All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 19, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:36
564 Shadow Governments
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Open up your mind and let me step inside.
Rest your weary heart and let your head decide.
It's so easy.
When you know the rules, it's so easy.
All you have to do is free domain.
Free domain. Everybody free domain.
It was all fun and games until the final note.
Hope you're doing well as Steph.
It's 5.30 on December the 19th, 2006.
And I wanted to...
I'm not going to do a user topic tonight.
I'm going to do a Steph topic.
A topic just for me.
Smedley here. Just for us.
And the topic I'd like to talk about is...
The government. I know it's a shock, but we haven't actually talked about the government as is in at least 1.08 podcasts.
So, let's have a go, shall we?
I got an IM from a gentleman today who was talking about how something I said, I think in Podcast 500, was a statement that everything that the politician promises to you is exactly the opposite of what he is going to provide you or what he is in fact able to provide to you.
And so I wanted to expand upon that because he was quite fascinated by that statement and talk about this in relationship to the state as a whole.
Now, the sort of very base...
In many senses of the word, the very sort of base mechanics of the state, as we know, the state is a monopoly of the right or the monopoly of the supposed moral right to initiate the use of force in a particular geographical region.
And I think it's really important to dig down if you sort of want to get the state and why it's just so fundamentally devilish.
I think it's important to dig down and sort of understand what violence is for.
What it's all about and what it's for.
And that I think will give you a sense of the nefarious nature and content of the state.
And also I think give you a sense as to why the state...
The state is never ever going to provide what people want.
And in fact, as I'm going to sort of argue over the next while, the state is actually in fact only ever going to provide the exact opposite of what people want.
And it's not a perversion.
It's not a perversion of the state that it only supplies the opposite of what everyone wants.
It is the nature of the state.
It's not a perversion of cancer that cancer makes you die.
That's the purpose of what the cell is doing.
I mean, to use the word purpose in a much looser kind of context.
But it's not a perversion that praying fails to cure illnesses.
That's not a perversion of prayer.
It's not like it should, but it just goes wrong.
Prayer Actually causes people to become sicker because the belief in the efficacy of prayer causes them to avoid going to doctors or to accept their fate in a way.
So it's not a perversion of prayer that it adds to the ill health, physical and mental ill health of the world or of religion in terms of that.
It is the sort of nature of it.
It is the nature of religion that it destroys man's humanity and capacity to reason.
It is the nature of unjust parental authority that it creates instabilities in the personalities, a lack of capacity to negotiate.
It is the nature of patriotism that it supports everything that the patriot claims he wishes to oppose.
Tyranny, dictatorship, the corruption of all that is virtuous.
So we have a lot of propaganda and illusions about these kinds of things.
And I want to run through a reasoning process about the roots of violence so that we can understand that it's not like the state is a good ideal and it goes awry.
We have this myth around things like Christianity or religion.
We have these things around communism.
On paper, these systems are great, but they just somehow, oddly enough, go wrong.
It's like a doctor who wants to treat headaches with a guillotine.
Somehow, every time he uses that guillotine, I guess the headache is sort of cured, but so is breathing.
When we see a doctor repeatedly using a guillotine and repeatedly failing to achieve the subtle and herbology-based cure that he claims, at some point we're going to say the purpose of the doctor is to kill people.
And there's a lot of propaganda about how the doctor wants to help people and it's all about the health, but the purpose of the guillotine, even if we say the doctor is so ambiguous in some manner, definitely the purpose of the guillotine Is to kill people, right? So when somebody uses a guillotine and says, oh, well, I wanted to use a guillotine for X, Y, and Z. I don't want to use it to kill people.
Well, you're using a guillotine, and that's what kills people.
So it's sort of to understand that the state is a guillotine.
There is only one purpose for the state.
There's only one purpose that the state has.
And... The fact that people claim otherwise is simply because they haven't looked at the state and what it does, right?
