounding them would enjoy Can you imagine if 100,000 people who were refugees fled and tried to enter America, which is, of course, where they should be going if there was justice in the world?
And they should all have to be put up in the homes and supported by the politicians who voted for the war.
But that's not the world we live in yet.
In fact, we want to live in a world where that never needs to be inflicted on anyone.
But I just, I can't help but sort of think, in sort of my mind's eye, I'm flying over this land that is just wrecked and ruined and tortured.
And, you know, bone splinters sticking out of its shins and groaning in agony and literally a tortured Mordor style of landscape.
And people are fleeing like stampeding cattle.
From this sort of dark, vicious overlordism of violence that is rolling back and forth like a sort of acidic black and red streaked fog across the landscape, a choking noxious vapor of arbitrary and brutal state power.
I don't know if it's imagination or projection or something to do with my own life.
I don't know that just yet.
Maybe we'll figure it out by the time we get done with this podcast.
But the amount of agony that is in that land at the moment, and I'm not going to try and compare this to what was going on before, but certainly the degree of refugees that are stampeding out of the country are significant.
The agony that forces people to flee their homes, to flee their history, their community, their culture, to stampede across the border, like a herd of buffalo with cougars bringing them down in the rear.
Like a herd of swimmers attempting to get out of the reach of a pack of sharks.
Like this mad, agonizing stampede of what do we...
And I guess I can't help but sort of picture in my mind's eye the sequence.
And it's not even like I work to picture it.
It's sort of... Invasive imagination in a way.
The sequence that is occurring for these families in this realm.
The sequence of how long can we hang on for?
How much violence can we stand?
How much horror can we take?
How many family members need to be injured or maimed or killed before we decide to flee?
We know that where we're going to is going to be just another species of hell.
Where we're going to be stuck in refugee camps with no air conditioning, with barely enough food, with very little water, in the scorching desert sun.
So we know that we are fleeing to a particular kind of hell, and this gives an indication...
Of the living horror that is Iraq, that Iraq is now become.
And again, not knowing much about what went on in the past with Saddam Hussein, I'm not even going to guess relative to before and so on.
But for sure, this is a land that has turned absolutely, completely and totally toxic to all forms of human life except the most rapacious and predatory forms of war profiteering.
That this is the image of the state.
Somebody posted on the board, and I'm trying not to use names unless people want me to, but somebody posted on the board, a prison is where the state is free to be itself.
A prison is a place where the state is free to be itself, and I think that is a very powerful and telling statement.
And I also believe that Iraq...
It's a place where the U.S. government is free to be itself.
I watched two nights ago a two-part series from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, wherein one of them gets dragged out to Nebraska.
So, spoiler, I'm sorry, fast forward for a minute or so if you haven't seen this and plan to.
But one of the cast members gets dragged out to Nebraska where he's facing charges which he failed to show up for for a speeding ticket.
And the judge is there, played by John Goodman, who brings entirely too much sort of positive charisma to the role of this kind of judge.
And they're all going to be up on charges and a joint's found in the guy's pocket and blah, blah, blah.
So, you know, things are escalating very rapidly to a very bad situation.
And the judge then finds out that the reason the guy was speeding was because...
He was speeding, and his brother was this cost member who was being charged with all these things.
His brother was in the army, right?
In the army, out there building schools in Afghanistan.
And because of this...
The charges were all dropped.
The judge just says, well, fine, the charges are all dropped, and therefore you can all leave.
And I guess this was considered to be sort of a positive ending.
And to me, this is completely a terrifying situation.
And I'll just talk about this briefly, and I'm sure it's fairly obvious.
But the terrifying situation is that the judge has the power that it all comes down to the whim of one man as to whether these charges get pressed or not.
Whatever happened to the idea of government of laws and not of men?
And so you have all of these charges.
And, of course, you have a charge.
All of these charges that were levied on this fellow involve no direct complainer.
So the drug, the half-smoked joint in his pocket, nobody's complaining about that.
The government just takes it upon itself, the speeding, and so on.
But because this guy happens to have somebody in the military, the charges are all dropped and he gets to walk off.
What a terrifying, terrifying world that is.
Where you are utterly dependent upon the whim of one man for ten years in jail, or whatever it was going to be, or five years in jail, or even just charges of any kind, fines and so on.
