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Jan. 24, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:24
618 Surrendering Liberty
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Hello everybody, it's Seth, 24th of January 2007 and thanks to our resident feline for posting something interesting.
In England, a huge majority say civil liberty curbs a, quote, price worth paying to fight terror.
The research finds most support compulsory ID cards with phone-tapping curfews and tagging for suspects.
An overwhelming majority of people in Britain are willing to surrender civil liberties to help tackle the threat of terrorism.
The nation's leading social research institute will disclose today.
The survey found that seven in every ten people think that compulsory identification cards for all adults would be a price worth paying to reduce the threat of terrorism.
Eight in ten said the authorities should be able to tap the phones of people suspected of involvement in terrorism, open their mail, and impose electronic tagging or home curfews.
The findings come from the annual British Social Attitude Survey, based on interviews with a sample of 3,000 adults by the National Centre for Social Research.
It found a declining sense of Britishness, particularly among English people who are becoming more inclined to assert their Englishness.
I don't know what the hell that means.
Greater stress at work, any yearning among working parents to spend more time with their children, overwhelming public support for euthanasia, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Support for civil liberties peaked in 1990 before going into a steep decline.
In 1990, 9% of adults thought the police should be allowed to question suspects for up to a week without letting them see a solicitor, a lawyer.
In the latest interviews, this nearly tripled to 25%.
In 1990, 40% disagreed with the proposition that every adult should carry an identity card.
That proportion has nearly halved to 22%.
Much of this hardening of attitudes occurred in the mid-1990s before people's views were influenced by possible dangers of Islamic terrorism.
The researchers decided the main reason was a slackening of concern for civil liberties among voters who were influenced by the tough rhetoric of Tony Blair and his law and order spokesman.
The proportion of Labour voters opposing compulsory ID cards fell from 45% in 1990 to 15% in 2005 as the party changed its stance.
Although the threat of terrorism did not cause the change in public mood, it was now being used by Labour and Conservative politicians to mobilise support for even tougher measures.
The poll found most people were less inclined to support civil liberties when asked questions mentioning terrorism.
About 80% said that electronic tagging of terrorist suspects was, quote, a price worth paying to combat terrorism.
The same proportion backed home curfews, travel restrictions, and detention without charge for more than a week.
Less than a quarter of the population said torturing terrorist suspects would be, quote, a price worth paying, and only 35% would accept a ban on peaceful protests and demonstration.
But the nation is almost equally divided on whether people charged with terrorism-related crimes should be denied a jury trial.
50% finding that acceptable and 45% unacceptable.
So, very interesting.
I think that you can...
Oh, your fear of terrorism did not reduce people's support for human rights in the international arena.
About 84% agreed that when a country is at war, it must always abide by international human rights law.
78% rejected the proposition that during war it's acceptable for the armed forces to torture people.
Very interesting stuff.
Of course, it's very interesting that this kind of stuff is...
these beliefs are showing up prior.
To the terrorist attacks, both in New York and in London, in the 21st century, that people's attitudes towards civil liberties were declining anyway.
And not wildly surprising, I would say, although it's real easy in hindsight to say, hey, you see, I've read it to you now, it's not surprising at all.
But the reason that I would say that is the following.
The question of the role that the state is supposed to play in society has really undergone quite a change.
And, sorry, obviously over the past century or so, is...
And if people are going to say that the government can take care of nasty little things like poverty and sickness and all these kinds of things and national defense and so on, Then, where is the line that you are going to draw, which says, well, I don't really like the fact that the state does X. Once you accept the use of coercion to solve human problems, I'm not really sure where the line is that you can objectively draw.
In fact, I'm quite sure that there is no line that you can objectively draw that is going to say, well, here, but no further.
This is the grave danger, as we've been talking about with political libertarianism, of breaking with principle.
So, once you break with principle, where do you go?
Well, it just becomes a war of all against all.
It becomes whatever you can get away with.
And what it does, once you break with principle, the worst rise to the top.
The worst kinds of people rise to the top.
Because principles, you see, result from doubt.
principles result from doubt and uncertainty.
And it is doubt and uncertainty and a recognition that we have very few answers relative to the number of questions that are relevant in the world.
That is the reason why we have principles.
People who are certain have no need of principles because they don't need to have a map because they never go into the unknown.