So if you think that a guillotine is going to give you a nice neck massage, you probably haven't noticed the massive frickin' blade and the weights and the bucket of heads at the bottom and the hip-deep weighting in blood leading up to the guillotine.
It's good for haircuts.
Well, there's a little bit of evidence, a little bit of physics that's going to contradict you.
So the state is, as I've said a number of times on this program, the number being infinity minus three podcasts, that the state is an agency of violence.
And the state has nothing to do with self-defense.
The state is the right to initiate the use of force.
Even in most modern Western countries, even in most statist countries, a man or a woman have a right to self-defense.
The state does not reserve the right to self-defense, except against the state, right?
But if I shoot a robber in my house, most times I'm going to be let free.
I might even get, I don't know, like some pats on the back from some certain bloodthirsty patriotic types or whatever, but I might get some pats on the back for a regrettable action like having to shoot a human being who was invading my home or something like that.
So the state does not claim a monopoly on self-defense.
Self-defense is available to all citizens.
The state claims a monopoly on two things.
The initiation of the use of force and self-defense against the state.
You can't defend yourself against the state.
If you come to get arrested, even if it's totally unjust, you can't shoot those who are coming to arrest you.
So the state does not grant self-defense as a right in the realm of the state.
Right? That's a fairly important thing to sort of understand.
The state has the right to initiate the use of force and the state denies self-defense for its agents.
You have self-defense against a robber.
you do not have the right of self-defense against a cop.
So violence...
The state is not a monopoly on violence, right?
Because citizens have the right of self-defense.
The state is a monopoly on initiation and disallows all defense against the state.
So, given that the state is not centered around self-defense or retaliation against violence, but is centered around the initiation of the use of force, and if you say, well, yes, but the cops will protect you if you're being attacked by someone, but that's not the issue.
The issue is that the cops are paid for through the initiation of the use of force.
The cops, the roads, all these things, as we all know, they're paid for through taxation, and taxation is by definition the initiation of the use of force.
If taxation were truly contractual, then it would not be the initiation of the use of force to collect it, in the same way that to collect a debt.
When you deliver a car and somebody refuses to pay you, you can get your car back or get the money.
And force may be acceptable in those situations.
Now, we've talked about DROs.
I would say that I would have no particular moral issue with somebody who did that.
I might if it was a ballpoint pen and they gunned a guy down.
There's some sense of proportionality.
But fundamentally, the right to get paid for goods and services is to have contracts fulfilled.
It's morally acceptable to use violence, you know, with grey areas and all this and that and the other, right?
But if somebody steals your car, you can use violence to get it back.
Although I definitely would prefer the DRO approach, which I'm sure would win out over time.
The exclusion and anyway, so...
So everything that the state does, even if the state says, well, the police are here to protect you, the courts are here to protect you, it doesn't matter because they all result from the initiation of the use of force.
So the state is really fundamentally and completely and totally singular only in this twofold thing.
Initiation of the use of force, no retaliation against state agents is permitted.
So, the real question, of course, is why?
Why would you want this power?
Why would you want this power?
Why would you want to have the right to initiate force against others?
I'll just say use violence.
I don't like to initiate force.
Everyone can understand that I don't mean...
I'm not counting self-defense in anything that I talk about with the state.
I'm just going to simplify it, use violence, and so on.
Why would you want to use violence against your fellow citizens?
It's quite clear once you get it.
Why would you want to use violence against your fellow citizens, against your fellow man?
Well, let's take a silly example.
You want a date for the prom.
Big chatty forehead happens to be busy and married.
But you want a date for...
So your first choice is obviously out.
Plus you might want to get a word at edgewise.
And you also have never seen me dance.
And I don't think, in fact, even when I have danced, anyone has actually seen me dance.
But we'll come back to that.
But... If you want a date for the prom...
You can go stag...
You can ask a girl to voluntarily come with you, or you can kidnap her brother and threaten to cut his finger off if she doesn't come to the ball with you.
There's really not any other options.
You ask, you force, or you relinquish the desire.