It's all entirely dependent upon the whim of one man, and this was considered to be, I guess, a happy sort of ending.
At least there was no complaint, and they went back to bickering about religion.
There was no complaint about the fundamental nature of a society.
Wherein charges can be levied or dropped according to the whim of a man who happens to take a fancy to the fact that you have a brother in the military.
Of course, it could have worked the other way, that if you had a pacifist judge and you happen to have a brother in the military, then you'd have the book thrown at you.
What an entirely terrifying and nightmarish world that would be to live in.
Sorry, that it is to live in.
It's so funny, you know, and I think about this when I'm driving home and I'm pulling into...
I live in a Crescent and it's a couple of streets back from a no-exit sign, so there's zero throughput in this street, zero sort of avenues through to anywhere else.
And so when I'm driving home...
If there's somebody behind me, I sort of noticed this a couple of weeks ago.
If I'm driving home and knowing that no one should be, statistically it's very unlikely that anyone would be behind me.
When I'm driving home and somebody is behind me the whole way, I get irritable.
I get irritable.
And not just because I'm trying to maybe frantically stop a podcast without crashing the car, although I don't really do that anymore.
But I get irritable.
And the reason that I get irritable is because I'm afraid.
Fundamentally, I sort of realized this.
I'm afraid that it's a clothes...
Sorry, it's a, yeah, it's a closed policeman cop, right?
It's a cop with a car without markings, and I've done something.
You know, I went 51 in a 50 zone, or I did a rolling stop at a red, or one of my stickers is out, or one of my lights is out, or some damn thing.
And then I think, well, where's my registration?
And where are my papers? And do I have my ID on me?
And where's my insurance? And where's my plate?
And, you know, all of this sort of nonsense.
And so when this is as simple as somebody following me home or living on the same street, living further down the street or living around the Crescent, that I'm just afraid, right?
And every time you get a letter from the government, the IRS, or some damn thing, right?
We're all just kind of nervous and jumpy.
And this is the world that we're sort of ever more increasingly living in.
And so, when I think about this, where the government is free to be itself, and you think about this war in Iraq, where this pomposity...
I mean, I did a podcast this morning on a gentleman who bullied and pried the candy from his crying younger sister's hand, and We think of that sort of violence and abusive power that occurs in that sort of sibling relationship I remember when on the USS Lincoln, the sort of mission accomplished thing that happened about two years ago, where Bush and his tiny little packet came down.
I bet you he wasn't actually flying the plane, of course.
He came down and strutted out and said, you know, I announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq.
In this conflict, the United States has prevailed.
It has prevailed. You know, sky bombing the shit out of cowering Iraqis from, you know, 20,000 feet from B-52s is any kind of conflict at all.
When you have poor, bewildered, barely literate Iraqis with a broken rifle in their hand voluntarily running away or getting bombed, they're getting the shit bombed out of them or being shot for deserting.
I mean, these poor... It's like calling yourself a hunter because you're looking in the window of a slaughterhouse and saying, what a brave, brave hunter.
I mean, you're not exactly Tarzan.
You know, in the same clips they used to play in the old Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O'Sullivan Tarzan movies, you're not exactly Tarzan hanging on to and killing a crocodile with a knife and a stern glance, right?
I mean, this idea that there was...
When Iraq's military budget is about one-tenth of one percent of the United States' military budget, and when there was a coalition of the willing of the U.S. and of England, and I guess back then Spain, Italy, Japan, a couple of other people, That there was this coalition of industrialized nations, the combined military budgets of which dwarfed by a thousand or more the Iraqi military budget.
And when you had Iraqis being constricted, the idea that we have prevailed Really, really, I mean, it is absolutely, absolutely astounding.
It's absolutely astounding.
It is literally like, what was the guy in some place in Dunblane, Scotland, there was a guy who went into a school with lots of little kids and blew their heads off and blew their arms off and shot them.
And of course, what were the kids armed with?
You know, pencils and urine at this point.
And him saying, well, it was a fierce firefight, but I have prevailed.
And this is a very similar situation, although I guess even one of the kids could have run and bit him or something, which was more access than most of the Iraqi soldiers had to any of the invading forces.
I just can't help but think of the Iraqis and imagine them as mad, frightened cattle.
