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Jan. 22, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:22
614 Political Libertarianism Part 2
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Good evening, everybody.
Steph, just after five.
Oh, he's driving home in Russia, so this should be a fairly lengthy podcast.
What? Yes, I think so.
I guess it's time to pull back the veil.
And this is the dance of seven million veils, so don't worry.
We still have a few more to go.
But I think it's probably a good idea that we started talking about political libertarianism.
Ideas. This is sort of my take on our good friends, the polylibs, the political libertarians.
The libertarians who believe that writing letters to the editor and running for office and educating people about the deprivations caused upon busboys and waiters through the minimum wage increases and so on, The political libertarians, the polits, and I may as well share my thoughts on them.
I guess I was sort of hoping to do a little bit later.
It was certainly scheduled for a little bit later, but it's come up because of our bungee jumping spray and pray guy who came in from the Libertarian Party or ex from the Libertarian Party.
Who had a few, if any, actually no kind things to say.
And this is not retaliatory or anything like that, but since it seems to be a fairly popular topic on the board, who am I to deny the occasional customer who denates?
So, my history with libertarianism is maybe of interest.
I'll sort of run through it briefly.
When I was 18, 17?
17, I think I was.
I went to a libertarian...
I think it was libertarian.
Sort of a conference, I guess you could say, at Glendon College, which actually later ended up going to university for two years for English literature and acting.
And I went there and saw some very interesting lectures.
And the one that I sort of really remember was this color-coded way of talking to people about libertarianism.
You're a red or a blue or a green or I think there was polka dots, kaleidoscopes, swirl, rocky road.
And based on how it was that your personality type, what sort of personality type you had, this was supposed to be based on your personality type and somebody else's personality type, how you're supposed to speak to people about freedom.
Now, I was 20 years or more away from podcasting, and I certainly did.
I remember I was blue at that point.
Blue was the color, and I remember feeling quite thrilled to have a personality.
And I was skeptical even then about the efficacy of that approach in terms of communicating to people about freedom.
That everybody looks for a sort of skeleton key that is going to open up people's hearts and get them to understand the beauty and the joy and the value, not of freedom, not of libertarianism, but fundamentally a philosophy of truth.
Of which libertarianism, even in the political sense, is just a consequence and not even a major consequence in one's personal life unless you're in a dictatorship.
In which case, there's nothing you can do anyway.
But in terms of the effects that we have, libertarianism as a focus on mere politics.
And economics has, to me, always felt somewhat lacking.
I've always been more drawn to the philosophical, and for me at least, the richer and deeper aspects of truth, personal courage, integrity, and living in a stateless society of me has been pretty important, because the state, of course, is just an effect of abuses between people's relationships at a personal level, so I felt that it was sort of important to go to the root.
Now, I didn't have anything really to do with libertarianism for a while.
I met a couple of times with an objectivist group.
I think it was at York University.
It may have been at U of T, but I think it was York University.
But I didn't find them to be particularly stirring individuals.
I didn't find them to be individuals that I felt were going to make much of a difference.
And there, of course, is a sort of lonely and broken aspect to being outside the main that you have to, I think, integrate or deal with when you start communicating in these sorts of areas.
When I went to the Libertarian Party Convention up here to give the speech on environmentalism, which is on YouTube, and I guess there's a podcast here as well, It's the same challenge, right?
You had some people there with some serious halitosis and people there who can't match their socks.
And these are people who aren't going to change the world.
And by change the world, I don't mean that they're going to overthrow the state or anything.
What I mean is that they're not going to change their world because they're a focus on the state.
And in this sense, I sort of view libertarianism, rightly or wrongly, this is just total opinion, total opinion-based nonsense.
But I sort of view libertarianism, rightly or wrongly, as a massive excuse for avoiding action.
As a massive excuse for avoiding action.
Because the actions that we can really take in our lives to be free are getting bad people out of our lives.
I mean, that's what you can do.
I don't have, you know, the people at the DMV don't yell at me and nag me at home at night.
But when I was living with a woman and it wasn't working out, that was kind of a bit more oppressive than some regulations about the size and color of cabbage that I'm allowed to buy.
Which, you know, even taxes.
Yeah, they just, I just imagined that I'm really bad at my job.
They don't get paid very well.
But that doesn't interfere with my personal joy.
I mean, it's irritating at times for sure, don't get me wrong, but it's not insistent.
The state is not, at least in Canada and in most of the places where people are listening to this, Turkey probably accepted, the state is not invasive or intrusive in this manner.
It doesn't wake you up discontented and upset with your relationship.