You fulfill your desire either through voluntary exchange, corsage for attendance, or you achieve the satisfaction of your desire through force, or you give up your desire.
Trade, force, or abdication, or relinquishing of desire.
That's it. There's no other...
There's no other possibilities.
Now, you can go stag for sure, right?
No problem with that.
And there's no real point talking about that, right?
Or, if you decide to force the woman or the girl to go on a dance with you, to go to the dance with you, to go to your prom, why is it that you would force her?
Why is it that you would force?
Why is it that you would require force?
Why is it that you would use force?
I'm sure I'm not giving anything particularly away when I say you would use force because the girl doesn't want to go to the dance with you.
Or you would use force because you believe that she should want to go to the dance with you But she's not going to.
And the should is also optional.
But basically you are going to use force because the girl does not want to go to the dance with you.
So if you're on your way to go and kidnap her brother, assuming that it's a brother she likes, if you're on your way to go and kidnap her brother, And your cell phone rings, and it's said girl in question on the phone, and she says, I'd really like to go to the prom with you.
Then it would seem likely that you would abandon your plans, unless you're just a complete sadist, and you would say, yay, let's go to the prom together, and her brother would continue in an unmolested fashion to do whatever he's doing.
Well, I stood here in the sense of just being kidnapped.
So, clearly you don't think that if you ask the girl she's going to come with you to the prom, or that she's going to call you and invite you.
So you want to go to the prom with this girl, but you believe that she does not want to go with you.
And most people who go down this route will usually ask the girl first, and then when she says no, will go and kidnap her brother.
So it's either because this has happened a lot of times before, you've got a crushingly low self-esteem, or because she's already rejected you, but you have a firm enough belief that she does not want to go to the prom with you that you're going to kidnap her brother.
Now, the degree of violence is the degree...
Sorry, let me start this again.
The fact that she does not want...
And I'm not going to say you know or you don't know again.
I'm just trying to keep it relatively simple here and take out some of the caveats.
Violence occurs because she doesn't want to go to the prom with you.
And you want to force her to go.
So you know that she doesn't want to go to the prom with you because someone is going to know because you're willing to use force.
The degree of force...
That you are willing to use is the degree to which she does not want to go to the prom with you.
So, if you kidnap her brother and you threaten her and she still refuses to go to the prom with you and then you cut one of her brother's fingers off and you hand it to her in the hallway and she still doesn't want to go to the prom with you but then after you cut his arm off she says, fine, I'll go to the prom with you.
Then she's like four fingers of thumb and an arm full of not wanting to go to the prom with you.
The degree of violence is the degree to which she doesn't want to do something.
So if you sort of laugh and you joke and you take a 20 cent pen from her nothing else has happened you laugh and you say I'll give this pen back to you If you'll come to the prom with me.
And she says, okay, I'll go to the prom with you.
Well, maybe she would have anyway, but for sure we can say, and she says, as long as you give me that pen back, that she's 20 cents a pen full of not...
less than 20 cents a pen full of not wanting to go to the prom with you.
Greater than 20 cents a pen not wanting to go to the prom with you.
So, when violence or fraud or whatever...
If violence is deployed, then we know that there's an aversion.
And the degree of violence that is deployed is the degree of aversion that is being averted.
So those two principles, I'm sure, are fairly clear.
So the right to initiate force...
The desire to use violence against your fellow man is the desire, of course, to force them to do what they don't want to do.
The degree of force is the degree of aversion.
The presence of force is the presence of aversion.
the degree of force is the degree of aversion.
So, when you have a government, the size of the government is the degree of the aversion the size of the government is the degree of the aversion to
And the punishment that the government inflicts for disobedience is the degree to which people revile, hate, fear, loathe, or are fundamentally indifferent to what the government is doing.
This is the funniest thing about democracy.
Government is portrayed as a manifestation of the people's wishes and desires.
Madness! Absolute madness!
Absolute madness!
The state It's a black and vicious, bloody map of everything that the population does not want to do, does not want to do, reviles doing, hates and fears doing, or is indifferent to doing.