And I mean that in no way, shape, or form to be disrespectful to the poor Iraqis.
Because they sure as hell didn't choose Saddam Hussein, and he's put in power by the United States.
They didn't choose this ridiculous weapons of mass destruction charge or As Ted Koppel said recently on The Daily Show, he said, weapons of mass destruction?
Of course we know he's got them.
We have the receipts. This is the joke that was running around in the media and in Washington that you saw nowhere in the media, of course, that the United States had sold the weapons of mass destruction.
That Iraq used against its own citizens and then invaded because Iraq had, heaven forbid, actually achieved or had done the horrible thing of attacking its own citizens with weapons supplied by the US government.
And I just can't help but think of the Iraqis like a bunch of hamsters in a cage in a house that's on fire going mad with fear.
And having to sort of wake up and look over the decimated rolls of their own family lists and pray to a God that's all they've got because the world around them is mad and evil.
And to just sort of get up and look at each other and finally that the mom and dad have to sit there and look at maybe the two out of the three children who are left or they have a family meeting and they have to decide who's going to come and who has to be left behind because you've got some people who can't make the trip.
The people who are 80 or 70 or infirm or ill or pregnant women or any of these.
They have to sit there in their little houses and they have to try and decide who is going to get to come in this mad dash to a refugee camp with no future.
And who has to be left behind?
And of course there are very many family members I don't know what happens if you run out of money in Iraq.
But I doubt very much.
I mean, you end up selling or selling your body to the...
If you're a woman, you can sell your body to the soldiers.
Or if you're a man, you can beg.
But I don't imagine that there's a whole lot of room at the barracks of the U.S. military for you in that kind of situation.
And they have to then sift through the accumulated memories and memorabilia that they have from their lives and generations living in this same area.
This, of course, they have to choose...
They have to choose whether or not to take the photos of the beloved sons, or not so beloved sons, I don't know, but they have to choose whether to take the photos of the sons.
That were killed in the Gulf War by the American forces, or they can choose whether or not, this I guess would be a little over 10 years ago, or they can choose to go back sort of 15 to 20 years ago and they can choose whether or not they're going to take the photos.
Of the sons who were killed in the Iran-Iraq war, which was funded on both sides by the United States government and other people, which doesn't mean that the Iraq governments weren't responsible and the Iran governments weren't responsible.
Of course they were, but it sure as hell wasn't the fault of the poor people who are kept without even the consideration and the investment of slaves.
They are kept as hunting beasts, beasts to be hunted and to be ignored.
They are as well-treasured as a public bathroom is to the average mayor.
And they have to choose who they're going to leave behind.
They can't take everyone.
They're old people, very young children.
I guess they have to be carried.
They have to go through all of their possessions and they have to figure out what they can take and what they're going to have to leave behind.
And the families have all lost people in the current conflict.
They probably all lost people or knew in the extended family somebody who died or was killed or was maimed or was raped in the Gulf War.
And then they also know very many people who died.
The deaths were in the millions I think in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
And What an unbelievable life to live.
Just imagine the human potential that is destroyed and wrecked and not just now.
This is not just Iraq now.
This is not just Iraq for the next year or two years or ten years.
This is Iraq for the next five generations.
This is Iraq for the next hundred years.
I mean, if you look at What happened, as I mentioned recently, with regards to Spain and the discovery of the New World, Spain's economy, and we'll get into some other aspects of it, was really destroyed, or at least highly undermined and weakened for, you know, 400 years.
And finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, began to recover.
So, this is a land that has now been utterly destroyed for generations in the same way that Russia, in many ways, utterly destroyed by the brutality of the Communist regime and the prior Tsarist regime.
The brief period of the Mensheviks and certain tinkerings with social democracy didn't quite take long enough to undo any of this.
But the cycle of violence has absolutely overwhelmed The violence within the society has metastasized and gone completely inflammatorily cancerous.
It's gone into the lymph nodes, into the nervous system, into every major organ, and it is absolutely overwhelming to society.
Of course, the people who are fleeing are those who have the most opportunities, the greatest amount of money, the highest IQs, and so the people who are left, I mean, the gene pool is just being decimated as well.
This is another thing that happened with We're good to go.
It's like Iraq is a man standing in a field, shivering and bleeding, and someone comes along with a baseball bat and hits his head so hard it flies off his shoulders and lands in another country.