It doesn't put you down in front of your friends.
It doesn't humiliate you.
When you're at a dinner party, it isn't mean and cold and rejects you.
The farmer isn't specifically mean to his livestock.
So, when it comes to happiness and personal joy and all these kinds of good things, it's the personal relationships that count.
What the frick does the state have to do with anything?
Now, Before I met with libertarians, and have had some social events with them over the years as well, before I met with libertarians, having come from the Ayn Rand School of Social Aesthetics, I guess I was looking for heroes.
Really, I was looking for heroes.
And by that I sort of meant people working from principles up and people whose personal lives were good.
Were... I guess...
I guess... Any questions?
It's that I sort of felt that people would move from the personal to the political.
So once you're free, once you've bumped up and you've sort of opened up, you've bumped up to your own personal limitations and restrictions in your personal relationships and your family and friends and so on.
And when you've resolved those, either through improving the relationships or ditching the bad ones, Then you set your sights on wider things and then once you have freed up as much of your life as possible and you've cleaned up your past and you're free of fears and phobias and you've gone to counseling or done whatever it is that's going to get you out of any kind of dependency on depression or feelings of futility or lack of meaning or all those.
Once you're free of that stuff, well then you're going to train your laser sights of freedom onto the towering edifice that is distant and glowering and thieving we call the state.
But that didn't occur for me with libertarians, with meeting libertarians.
It didn't occur to me when I met, or it didn't happen for me when I met libertarians, that I felt, ah, here are people who have freed themselves to such a great degree that the state is what is limiting their freedom the most.
These people who have achieved such glorious independence and liberty in their personal lives, that they are surrounded by nothing but love and joy and support and encouragement and intimacy, that having cleaned up their own house, they can now take on the neighborhood.
But it's sort of like a colleague who keeps nagging you about that you can't find your papers and you can't find this and you don't seem to be organized and you're not on time and this and that.
And you hear this nagging going on for quite some time, and then you finally call a meeting with them.
They don't show up for 20 minutes.
You go to their office, and they're buried in paper saying, oh my god, I can't find a damn thing in here.
You're going to feel a little like, ah, physician, thyself, heel, mirror, let's go.
And so with libertarians, the political libertarians, I really sort of didn't quite get what kind of freedom they were talking about.
Or I guess you could put this another way, and you could say that if I were able to snap my fingers tomorrow and eliminate the state or reduce it to a fifth of its or five percent of its current size...
Would these people be fundamentally more free?
Well, no, because they didn't seem to be very happy people.
They didn't seem to have very good relationships.
They didn't seem to be very happy.
I'm sorry, positive. They didn't seem to be very enthusiastic.
They didn't talk about the great support and the joyful lives that they had.
They didn't talk about being satisfied in their careers.
They just seemed to talk about that the government is bad.
And so, deep in my gut, and this is all nonsense, right?
Just so you understand, this is all just my opinion, right?
But deep down in my gut, I kind of didn't get that the big weight pressing down on these people was the state.
That they were happy, content, free, secure, and joyous in every area of their life, but paying taxes.
Really didn't get that feeling at all.
So for me, it was kind of like this.
This is like metaphor day, so I hope this works.
Let's try, shall we? It's kind of like there's a terrible crash and your neighbor's house collapses.
And you run over and you want to help and you see that your neighbor is pinned down by Tons of masonry and concrete and bricks and all this kind of stuff, right?
And he's alive!
Heaven be praised, he's alive!
And you kneel down to help him.
And you start moving the bricks and the masonry delicately.
And he's like, what are you doing?
I'm like, I'm trying to help get you out of the house.
Fell on you. And he's like, no, that's not the issue.
My freaking shoe is way too tight.
Can you just loosen my shoelace a little?
Oh, man, that's killing me.
It's driving me nuts! Well, as far as people's personal relationships go and the effect of state power on their lives, I kind of feel that a lot of people are complaining about their shoes being too tight with 10 tons of masonry pressing down on their chest.
If we could only get rid of the state, boy, life would be great.
So you're happy everywhere except in the realm of paying taxes and filling out forms and so on.
We're not talking about people who got drafted or anything like that.
We're just talking about most of the people in the West.
Everything in your life is great except for this.
Except for this damn state, right?
Never got that sense.
When I would start to talk to people about their personal relationships, they'd get all clammy.
Do you know they come out with a new regulation?
One guy had really bad halitosis.
Bad breath. Bad breath.
You know, if you can't even be free of germs, I'm not sure what bringing down the state is going to do for you.