There is no unknown for them, right?
So when you are certain of things and you just know this is the way things are, Then you have really only need for willpower, and usually an escalation, a raised voice, or something like that.
And a sort of table-pounding-with-your-fist kind of assertiveness, or aggression, I guess that would be.
So, if you have certainty, then you are never faced with anything that is incomprehensible.
You're never faced with anything that is going to cause you doubt.
And what does that mean? Well, it means that you never need to develop any kind of scientific or philosophical methodology, because there's nothing that is not known to you.
And you can see this when you debate with people who just start making up answers, and do not display any uncertainty.
Uncertainty really is the mark of a civilized human being.
Uncertainty, hesitation, humility, whatever you want to call it, the recognition that We know very little relative to what we need to know or what could be known.
And it is a mark of strong self-esteem and of courage, I think, to be able to go into unknown areas and try and figure out what's going on and try and understand the way things work and what laws or principles may be operating.
This is true for economics, for science, for philosophy and so on.
But in order to be curious, you have to recognize that there's stuff that you don't know, right?
Now, if there's stuff that you don't know, and you have no methodology for organizing the principles, or for organizing the information, sorry, you have no principles by which to organize the information that's coming in, then there's no point being curious.
Being curious, then, is just going to make you confused, right?
And that's no fun.
It's no fun to attend, if you don't speak Arabic, it's no fun to attend an Arabic dinner party.
And to attend an Arabic dinner party if you don't speak Arabic will probably be interesting for a very small period of time, say five or ten minutes, but it will not be interesting for very long, because you have no way of organizing the information, because you don't speak Arabic.
Whatever people are talking about, you can't follow.
So, that's an example of being in a new situation without any organizing principle.
Now, if you had some sort of, you know, studying body language or something, wherein you really needed to observe people's physical movements and a knowledge of the language would be distracting, then I could see that that would be useful, but you still have organizing principles.
You know what it is that you're looking for.
Right? You never get lost unless you have a destination.
If somebody says, go drive to Buffalo, then you can go.
If somebody says, go drive, and you could get lost, you could get there, you've got time, you look for efficient routes.
Once you have a destination, then you have principles.
And if you think you know how to get to Buffalo, then you'll just start going.
But if you have a destination, then you have principles.
Or at least you have a methodology.
Whereas if somebody says, not drive to Buffalo, but just go drive, then you don't need any principles, I guess, other than staying on the road, for the most part.
But there's no real risk that you're going to go astray, because there's no destination.
So, wanting to get somewhere, not knowing exactly how to get there, is really the source of principles, rationality, values, and so on.
And this is, of course, what's so contemptible about the religious mindset.
The religious mindset just makes up answers.
So, recently there was an ecumenical council, I guess, at the Vatican, where they sat down to try and figure out limbo.
And You know that there's no evidence that conceivably could be brought forward to figure out whether or not babies go to hell or babies go to limbo, where they live in a state of ordinary human happiness without direct contact with the face of God or whatever.
And it's very, very clear that all of that information is just purely made up, and no reference to any facts, no uncertainty.
There's no fundamental uncertainty in the religious mindset.
To the degree with which you have uncertainty, you are starting to be rational.
But to the degree with which you stomp and kill all the mechanics of uncertainty, the rational mechanics of uncertainty within your mind, because it's portrayed as an evil in the theological mindset or theological approach, that is the degree to which you are religious, and therefore no longer have curiosity, and simply make up answers.
You don't need to get out a map and figure out how to get to Buffalo if you think that you visit Buffalo in your dreams and can get everything you need from there.
So, when it comes to principles, you have to have a destination, you have to have uncertainty, you have to have unknowns, and when it comes to our system of governance, our society as a fundamental, we have no questions.
We have no questions. We're fundamentally theological in the way that we approach our society.
We have no questions. You start to ask anyone whether we need a government, and they look at you like you're suggesting that we should all go and live in the clouds.
There's no doubt whatsoever that in society that we need a government, we need laws, we need the police, we need the welfare state, we need foreign policy, we need military, we need A policeman, a fireman, and all these things need to be run by the state, old age pensions, and so on.
Now, you may have some libertarians who are out there saying, we need less of it, but in society as a whole, we have no doubt whatsoever that the state is the way to get things done.
