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July 9, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:40
821 Iceland, Ireland, Somalia and Mommy

The primal roots of the 'noble savage' mythology...

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Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph, July 8th or 9th, Monday, 2007, and this is going to be a podcast, a one-two podcast, hopefully designed to help Eliminate or alleviate concerns in two particular areas that have been floating around recently.
Philosophy, psychology, and a little bit perhaps of economics.
Anthropology, all of the good stuff.
And not the keyboard fights, as was mentioned in a recent song.
FDR 800 is out, in case you haven't seen this.
I don't think there's any other particular news items that are out.
There were some technical issues with Skype this weekend.
We switched to Gizmo for a bit, which has its own challenges.
There's no pay service that I know of that is going to give everybody free call-ins.
I would be happy to pay for a service to do the Sunday shows, but I don't know of any.
If you do, I certainly would be more than happy to hear about them, so please feel free to let me know.
But other than that, any other particular announcements?
A new diamond...
Actually, a new Philosopher King donator.
Thank you so, so much for a wonderful gift that was given to me over the last couple of days.
I certainly do appreciate it.
And if you are up here in the 800s and you haven't donated for a while or haven't donated at all, I would really appreciate it.
If you would, I promise to pay you back in happiness and satisfaction, which I can guarantee you will always accrue when you do the right thing.
So, I look forward to your donations.
Two related issues, I think they're related, have been floating up through the Borg brain recently, and I'd like to sort of tackle them in the podcast today.
Oh, I've also finished Objectivism Part 3.
Which is a two-parter, one with me just talking and one with Christina asking questions about the rather challenging theory that I put forward as to why Ayn Rand was down with the rough stuff.
She always had a rape in her novels.
And this, of course, was quite disturbing and tells you a lot, I think, about Ayn Rand's vanity and the challenges which accrued both within her philosophy and within her movement that I think caused its failure.
So, I hope that you will enjoy that.
That's for Gold Plus. Just head on over to the boards, and if you've donated and don't have access, let me know.
Send me your email with your donation email account, or send me an email with your, or you can private message me on the board.
Let me know, and I will check it out.
The only reason I may not have been able to do it is because I couldn't find your particulars.
So, I hope that you will enjoy that.
The Sunday show, this last Sunday show, I'm going to post to Gold Plus because it's really, really advanced and I don't want to freak out the newbies, the people who are sort of listening just to the recent stuff and haven't gone through more of the detailed levels of the conversation.
Or who have not implemented the philosophy that we talk about here, or I would like to think, perhaps with a touch of vanity, just philosophy as a whole in their lives.
So, last Sunday's show is going to go to Gold Plus, and I hope that you will enjoy that.
Alright, enough business.
Let's get on with the podcast.
So, the topics, which I think are quite challenging, are sort of twofold.
The first is...
The idea that at some point in the distant past, society was anarcho-capitalist or anarchic, and states evolved, and so states represent a step forward, in a sense, from anarchism, and thus getting rid of the states would be to return back to a prehistory and also...
It is a way of justifying the state.
I mean, if the state is in advance over the anarchism of prehistory, then if we get rid of the state, we may very quickly find all sorts of disasters accruing to society, which will then have us go, oh, that's why we had governments.
Oh, right. Okay.
It all makes sense now.
Gee, I wish we hadn't gotten rid of that wonderful state.
Because now we're in a crippling state of prehistory, which will cause us to have to get a state back, just as we did long ago in the past.
And that's sort of one aspect of this.
And the other aspect is the questions or the criticisms of examples of anarchic societies, or at least stateless societies, let's say.
Such as ancient Celtic Ireland, Iceland in the early part of the last millennium, and Somalia in the present.
And, of course, these comparisons, which say, basically, either, wow, geez, you know, it's going to disintegrate back into a state-based society, as we see.
In ancient Ireland, or, God, heaven forbid, Somalia, we get factions, warlords, and, you know, internecine war of some kind or another, and therefore that is not valid.
I, look, I absolutely and totally agree that...
We need to have empiricism with regards to anarchy.
And I, of course, will constantly argue that the fundamental empirical aspect of anarchy that you should be looking at is not ancient Ireland, unless you speak ancient Celtic and spend 20 years studying the culture, the society, and of course, what source materials are left and to what degree have they been interpreted by the Christian people.
Embedding in ancient Celtic society that began to occur around the 5th or 6th century AD. How much of it has been lost?
How much of the context has been lost?
