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April 18, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:02
717 My History with the State

What childhood taught me about authority

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
I'm going to, sorry, this should be the last time that we have a slightly lower quality audio recording.
It's the 18th of April 2007, 828.
I'm cruising after work for the past, actually for only a little while longer.
Oh, how lovely. And...
I wanted to...
I have lovely printouts, but I'm just having this new notebook that a listener has very kindly donated.
Thank you so, so much.
It is really quite exciting to have a notebook with a battery life of more than, say, 18 to 20 minutes.
So this is quite thrilling.
It's a wonderful Dell.
Which has two, count them two batteries, so just imagine the lengths of the podcast that can be coming up, even with the power well of the webcam involved.
It's going to be some pretty spectacular stuff, let me tell you.
But unfortunately, the...
The plug that I use in my car, this thing seems to pretty much chew it, and what happens is when I plug the notebook in, time starts moving backwards and the sky gets darker, so it's got a little bit more power requirements than my little plug for my car cigarette lighter can provide, so we're back to this. No problem.
I will do a podcast at lunch, and I also wanted an eye contact podcast with a video for the next letter, so if you'd like to tune into that, that would be most excellent.
Since I can't go with my planned topic since I'm driving, and I'm not so much down with the reading.
I can podcast while I'm not so much with the reading while I drive.
You know, there's a line that we try not to cross, and that would be it.
Plus, it would be completely ironic if I had a fiery car accident just before I no longer had to podcast in my car.
Oh! Oh, the near-cosmic irony of that would be more than I can handle.
So... I thought, why not, and perhaps this is where the podcast gods are pointing me, why not do a part two to the part one of my history with religion and talk about my history with the state?
And I'm going to start with something that is probably...
It's later on in my life, but I think it's something that...
And I've mentioned it once before, but I'll go into it into slightly more detail because...
Don't you all just want many more details about the inconsequential histories of my life?
We'll see. This might not be the most downloaded podcast, but for me, I think that I'm, you know, of course, I'm partly talking to the present, and I'm a lot talking to the future, and I know that for myself, I've always been interested in biographical details of somebody's life, so, oh, let's hope that mine satisfies some interests that people have in the future.
I had a history teacher when I was about 15 or 16, Who was actually not...
bad. I mean, he couldn't think his way out of a paper bag, but then none of my teachers could, and very few people can, so no disrespect to the teachers, they're not...
High school teachers, junior high school teachers, not exactly on the cutting edge of avant-garde intellectual progress.
They're mostly just, you know, blindly photocopying the blind clichés that...
Oh, blindly photocopying the blind...
I wonder if two blinds make a sight?
Anyway. They are just repeating the stale clichés that intellectuals, usually a couple of generations before, have carved in the air, which have then settled into the stone as the uncommandments of modern philosophy.
But this guy wasn't too bad.
What he did have was tension and passion, and I've had a couple of teachers who have had this kind of tension and passion.
Not rationality, not reason, But tension and passion, which was actually not bad.
I mean, somebody who really cared about ideas and who cared about what students thought.
And this guy, like, amazingly, he actually wrote, and I can't remember his name to save my life.
I do remember he had a good Freddie Mercury 70s stash, though.
Good old soup strainer.
Not quite an Ichi, but definitely more than a, more than, well, more than my Minji little lip can produce.
But he actually wrote a paper.
This was, of course, I was going to high school when the Soviet Union and China, well, they, of course, had attempted to reach a detente or a sort of mutual understanding in the early 70s, and it hadn't worked.
And they had drifted apart, and my mother always believed that this was the greatest thing for world peace, that these two had split apart.
And also, this guy wrote This would be in the mid...
Oh gosh, no. Oh God, I'm so old!
Wait, I'm coming back.
Oh, mortality, push it back.
Stay away from the white light. Ah, relatives!
This guy had written an essay on China and Russia and so on, and he read this to the class, and I thought that was pretty cool.
Like, I thought, this guy sat down and wrote an essay about...
China and Russia, and he wasn't getting it published anywhere.
It was not like publish or perish in high school.
But he wrote this thing and he read it out to us and he had quite a lot of passion in it.
And it's also completely occurring to me now what his motive was, but I'll tell you sort of what I remembered.
The only thing that I really remembered from the essay other than his oddly intense passion Which, you know, hey, I'm one to talk about oddly intense passion.
Ah, the Fed has killed my dog!