The government is an absolute map of aversion, not of desire.
The government, everything that the government does and every action the government takes, everything that is defended by this combination of the initiation of force and the rejection everything that is defended by this combination of the initiation of force and the rejection of the right of self-defense
everything that the government does is an exact map of what everyone doesn't want the government to do or doesn't want to do themselves.
Government is the exact opposite of everyone's desires and preferences.
It's the exact opposite of everyone's desires and preferences.
Because the degree of force is the degree of aversion, and governments are the greatest force ever.
the greatest users of force with the most insane and inhumane punishments this side of Dante on the face of the planet.
Governments are not a manifestation of what people want.
That's why the social contract theories are so hilarious and ugly.
Government is exactly what people don't want, hate, fear, loathe, or are indifferent to.
This is the most fundamental thing to understand about the state. .
And if you get this, then you get that there's no conceivable, remote, tangible or intangible possibility that the state will ever achieve anything positive because the state is the shadow cast by violence forcing people to do what they don't want to do.
Now, the state doesn't force bad people to do what it doesn't want to do.
It will occasionally use them as scapegoats to expand its own power, but they just join the government, right?
The really smart bad people who want to force people and steal people, they just join the government.
So the government's not about forcing bad people, right?
Bad people operate pretty much outside the law, compared to people like soldiers and politicians and unions and, I mean, state-supported unions and so on, public school teachers and so on.
Bad people operate outside the law.
So the government isn't about stopping bad people from doing what bad people want to do.
It's about stopping good people from doing what good people want to do or forcing good people to do what they don't want to do.
So government is the exact opposite.
Government is using force against good people.
And government only survives because good people obey the law, good people obey the government, good people think that there's virtue and it's called obeying the government and being a patriot and that's what we're going to do.
If everybody went into the black market or the grey market tomorrow and said, fuck these rules, there would be no government the day after.
So, government is all about herding and encircling in barbed and electrified wire all of the good people in the world and forcing them to do the exact opposite of what they want to do.
Thank you.
Or preventing them through force from doing what they want to do.
And only good people, the obedience and compliance of good people is the only way the government survives.
So naturally, we would assume that good acts would come from good people voluntarily.
Because that's one of the definitions of being good people is to produce good acts.
One of the definitions of being a good doctor is to heal people.
That is the purpose of being a doctor.
The purpose of being a good person is to do virtuous things or to act in a virtuous manner.
Therefore, good people will produce good actions if not forced.
But the government is all about forcing good people to do the opposite of what they want.
Or prevent them from doing what they do want.
Now since the natural actions of good people are good, the natural effect of good people is good actions, forcing good people to do what they don't want to do is forcing good people to be bad people.
Or forcing people...
To perform actions that would be classified as bad if it wasn't for the force.
So, if I voluntarily were to give an enormous amount of money to a large group of hitmen who went out killing people whenever some leader told them to, I would be a pretty bad guy, right?
That would be a pretty bad thing to do.
I'm not talking paying a DRO to defend your property.
I'm talking about sending assholes over to Afghanistan to go shoot people.
That would be a pretty bad thing to do, right?
But that's what the government forces you to do, of course, every day.
It's forcing you to do things that, if the force were removed, would be evil.
Or, at the very best, corrupt.
And it prevents you from doing things that are good.
So government is a black pestilent plague that is the entire exact and total opposite of virtue.
Thank you.
Government is that agency which forces good people to do bad things, prevents good people from doing good things, and merely harasses and gets bribed by bad people.
And, of course, the bad people join.
This is the fundamental truth of government.
It is the exact opposite of virtue.
So the idea that this black satanic pestilence, this undertow on healthy virtuous swimmers...
This shark in a swimming pool is going to be a lifeguard and a force for good in the world is savagely, savagely stupid.
I'm not saying that the people who believe this are all stupid.
Of course not. This is why I'm putting the ideas out.
The idea itself is completely retarded.