I mean, you don't know. Ancient Ireland?
Sorry, ancient Iceland? Who knows, right?
We do know that in both situations, the rise of statism was preceded by the infection of Christianity.
And I'm going to make sort of a case as to why that is the case.
We also know that in Somalia, we have...
Tribalism and Islamofascism and theocracy, the earnings of totalitarian theocracy and a very, very sort of primitive philosophical mindset.
So you can't really compare ancient Ireland or Iceland or modern-day Somalia or the Wild West or any of these sorts of things to a theoretically understood situation or system.
If you get rid of an organized church, It does not necessarily follow that you shall get springing forward from the mind of man, the scientific method.
The elimination of one form of totalitarianism does not, in the absence of a theory, inculcate freedom.
If you stop smoking, if you overeat and you smoke and you stop smoking, you may be slightly healthier, you will be slightly healthier than if you keep smoking, but you're not going to be healthy without a coherent and comprehensive method.
The theory of health and well-being and good health habits and so on.
So I always say look at your own life where you operate without violence.
That is the anarchic society that you have the most knowledge about!
I mean, ancient Ireland, ancient Celtic, the eclipsing 1500 years and the motives of everybody who wants to rewrite this story and the hostility of the church.
Forget it. You're never going to know the truth about that society.
What you can do is look in the mirror and say how statelessness or the non-aggression principle working out for me in my life.
But there is, of course, this great temptation to move towards historical examples, right?
Because people can argue historical examples endlessly, and what that does is it helps them procrastinate and avoid and put off the actual need to implement philosophy in their own life.
But let's have a look at these examples.
These sort of arguments.
Let me start with the prehistory one.
That ideally, or in reality, there was a prehistory of anarchism of a stateless society.
And for some reason, people found it more beneficial to have a state.
So if we return to anarchism, we will simply repeat that history or that lesson of prehistory and find out exactly why a state is better than anarchism and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, I mean, please.
First of all, this Rousseauian ideal of the noble savage is something that is unbelievably persistent in human thinking.
It's like a recurrent cancer.
It continually strikes down even the most able brains who love to fantasize about some Johnny Weissmuller-shaped and chested Tarzan who lived in sanctity and harmony with nature and the wise Indians.
You know, this noble savage nonsense, right?
Which is... Reflected in so many different myths, we don't even sort of need to get into them, but of course every religion has the myth of harmony with God and a state of purity and virtue that was prior to the fall,
whatever that fall is, described in many different religions in many different ways, that there is a state of early perfection that is then marred by the actions of those who were formerly pure and innocent and good, And then became bad, and now the current life that we have is a mere punishment for that.
This shows up.
We don't even need to go into it.
We all know this. It shows up everywhere.
It's pure nonsense, of course.
Tribalism is not anarchism.
Let me say that again. Tribalism is not anarchism.
Tribalism is not anarchism.
Tribalism is a hierarchical society with a brutal chief and usually a mystical witchdoctor at the center of the power.
The Attila and the witchdoctor is Ayn Rand.
It's not my theory. I think it's a great one that Ayn Rand had.
The mystic of the mind and the mystic of the muscle.
And there is no capacity for independent thought.
There is no capacity or respect for an independent evaluation of reality.
There is incredible...
Illusion, fantasy, people are 95% embedded in social fantasies rather than in reality.
There's ancestor worship, there's the worship of trees, there's ritual mutilation of the young men in order to prepare them for the life of the adult male warrior and to split them off from the feminine, which is always considered to be dangerous and debilitating and emasculating.
There is I mean, there's physical mutilation in the form of neck extensions and bizarre and brutal tattoos.
There's the sharpening of teeth.
I mean, it's really primitive.
I mean, that's being a slave to fantasy, and if you are a slave to fantasy, you're not an anarchist.
Right? Or you're certainly not a philosopher.
I mean, if we can get sort of confused about the term anarchist, which means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, you're certainly not rational.
You're certainly not in the truth.
If you're into ancestor worship, then you're not in the world of the truth.
If you think that if you sacrifice a young virgin that you will get good crops, then you're not in the realm of the truth.
You're in the realm of murderous and destructive fantasy.
And, in some ways, and this is sort of arguable, but in some ways, the state is a step up from the tribe.
In the same way that a monotheistic god is conceptually a step up from the worship of a tree or a rock or a dead grandparent.
It is a, I mean, the concepts must break from the instance in order to be proven false.
So if you worship your ancestors, I mean, you actually did have ancestors.