But he had the phrase in there, which was that he said, China and Russia, while seeming opposites, have more in common than people realize.
And I'm paraphrasing, but this was the idea, that everyone assumes that these two totalitarian regimes who have not been able to achieve detente are now enemies but he said they're not really enemies because they share an enormous amount in common and I literally remembered this for like 20 years until I figured it out while I was keeping my journal and my dream journal which runs on for as you can imagine seven or eight hundred pages of typed work I've actually typed it up when I was in therapy and this one during this time My mother and my brother were just fighting like mad.
Not like mad. My mother was continually enraged that she didn't get the respect that she felt she deserved from my brother.
I was sort of a silent partner.
I mean, I would occasionally rage, but I was more of a silent, you know, the quiet mouse who hides in the hole while the dinosaur thunder gods are raging and hurling thunderbolts.
But my mother would always start picking at things because she felt she wasn't given the respect she deserved, and my brother would start mocking her, and she would get more enraged, and she would start saying, well, you don't obey me, you need to do this, you need to do that, and my brother would say, yes, mom, no, mom, three bags full, mom, whatever you want to say, mom, that's what we'll do.
Yes, we will obey, or something like that.
You know, just this sort of maddening, chanting craziness that, of course, he's always had.
Beginning of my sort of life memories, or at least conscious life memories.
And this was, I mean, it's a pretty hellish environment.
I mean, if you've been around family members who fight a lot, oh my god, is it ever exhausting.
And you just, you want to pry them apart.
I mean, they're like two infernal, hellish, flame-spouting magnets that simply can't leave each other alone and continually return for this...
Humiliation, right? I mean, this was the fundamental aspect of it.
She would say over and over in various ways, you owe me respect and don't give me what you rightly owe.
My brother would say, you don't deserve respect because you're an evil bitch.
And then she would get enraged and he would get scornful and distant and contemptuous.
And of course, I mean, it was all family stuff for her, her godforsaken Nazi history.
And sorry, this is not that she was a Nazi, but she was born in Well, in 1937, to Jewish.
My understanding is to Jewish ancestors, and that makes me nothing.
Actually makes me absolutely nothing.
It makes me absolutely nothing.
I could call myself a Jew, I'm sure, or I could call myself the man in the moon, and both would be equally applicable labels to affect my biology or nature in any fundamental way, or even any non-fundamental way.
I can fly, but I'm not going to try.
And the reason that I'm sort of bringing this up is not because we all want to lift another sort of window into my dismal history as a child, but because I literally hung on to this inconsequential statement that my history teacher made when I was 15 or 16 for like 30 years until I figured it out.
And of course, the reason that that phrase stuck in my mind As is the reason that thousands of phrases stick in both of our minds, is because it said something elementally true about my circumstances and situation.
And this is why when people say to me, I don't know, I say to them, yes you do.
Yes you do. Well I don't know why my mother did what she did.
Yes you do. Yes you do.
You really, really do.
And I know that people aren't feigning ignorance, and it's not that the knowledge is there, but they refuse to share.
They don't know that they know, but they absolutely know, and if they accept that they know, the knowledge is provided.
I mean, this is where God comes from, right?
This is why prayer works.
You're not praying to God, you're praying to yourself.
But you have all the stored wisdom of the ages and all the philosophical depths of the species embedded within you, and you probably had it at about the age of two or three.
Of two or three years old.
Two or three years old.
I was frightened of my mother when I was three.
Everything that I needed to know about my mother I knew at three.
We know everything about everyone.
We just have to relax and accept.
The way that this knowledge stays hidden or stays buried or stays inaccessible is we have these cliches and these bromides that we're not supposed to feel or think certain things and those are very effective.
Now, once you let them come down, the knowledge pours out like a, well, like 720 freaking podcasts, but we all have this.
What I do is not what you cannot do.
You may not have...
The verbal habits or abilities.
You may not have the goofy joke generator.
But you have all of the knowledge that I am providing you, you have already.
This is not me giving you shining tablets of wisdom that you just don't have.
What this is, is me reaching past your false self to tickle your true self and get it to speak.
This is nothing that I'm not giving you anything you don't already have.
I promise you that. Absolutely, nobody believes me when I tell them this.
Oh, Steph, you've got good verbal skills, and you're a pretty smart fellow.