If you want me to figure out how to separate the people from the ideas, I'm not going to do that in this podcast.
But I think it's really worth mulling that over.
And of course, you can apply the same principles to churches and to families and all this, but let's just sort of mull it over with the state, you know, for a little while.
And there's going to be people who come back and say, oh, but the state kills murderers and the murderers are bad, and so they're preventing bad people from doing badly.
Yeah, fine. Fine.
Got it. Got it. But how is it that the state is funded?
And how good is this government at preventing crime?
Right? Even the mafia shoot each other from time to time.
So yes, the big thugs sometimes kill the little thugs.
The government sometimes kills the criminals.
Got it. But I don't think that we view a mafia shootout as a good thing, right?
Because if one mafia ends up killing all the rest of the mafia, then that mafia can then continue unopposed and grow.
I don't think that we view a mafia shootout as like, yay, great, they're reducing the number of mafiosos.
No. So government going and killing people...
Doesn't mean that the government is doing the right thing, or the good thing.
So let's take another view at this.
I said that the degree of punishment is the degree to which people don't want to do X. So if I say, I want you to send me $500, and if you don't, I might send you a Stink bomb or a nasty letter or I don't know, something like that.
Then I want you to send me $500 one stink bomb worth or one nasty letter worth or something.
If the punishment is mild, then clearly the aversion is not that great.
Where the punishment is extraordinary, as we talked about with the cutting off your potential date's little brother's finger as an arm, where the punishment is extraordinarily great, then the aversion where the punishment is extraordinarily great, then the aversion to that which is being proposed is very high.
Okay.
So, the punishment for not paying your taxes is continual harassment for years, being hounded back and forth, having to spend a fortune on legal fees with a fairly good to high chance of ending up in jail.
Jail, of course, is an absolute Stygian abyss, a complete and utter hell where your life is destroyed.
And when you get out of jail, you're a broken human being and you can never get a real job again.
And any professional qualifications you have are probably stripped away permanently.
And if you're in Florida and you have a name that has Anglo-Saxon letters like the name of felony offenders, you won't even get to vote.
No great loss. So how much is it that people don't want to pay taxes?
They don't want to pay taxes 10 years in a rape room's worth.
They don't want to pay taxes 10 years in a rape room's worth.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal fees, this, that, and the other.
That's how much they don't want to pay taxes.
How much do people want the war on drugs?
Well, they want the war on drugs minus ten years in a rape room's worth, because the war on drugs is funded.
By taxation. And if people really wanted the war on drugs, like the same way they want iPods, there would be no need to be taxation.
People just, they'd send the money to whoever was, you know, doing it.
This is what I mean when I say it is the exact opposite of what people want.
Because when people want it, you don't need force.
I don't need to go around to everyone and say, listen to my goddamn podcast or I'm going to shoot your little toe off.
We're getting 130, 140, 150,000 downloads a month because people want to listen to these podcasts.
I love it. I love the species for wanting to listen to these podcasts.
There's no force.
No force needed. But if you throw children into public schools...
How much do their parents want their children to be in public schools?
Well, 10 years of rape rooms worth.
That's how much they don't want their children to be in public schools.
And we know that.
It's indubitable. Because if people did want their children to be in public schools, like the way they like new cars, or new houses, or kitchen counter upgrades, there would be no need for the force.
No need for the violence.
If the punishment for not paying your taxes was a stern letter from the government, but everyone paid their taxes anyway, we'd know that people kind of wanted to pay their taxes, they just needed a tiny little bit of prodding.
So the negative desire or the aversion to paying taxes would be pretty minimal.
Pretty minimal. So how much do people hate governments?
Ten years in a rape room and a ruined life's worth.
That's how much people hate and fear and loathe governments.
And the smartest people, right, the smartest and the best and the most moral people, the people who can figure out the consequences of their actions, who aren't totally enslaved to impulses and all the lowest instincts, those people go, well, crap, on a cost-benefit basis, it makes sense to pay taxes.