You can speak to people, you may have known them directly.
You actually did have ancestors.
If you worship a king as a god, there is actually a king.
So, the way that we free ourselves from concepts is to continue to abstract them away and away from reality until they become so disconnected they just pop free and float into the endless universe of historical error.
Monotheism is a step up from polytheism.
Polytheism is the worship of many personalities, and of course there are many personalities in the world.
Monotheism is the idea of a god distilled into pure abstraction.
Where it then becomes more vulnerable to a logical attack.
So the increased abstractions of a concept are like a silver thread that pulls and pulls and pulls, and then requires the barest snap of the fingers to break.
So the state is a step up from the tribe.
The tribe is a local dictatorship.
That literally has dozens of eyeballs on you at any particular moment.
The state, as an abstraction, as a distant tribe, can't watch you at all times.
There is, again, not counting war and genocide and gulag and concentration camps, which are not inconsiderable and certainly argue for...
The destructiveness of the idea of the state very strongly.
But life expectancy in general tended to rise under a state, even if you include things like, in general, right?
Even if you include things like war and so on.
You can get some form of medicine in a state, right?
You can get some sort of An organization that is not purely and personally tyrannical.
So, I mean, even if you are a...
I mean, sort of the comparison is something like the family, right?
In sort of orders of ascending abstraction, there is the...
Well, there's the personal state, I guess, the superego.
There is the family, there is the tribe, and then there is the state, right?
Greater levels of abstraction, greater levels of distortion in some ways, and therefore greater capacities for correction.
When you talk about someone with a family, you say the family doesn't exist, then it's harder for them to grasp that because they see their family.
If I point at a forest, or I point at a whole bunch of trees, and I say that the forest does not exist, you're confused, because you're looking at it and you're saying, well, there's lots of trees there, that's called a forest, so clearly a forest exists.
It's easier, that's why I started with the state during this podcast series, right?
It's easier to disprove the abstract tyranny of the state as a valid moral criterion than it is the family.
And we don't have quite as much to worry about in terms of the tribe, but if you look at the degree to which the state can control you compared to the degree with which, when you were a child, your family can control you, then I think that we can say that since the tribe is more of an extended family, it's situated much closer in terms of tyranny and power and intrusiveness and control.
It is situated much closer to the family than it is to the state.
And if you get that when you're a kid your family controls you to the nth degree, whereas when you are an adult the state does not to the same degree, then I think that it's sort of easier to understand that tribalism is a primitive and local predecessor or antidecent to the state.
And the state, by abstracting the concept of authority and removing it from the immediate, it becomes more possible to disprove its existence.
So, this idea that at some point in prehistory there was a happy sort of liberty...
Although the sort of, quote, liberty that is always discussed is blatantly tribal, i.e.
blatantly irrational, is to say, and I think, you know, wonderfully erroneously, is to say that liberty, fundamentally, is liberty from the state, which it's not. Freedom is not, fundamentally, freedom from the state.
Might as well get to that, right?
Might as well get to that. Freedom is freedom from error.
Not freedom from the state.
The state is just one of the errors that we must free ourselves from.
The virtue of the family, the existence of God, the virtue of the state, and so on, and so on, and so on.
The value of violence, the existence of violence, or the fact that violence is invisible through Conformity in the democratic states, and in most states.
These are the errors that we have to attack and oppose within ourselves.
Freedom is freedom from error.
Which, of course, first requires the identification of error, which requires logical principles and evidence and scientific method and so on.
The fundamental freedom is freedom from error.
And in a tribal system, a tribal system is based almost entirely on error.
Look at those National Geographic articles on the Pygmies of the Amazon.
I mean, these people are not free.
They have a barely coherent relationship with reality.
They believe that snakes contain the souls of ancestors.
They believe that if they pray to a particular kind of tree that they can win in battle.
They believe that if you eat the heart of your enemy you gain all of his psychic strength.
I mean, this is not a society that is free of error.
I mean, it is almost entirely and completely embedded in error.
It is ruled almost completely and entirely by error.
And brutality, right?
From error comes brutality.
Because error must always be enforced, because it's not reinforced through reality.
And this is why the greater the abstraction, the greater the danger.
Okay.
So when you have a whole bunch of competing mythologies, you tend to have a smaller state, where you have one dominant mythology, then you tend to have a more powerful state, which is why it's in advance, but at the same time, it has in some ways greater danger.
So, of course, originally in the Roman Empire, you had an avenue of temples.
