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April 19, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:39
719 Will Kill' and Self Defense

A non-intuitive road to world peace

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is the 19th of April 2006.
Off we head to work. Now, I believe the time has come for me to put forward a minor point of clarification.
Because I keep, and I'm sure it's my fault that I miscommunicated something earlier on.
And Lord knows this is a sensitive issue for many people.
And not a particularly personal one, though, of course, perhaps in their private life it is.
But I keep receiving comments about the CAL, Candy Ass Liberal, that I am not a big fan.
Of self-defense, right?
That I am a dewy-eyed, kumbaya, pacifist, granola, hippie dude who just says, well, why can't we all just get along?
Love your enemy and everything will be fine.
Now this, of course, is not my belief at all.
So what I thought I would do is I would put together a short issue video which would detail...
What it is that I thought about self-defense, and I'm going to wrap it all up in a tidy little metaphorical bow for you just so that there's let there be no mistake, make no mistake.
This is my views on self-defense, on the use of violence, and so on.
So I'm going to start with a metaphor.
You can let me know what you think. This is the world that I would create if I could, if I had the magical powers to create superpowers and offer superpowers to my fellow citizens.
And it's not a world that I would create out of nothing, but it's the world that I would now create in the absence of a state.
For me, the ideal world would be a world where everyone could kill anyone at will.
Where Anyone could kill everyone and everyone could kill anyone at will just by thinking about it.
If you irritate me, I can kill you with my mind.
That is the world to me that would be the ideal world.
Now, don't think I'm mad and don't think I'm genocidal.
Let me spin out for you the logic and then you can let me know what you think.
You are also welcome.
Although the patents are pending, you are also welcome to use this argument with regards to the joyful land of debating about gun control.
Because with the Virginia Tech shootings a couple of days old, the howls of the ignorant masses are ringing out for gun control despite the fact that the University of Virginia Tech was a gun-free zone.
There was no Guns allowed, which meant that the shooter knew that he was never going to be opposed by anybody with a concealed weapon.
And that's exactly why he did his rampage on the campus.
If you want to go and shoot a bunch of people, you go exactly to the gun-free zone, which is, of course, the principle behind why government wants to get rid of private guns.
But let me give a little bit more explanation as to why I think it would just be so joyful and such a wonderful world If everyone could kill everyone at will.
Let me just explain what I mean by that.
What I mean by that is that it would be a concentrated thought, not just an idle one or whatever.
I mean, put some barriers so you don't sort of accidentally kill people, but it was a concentrated thought would allow you to kill someone.
Now, let's spin this out and see what would happen.
I'd like you to picture the crime of rape.
Not really picture it, but picture its prevalence.
Rapes occur, you know, dozens of times a minute throughout the world.
I'd like you to sort of picture what the crime of rape would be like, its prevalence and its incidence, if anyone could kill anyone at will.
Instantaneously. How many women do you think would be raped if when the rapist said, I'm going to rape you, they could simply cause him to die with a concentrated thought?
Do you think that the crime of rape would be prevalent by...
And even if somebody said, well, I'm going to have death by rape, you know, the way that some crazy people have death by cop?
And some people say, well, I'm going to have death by rape.
So, I'm going to go and say to a woman, I'm going to rape you and I don't care if you want to kill me with your mind and blah, blah, blah.
Well, she would then end up killing him with her mind in self-defense.
And if you prefer, you can substitute disabling someone, although to me there are problems with that, which we won't have to get into right now.
You can substitute disabling if you want.
But she still wouldn't end up being raped.
She still wouldn't end up being raped.
What about spousal abuse?
What about beating up your wife or beating up your husband?
How prevalent do you think that the crime of spousal abuse, of domestic violence, how prevalent do you think that this crime would be if anyone could kill anyone at will?
It would be very rare.
Now, there's a little bit more sort of psychological stuff that occurs with that kind of situation, but overall its prevalence would drop enormously.
And you wouldn't have to be in the presence of anyone to kill anyone at will.
Do you think that the invasion of Iraq would have occurred if everyone had the capacity to kill anyone at will with their mind?