Anything that's important, anything that's collective, anything that's centralized, that's not immediate, right?
This is the very important thing to figure out about the state.
Anything that's not immediate is turned over to the state.
There are people who say we need to give up our civil liberties so that the state can combat terrorism, but there's almost nobody, except for a few die-hard communists, there's almost nobody who's agitating or advocating for the state control of the food supply.
People will hand over stuff to the state that is long-term, That is hard to measure, that is pretty subjective, and where the opportunity costs are hidden.
So people will hand over children's education to the state.
Why? Because how long does it take for bad education to show up in society?
20 years? 10 years?
And what are the opportunity costs?
Are they visible or are they hidden?
Well, they're hidden, right?
We don't know exactly how well people would be educated in a private school system.
Just a hell of a lot better would be the key.
So people will hand over that stuff.
Foreign policy! How long does it take for a foreign policy mistake to directly impact the home citizenry in a tangible manner?
Decades! Centuries sometimes, I guess.
Well, decades, I'm guessing.
Currency. Government should control currency.
What happens when the government debases the currency?
How often and how quickly does that affect the citizenry in a direct, tangible way that can be traced?
Almost never. Where you really can drive a wedge into people's certainty about the state is to say, well, public housing, right?
How long does it take for public housing to turn into a rack and ruin?
Decades. What are the opportunity costs?
Nobody knows. Nobody can see.
But if you hand over food production and distribution to the state, then people have a very tangible and immediate result, which is no food.
No food except for the people in the state.
As Julia says in 1984 when she opens the coffee and jam, oh, those bastards in the inner party, they have everything.
Wine. Not much of this makes it to the out-of-party members, I'm afraid, says O'Brien.
But that's really what we should be focusing on.
Roads. What happens when road congestion gets too high?
How does it directly intangibly affect, and what are the opportunity costs?
Nobody knows. But if you get the government to start running the food, or let's have the government take over the gasoline supply and distribution.
Let's have the government take over steel production.
And let's have the government do all that kind of stuff.
What happens then?
Well, then there's a tangible and immediate repercussion.
Within months, if not sooner, there is a tangible repercussion.
And the opportunity costs are very clear, because people will remember what it was like beforehand, and will notice the difference, and they'll see the incompetence of the state.
When it comes to things like national defense and foreign policy, the education of children, the managing of the currency supply, all that kind of stuff, long-term mercantilist subsidies and policies, the welfare state, old-age pensions and all these...
Well, these things, they're all long, long, long-term, very hard to trace the effects, always debatable, and no opportunity costs are visible.
So, when you put something into In the sphere of the state, like old age pensions, everyone's happy right away.
How long does it take for the system to collapse?
50 years? 60 years? How long would it take for people to run out of food if the state took over everything to do with food production and distribution?
Or at least for there to be a vastly diminished amount or quality of food.
Well, it wouldn't take that long.
And... There are things like water distribution, which is often the province of the state, and there are other things like electricity distribution, but these things were often taken over from the private sector, which put these things into place to begin with.
I would really like to see an argument for the government taking over the food supply if the government is so efficient.
Food is much more important than everything else, so it would be interesting to see what would happen.
So, in the realm of doubt around our existing framework, there's no doubt, and therefore there's no destination, no knowledge of a destination, and there's no need for principles.
There's no need for principles whatsoever.
Why would there be? And in the absence of principles, then everything becomes an immediate cost-benefit calculation.
In the absence of principles, All decisions become immediate cost-benefit calculation, and little more than that, at best.
Maybe some generalized or abstract rules that are appealed to in a sort of moment-by-moment kind of manner.
The greatest good for the greatest number, good for the poor, whatever.
But there are no principles.
There is simply the expediency of the moment.
And why would there be anything else?
You don't plan for your RRSPs when you're dying of thirst in a desert.
you come across an oasis, and you just drink.
So, I would say that it's not at all surprising that people say, "Well, here's my cost-benefit calculation." In the absence of any principles, here's my cost-benefit calculation.
I have the minor inconvenience of carrying an ID card.
Versus the major inconvenience of getting blown up in a terrorist attack.
I'm not saying anything about the probability of either of these things cause and effect or anything.
I'm just talking about, in the absence of principles, people will just make range-of-the-moment calculations.