You could just go worship whoever you wanted.
And then the Christians came along, and they were persecuted not for their religious views, but for the fact that they were terrorists.
For the fact that they said that every other god was evil, that all the other worshippers were evil, that they bombed temples, that they bombed whatever they used at the time.
But they were absolutist monotheists.
And they attacked, vociferously and repeatedly and destructively, all other religions, whipped people up into a frenzy by proclaiming all other religions evil and satanic, which other religions really weren't that big on doing.
So monotheism is a particular kind of virus that attacks a pluralistic society.
So what are the two things in common that resulted in the end of What was a form of statelessness in ancient Ireland and in ancient Iceland?
Well, it was the virus of Christianity, the virus of monotheism, which is great error, which is in many ways a more fundamental error than polytheism.
Polytheism is much more anthropomorphic.
It's much more of a projection of the realities of human society than monotheism.
Because in polytheism, the gods are good, the gods are bad, the gods get angry, the gods make love, the gods have wars, the gods pick sides.
It's a massive cosmic soap opera, much like the majority of society.
So that's how you could get somebody like Socrates and Aristotle, people like that, and Plato, in a polytheistic society.
As Pope said, the proper study of mankind is man, and in a polytheistic society, you are more closely studying men through studying the interactions of the gods, the primitive psychological types projected onto Mount Olympus or whatever.
When you get monotheism, you're then studying narcissism.
Monotheism is, I am the only valuable thing in the universe.
I'm the only thing that is fundamentally in the universe, and people must obey me.
So, more easygoing polytheism gives way to more narcissistic, domineering, invasive and corrosive and destructive monotheism.
Polytheistic societies don't require quite as large a state as monotheistic societies.
And when I say polytheistic, I'm going to include the deists in there, which was, of course, the foundational religious aspects of many of the framers of the Constitution and founders of the American Republic and so on.
And so when you get into a tribal society, you get this infection of monotheism.
A monomaniacal, narcissistic, aggressive, fascistic, dictatorial, religious mindset, which is Christianity and Islam and Judaism to a large degree.
Well, then you get the need for a state.
The live and let live of polytheism means that you don't...
The polytheistic priests, I'm sure they would prefer to have bigger congregations...
But, you know, the same way that Walmart would prefer to have more customers, but that doesn't mean that they're going to use the state to get it.
And use the state to eliminate all other competition.
Because in a polytheistic society, that would be sort of ridiculous.
That would sort of be like killing everyone but one person in a village.
But when you have a monotheistic religion, it's dictatorial, fundamentally fascistic, and requires the state to enforce.
So what happened in In Iceland, well, the missionaries came along, started proselytizing, started attacking those who were not Christian, started dividing the Christians against the non-Christians, telling that all the non-Christians were evil, they're going to corrupt their children, they're going to send them all to hell.
Raises the hysteria!
And the conceptual tribalism within society.
So the Icelandics, they...
Icelanders, they have to start having referendums on what is the official religion.
Monotheism invading polytheism provokes religious warfare, which either ends with driving out Christianity or the monotheism, or imposing monotheism on everyone else.
Polytheism is like the free market of religion.
Monotheism is like the fascistic or communist centrally planned economy of the religious world.
And it's a great curse.
Although, as I say, it is easier to disprove than polytheism.
Polytheism more closely reflects society as a whole, so it's harder.
So Christianity had to be dominant before the scientific method could come along, I think.
I mean, I can't prove it, but to me it makes sort of logical sense.
It's a shame that so many millions of people had to be murdered by religious warfare.
In order for religion to be disproved, but that's what happens in the absence of philosophy.
People must learn you either drink from the cup of wisdom, or you drink from the cup of blood to gain your knowledge.
So, the idea that at some point in prehistory there was this Egalitarian, free society is not true at all.
There was a local state far more invasive, far more controlling in the form of the tribe.
And there was slavery, there was common property, nobody had individual property rights, there was endless warfare, there was conscription, there was mutilation of children.
I mean, this is really, really primitive.
You don't see apes in a community working on the principles of anarcho-capitalism, right?
It's hard to find some Stone Age skull without some axe embedded in its head.
So it was more of a human farming situation, where the leaders would use the children, the young men and the young women, as livestock for war, for breeding, for work, and so on.
So this was a local fascist dictatorship where you had even less freedom than you would.
In the form of a state society.
So, when I say a stateless society, I'm talking about a society that is free from error, fundamentally, right?
Philosophically free from error.