Do you think that dictatorships would occur if everyone could kill everyone with their mind?
When the state's thugs came busting down your door to drag you off to prison and you could kill them with your mind, do you think that dictatorships would occur?
do you think that dictatorships would occur?
When it came to something as relatively benevolent as tariffs, do you think that tariffs would occur do you think that tariffs would occur if everyone could kill anyone at will?
So you bring your ship into the harbor.
someone comes down and says, well, in order to unload your ship, you're going to have to pay the local state thugs 10% of the value of your cargo.
I don't think that would happen.
The government fundamentally would be impossible if everyone could kill everyone at will.
We'll just call it the will kill.
And obviously, it's not because I want anyone to kill anyone just randomly.
Now, you're going to say, well, what about the crazy people who can kill anyone at will?
I totally get it.
I totally get it.
There's no easy way to dismiss that problem, but we'll get to it a little bit later.
Let's say that you knew that...
Now, forget it. I'm not going to get overly complicated with that.
Let's just say that there's the problem with the crazy guy who's going to sit there and just...
You have to know the person, let's say.
You have to know the person. You can't just sort of say, I want to kill California and everyone in California drops down dead.
You have to know who the person is.
Now, if anyone...
Can kill anyone at will.
There's no rape.
There's no assault.
There's no economic violence.
There's no incarceration for drug use and so on.
There's no war.
There's no dictatorship.
There's no concentration camps.
There's no gulags.
There's no flushing humanity down the sewage of what Solzhenitsyn called the Apicalago, the separate country of sewage systems that sluice humanity into an underworld of shame, degradation, brutality, violence, and ultimately, and not too ultimately, death.
Could there be such a thing? Could the Khmer Rouge have used thugs to drive every human being pretty much out of the cities into the countries where they all starve to death by the millions?
Could Vietnam, could the American invasion and destruction of two to three million Asians, could that have occurred?
If anyone could have killed LBJ or John F. Kennedy or even Nixon before his withdrawal, at will.
If you think about the war in Iraq, there is no way that Saddam Hussein could have gained ascendancy over his population if his population had the capacity to cause his death at will, or the death of Uday and Qusay and all of the thugs that he ruled Iraq with.
It's impossible.
Impossible.
And even if he did, there's no possibility that the US would have invaded if Iraqis could have caused the death of George Bush at will just by thinking about it.
It would have been there's no possibility that this could have occurred It never would have. It never will have.
have this just doesn't happen.
So if you mull this over, I mean, the normal recoil of horror that we have about the idea of the will kill, and what we imagine would be a mass orgy of destruction and death that would arise from the universal instantiation of the capacity for the will kill.
Once we get over that initial, oh my God, everybody would kill everyone and there'd be nobody left alive.
No, no, no, no.
No, no, no.
That would be not the case.
This is not what happened with the world.
The world would not end up being bereft of human life the very next morning after the will kill was implemented.
What would happen is that the world would become incredibly polite.
The world would become incredibly polite.
Imagine what would happen to fraud.
You know, the guys who phone up the sweet little old ladies and rob them of their life savings.
Imagine what would happen to fraud in this world of the will kill.
Little old ladies get angry too, and they know who you are.
They've heard your voice. Whatever it is, whatever criteria that makes it personal, whatever works.
I mean, we can spend forever refining the model, but that's not the issue.
The little old ladies would just will the guys die.
They put a will kill on the guys who had defrauded them out of their life savings, and there would be no such thing as fraud.
Imagine what would happen to blackmail, right?
So people will always say, oh, well, all that would happen is that I would walk up to you and say, I'm going to will kill you unless you give me a million dollars.
But the moment you do that, I've heard your voice, you're standing right in front of me, I will kill you.
Blackmail would not occur.
And people say, well, how would you deal with crime in the world of the will kill?
Well, what crime?
What crime? And people say, well, there still would be crime in a will-kill world.
Yeah, okay, fine.
Yes, no problem. There will be crime in a will-kill world.
And yes, if you get cured of cancer, you may also still get colds.
In fact, you probably will. But nobody then says, well, since I'm going to get colds in the future, don't cure me of cancer now.