That's the sort of image that I have of this absolutely tortured and brutalized and broken land and people that is going on.
When you make the choice about who can come and who must stay, you have to, I'm sure, if you're in an Iraq family who is planning to leave, I'm sure that you must also desperately hope that the word doesn't get out So that everyone is going to try and come along with you.
Because there are people, of course, who are now alone.
So these are the people who've been widowed by the war, the children who nobody can afford to take in because there's just not enough food to go around, who are sort of wandering the streets.
The sort of young people whose parents have all been killed or so on.
And those people, as well as neighbors, they want to stick together.
It's not particularly likely, perhaps, that you go off on your own towards the border.
And so this endless procession of people, as soon as you indicate that you're leaving, there are many people, I bet, who want to come along with you, and you don't know them very well, or maybe you don't know them at all, but there's a problem.
And of course, you know, on the people who are being left behind, I mean, what kind of life can they look forward to?
A life of begging and starvation and hunger and fear and knowing or believing every day.
And the same things that happened in Kosovo and the same things have happened in Rwanda.
Just the world over, this is where governments are free to be themselves.
This is the living hell that they create, right?
This is the absolute evil heart of Satan fire that runs across and shrivels and burns and cracks and popples human flesh wherever it goes.
This is the devil loose in the world.
I mean, this is the greatest evil loose in the world where people are screaming and fleeing in terror and leaving treasured possessions and treasured relatives, most importantly, behind.
And it's like I remember also reading when I was doing my research for Olmos that one of the problems that would occur in...
In bombings in the Second World War was that women would be shocked into labor, and often premature labor, and they would be giving birth either in the street or someplace in a shelter with bombs all around them, and of course many of the babies who were premature would simply die.
And the concussion of this violence raining from the skies is so great that it shakes or expels the very baby out of the wombs of the children.
And think of all of the lives out there in Iraq where they simply can't decide whether they should even try to have children, whether it's even worth getting married.
What is happening to their general values in this extraordinarily...
What horrifyingly terrible state of nature that they live in, where every day can be their last, where there is no future?
What kind of nihilism is being bred into the souls of the Iraqi people?
What is their relationship to virtue and integrity?
What is their faith in the power of goodness?
What is their joy in attachments and children and marriages and careers and education?
And what is happening to their sense of what it means to be human?
In this hellfire of endless destruction and death and starvation and want and misery and what is happening to the souls of people under this endless withering furnace, flamethrower of fire that is spouting from the muzzle of the state, the occupying state.
And... To have even the tiny shreds of empathy that are sort of rolling through my system, to feel that, what is happening to the souls of those of us who are outside the conflict?
Who are looking at this, and we know what's going on.
There's not a lot of mystery, and you can find footage and photos on the web very easily of what life is like in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
What is happening to the souls of those who are cheering this on?
What is happening to the souls of the soldiers, obviously, and the war profiteers and the children of the war profiteers?
There's a scene in Brazil where Michael Palin plays a rather terrifying What happens to the children of the war profiteers and the soldiers and those who are profiting from and allowing all their sadistic impulses to run rampant via this war?
What is going to happen to their children, right?
I mean, there is nothing fundamentally that is being done unto the Iraqi people which will not also have significant repercussions to the American people and to the British people and to the people of the other countries.
Not just those who were there and not just those who voted for it and not even just those who supported it or continue to support it, but in a much more fundamental way, it's everyone who is not experiencing the horror of what is occurring. it's everyone who is not experiencing the horror of what Everyone who is no longer able to register or perhaps was never able to register the horror of what is occurring to the Iraqi people.
What is happening to our souls?
What is happening to us in a very fundamental way?
What is happening to our capacity for humanity?
To what degree are we now viewing our brothers and sisters in cattle, our brothers and sisters in the realm of state livestock?
What is happening to us that we look across this barbed wire electrified fences of human cattle pens we call countries, that we look across at the herding and slaughter and decimation and rape and destruction and starving of Other livestock, other state-owned souls.
And there is cheering, of course, that we feel that they sort of had a coming to them, or that it doesn't matter how many of them die, they're still better off than they were under the previous farmer, without ever wondering why it's never possible to be To be free, right? Why the option is like, well, they're doing better than they did under Saddam Hussein.