No. Yeah, sure, okay, I've got good verbal skills, I'm a pretty smart fellow, but it's got nothing to do with the communication that is occurring between you and I, my brother, my sister.
I am telling you what you already know.
All I'm doing is pulling back the curtain on the inscriptions you already have.
I'm not carving anything.
This is not invention.
This is archaeology. We're sitting there In the tombs and gravestones and histories and lost cities of our youths, and we are simply excavating.
I'm saying dig here, dig there, and there you go.
You dig, and up rises the shining city of the future.
And it's nothing to do with me communicating something to you that you don't already have.
I mean, there may be some facts or whatever that you aren't aware of, but all of those are fairly inconsequential.
Because I don't like research, so facts, you see, are very inconsequential.
This is the funny thing when people say it's a cult, like I'm dominating people or telling them what to do.
Good lord, no, that's completely ridiculous.
I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.
And when this phrase stuck in my head, it stuck in my head as a signpost to lead me back to understand the past.
And if I had not been stuffed so full of inconsequential banal clichés and things I shouldn't think about and stupid distractions and how's my hair and do I have a pimple and all this just nonsensical Subterranean, stupid, empty crap that we're left with filling our brains when all depth is kept willingly and obsessively from us, then I would have realized what this guy was talking about.
Of course, this guy, when he said, China and Russia, although seemingly an eternal conflict, have much more in common than many people suppose.
Huh, I wonder who he could be referring to.
Well, it's of course my brother and sister, my brother and my mother, that there is nothing but commonality between them, which is why they remain locked in this fetid embrace, yea, up to the present day.
And they don't fight as much anymore because my brother now has been to the Landmark Forum and believes that stifling differences and force-grinning faked maturity is the Sinh Khoa Na, of personal growth, and he's also had some exposure to bullshit Buddhism,
sorry, just Buddhism, and so he now doesn't do that so much anymore, but of course they have an enormous amount in common, and what they had in common was the subjugation of those who were within their power, and that was a common thread between the two of them, between the two of them.
And if you're around people who fight endlessly, and they don't stop, they don't tell you, they don't sort of feel embarrassed about it, then Then partly why they're fighting is to humiliate and abuse you.
Those of us who were insignificant, seemingly insignificant or inconsequential within our families, we often feel that people just ignored us and we didn't matter and nobody cared.
But that's not true at all.
That's not true at all. People were obsessively focused upon us, the inconsequential ones.
And if you don't believe me, all you have to do is remember back to a time when, even at the age of 15 or 16, when you were the invisible silent one in the family, if you spoke up or said something that people disapproved of, did they instantly leap to throttle and choke or correct you?
Well, of course they did, right?
So they were watching every move that you made.
There was no...
You weren't ignored.
I mean, you were obsessively focused on...
The real slave in the slave-master relationship is the master, of course, because...
The master becomes dependent upon the slave.
The slave can survive without the master.
The master cannot survive without the slave.
And this is the great secret, right?
Who is the real slave? It's the state.
Who is the real slave? It's the priest.
And that's something that everybody's desperate not to understand because it means that we have to accept the power that we have in life and use it for good, which means running into significant conflict with the abusers.
Who run the world, and we don't want to do that.
At least I didn't. I'm getting more used to it now, but I surely did not want to do it to begin with.
Oh no, oh no, oh no.
Let me write another manifesto about the libertarian society of the future.
That will free the world, not dealing with the corrupt people around me.
So that was a very interesting thing when I look back on it, because even then, Despite the fact that I had no conscious knowledge of it whatsoever, it just stuck in my head like a tune does sometimes.
Even then I knew that the state was really about the family, because this guy was describing totalitarian regimes that I'd never visited with odd passion, and of course the odd passion was he was probably talking about his own family, and this is why he was driven to write this essay and communicated to people.
It's like a self-imposed samistat of metaphorical obscurity or something like that.
But even then, when he was talking about the state, I strongly and truly felt that he was talking about my family.
The family is the root of everything.
It all starts with the family.
Everything that we see in society is merely a reflection of early childhood experiences and the lies that we are forced to tell to ourselves about them.
So, that experience of the state was very interesting.
Now, I can't remember the first time that I had any particular experience with the state.
There was a television show, I guess Blue Peter was a television show that I watched when I was a kid, and they had the friendly, be safe, kind of mustachioed, slightly pajeech cop, who would come on and, you know, talking to the kids about street smarts and being safe and this and that and the other.