I'd die of cancer. Yes, there will be crimes in the will-kill world, just as there will be crimes in the anarcho-capitalist world and so on.
But there won't be the state declaring wars, running the money, selling weapons of mass destruction to people overseas, to thugs and governments overseas.
There won't be massive national debts.
There won't be the strangling noose of the welfare state.
There won't be two million Americans in prison for a million and a half for nonviolent crimes.
So the government is a cancer.
And this is what's so funny when people say, well, yes, but after we cure cancer, I might still stub my toe, get a hangnail, and have a runny nose.
Absolutely. And when you fly a plane, your ears might not pop and you'll be uncomfortable and you'll still get headaches.
Does that mean you don't want to be cured of cancer?
This is an excuse for people to say, I don't want to fight the evil of the state.
And that's fine. Just say it with me.
Say it openly. I'm afraid to fight the power of the state.
And so I am going to...
Say that there's going to be crime after we get rid of the state without realizing that the state is the biggest purveyor of crime and war and financial corruption and the welfare state are its greatest acts of criminality.
What about child abuse?
Now, children and the will kill, you know, you can fine-tune this all you want.
Let's just fantasize for the moment for the sake of argument that there is a situation Wherein they can't just will kill their own mom because the mom denies them cookies or whatever, right?
There's something like that.
But let's say you get the will kill when you're 18 or 20 or you have to pass some test that shows you're mature or whatever it is.
Let's just make up something that eliminates that as a possibility.
And let's say that pedophilia, for instance, child abuse of that kind is often enacted, usually enacted by someone that the child knows.
How many pedophiles would be comfortable preying upon children when they knew that the child could will kill them when the child grew up?
I bet you that prevalence of that evil would go down considerably.
How many priests would molest children?
As they do sometimes hundreds of children If they knew that in the future, any one of those children could will-kill them.
Bet you that wouldn't happen.
So if we sort of understand how peaceful a will-kill world would become, at least if you understand my argument for it, at least if you understand my argument for it, whether you agree with it or not, is fine.
If we understand how non-violent the will-kill world would be, how peaceful, how safe, how secure the will-kill world would be, then I think that we're a long way towards understanding Why, of course, gun control is such a ludicrous monstrosity of an idea.
And how a stateless society is so peaceful.
Now, for those of you who say, but the will-kill idea is monstrous.
The will-kill idea is madness.
Madness, I say. Then I say, okay, that's fine.
So we have to have gun control, we have to have a state, and the will-kill idea is madness.
Well, that's fine. But basically what you're saying then is that it's not everyone who should have the right to the will-kill.
It's only some people.
Only, say, 5% of the population should have the right of the will-kill.
Only 5% of the population should have the right of the will kill and nobody else should.
Do you really think that's better?
Do you not understand that giving only 5% of the population the right to have the will kill is going to guarantee endless and bottomless and violent and vehement tyranny in the world?
But this is not intuitive, but it's logical.
Like all good science, I think.
And people say, well, I don't want 5% of people to have the will kill.
I want nobody to have the will kill.
I'm like, great. Then we have to get rid of the government, because government right now has the will kill.
Government, governments, politicians, soldiers, policemen, all have the will-kill.
So there's no possibility of eliminating the will-kill from the world.
The only question is, does everyone have it, or does a tiny minority have it?
If a tiny minority has it, then all you're doing is guaranteeing perpetual slavery, war, and destruction to the human race.
Because only a minority of people have this awesome power of the will kill.
The government is about stripping self-defense from people.
Thank you.
I dislike the idea of self-defense in the collective sense, in the state-ist sense.
That, well, there are people abroad who would do us harm, so we need a government for collective self-defense, which is pure nonsense.
Oh, the Nazis, oh, the 1930s, blah, blah, blah.
Well, this was the result of the government.
This was the result of government actions and inactions.
And it was the result of people relying on governments for their collective security in the 20th century.
How did that work out?
How did it work out relying on governments for collective security in the 20th century and the 21st?
How did it work out? How did it work out for the people in New York, 2001?
