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Jan. 22, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:10
613 Political Libertarianism Part 1

Just because it's a party, doesn't mean it's fun...

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well at stuff. It is time for our lunchtime strolls.
Now enclosing my Zen Vision M in a sock to keep the wind off, which I think is only going to add to the sanity quotient of my occasional lunchtime strolls and podcasting, because now it appears that I am having passionate philosophical conversations with a sock.
And I think that for a lot of people who watch these strolls, or who occasionally participate in them by giving me a wide berth, it may actually add to the sanity factor.
Who knows? Anyway, it's the, what is it, 22nd of June, January 2007, and thanks again to the fabulous and talented Mix Master Beach, who put together the very first Free Domain Radio Dance Mix, which is available.
Podcast 612, I think it is, up there on the website.
So, we had an interesting bungee-jump gentleman come into the board.
He was a fairly prominent libertarian, and he ran into the natural problems of an activist Libertarian Party member who comes to a market anarchist board, in that immediately people start skewering him on principle, which is important to do.
Once you give up your principles, I've never quite understood this.
And I've certainly made mistakes in my principles throughout my life, but I've never really understood this basic thing.
I mean, for me, fundamentally, principles are kind of basically, more or less, an all-or-nothing proposition.
I don't mean that I live my life with shining impunity at all times, but what I mean by that is that, in general, you have principles or you don't.
That is a very basic principle.
Aspect of philosophy in life for me.
You have principles or you don't.
It doesn't mean that you're always principled and everything is perfect and nothing ever goes wrong and you never make any mistakes.
It doesn't mean anything like that, of course.
But fundamentally, I've never really understood why you would not just go with the flow if you didn't want to have principles.
And if you do want to have principles, why it is that you would consider them to be flexible or optional or Just make up synergies where there are contradictions and so on.
And, I mean, I guess maybe there's a psychological reason that we can mull over at some point, but for me, there's not a lot of room between, you know, general compromist and market anarchist.
I mean, there are subgroups that you can conform to and so on, but if you're going to go through all the hassle of Believing in things that are, let's just say, a tad outside the mainstream, then it doesn't seem to me that it's a good idea to sort of go halfway.
I think then you just kind of end up neither fish nor fowl, right?
If you're going to turn a land plane into a seaplane, then I would suggest taking the wheels off And replacing them with skis.
That would be a sensible way to turn a land plane into a seaplane.
I really can't see the point of taking one wheel off and replacing it with one ski.
I just couldn't see what the point of that is.
If you're going to make a change, then make a change.
If you're going to have a land plane and you're going to coast down and touch down on that landing strip we call conformity, then that's great.
You don't need any Skis or hydros on your plane.
But if, on the other hand, you decide to go and land on the sea, you for sure aren't going to have any luck if you have wheels on.
So you might as well replace those with skis.
But putting one ski and one wheel on is going to mean that you can't land on any place.
You can't land on the land, and you can't land on the sea.
Just for me, if you're going to make the change, this half-world just seems to me a complete nightmare.
To live with the shining goal of integrity and consistency with principles is worth it for me to detach myself from the herd.
But if I'm going to detach myself from the herd, and then just attach myself to a different herd, that doesn't seem to be very sensible, because there's a lot of benefits in being a herd animal.
I mean, let's not kid ourselves.
A philosopher, being a market anarchist, whatever you want to call us, is not easy.
Even simple conversations become quite a challenge at times, right?
I mean, as we were talking about in the Sunday show.
Even simple conversations become a significant challenge.
So, it's not particularly easy to be a philosopher or to be a market anarchist.
So, I would say, don't do it or do it all.
Because if you end up in the middle, then you don't get the comforts of social conformity and the ease of interaction.
That I think comes from just being blindly at one with the herd, which, you know, has pleasures that we all yearn for at times.
So, you can go for that, or you can go for real integrity and real independence and real true self, authentic self, individuation, as some would put it, which have deeper and richer and more wonderful pleasures.
I mean, admittedly, the journey is a bit of a doozy, but...
I just can't see what you'd want to give up all of the natural pleasures of social conformity without grasping all of the deeper and richer pleasures of true individualization, of true independence, of true independent thinking.