I guess that when I was 10 years old, my brother and I went to the Royal War Museum, I think it was, or it was either that or the air museum at Hendon.
I think it was the Royal War Museum downtown.
And we were mugged when we got a bunch of black kids.
It doesn't really matter what race they were.
It wasn't like I wasn't bullied by all kinds of kids.
A bunch of black kids who were, you know, in that horrible physical disparity where a 10-year-old and a 16-year-old might as well be coming from different species basically stopped us and bullied us and took our money.
And we had sort of asked for a bus fare to go home.
And nothing particularly horrendous about it.
I mean, it was scary, but not...
I mean, nothing compared to my family, right?
I could get away, right?
It was brief. Anyway, so we...
My mother, of course, asked where our money was and why we were home late and so on.
We told her. And, of course, she flew into a wild rage about this, and she called the cops, and her children had been brutalized.
And even then, even then, even at the age of 10, I thought, Oh, really?
Really, woman? Your children were not physically assaulted, but simply threatened, and their money was taken.
So now you have flown into a hysterical rage.
You're calling the cops and justice must be done because someone has harmed your children.
Really? That's where you go with this piece of information.
And of course I totally got that that was ludicrous.
And the cops came and interviewed us and they ended up picking up the kids.
And it took months.
It took months. And apparently they knew the kids, right?
Oh, those kids are down there all the time, blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, we sort of caught and released them over and over, and they went over this kind of stuff.
But basically, fundamentally, there wasn't anything that they could do.
And that was that one significant time.
The only other significant time of bullying, which I've mentioned before, was when I was hiking in the woods with a friend of mine when I was about 12, some 16, 17-year-old, two guys.
Held us for an hour or two or three, I don't know how long it was so long ago now, and just sort of terrorized us in the woods, you know, in this sort of vague deliverance kind of way.
Actually, it wasn't that vague. But, you know, no, the only time I was assaulted was when they were picking on my friend, who was even smaller than I was.
I was a pretty small kid. Um...
I said, I mean, it just looked so ridiculous.
This guy was threatening.
He was literally like 6'3", 200 pounds, and this guy was like, I don't know, 5'90", or something like this little guy, 4' whatever.
And I just couldn't stop myself.
I just said, my God, man, why don't you pick on someone your own size?
Because it was just so elementally cowardly and brutal.
And he turned around, and of course I'd struck a nerve, as you always do when you speak the truth to bullies, and he punched me in the stomach.
And it wasn't horrendous, and it didn't leave me with any internal injuries.
It was painful, but not the end of the world.
But I've always been sort of glad that I said it, but not because it did anything, but because it was the truth to say.
And eventually they let us go, and they basically said, if you tell anyone about this, We'll get you long before we go to jail.
We'll never go to jail anyway, and we'll get you again ten times when we get out.
And I remember the Monday morning that I was there at school, and one of the guys leaned over and grinned and said, Hey, how was your weekend, dude?
And I just, I mean, I didn't feel an enormous amount of rage or anything like that.
It was certainly scary and humiliating, but I just kind of got that it was a dangerous situation.
That whatever I did to get out of that situation was a good thing to do, and I had some sort of pride around that.
You know, like, I mean, if you encounter a bear in the woods and you get away intact and unhurt, then you feel like, well, that was a good thing to do.
I'm glad that I didn't get mauled by the bear.
And I viewed these people this way.
I mean, of course, they were conscious of what they were doing, and it was wrong and evil what they did, but a state of nature, right?
But I didn't I'm sort of trying to think back on this.
I certainly got that there was no way that the authorities were going to help me.
There's no way that the authorities were going to help me.
He was right. And he was right insofar as if you go to the cops and you say I was detained and bullied and hit.
When I was walking in the woods by this guy and this guy, I know exactly where they are and so on.
What would happen is, of course, the cops would go and talk to them.
Would they throw them in jail?
Would they take them out of school, put them in a holding cell, and deal with, I don't know, kidnapping, forced attainment, physical assault, or whatever, right?
No. What would happen is they would go and give them a stiff talking to.
And I mean, I got the whole chain of causality.
I mean, I really knew what was going to happen, because the protection of children is not something that the police are interested in, because children don't pay taxes or vote.
And it's not to their interest, right?
Because, of course, the first people that cops would have to protect children from is their parents, and nobody wants to get involved in that.
I mean, that would actually do some good, right?
So I really got that there was nothing that I could do.