How did it work out for the 40 million people who died in World War II? How did it work out for the 70 million people who died under...
Russian communism. How did it work out for the tens of millions who starved to death in Mao's famines and Stalin's famines?
How did it work out for the millions who died under the Khmer Rouge?
How did it work out, this idea of collective security?
It's like saying, in order to preserve the health of my hand, I'm going to cut it off and put it in a jar of formaldehyde so it will never age.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's true, it won't ever age, but you're now minus a hand.
So the government already has the will kill.
Politicians already have the will kill.
And if you don't believe me, then look at the Patriot Act, look at wars that are declared, look at the endless and horrendous pursuit of those who are taking drugs or doing other innocuous things to their own bodies.
The power of government is the power of the will-kill.
The power of politicians is the power of the will-kill.
They can pass any law they want.
Nobody even knows what these laws are.
Nobody's read the Patriot Act all the way through or understands all of its legal ramifications relative to the other 100,000 federal statutes that are put forward every single year.
The law is chaos.
The law is quantum.
The law is pure madness.
The law is whatever people want it to be.
That is the power of the will kill.
Some politician says we're going to raise taxes 10%.
He tells the chief of police.
The chief of police then goes and shoots anyone who resists arrest and doesn't pay their 10%.
That's the will kill.
It's a little slower.
There's a few more steps.
But it's exactly the same principle.
It's the will kill. I will this law.
You are killed for disobeying it.
And resisting arrest. If you don't get thrown into prison, if you don't submit to escorting to the rape rooms, then you are shot down, dead, and killed.
And if you try to escape from the rape room prisons, then you are shot down dead and killed.
So the power of the will kill already exists.
And this is why I say I would not want the will kill in the absence of a statist history.
Because there's no private industry in the world that would have developed nuclear weapons.
There's no private industry in the world that would have developed nuclear weapons in the absence of a state.
If the world were a stateless society, then these weapons would never have been developed.
The proliferation of arms throughout the world in the hands of brutal dictatorships, the arms sales that, oh, these freedom-loving democracies receive enormous profits from, these massive arms sales to dictators overseas.
All of these Sowing the seeds of violence through the sales of not just handguns and Kalashnikovs and M16s and Glocks, but also Scuds and submarines and aircraft and ships and all of the paraphernalia of mass murder.
That is the hallmark of the state.
It's all sold by... They tax us for the R&D, they tax us for the development, and they tax us to pay for the production of these weapons, and then they take all the tidy profits from the sales.
And then they get upset because there are sweatshops in Indonesia where they take money from us by force to produce weapons that they sell for their profit, which are then used to generate resentment against us.
But we're really worried about people being paid a buck a day because that's exploitation, you see.
These psychotic, sociopathic, deranged, stone-evil sociopaths in the state we turn to to save us from global warming and protect the environment.
They'll sell weapons of mass destruction to homicidal dictators Who enslave the third world.
And they'll cuddle up and cozy up to the evil, blood-soaked Saudi regimes, the House of Saud and the 5,000 princes who feast upon the population.
They will sell $200 billion worth of arms and station soldiers to protect those people.
They will protect and support evil dictators.
And then we turn to them and say, please help us save the spotted owl.
Because they've proven themselves to be so moral that we really...
These are the people that we say, here are my children, please educate them.
When you get back from selling arms to foreign dictatorships and helping them set up prison systems, would you please instruct my child on ethics?
Madness, madness, madness, madness, madness, madness, madness! Madness.
So the option to not have the will kill does not exist. .
The option to not have the will kill.
The will kill already exists.
Nuclear weapons, police, the jail systems, the quote legislature, all of the infinite and myriad layers of government who pile every rule on mankind known to the planet in this generation and many to come.
You could live for 10,000 years and never understand all the laws even in one country and how they interrelate to each other.
Even if you could freeze time.
It's simply impossible. How many layers of government are there?
Dozens. How many rules and regulations does each one produce?
Thousands. How many are on the books but still not enforced?
Tens of thousands. How do they all relate?
In infinite complexity. Ah, but ignorance of the law is no excuse.