So, I mean, this is sort of a problem that I have with some of the sort of libertarians who are into party politics and so on.
It's just... So, you're against violence, and that's your principle, but you're for violence in the form of the state.
And, of course, you can see...
This in the Libertarian Party, now that it's been taken over by sort of the right-wing Republican side, or they're trying to turn themselves into what the Republicans claim to be, in terms of small government.
And you can see that there's no such thing as a little compromise.
I mean, there really is, and I wish there were at times, and I spent a lot of my adult life trying to find these avenues, trying to find a path through these mountains.
But there really is none.
There really is no... Many a philosopher and thinker has frozen to death in these high wastelands trying to find a compromise that did not escalate.
But this is what I mean.
When I say principles, you either have principles or you don't.
You either decide what is valid about the world by science, or you imagine you're achieving some knowledge through mysticism and prayer and fantasy and drug use and whatever, whatever, whatever.
But... There is no compromise between these two things.
I mean, you either have rationality or you have mysticism.
Irrationality. It doesn't mean that you're always rational, but what's your standard?
Absolutism in the methodology, not in the conclusions.
So, the libertarians who have, for the last 30 years or so, I guess 30 or 35 years they've been running, they've always had the central contradiction.
We're against violence. We support a state.
All people are equal.
We support a state. Everybody has the right to self-ownership.
We support a state.
Well, these contradictions never stay stable, right?
Either you get rid of the statism, in which case you're no longer a libertarian party, but a merry band of philosophers such as ourselves, or you get rid of the freedom side and you simply become another party that is appealing to a particular constituent, i.e. those who dislike the state.
Not those who like freedom, But those who just like the state.
And you just become a MeToo, and all of your initial idealism and ideology and the purpose for your existence as a movement is all gone.
And you just capsize slowly into the flowing sewage waste of failed ideals.
I just can't see...
What the fuck is the point of all of that, frankly?
What a huge waste of time and energy.
So anyway, I made a comment...
Because this guy, as I mentioned yesterday, and it's not him in particular, it's just there's a fair amount of this stuff floating around, so I'm not trying to pick on anyone.
But he called us children and naive and weak and willed and futile, and all this kind of stuff, which I can certainly understand his perspective from that standpoint.
But I said, in response to some comment, I posted this.
I said, well, of course, he's been made bold by all the state-crushing the Libertarian Party has been up to lately.
And so in calling us sort of futile and wasting our time and by dealing with principles and communicating about personal relationships instead of just grumbling about the state, he calls us futile, although I would say that people who have gone through this conversation have achieved quite a bit more freedom and success in their lives than those people who go to Endless Libertarian Party meetings and have all the infighting and compromises that are naturally associated with the political movement.
So, in calling us futile and saying, what if we've achieved absolutely nothing, I was sort of pointing out that the Libertarian Party, of course, has been fighting against state power for 35 years.
And I'm sure it's not causal, but it may not be entirely coincidental, that during that time, state power has grown multiple times, enormous amounts, and the national debt has swollen enormously.
When your stated goal...
I mean, this is what I find so funny about libertarians and party politics.
When your stated goal is to reduce the power of government, and government grows far faster after you start your movement than before, then clearly there's something wrong with the methodology.
This is not brain surgery.
This is not me picking on anyone.
I just... As in all cases, you just look at the facts.
Libertarians, we will...
Reduce the size of government.
We will control and reduce the size of government.
Smaller government is better.
And they've been fighting and working and sweating and straining and shouting and screaming and picking on each other and forming and reforming and changing, publishing and speaking.
This has been going on for 30-40 years.
And what has the result been?
Well, massive increases in the size of government.
I'm not saying that libertarianism has caused this, of course, but When your stated goal is to reduce the size and power of government, and government accelerates its growth during the course of your movement, again, not as a causal factor, but simultaneous too, then I would say that any sane human being would check the map, perhaps a little.
Hey, let's drive to Chicago.
You know, every time we check the map, every couple of hours we stop and check the map, I gotta tell you, we actually are moving and accelerating further and further away from Chicago, right?