And why the option is, why do they need to be ruled and herded around and killed in general?
And why do we?
Millions of people in prisons even in America and so on.
And all the rest of us living in fear.
But what is happening to our sense of humanity when we shiver and blind ourselves to the whips falling on our own flesh and we jeer and cheer at the whips falling on the flesh of others?
What is going to happen to our souls in the long run if we do not nakedly and vulnerably gaze upon this power and...
And recognize it for what it is, which is the manifestation of a kind of hell on earth, the manifestation of the worst devils of human nature, the devils that inevitably grow in the disparity of power between the state and the individual, and the disparity of power between the priest and the individual, and fundamentally all resting on and dependent upon the disparity of power.
That is, abused between the parent and the child.
What is going to happen to us?
And in some ways, of course, this does tie in a, you know, macro to micro level in with what I was talking about this morning, that you have somebody who stole candy from his youngest son.
Sister. And mocks her and jeers her fundamentally for...
It's not the same class.
I don't mean to offend the gentleman I was talking about this morning because it's so common.
It's hard for us to really see it.
But this continuum of the abuse of power that is so common and fundamental to our species, if we can't look upon it with the horror that it deserves, if we can't...
We somehow wrench our perspectives away from the habitual and bloody grooves of railroaded opinions and historical absolutes, and this is just the way it is, and human nature is this, and there's original sin, and the world is bad.
The world is full of bad people.
And, you know, we're good, they're bad, right?
We're strong, they're weak, and they should pay for being weak, and it's not our fault that they're weak, but it is our virtue that we're strong.
These kinds of patterns, this worship of authority, this...
Subjugation of conscience and of personal moral authority and autonomy to leaders, to gods, to priests, to teachers, to parents, to all of these people who will absolutely gladly gather up our money, our time, our energies, our souls, our wills, our conscience for their own profit and self-aggrandizement, that we have a world of the empty, leading people.
It's the blind leading the empty, and this world of a simple whirlpool where people submit to power, power grows over people, and people then submit further to power, and this escalation that stops only with general and universal slaughter in the form of a war or a kind of genocide,
as we've seen happen countless times in human history, that the only way to Arrest this inevitable slight towards these kinds of horrors is to grab onto whatever shreds of empathy we can have for those around the world and within our own countries,
of course, who are suffering under this hellish heel of the state.
What is it, the line from 1984?
Imagine a fist smashing into a human face to eternity.
This is really the little candle that we need to keep alive, that we need to shield so desperately, because if we lose that, then the fact that we're livestock,
the fact that we're kept in a kind of state zoo, absolutely vanishes for us, and we become Another one of the sort of mindless invasion of the body snatchers, cheerleaders of our side versus their side, as if it's us versus the Iraqis, as if it's us versus the Afghanis, when it's all of us versus the governments and then the churches and the unjust powers of the world.
And that aspect of empathy that is so hard starts first with ourself.
We can't feel any more empathy for the Iraqis than we feel towards ourself or to those around us who we have harmed.
We can't feel any more empathy than that.
And the first thing that we need to do is just...
Wrench herself away from staring at this narcissistic well of prior human history where all of this stuff is normal and everybody cheered on like the Roman crowds in a Colosseum cheered on the unpopular group of the day getting torn apart by lions or getting crucified or Or attacking each other with tridents and nets and swords in this Russell Crowe-ian manner if we can get out of the sick and superficial and oddly strong comfort of baying with the pack for blood.
Or shrugging with indifference at the plight of others, but can actually genuinely connect with the emotion that comes with watching, even in our mind's eye, another human being be tortured and suffer.
If we can connect with that, that is really the antidote to power.
That is the antidote. Empathy is the antidote to power.
And this is why we're all raised to be mindless cheerleaders for our states and our schools and our sports teams and our families, of course, most fundamentally, and our gods and our churches and our priests and so on.
And it is pulling ourselves, peeling it.
It felt to me like I'm peeling, like we have, what, seven layers of skin.
It felt like I was peeling 6.5 layers of skin off myself when I was going through this process of wrenching.
My mind away and my view and my vision away from this bloody soup of shattered souls that is human history and is what we're habituated to and is what we're used to and is what we are raised under in a familial school and religious and state-based sense.