So basically, governments have created such a complex vortex of rules, regulations, laws, statutes, and blind willpower, and of course, not to mention the random predations of random cops, that they can do whatever they want to do.
They have the total power of the will kill.
They have the total power of the will kill.
And if they want to expand that power, all they do is they bury some new tax law in the middle of nowhere, and then they just start prosecuting everyone who wasn't aware of it.
I mean, easy peasy, right?
They have the total power of the will kill.
So, not having the power of the will kill is not an option.
The only question is, does a small minority of people have it, or does everyone have it?
And if you say, well, gee, gosh, that's bad.
You see, if everyone has the will kill, then there are crazy people who are going to go and introduce themselves to everyone on a bus, and then will kill them all.
Yes, absolutely that could happen, for sure.
And then anybody who sees that is going to will kill the guy, and the problem in terms of its recurrence is solved, which is not perfect for the people who died on the bus, and I wouldn't want to be one of them.
For sure, that is an issue.
But of course, the moment he will kills the first person, the second person will kills him back.
So unlike Virginia, unlike Columbine, unlike the 250 million people killed by governments, we've got a death of one.
Some crazy starts will-killing people on a bus, one person dies, then somebody will-kills them back, and it's all over.
A tragedy for the one who dies, without a doubt.
But really, we're not comparing nirvana to hell here.
We are comparing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people versus the death of dozens of people.
And if you think that's irrelevant, then I have a proposition for you.
If you think that the numbers of deaths is irrelevant, I have a proposition for you.
Let's say that you live in a town of 10,000 people.
And I say to you, someone's going to come to town and kill one person, or someone's going to come to town and kill 10,000 people.
Are you indifferent as to whether it's the first or the second?
Of course not! You'll take your 1 in 10,000 chances of being killed versus a 1 in 1 chance of being killed any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
The numbers of deaths are not irrelevant.
It is, of course, a perfect tragedy for the person who dies, but even that person who dies We would probably rather that he die than everyone die, especially if he's got family and friends.
So yeah, yeah, yeah, the will-kill scenario might result in the deaths of some people, but those deaths wouldn't be preventable anyway.
If some crazy guy gets on a bus and wants to kill everyone, is it better that everyone is completely and totally disarmed and can't even carry a letter opener?
And this guy can get any gun he wants from the underworld, probably manufactured and sold by the state?
Or some foreign state?
Is that better? That he just walks up and down the bus gunning down whoever he wants?
Or is it better that the moment he will kills one person, everyone else will kill him back?
I think that's better, to be honest with you.
I really think that's better.
That's the world I'd want.
I want the will kill. Not because I want to kill people, but because the will kill already exists, and I just want to even up the possibilities.
The only solution to the problem of hierarchical power is the dilution of power.
Europe didn't magically become free because everyone woke up to the slaughterhouse.
Of the 20th century.
Because the slaughterhouse, in many ways, was worse in the First World War in Europe than in the Second World War.
Because France folded in the Second and not in the First.
And everyone goes, oh, France is so cowardly.
Oh, France, oh, they'll just run away, blah, blah, blah.
Well, no shit, Sherlock.
You start to lose a couple of million people and have your country devastated for no clear purpose other than a mere 20 years pause between that and the next war, you're not going to bother either.
Neither would I, and if you had any brains, neither would you.
So that power already exists.
The only reason that Europe is not currently fighting World War III is that they've all got nuclear weapons.
So they all have the power of the will-kill.
I mean, the politicians all have the power of will-kill on each other.
Magically, they have discovered the road to peace.
And now all they do is turn their guns on their populations, right?
Through taxation, the welfare state, protection of unions, all this kind of crap.
Old-age pensions. Robbing from the young, the poor, to pay for the rich, the old.
How anti-Robin Hood is that?
So, when you look across the world, you can see that nuclear powers don't attack each other.
America and Russia squared off in the Cold War and only fought proxy wars in the lands of those countries where people didn't have nuclear weapons and could not strike them back.
Afghanistan and Vietnam and Cambodia.
these were the countries that they fought their proxy wars in because those countries did not possess weapons of mass destruction.