Wouldn't that be a logical thing to do, a sensible thing to do, when faced with the complete opposite results from your intended goals, to question what is going on?
And if I were a cab driver, and you jumped in my cab, and you said, take me to Chicago, and I hit the gas hard, and we're cruising along, Cruising along, and you see the signpost that says, Chicago, 20 miles.
You're like, oh, okay. Chicago, 20 miles.
Okay. Then an hour or two later, you see Chicago, 100 miles.
You're going to freak, right?
I was going to say, you're driving me away from Chicago, not towards Chicago.
And if I turn to you and I say, well, yes, it is true that I am driving you away from Chicago when you specifically asked me to drive you towards Chicago, but let me tell you this.
As I've hit the gas, I've also been hitting the brake intermittently, you see.
So, while it's true that we're moving away from Chicago, we are in fact, because you're in my cab, we're moving away from Chicago at a slower rate than we would have otherwise.
See, we're currently 500 miles away from Chicago, but if it wasn't for me, we'd be 520 miles away from Chicago, so you're actually 20 miles better off than you would have been otherwise.
Well, would you go, oh, that's great, keep driving that.
No, because you want to get to frickin' Chicago, right?
That's the goal, get to Chicago.
So the fact that I'm driving you away from Chicago at a slightly slower rate than may have occurred otherwise, and I say this without any proof, I don't think you're going to sit back satisfied and say, great, drive on.
We're not getting to Chicago, we're moving away from Chicago, my stated destination, at a slower rate than we would have...
Otherwise, so that's good.
I'll continue to let you drive me away from my destination at a slower rate than would have occurred otherwise.
Well, so when I wrote this post and I said, well, of course this gentleman's been made bold by all the state-crushing the Libertarian Party has been up to lately, so calling us futile for reworking, rediscovering, re-communicating the principles and applying them to our own lives.
And the reason we do this, of course, is that we care about the world.
But you don't want to At least, I think, from an integrity standpoint, you don't want to suggest to other people principles that you yourself have not tried for yourself.
I mean, that would be, you know, you all be the guinea pig, and I'll see how it goes.
So, if we're talking about a non-coercive, non-abusive, non-violent, non-destructive society, let's create that for ourselves first, and that way we're going to have both the integrity, the experience, and the gut-level knowledge and proof that it works And that way, when we communicate others, that certainty is going to communicate itself in ways that we can't even manufacture.
So he replied to my statement.
He said, while I'll be the first to admit that the Libertarian Party is no longer being run by Libertarians, one would have to ignore the elected Libertarians and the thousands upon thousands of state, country, and local initiatives to increase government that were defeated by the Libertarian Party.
What have anarchists accomplished again?
Oh yes. Nothing.
As they say, if you don't vote, you don't matter.
I don't know what that last bit means.
But that's why I pointed out the parable of driving to Chicago.
Because he's saying, well, there's lots of government initiatives that have been slowed down by libertarians.
And so we would actually be 20 kilometers or miles further away from Chicago if it wasn't for the Libertarian Party.
Now there's a lot to be implicit in this that is understood.
First of all, I'm not convinced that slowing down state growth is the way to go.
I think if something's going to go, then just have it go, right?
If your tooth is rotting, you just pull it out, or you get a root canal or something.
You don't just sort of wait for it to fall out on its own.
It's okay to intervene, and I don't mean anything violent by this, but I'm not entirely sure, even if it were true that libertarians have slowed down the rate of growth of government, that that's necessarily a good thing, but of course that's more debatable.
But, what I'll say, and I'll expand, I think I'll need another podcast for this, I'll maybe expand on this a little bit more.
Let's use another metaphor.
Let's say that we're on the Titanic, and we're ogling Kate Winslet, or perhaps some of us are ogling Leonardo DiCaprio, let's be all inclusive.
And, we've hit the iceberg, and we run to the captain.
And we say to the captain, Dude!
We're... We've got to get the lifeboats in the water because the ship's going to sink.
Maybe we've seen the ending.
I don't know. And the captain says, well, I'd love to.
I'd love to put the lifeboats in the water, but I can't because I have no crew available.
What do you mean you have no crew available?