I mean, I hate to say it, but it's kind of true.
And you see a very clear picture of someone like that, this gentleman who, he was married, right?
So he's got halitosis or some sort of horrible breath thing.
And you know that this is exactly what his marriage is like, that his wife won't talk to him about it.
His wife is not free to say, ooh, listen, furnace mouth, I wonder if we couldn't send some people in there with sandblasters and croci.
So his wife is not free to say to him, dude, breath's a little rough there.
I mean, my eyebrows just fell out.
So if his wife is not free to say that to him, then he's got to be kind of dictatorial, or she's dictatorial, or some damn dictatorial stuff is going on.
And the guy who came to criticize us on the board, I guess, right?
Or to respond to questions or criticisms about his own principles, somebody posted a picture, he's huge!
Hugely overweight. Is that free?
I'm not entirely sure that it is.
Not free from overeating.
You get rid of the state? Is that going to free him from overeating?
No. And the real thing, of course, about libertarianism, political libertarianism, for me, is this sort of paradox.
At least to me it's a paradox. Let me know what you think.
I never ever wanted to be enslaved by freedom.
To have to have debates.
To have to free the world. To feel frustrated that the state gets bigger.
To this, that and the other. If I'm going to dedicate my life to getting rid of the state, what a nightmare existence that would be.
How little control I would have over that.
And how subject to the corruptions of others would my happiness and sense of efficacy and self-confidence be.
Which I will surrender to no man.
So libertarians have set their sights on sailing to Libertopia.
The only problem is that it's uphill.
There's 19 hurricanes in the way and a tsunami is coming this way.
But the moment that you say...
I will be happier when the state is gone.
I will be happier when the state is reduced in power.
I will be happier when my taxes go down.
You're automatically less happier when you are right now.
You're not defining future happiness.
you're defining present unhappiness.
And that just never made much sense to me, to really want to get rid of the state because you don't like being controlled, but then to feel that your life's going to be a whole lot better once you get rid of the state.
Which automatically makes your life less than that now.
Now, of course, I know I will be happier when the state has gotten rid of.
If the state was gone tomorrow, I'd be happier.
And it would last about two days.
And then I'd be me again.
I can't remember.
Some woman who was a Wimbledon champion, she said, the thrill of victory lasts about 15 minutes.
That's quite true. And what has much more effect on us, on our happiness and our joy, is peace and acceptance of the way the world is.
Right? Peace and acceptance of the way the world is.
And not applying standards to the abstract conceptions of faraway relationships like the state and citizen.
Applying the standards, sorry, rejecting standards of behavior that we would reject in terms of the state from our own lives as well.
What a terrible way of putting it.
Let me try that again, shall we?
Let me back up for that sentence.
Beep! Whatever we would reject in the state, we must reject in our personal relationships.
Domination, bullying, humiliation, control.
And I just never really liked the idea that I was going to set my happiness against a task that I had virtually no control over.
That because I was so desirous of freedom...
I must now be compelled to achieve it in the world, in others.
Bleh! I mean, what a nightmare!
I am so dedicated to freedom, I'm going to walk into this cell, lock it, and throw away the key all on my own.
Well, that never really was particularly appealing to me.
And really, I think that that's when the germination of the idea that to sell freedom, you kind of had to be freedom.
That to sell the car you have to own the car, right?
I mean that that's where I think unless you're just a really stirring actor Like Martin Luther King Jr., with a thrilling voice and 20 years of religious oratorical practice and natural ability and oh, that kind of approach, which is not me.
If you can do that, then you can give great speeches, which add up to nothing.
But what I've tried to provide through this stuff is what was missing for me.
The best way to supply a very scarce need is to become the supplier.
I mean, that's the best way to fill a very scarce need is to become the supplier.
A very scarce supply.
Oh my God! What has happened to my eloquence?
It's Godman! If you want something that's very rare, the best thing to do is to make it.
And if you have a need that's very hard to fill, the best way to do it is to fill it in others.
That's what we were talking about with our good friend Rod on the show yesterday.
So people who focus on a great abstract tyranny like the state Pardon me.
And don't achieve any kind of freedom in their personal lives, or the state and their need to get rid of it becomes a tyranny over themselves that's worse even than the state.
The state doesn't tax me when I'm sitting in bed chatting with my wife.
I mean, fundamentally, there's nobody in there taking every third syllable.
The state doesn't tax my hours.
It just takes my money.
My hours are still my own.
And I'm not being physically tortured, so my body is still my own.
um My mind, as it always is, is still my own.