And thus, all that is required is for the bad people, who want you to make the wrong decisions, to simply increase the fear factor.
Because that changes the whole equation.
In the absence of principles, you make, moment by moment, calculations based on expediency.
And, therefore, all that is required for people to gain control over you is to up the fear factor.
Or the love factor in terms of patriotism and so on.
And this, of course, is well known by the church, religions, right?
The fear factor of hell. Or the fear factor of hell, or in the case of Judaism, more so the fear factor of social disapproval or whatever, but people will always, always, always want you to abandon principles and make range-of-the-moment decisions on expediency, cost-benefit calculations, immediate, long-term.
This, of course, is the whole principle behind, give me your wallet or I'll shoot you.
This is a range of the moment, right?
What's the negative? Well, me without my wallet has some value.
My wallet without me has no value, right?
So, for me, right?
So, I'll give over the wallet, right?
That's a range of the moment.
I'm not saying it's the wrong thing to do.
I'm just saying that's the cost-benefit calculation that thieves and politicians and priests and families, in terms of rejection, give you, right?
So, in terms of family, if you don't have principles around how it is that you will accept being treated versus not accept being treated, Then, in the moment-by-moment calculation that a life without principles devolves to, what is your situation?
Well, all you do is you say, huh, okay, well, Mom's called me up and asked me over for dinner for a family event.
She's put a whole lot of needy vibes into the phone call.
Clearly, there'll be Titanic disappointments should I not show up, or should I say that I don't want to?
There'll be endless questions. There'll be complaints.
Other people will phone. My brothers will phone.
Everyone will phone. They'll start to call me a jerk.
They'll call me selfish. Why are you hurting your mother?
What stupid principles are you pretending to stand on?
All of the stuff that's going to happen in families.
And they do this to change their behavior, but not through any appeal to principles, but simply by appealing, or by bullying, your range of the moment Cost-benefit calculation engine, which we are all born with and all use on a fairly regular basis.
Not almost badly or anything, it just happens that way.
So, in the absence of principles, the cost-benefit thing, you know, family will disapprove of you and get mad at you and make your life difficult, make you feel bad, make you feel guilty.
So the cost-benefit calculation there is, I'll just go to dinner.
God! So it's two hours out of my life compared to And I won't feel that bad, right?
It's two hours of minus 10% happiness, versus if I say no, then it's 16 hours of minus 80% happiness, plus 80% sadness, or whatever.
And these calculations, in the range of the moment, is what we always do, right?
It's what we always, always do, in the absence of principles.
When it comes to getting people to give up their civil liberties, well, of course, you get them to think in range of the moment.
Immediacies. Pragmatism.
Common sense. Be reasonable.
Don't be so abstract.
Principles are all well and good, but we're at war now.
Civil liberties are all well and good, but sometimes you have to give up a few to protect the ones that remain.
And temporarily. And that is really all that is required for this kind of stuff to escalate and continue.
Because what's the inconvenience of carrying an ID card?
Minus 5%, maybe. Life's efficiency, minus 3%.
We already have a driver's license.
We already have a social insurance card.
We already have health cards here in Canada.
I carry three or four pieces of identification pretty much permanently.
And I've already accepted that.
Why would I say no to a fifth one?
Or a sixth one? And remember, human beings are fundamentally around biological reproduction.
And so, carrying an ID card doesn't interfere with that.
It really doesn't interfere with you raising your children or going to work.
Whereas, if you or your children get killed, then, you know, the negatives far outweigh the positives.
So, it is inevitable, of course, that either through exploitation of accidental terrorists, such as certain terrorist attacks, or through the manipulation of terrorists, through the constant beaming out of terror alert this and terror alert that, we are constantly enjoined in no subtle manner to continue to make cost-benefit calculations in favor of giving up our freedoms.
Because we'll get blown up or killed or poisoned, WMDs.
Children will be killed. So we'll just go along.
Of course, this is the incremental way in which, like sand through an hourglass, our liberties and our identities and our integrities drain away.
And until such time as people begin to doubt, and I hope it's not too late.
I don't think it will be, but you never know.
Until such time as people begin to doubt, The path that they're on.
If they continue to make these cost-benefit calculations, they will continue to hand away, finger by finger, in order to keep the hand.