To wrench Myself away from that was just unbelievably hard, unbelievably hard.
It really felt like I was going mad, and it really felt like a kind of death.
And I wrote many, many years ago in a poem that I believe that we must bury ourselves in order to be resurrected.
And if we're not alive, we have to go through that sort of living death of our own illusions in order to become alive, to become, oh, no, no, dare I say it, born again.
We do have to go through that process, at least I did.
And most people that I know who've had, actually everyone who's going to go through this, goes through that period of feeling like there is a kind of death in the self that brings us a new and our first real set of eyes and our first real beating human empathetic heart.
Is to simply break out of the grooves of habituated cheerleading for death and for victory and for strength, brute physical strength, right?
You watch these football players stalking around on TV and smashing each other up and so on, and you're cheering for that, right?
I mean, I'm not saying sports is the same as war, but they're strongly related, as I talked about them on my earliest podcasts.
Giving up the team, giving up our side and their side, giving up the identification of yourself with a larger social group that A, you're not a part of, and B, even if you were, is totally ruled by other people who have exactly the opposite of your interests at heart.
It really is like we have two groups of livestock next to each other in farms, and each one of the livestock is jeering at the other livestock saying, we have...
We have the best team.
Well, you're not a part of the team, right?
You are, as a taxpayer and as a citizen, you are a slave to the state.
You are subjugated to all of the powers and arbitrary bullying of the state.
You are only free to the degree with which the state finds you useful, just as you are only kept alive by a farmer as long as you serve his economic interests.
And at the moment that you don't, then you're no longer really alive.
And the degree of freedom that we retain based on the fact that we are still of service to the state is a pretty pitiful scrap to live on.
And it is fundamentally and essentially humiliating to live by the grace and the pleasure of our masters.
And yet we look across at other countries and other lands and we don't have empathy for the groaning horrors of state power and we cheer about our own states and we cheer for our own farmers Who makes speeches to us about what wonderful cows we are while mentally calculating how much we're worth per pound and how much blood he can hoover back up to use as fertilizer and how many of our children he can steal to put in the veal fattening pens to use a very strong metaphor.
But... If we can peel away from this identification with the group, from this identification with the state and with the church and with the families as our primary source of moral reference, then we really do, of course, reach out from this sky-fog castle, sky-fog empty castle of illusion and actually do begin to touch the ground and to feel gravity and to feel our own skin and our own weight and reality in a very fundamental way.
And that is a very hard process to do.
I would certainly...
I mean, it's absolutely essential.
If you want to sort of live a philosophy rather than speak or read a philosophy, then peeling back the layers of empathy for yourself, first and foremost, despite the fact that you may have had a better childhood than 99.9% of people in the world, your childhood relative to a really good childhood in a real world, in a free world, And, of course, your adulthood as a piece of livestock for the fools who run the show and the fools they arm with our money to keep us down.
The horror of that life as an adult is almost incalculable, almost beyond reckoning.
It's very hard for us to imagine what we would look like in a state of real freedom, in a state where we were not in a stateless society.
Where we had true authority, true autonomy, and could really be our own conscience.
But it is an essential step to take, and I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry for this topic to be out there when we are looking at, and there are a number of people who listen to this show who are going through solitary times relative to their family, and I'm certainly not trying to make that more difficult in my own, perhaps clumsy way.
I'm trying to make it a little easier by pointing out that the loyalty to family, the loyalty to the state, to church, religion, the loyalty to all of these things is why millions of people around the world get murdered every year, and why the rest of us live in fear and live on the crumbs of freedom left over based on our utility to our masters.
And While it is a very difficult thing to go through a lonely Thanksgiving weekend, the service that you're performing for the world as a whole, for the next generation, for those around who you can reach out and touch with your courage and with your independence and with your clear thinking and with your dedication to principles and with your dedication to reality and to virtue, the service that you're doing to these people is almost...
I mean, it really can't be calculated.
And I know that it's a very tough road to hoe, so to speak, but...
The virtue in it is something that if there is to be a virtuous world in the future, and I absolutely and totally believe that there will be, then we are the founding fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters of this new world, and the road that is very hard is the one that is the most worth stepping along,
because we may be at the cutting edge, we may be out here in the perimeter where there are no stars, but the lights that we have at least Thank you so much for listening,
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