It's like, well, the crew's all down in the engine room below the waterline and they're patching the hull in the side of the ship that was made by the iceberg.
So they're patching the hull and...
They're slowing down the rate at which we're taking on water.
And it's like, oh, that's good.
So what's happening to the water flow?
Is it decreasing? And he says, oh no, no.
God, no. We're taking on water at an ever-accelerating rate.
But I've got all my people down there, all my guys are down there, and they're doing what they can to patch this hole, and I'm pretty sure that if they hadn't gone down there, we'd be taking on water at an even faster rate.
Than we are right now. I say, yes, but we're still taking on water at an ever-accelerating asymptotic rate.
And he's like, well, yeah, absolutely.
But I got all these people down there, and they're slowing down the rate, I think, of the increase in the water coming on board.
And it's like, well, so we're still going to sink, right?
Yes, and we're going to sink in an ever-accelerating fashion, right?
Yes. Well, what's important about this parable?
Would we respect the captain that made this decision, sent all his people downstairs?
Down under the waterline to patch off these holes.
And in so doing, did not in fact patch any holes up.
And in fact, the rate of increase of the water flow coming onto the Titanic was simply increasing and asymptotically too.
Would we think this was a good use of resources?
I would argue not.
Because what we would say, I think, and reasonably so, to the captain...
We would say, you do realize that by putting all of these people down into the bottom of the ship, that they are not available to put out the life rafts.
This is not neutral.
It's a zero-sum game for everyone who is down there futilely trying to patch a hole that is just getting worse and worse.
That's one person who's not available...
For the life rafts. Which I think is a reasonable question to ask.
If the ship is still sinking faster and faster and faster, despite all of the efforts of the people down there trying to patch the hole inside, at what point do you say to the people down there, get up and put these life rafts in the water?
Lifeboats. Because all of the energies that people have poured into patching the hole in the water has not been poured into getting the lifeboats out.
So it's not neutral. It's a net loss.
Far from preventing the sinking of the ship, they have not even appreciably slowed down the rate of its increase of taking on water.
And the captain might say, well, yes, but because of the efforts of these people, instead of sinking in three minutes, we're going to sink in three minutes and ten seconds.
Well, I would still suggest that that would not be, an extra ten seconds of life would not be an achievement comparable to get in the frickin' lifeboats in the water.
And this is what I find troubling about the Libertarian Party.
Every joule of energy that Libertarians in politics spend in attempting to patch a ship that is sinking, and that is sinking faster and faster despite all of their efforts to patch it, the hole in the hull is tearing far faster than it can be patched.
So we know where this is going to end.
This is not... this is basic math.
So all of the efforts that the Libertarians are putting into running for office, writing petitions, running websites, having meetings, doing the finances, filing with the Voting Commission, dealing with all of the ballot access laws and paying all that money, they could be donating to Free Domain Radio.
Just kidding. I mean, yeah, okay, but it could be.
I think it would be a better use of the money in time.
They're doing all of that and they're not putting any lifeboats in the water.
And this is why this gentleman who has posted got so angry so quickly and called us childish and futile and wasting our times and that we've accomplished nothing.
Well, let's just say for the sake of argument that we have accomplished nothing.
But if there is nothing to be accomplished in terms of saving the state then accomplishing nothing is actually sensible.
If you're on a ship That's going down in the Arctic and there are no lifeboats, then doing nothing kind of makes sense, right?
Because you're not going to live.
You can run up and down and rearrange the deck chairs and, you know, blow out some musical farts on a tuber, but it doesn't really mean anything because you're going down and there's no lifeboats.
When there are lifeboats, though, I think that there is something to be done more than trying to patch a hole that can't be patched.
Now, the lifeboats, to sort of finish off the metaphor here, the lifeboats are individuals who can be free, right?
So, from this standpoint, what we would call the ship of state is going down.
And this is not paranoia, this is not alarmism, this is not the sky is falling, not chicken little-ism, this is just basic math.
The ship of state is going down.
Now, libertarians are all down there trying to patch it up, and Of course, they're perfectly aware that the hole is tearing far faster than any little rivets that they managed to stitch back together, and so they know how it's going to end as well.