It was a total state of nature, that there was no way that society was going to protect me in any way, shape, or form from a dedicated group of sociopaths or whatever.
And that if I went to the cops or went to the school, That I would end up in far more physical danger and physical harm.
I could be further assaulted.
And there was nothing. I was half of these guys' size.
I hadn't started going to the gym.
Of course, I was like 12.
There was nothing that I could do to prevent this from escalating, right?
And I knew that it would escalate.
I mean, it was very clear, right? I mean, if I went to the cops or went to the school, the school would call these guys' parents.
These guys' parents would beat the shit out of them because I got that you don't get that way unless you've got violent parents.
And these guys were just on the edge of real moral responsibility.
But they were capable of this.
So, I mean, it was very clear to me what would happen.
And I would go to the cops. The cops shop at these guys' houses.
They wouldn't do anything other than scare them and bully their parents and bully them.
And then their parents would hit them or their parents would do something like that in that sort of Judd Nelson breakfast club kind of way.
And then, having stored up all of that humiliation, these...
These teenagers would not say, gee, you know, my parents are really horrible people, I'm going to go and deal with this.
They would say, the cause of my beating and humiliation was that Steph guy, so I'm going to go and make him pay so that he never thinks he can do something like this again, and then they would just come and whatever, whatever, right?
I mean, these weren't people who particularly thought of consequences, otherwise they wouldn't have taken the risk to detain us and to bully us and so on.
So it was really clear to me that there was no...
A possible way that I could be protected by the state, by the authorities.
I do remember also, when I was in boarding school, we would go through these fads, and the one fad that I really remember was paper airplanes.
We all became massively obsessed with paper airplanes, and this was the big thing to do.
And they began to restrict it.
And why, I don't know.
Because, again, as I sort of mentioned, When you find something that you enjoy, then people in authority, they just want to stop you from doing it, right?
They want to make you not want to do it.
And so what happened was they banned paper airplanes and people still began to make them.
And of course, this was also my, you know, they just banned stuff and there was no reason for it.
It wasn't like there are too many paper cuts and children are dying or anything like this.
It was just, you know, well, you guys are enjoying this and happiness makes you Hard to handle, right?
Hard to control. And so, and of course, there's a lot of passive aggression in children with regards to this as well.
Just by the by, I have a very strong memory.
We used to have these morning assemblies, and I remember that we would have coughing fits as ways of asserting ourselves, right?
I mean, it's sad, but it's true, right?
So what would happen is one guy would cough And then another guy would cough, and then we'd all start coughing.
And of course, it would escalate to the point where there's just no way that we could all be coughing in this kind of way.
But they couldn't identify and they couldn't say to any individual, you can't cough.
And this is how we expressed our individuality and our discontent with the rulers, right?
With the people who could, you know, cane us at will, right?
I mean, that was sort of the story.
Put us in a sanatorium at will.
The brutalizers, right? It was a kind of mini-concentration camp for children, is what boarding school was.
And certainly, for those who are now acclimatized, the younger people who are acclimatized, to teachers not even being able to touch children or hug them, it wasn't until the 70s, late 70s, that you could still hit children in the classroom with a ruler or with your hand or whatever.
Not that long ago.
So they took away the paper.
I can't remember how they did it, but they took away the paper that we could use to make paper airplanes.
And what happened was I had a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records that my mother had given me, I think.
And I tore a page.
I had a new idea for a paper airplane or a way of making it fly longer.
We had all these contests for tricks and loops.
How long it could fly. And we took enormous delight in it, as children will, with these things.
And I tore the page out of...
It was a page that was the oldest coin.
Like, I didn't care about it, right?
I didn't tear out something like the biggest brass.
I didn't tear out something that I actually cared about.
And I made this paper airplane.
And, of course, I was seen by the headmaster, who then descended upon me in a raven-like, cloaked fury, and dragged me up in front of a classroom he was teaching with all the other kids.
And I just got an enormously long lecture about property, about respect for property, about respect for gifts.
And literally, like, I swear to God, like, without a word of a lie, it went on for 20 minutes, which when you're, I don't know, six or seven years old is like three lifetimes.
And I just remember standing up there, and I remember thinking, like, I didn't feel bad.
And again, this is sort of relative to how I felt with regards to religion.
I didn't feel bad that I had done something wrong.
I really didn't.
I didn't feel like, oh gosh, I need to not do this again because of that.