That disbelieves in the state on principle, not on the argument from effect.
When you disbelieve in the state on principle...
The state is just one of the many things that you have to give up.
In many ways, it's not even in the top ten of the most important things that you have to give up when you become philosophical and you aim for the truth.
A stateless society is a stateless society, at least in my terminology, fundamentally because it has rejected illusion.
And people say, how are we going to get there?
Well, you just keep rejecting illusion.
You keep projecting illusion, and you aim for happiness, and we'll get to happiness soon.
I've got two podcasts slated in the short-term, happiness and meaning.
But, no, you have to sell, too.
Right? A thin man, you kind of require a thin man to sell a diet.
You kind of require a happy person to sell a philosophy.
By sell, I don't mean debased or cheapened or anything like that.
I just mean to convince.
So the way that you bring a stateless society about is you say, well, a stateless society is brought about by a rejection of error.
And the fundamental error that needs to be rejected is that concepts exist and have moral dimension.
The anthropomorphization of concepts and the imagining that they exist somewhere.
The fundamental platonic error of forms is the most essential error that needs to be discarded.
As a result of that, people no longer believe in the state.
But you don't aim at getting rid of the state.
You aim at getting rid of error.
We've got a big plan here.
We've got a big project on here, which is getting rid of error.
Through an objective methodology.
You always aim at the root of the problem.
Always go for the root of the problem.
I don't keep cutting cancers out of people's lungs and you don't say, well, maybe you shouldn't smoke this cigarette or that cigarette or whatever.
and say, "Hey, stop smoking." So then the question always comes, and it's, I think, a perfectly sensible question to ask.
Then the question always comes, Okay, dude!
So, like, if nobody believes in these...
Like, if it's not true that there was this happy-go-loppy Gruber surfer guys long ago...
Then why is it so prevalent, man?
Why does everyone believe in this?
Well, that's an excellent question, Blaine.
And so my answer is that it mirrors a psychological experience that...
or a psychological projection and experience.
I would sort of co-mingle the two in this particular instance, which means nothing to you.
Let me continue to explain without explaining why I'm explaining about the explanation.
Boing. When we project into the history of the species, or when we have opinions that are not empirical about the history of the species,
about the world, about authority, about God, about virtue, whenever we have opinions about these things, the fundamental thing that people get the most irritated at me about in this conversation is my continued insistence upon this principle.
If you have an opinion about the prehistory of the species and you're not an anthropologist with 20 years' experience, then you're not talking about the history of the species.
You're not talking about the prehistory of the human race.
You're talking about, yes, indeed, you know it.
Yourself. Your history.
Your prehistory. Whenever people come on strong with opinions about this, that, or the other...
I say, hey, how did you arrive at these conclusions?
When people say to me, because I'm a perfect philosopher with 20 years experience, and people say to me, hey Steph, why do you believe this?
I can say, well, because of this X, Y, and Z principle.
could be right, could be wrong, but I have a reason for, got to be a reason to believe.
And so when people have strong opinions about this, that, or the other, and they haven't reasoned from first principles, or they haven't got a lot of empirical evidence, or they haven't studied it in depth, independent of their own histories, then or they haven't studied it in depth, independent of their own histories, then they're just And they don't know that they're talking about themselves.
It feels natural to have such opinions.
But I'll tell you why I think that people believe All of this nonsense about the virtuous and harmonious prehistory of the species, and how a government had to be instituted because that didn't work.
Which, of course, is a paradox, right?
That's why you know it's personal, and why you know it's about personal history.
Because if there was this wonderful and harmonious prehistory of the species which involved anarchism or a stateless society, then we should all want to go back to that, right?
But people then say, well, we can't go back to that because states arose for a reason, and we don't want to have to go and reproduce that reason.
But if it was harmonious and great, then we should go back there, right?
So, there is a paradox, right?
And if it wasn't harmonious and great, then it wasn't stateless in the sense that people were free.
So there's a real paradox at the core of this argument, and I'll do my best to try and talk about why I think that it might be the case that people believe this implicitly and, one might say, fervently or unconsciously with no experience or evidence.
Well, of course, they do believe this fervently, and they do have evidence for what they believe.
It's just not anthropological, it's personal.
Now, of course, we, each of us, individually, have a prehistory of the self, which is the state of mind, or in a sense, the state of mindlessness that occurred for us prior to the development and retention of conscious memories.
So conscious memories begin to surface and be retained, or at least we can retain them, starting from the age of two or three or four, and so on, often coincident with the rise of language.