Everybody picks on the powerless, right?
What was it? 18 of the 19 9-11 hijackers or whatever the hell the number was were Saudis?
And we hit Afghanistan and Iraq?
What did we do? Miss? No, it's because the Saudis have power.
They have the power to turn off the oil.
They have the power to do significant harm to the United States.
So you don't attack them, right?
The dilution of power is the only way to solve the hierarchy of power.
And that's what the free market is all about.
It's the dilution of power. And so the world of the will-kill is a world of near-perfect peace.
It is a world of near-perfect utopia compared to, and it is utopia, plain and simple, compared to this hellish mess that we have right now of violent power growing and growing across the world.
The disparity of power is only solved by the dilution of power.
The disparity of the capacity to murder is only solved by the dilution of the capacity to murder.
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's counterintuitive, but so what?
So is science.
So is physics.
So is almost all economics.
So what? The world is not intuitive.
Deal with it. We have limited perspectives.
That's why we need rationality.
Deal, dude. So I hope that that clarifies my position on self-defense, and I think that exploring mentally the world of the will-kill is very, very helpful in terms of metaphorizing and more easily conceptualizing the world of anarcho-capitalism, which is not the world of the will-kill, but the world without the state.
And so just the sort of final way of looking at it is if we say...
That only 20% of the population have the will kill, but there's no government, and they don't know who each other is, and nobody knows who they are.
If 20% of the population, or 10%, doesn't matter, if 10% of the population have this power to will kill, rape is still going to cease.
Not everyone has to have this power.
You just have to not know who has this power.
You just have to not know who has this power.
If only 10% of the population has it and they're not in the government and they're not part of a relatively identifiable group and they don't wear a uniform and they don't have costumes and they don't have berets and they don't have medals, if nobody knows who this 10% are, the effect if nobody knows who this 10% are, the effect is the same.
And this of course is much closer to the current situation.
And once you understand that the power of the perfect and universal will-kill is enormously benevolent, you can easily understand that the power of the 10% will-kill is benevolent unless those 10% get together and get a state and wear uniforms.
Then no one's going to mess with them and they can mess with everyone because they're all clearly identifiable.
But if it's impossible to identify the will-kill people, Guess what?
Nothing but perfect peace results.
This would be a good movie, actually.
Maybe this is the anarcho-capitalist movie.
Maybe this is the screenplay that I can write over time, which is the world of the will-kill.
Will-kill. I'll probably get sued by Tarantino for Kill Bill.
Shouldn't rhyme with both words.
That's no good. If only 10% of the people have the will-kill and there's no state, everything's the same.
You don't have to have a gun in your house.
You don't have to have a concealed weapon on your body, on your person.
As long as someone does and nobody knows because it's concealed, no one's going to mess with you because they don't know if you have a gun or not.
Thieves don't know if you have a gun in your house or not.
A rapist doesn't know if you're carrying a concealed weapon or not.
And it's a shame that we need them, but there are just so many weapons out there produced by the state that it's just the only option.
I mean, either we have the will-kill situation with a readily identified, brutal, dictatorial minority, or we have a will-kill situation in terms of no arms control.
I mean, of course, there's no arms control.
If you want arms control, enter into a voluntary contract with whoever is selling you your house or your land or whoever has built the development.
That's fine. And see whether or not the thieves are drawn to the place where they know there are no guns.
There aren't a whole lot of shooters who wonder, like, there aren't a whole lot of these homicidal maniac shooter guys who wander into a military training area and start shooting people.
Why? Because they'd be dead.
And, like, one guy would go down, probably wounded, and everyone else would shoot the shit out of him.
But they always go to the kindergartens, they always go to the McDonald's, they always go to the gun-free zones, right?
And that's exactly, there's a disparity of power.
There's only one person there with the will kill.
And he runs rampant over everyone.
So thank you so much for listening.
I hope that this might really... I mean, I know it's something that makes you want to recoil, but I think it's well worth pondering and mulling over the will-kill scenario, because I think it reveals a lot about the world as it is, and the world that could be, and why the argument for the state, the society, results in such universal peace.
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