And I know how it's going to end, and you know how it's going to end.
And so we need to get some people into lifeboats.
And the lifeboats really is getting out of the ship estate and focusing on your personal relationships, being free in your personal relationships.
Being free with yourself, being free with regards to reality, being sensible, being rational.
That is getting people into lifeboats.
And what I think troubles me most about the Libertarian Party is, of course, they've recognized that they failed completely in their stated objective.
A failure isn't even big enough a word.
If you say that you're going to run a mile in four minutes, And you do it in 3 minutes and 59 seconds, then you have...
Sorry, 4 minutes and a second, then you fail, right?
And that's failure, and there's nothing wrong with that.
It's perfectly fine. It's most of life, so we can't complain.
But if you say, I'm going to run the mile in 4 minutes, and you start, and within 2 steps you fall down and break your leg in 2, that's more than a failure.
Because it's not that you've just failed to achieve your end, but you've actually achieved...
The opposite of your end.
Your goal was to run very fast, and now you can't run at all.
And you won't be able to run for months.
It's like the person who takes up jogging, he's overweight, hasn't exercised in years, and he takes up jogging because he wants to improve his health.
And then he suffers a heart attack and a stroke, and sudden onset diabetes or something.
So he ends up in the hospital in a coma.
He has not actually managed to improve his health at all.
In fact, he's achieved quite the opposite.
That's more than a failure. That's what John Stewart calls a catastrophe.
So, if your stated goal is to reduce the size of government, and government accelerates its growth, despite or as a result of, or in conjunction with all of your efforts, that's a catastrophe.
If you're down there trying to patch an ever-widening hole with futile little rivets, And cupping your hands up to keep the icy Arctic Ocean out, rather than getting off in a lifeboat where you might have a chance to survive,
that's a catastrophe. So, this is the troublesome part for me, that there's an enormous consumption of time and energy, not to mention all the other things like the justification of the existing structure and state power, the luring of people to believe that there is hope, right? The luring of people to believe that there is hope.
If you keep yelling up from the bowels of the Titanic that you're almost patched, that the ship is going to float, then no one gets into the frickin' lifeboats, man.
If you keep telling everyone that you're working hard, that you're patching things up, and that you're going to get this thing to float, then nobody gets into the lifeboats, because they don't want to be left behind when the ship stops sinking.
And this really is what troubles me, I think, the most about the libertarians, that it's the damage that you cause by pretending that you're fixing a problem when you're not.
If you're a surgeon, you're cutting some guy open, and you make the appendix, cut out some giblet that he really needs, and you just keep going and going and going, then you're going to kill him.
But if you say, holy shit, I just lost my entire surgical brain, and I got the tremors.
I done Tourette's.
So, somebody else better take over.
Or I better take a recess. Somebody else better stitch this guy.
Then you save his life, right?
But the Libertarian Party is like, no, we're going to work within the existing system.
We're going to vote and make things better.
And 30 or 40 years of the exact opposite results have done nothing to blunt their enthusiasm.
And now they've just morphed into a Republican light.
In other words, the Republicanism that the Republican, real Republican Party, I'm sure is very glad to have around.
Because... They draw off the crazy free market lunatics into another chamber underneath the waterline of the Titanic to work away at sealing up the hole that continues to widen.
But if they all stopped wasting their time with this stuff and started focusing on their own lives rather than on the state, and if they gave up and said, the system is unsavable, get into a lifeboat, then I think that they would Actually be doing quite a bit of good for the planet.
It is like one of these medical shows where the doctor continues to try to resuscitate the patient long past all reason.
Well, in this case, there's not even a skeleton on the table.
There's a memory of a fantasy, of an image, of a reflection, of a ghost.
And they're coming in with the defibrillators trying to Resuscitate this.
It's like me going to Churchill's grave and lecturing him that it's very important that he cut down on stogies because they're bad for his health when he's been dead for decades.
That waste of time and energy traps a lot of people below decks, traps a lot of people into thinking that something can be saved from what we have and where we are.
And I think that's very cruel because there are lifeboats.
There is a way to survive, even to flourish.
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