And what I will accept and what I will reject in others is still my own.
And that kind of freedom is real freedom.
And That kind of freedom is not even a kind of freedom.
That is freedom. Freedom is like the waves in a pool that emanate from a dropped pebble.
It starts with you. It starts with you.
It starts with you. And to believe that it starts with the state is to become enslaved and to become futile and to become hostile.
I know that it's a horrible thing for a libertarian who spent his whole life in party politics to come along and to say, oh, well, that was great, wasn't it?
What a fine, fine bouquet of achievements I have managed to gather together out of my 20 or 30 years in the movement.
And it is a very sad thing to look back and to recognize the ashes of non-achievement, of counter-achievement, of achieving the opposite of what you intended.
Whether that's the libertarian's fault, I'm not even going to guess, but it certainly is the effect.
That's tough. That's very tough.
And what you do with that, if you wish for the world to become a better place, is you fess up your errors and you help other people avoid repeating them.
You fess up your error, however bitter it may be, And you work to help others avoid making the same mistake.
A father who eschewed education and went to work on a construction yard, who then later in life realizes that he has underachieved relative to his capacities by a significant amount, can do one of two things, of course. He can either A... Mock his son's aspirations, scorn education, and become a big, pustule-filled reaction formation against any kind of progress in the gene pool.
Or B, he can say to his son, don't make the same mistakes that I made.
And here's what I've learned, and here's how I think you can avoid them.
And the same invitation I would say I put out to libertarians.
And this is not from any superior standpoint by any stretch of the imagination.
I did nothing for libertarianism, for anarchism, for philosophy for like 10 or 15 years.
And if you count the fact that my master's never went anywhere but getting me a master's, more.
15, 20 years.
Bad relationships with women.
Bad relationships with my mother.
Bad relationships with my brother and my father and my sister-in-law.
Bad relationships with friends.
Bad, bad, bad. Huge waste of time and energy.
And if I can throw a bottle of light across this dark canyon of 20 years and help other people sidestep and find a little bridge, fantastic.
Doesn't that give meaning to suffering?
Doesn't that redeem mistakes?
Not for me.
I mean, they're my mistakes, and in a way I'm kind of proud of them.
But for others.
And that's the challenge that we all face when we recognize mistakes in our life, right?
What are we going to do with that knowledge?
It's bitter. It's bitter.
It's very hard.
What are we going to do with those mistakes?
Well, I would say teach others.
Teach others. Kindness.
Gentleness, generosity, firmness.
Even with anger.
But teach others. And that's kind of what I would like from libertarians.
Which I'm not going to get.
I mean, I have no illusions about that.
I'm not going to get that.
Trying to reinvent themselves as the right-wing Republicans is a complete betrayal, right?
And of course, what they're doing is making freedom and the communication of freedom that much harder for everybody else, right?
It's a massive distraction.
A massive drawing off of resources to the liberty.
Because it's a temptation. Oh, I'm really into freedom.
I like Ayn Rand. I'm big on Hayek.
I'm going to go do something in the Libertarian Party because that's going to be achieving something.
How many people have to be swallowed up by this quicksand before there's enough that people will walk over this trap?
How many people are going to have to be swallowed up by this quicksand before it's full enough that we can step over it?
Libertarianism, from a political standpoint, will enslave you.
Thank you.
Imagining that a vote will set you free will enslave you.
Thinking the bus is coming is exactly the same as cutting your legs off.
Thinking the system can be reformed from the inside is exactly the same as being a statist.
It's worse, even.
Because you have enough to know the truth, right?
You know enough principles to know that the state is wrong.
People said, well, I'm going to vote for Ron Paul.
Well, you know, do what you want, of course, right?
But I'd make a very strong argument that that's a very terrible thing to do.
Because nobody votes for... I mean, you don't get to vote for Ron Paul.
Nobody gets to vote for Ron Paul.
Nobody gets to vote for George Bush or Hillary Clinton or any of these people.
You get to vote for the secret backers who gave them the money to run, and the only reason that they get given the money to run is so that they will provide return favors for those who funded them.
So voting for a representative for special interest groups and thinking that you're doing something for the cause of freedom, well, you're still saying that the state is...
It's worth voting for, and you still have some belief that the logic of the system can be interfered with through voting.
And you're handing over a sanction.
You are handing over an approval.
You are handing over a sanction.
You are participating. Not in a gotta have to, like I sometimes take contracts where I get paid by the state.
Not directly, but indirectly.
And it's not that. That's not what I'm talking about.
When you're actually going out, marking up a ballot, and saying, yeah, I want Ron Paul.