Right? So it's the intelligent and smart people, at least if we don't say virtuous, those who can recognize the consequences of certain choices.
It's those people who are paying the taxes, so it's the people who are the most virtuous, or at least the most sensible, or at least the smartest in terms of cost-benefit analyses, who are the ones paying the taxes.
Bad people and drug dealers.
I'm not saying that drug dealers are bad.
I mean, just people in the grey market or the black market, let's say, they're not paying their taxes.
But it's not a very good cost-benefit calculation to live your whole life in the grey or black market, in my humble opinion.
It's just an opinion. So, that's why I say that to imagine, and I'm not sure there are many people left listening at this level of podcasting, or this height of podcasting, the Tower of Babel, we call it.
I'm not sure there are many people left here who really have a whole lot of faith or belief in the state, but you may have some.
But you may have some.
And the way to get the last vestiges out...
The way to dig the last bit of statist shrapnel out of your brain and to truly see, for the fogs to clear and to truly see the state in all of its hellish glory.
The state is the anti-market.
Rape is anti-love.
Murder is anti-life.
The state is anti-choice.
The state is anti-virtue.
The state is anti-life.
The state is exactly what people hate and fear and resist and revile.
So I hope that this approach can help you to look at the state and to sort of recognize it for what it is.
And we get an enormous amount of propaganda to the opposite.
The state wants to help the poor, and the state is a reflection of people's desire to help the poor.
Bullshit. It's complete nonsense.
It stands up to no logical scrutiny.
If people wanted to help the poor, they would help the poor.
A reflection's... A reflection of people's desires are the shelves at Best Buy and the clothing racks at Sears.
That is a reflection of what people want.
Voluntary win-win negotiation.
That is what people want.
That is a reflection where you have a non-coercive environment to the degree with which you're able to do it.
And there's not many left.
Like it or not, Windows XP is a reflection of what people want.
It is. You can get as mad as you want, but it is.
Because nobody's forcing people.
The Teladon system, for those who remember that, was a government system.
That's an example of what people don't want.
It's a precise example of what people don't want.
The government, and this is what's so funny about this idea of democracy or any form of government and the idea of a social contract, the government is exactly the opposite of what people want.
And the degree of punishment that the government inflicts upon people for disobeying is the degree to which people do not want to do whatever the government is forcing them to do.
What's why I have such incredible optimism?
If people paid taxes because otherwise they'd get a stern letter, I'd never be an anarcho-capitalist.
I would never, ever do it.
Because then people would be too bizarre, weird, and corrupt, and strange to want to bother trying to free people.
But the fact that people have to be threatened with ten years in a rape room and the destruction of their professional career and separation from their families and children, the fact that people have to be threatened so much by the government gives me enormous hope for human nature.
If there was a war, And people sent in, voluntarily, sent in all of the money that was ever required to fight that war, and volunteered, and so you never needed a penny in taxation for a war.
I would never be in an ACO cap.
I mean, I guess I would. But I mean, I would have a much worse view of human nature.
Right? Because the degree of punishment...
Is the degree of virtue, right?
The degree to which people hate being told what to do and ordered around like a bunch of cattle and sheep.
The degree to which people hate that and want to be free is the degree of violence that is imposed upon them, right?
If there's like no fence and the cattle all stick around in one spot, then yeah, you can say that the cattle are a little unmotivated.
But if you have massive barbed wire fences and ditches with alligators and electrified cables and snipers, you'd be like, holy shit, do these cattle ever want to get out of here?
Do these cattle ever want to get the fuck out of Dodge and be free?
So this is very important.
The degree to which human beings have to be shoved in cages when you're a kid in school and taxed and ordered around and controlled and have your retirement savings saved for you, which will never be there, and told what to smoke and told what to drink and ordered around every which way but Sunday.
And the degree of punishment that is there for disobeying these commandments is precisely It's precisely the degree to which people yearn to be free.
Precisely. And that is what gives me the greatest hope for the world and for the future.
Thank you so much for listening.
▲
Export Selection