And then find that without the fingers, the hand is fairly useless.
So, people will continue to give these realities of personal liberty away until such time as they begin to doubt.
That there is a correct course.
And this, of course, is occurring in America, but it's still very early.
Maybe it's occurring in England, too.
They don't include the question in this survey, do you think that England is on the right course?
Certainly people in America who believe America is on the right course is down around 30 percent, down from 60 or 70 percent after 9-11.
And, of course, people will try and say, okay, well, this political party is on the wrong course, so I'll vote for a different one.
Okay, this one is on the wrong course, but now the political party I rejected originally has changed its rhetoric, so I'll vote for them again.
There's a whole seesawing back and forth.
It's certainly my goal to continue to put information out there that causes people to give up hope in false solutions, which then creates doubt.
Once you get that praying for your cancer is not going to save you, Then you can start looking for a cure, a real cure, or at least a real alleviation of symptoms, even in terms of painkillers, or perhaps something that will hopefully trigger a remission, such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy, radiation therapy.
So it's the false hope, really, that you have to continue to try and kill them people, because it's the false hope, it's the false self, right?
It's an argument for paralysis, it's an argument for stasis.
Keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
That's what we don't want.
But until people realize that, or until people start to really feel a fundamental doubt about the society that they live in, or the moment that people begin to doubt the efficacy and the virtue of using violence to solve problems, which is a long way up, because people don't even see the state as violent, right?
It's quite a long way to go.
Which is fine. I mean, that's okay.
That's part of the fun.
The greater the challenge, the greater the honor.
The greater the enemy, the greater the victory.
So, it's going to take a long time for people to begin to have doubts even about this.
Because fundamentally, of course, an ID card will not protect you from terrorism.
In fact, any ID card...
will make terrorism much more dangerous, because all that happens is that people who are terrorists will simply clone the ID card.
The more effective the ID card is, the higher the value of cloning it, and of course it only takes a terrorist or two to do his thing, so ID cards will do nothing to solve the problem of terrorism.
And allowing your home government to increase its use of coercion in order to fight the possible effects of coercion is really not a very rational process.
There's not a homeopathic remedy here if the doctor bit you.
Increasing the use of violence to fight the negative aspects of violence is an endlessly slippery slope.
We all know where it ends. The 20th century has legions of examples to show where it ends without significant philosophical intervention, which of course is what we're up to and what lots of other people are up to in this conversation.
So, this fantasy that terrorism is the danger, and that violence is the danger, and therefore escalations of violence domestically is the solution, is a great fantasy.
It is a great desperate and dangerous fantasy, and people will have to go further before they begin to doubt this fantasy.
It's just natural.
Until the cost-benefit calculation begins to swing, either through recognizing the long-term costs of the liberties that are being given up, Or through the accumulation of a diminishment of liberties.
The accumulation of a diminishment.
What a wonderful way to put it together.
Until there is doubt about these things, then there will be no principles that will emerge and there will be no solutions that will be rational or scientific or effective.
And, of course, what often happens, and I don't know whether it will happen in this situation, what often happens is that as the violence that the state commands increases, so does the resistance.
And here's where you get the vicious circle, right?
And the vicious circle is, we must protect you from violence by using violence.
As the violence that is supposed to protect you from violence increases, so does the, quote, violence that it's supposed to protect you from.
And thus you end up with a very quickly escalating situation where you apply more pressure to control the violence which creates more violence which causes you to apply more pressure to control the violence which in turn creates more and it doesn't take long for this to escalate to a pretty significant conflagration within society.
So, I would say that we should not be surprised about these things, and that if you really do want to work to increase freedom, then the most important thing that you can do in the short run, I would say, or in the immediate, is to try to create doubt in people's minds, where there is certainty, there is no need for curiosity, there is no need for principles.
Where you can create or foster a, not create, expose a rational uncertainty and get people to not have answers and get people to question the way that society works and to start from first principles.
I think that you'll be doing an enormous amount of good.
Where we can generate doubt, we can generate curiosity.
Where we can generate doubt, we can show an absence of principles.
And we can wean people off their addictions, which is entirely natural, but unproductive in the long run.
We can wean people off their addictions to range of the moment cost-benefit calculations, which is how you lose your fingers one by one.
And that's not good.
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