Now, Ron Paul isn't going to sit there as, and this is Harry Brown's argument, which is a very good one, I think.
Ron Paul isn't going to sit there and go, well, I guess they just hated everyone else so much.
No, Ron Paul's going to say, hey, they really like the fact that I want to crack down on immigration.
Because when you get into power, any time you want to reduce the amount of power in the state, you come up against every sword and poison-tipped spear of every entrenched special interest group on the planet that feeds off that money.
But if you want to increase control in the government, if you want to expand some program, then everyone who is going to profit from that is your best friend, a toady lickspittle all running up and down, a nice rim job and a reach around.
So which way are you going to go?
It's like asking the tide to fly up to the moon.
It's not going to happen. It's like asking gravity to reverse itself.
Human beings, like all organisms known to man, We'll take the most positive route over the most self-destructive route.
Or those who would take the most self-destructive route tend to pull a James Dean and don't make it out of their 20s.
They certainly don't make it to the top of politics.
On the one hand, if you increase the power that the government has, you face every conceivable back-patting people who want to get you there, give you money, praise you to the skies, Whereas if you want to take away government power, then everyone and their dog comes thundering down on you.
And yeah, people will say, well, what about taxes?
Weren't they reduced? No, of course taxes weren't reduced.
Well, I saw the numbers go down.
No, you didn't. Numbers did not go down.
If numbers went down, the government would be smaller.
Taxes went down, borrowing went up.
So the tax reductions were probably funded by the people who were going to make a lot of money lending to the government.
That's their special interest.
Ooh, good, they're taxing less.
That means they have to borrow from us more, which means lots of juicy interest.
Yay. Voting will not set you free.
Voting is participating in slavery.
Go spoil your ballot if you feel like you don't have an answer, but...
It's an illusion.
That is very dangerous, right?
It's very dangerous. Because you keep thinking, oh, I'll vote and the bus is going to come.
Something's going to get better. The bus is going to come.
No need to walk. Well, you're standing at a freaking Assyrian bus stop from the 12th century BC wondering why no buses are coming.
Because they've been gone for centuries.
centuries.
The chance to turn the state around and reform it from the inside was maybe 12 minutes after the Constitution was, quote, ratified.
But now, my God, you're digging up bodies and doing CPR.
And it's so essential to let go of this, because if you hang on to this, then you're still a slave to false hope.
False hope is a terrible, terrible thing.
False hope is probably one of the greatest enslavements.
Religion is all about false hope, right?
Families, my God, how many years do we spend enslaved to our families out of false hope?
Oh, they're going to get better. They're going to change.
They'll listen this time.
Oh, God, you've got to tear it out of you.
You've got to tear it out of you and run it through that Fargo wood chipper.
False hope is worse than paralysis is a virus.
And I remember so crystal clear when I gave up on that.
Harry Brown talking about Martha Stewart.
The state cannot protect you.
The state cannot save you.
The state will not protect your savings.
It cannot protect you as an investor.
It will not do that. And for some reason, 20 years later, I'm like, oh yeah, I guess that's kind of true.
That's very true. And you get that kind of click.
And I don't know, I'm probably not doing a very good job of reproducing it for you.
But the state is doomed and the society is doomed.
We as individuals will flourish if we work for our personal freedom.
And if you work for your personal freedom, then you become a beacon that you can't even imagine as yet.
If you just work for your personal freedom, forget about the state.
Forget even about God.
Your personal freedom insofar as you get the bad people and the bad ideas out of your life and out of your mind.
But if you look at a ballot and think that checking it is going to do something for your freedom, then you really are stuck in a limbo land of pretty rank illusion.
If it didn't work 40 years ago when the Libertarian Party started, or 30 years ago, or 20 years ago, if it didn't work then, when there were far fewer special interest groups, far less national debt, far fewer foreign wars at the time, when the government didn't have control over all that it has control over now in the healthcare industry and even in the higher education industry and so on, people say, oh, vouchers will help.
No, they won't. They won't.
They just won't.
Oh, well, if we can get the government not to do this funding for this or that program, well, we can get them to pass, not pass, doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. You're just pushing back the tide.
And yeah, where your hand hits the wave, yeah, it goes back, but so what?
You're still going to get swamped.
You're not wasting your time.
I have come to kill hope!
And to save you from the paralysis Of thinking that there is salvation in what is.
There is no salvation in what is beyond what you can control directly in your own life.
And that's why I say that libertarianism is a massive excuse for inaction.
Free yourself.
Free yourself.
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