I only felt bad because I got caught.
I only felt bad because I got caught and now we had to go through this ritual where he berated me for my evil or carelessness or thoughtlessness or whatever.
Short-sighted. All the things that, you know, lack of respect and so on.
And, of course, this guy didn't know my mom.
The idea that I should do something to respect my mom was just ludicrous, right?
So we had to go through this ritual where I get humiliated because I have disobeyed, and that's the price you pay for getting caught.
But it had nothing to do with, I'm a bad kid, I've done something really wrong.
It's just like, oh, okay, well, I got caught disobeying rules, so now I have to go through this ritual humiliation, and then I can choose whether or not it's worth it or not for me to go through this in the future, right?
But it didn't have anything to do With right or wrong.
It's just this nonsensical ritual that we had to go through because I got caught.
And I'm trying to think. It's not very clear to me why I didn't take any of this seriously.
Why I didn't take any of this seriously.
Well, I think it was because when you talk about respect for people, You know, I think, gosh, I wonder if the seeds for universally preferable behavior was in me even back then, which would be interesting.
Sort of looking back, trying to sort of feel out the younger Steph, so to speak, and what was going on, I think it had something to do with the fact that they did not treat the children with respect.
They did not treat the children with respect.
Therefore, it was, to me, ridiculous that they should ask, that they should term a lack of respect a moral crime on the part of the child when they asserted complete control over the child, right? We were told when to get up, when to go to bed, what to eat, when to eat.
We had to line up. We weren't allowed seconds.
If we were hungry, we were hungry.
We weren't allowed snacks. We weren't allowed any control over our own money.
We were forced to write letters home every week, whether we wanted to or not.
Of course, nobody ever asked us what we wanted to learn or what we were interested in.
Excuse me. And, I mean, of course, they could beat us at will, and they could isolate us, put us in isolation room.
We weren't allowed any access to television.
We weren't allowed access to the books that we wanted.
We were given a prescribed reading list.
And so, I mean, we were just heavily controlled.
And when our parents wanted to come up and see us, then we just had to go and spend time with our parents.
And I distinctly remember one Christmas, my brother and I and, like, two other kids who couldn't go home for Christmas.
I don't know what the hell was going on in my house.
I think I was seven. But I had Christmas at school.
And I was actually... That sounds terrible, but it really wasn't bad at all because Christmas at school was bad.
Christmas at home was always a nightmare.
As any holiday where your family is supposed to be happy...
And isn't. The demand for happiness just makes everything that much worse, right?
That was not a bad thing.
It was actually one of the more pleasurable Christmases that I recall until I got out of the cell.
By that, I mean childhood. But I think that it was hard for me to believe that respect was...
And of course, there was that fundamental paradox that I should treat people and their possessions with respect.
And this was being told to me by a guy Who was publicly humiliating me for, as he put it, destroying literature.
Or it's just something ridiculous.
I mean, not that it's literature and not that I was destroying it, right?
I took a page out of a pretty trashy book.
But I think I kind of got at that level just how ridiculous it was for somebody who was humiliating a six or seven-year-old kid in public for a long time and using all the verbal humiliation tricks that you could imagine.
I think I kind of got that this was not a very good example of treating somebody with respect.
That the way you teach somebody to treat somebody with respect is to treat them with respect, not to humiliate them for disobeying you, right?
That is quite the opposite of treating somebody with respect.
So pretty much time after time, at every time I encountered authority, they couldn't actually do anything for me.
They couldn't actually help me.
They couldn't protect me.
They were all very keen, the only time I sort of got the attention of authority, they were all very keen to just sort of bully and humiliate you with sort of, quote, rules that they themselves were doing the complete opposite of.
And I think that's where I sort of got, and I think we all know this deep down, we all know this deep down, that all of this is the purest form of corrupted nonsense, and that there are no rules that people believe in or follow in any particular rational way, but they always make that appeal, right?
And this is why I get so passionate.
About people who use rationality to destroy rationality.
About people who use ethics to undermine and destroy ethics.
And to me, I think it's just so essential that we really try and look at this stuff clearly, remember our own histories, learn from our experiences with authority, because what we experienced as children was all valid.
And that was, of course, the last time that we were completely dependent upon the state.
The next time that it will occur, or dependent upon authority, The next time that it will occur is when we get old and sick and dying, and let's wake up to the reality of authority before that situation comes to time.
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