So, there is a prehistory for us, which all occurs before that, wherein a lot of people have this feeling of, I guess Freud called it, oceanic oneness, or oneness with the universe, and so on, where you have no ego to speak of, you don't differentiate really between self and other, and you exist in really a state of oneness, because there is no other.
But it's not really oneness like you have a self.
It's not narcissism, because narcissism is the explicit knowledge of and rejection of other human beings' existence or value or worth or validity.
Whereas this is really a feeling of oneness in that you and the universe are one.
And of course, Freud believed that religion came from this oceanic feeling of oneness, where there was no identity or there was a complete merging with the mother, who represented love or goodness or nirvana or whatever.
And that was a source for him of the religious feeling or the Buddhist desire for nirvana or oneness, which is around the letting go of ego.
So people want to return to that infantile state of mind wherein they have a very dim measure or memory or pre-memory of happiness.
And so you have the Garden of Eden, and you have all of these source mythologies, and you have the noble savage, and you have the wise Indian, and all of this kind of stuff, right?
Wherein there is a...
In a dim prehistory, there is happiness and oneness and perfection and so on.
And then, of course, what happens is the crime of disobedience, right?
And this, I think, is very, very important.
Human beings are so fundamentally untrained in the truth, in their personal lives, that I know that this sounds like a blanket condemnation, and I do get a lot of that, and forgive me for that, but it is not a blanket condemnation of people to say they lack knowledge and are in error.
Copernicus did not say all human beings are retarded and evil because they don't know about the heliocentric model of the universe, or the solar system.
But if you had said to him when he first came up with this theory and knew it was true or correct, if you'd have said to him, do people know this?
He would have said no, and he would have been accurate.
So that's just my belief, right?
That it's not that parents are innately evil or bad or there's something fundamentally wrong with the family or anything like that.
It's just there's knowledge of this stuff.
We're in a pretty primitive and unsophisticated state.
So, this is just knowledge that we need to work to gain and to communicate and to live.
But, we'll talk about the narcissistic mother and the narcissistic mother's effect on this kind of, or the fertility that this kind of illusion...
Let me work with a metaphor that works.
The fertile soil that allows this illusion to grow, of oneness, followed by disobedience, followed by...
Badness. Well...
A lot of moms are narcissists, right?
And this is not because moms are innately bad or evil or human beings are innately bad or evil.
We're just raised badly. We're raised in state schools.
We're raised with bad family values.
We're raised with an enormous amount of illusion and belief in things that aren't true, like gods and states and the virtues of family, which is back to a very primitive form of clanism or tribalism.
We're just raised with a lot of errors.
When you have a lot of errors, you have a lot of narcissism.
That's just inevitable. Because the world is constantly disproving our errors, right?
You go into the trees, you can't find the forest anywhere.
You kick over all the leaves you want, you're not going to find a little blob of forest there that defines the trees.
You're going to find a bunch of trees, right?
So reality is constantly undoing us, constantly attacking our errors.
Well, not actively, but just naturally.
And that's where defenses come from, right?
Reality is constantly disproving us.
Our beliefs, right? Our fantasies.
So if I believe I'm the hottest guy in the world but can't pick up a woman in the bar, I'm going to get resentful, I'm not going to question my beliefs, and I'm going to have all sorts of problems because, you know, the basic reality is I think I'm hot but I can't pick up women in bars!
I think... I'm a great athlete, but I can't win any competitions.
I think there is a god, but I can't get any answers to my prayers.
I think that I need to pray to figure out things in life, but I go to MapQuest when I've got to drive somewhere.
Constantly, reality is disproving our fantasies, and that's where the anger comes from.
The anger in the species, right?
Fundamentally, this is where the rage of the species comes from.
That we desperately want these illusions because we're told that they're good.
But reality keeps disproving them, and so we get very angry, and fearful, and frustrated, and hysterical.
This is where the aggression of the species comes from.
Now, people who are not mired in error don't need aggression.
Need to be assertive, right?
Not aggressive, not hysterical.
So, when When narcissists have babies, I'm going to oversimplify this just for the sake of time, believe it or not.
When narcissists have babies, then they too feel at one with the baby, right?
The baby is a blob of eating and pooping, right?
And crying. And the baby is affectionate, as we talked about recently in the podcast, Your Children Do Not Love You.
It's just a biological attachment.
They fall asleep on your chest and they think that you are a living god, right?
Babies do. And they fuel your narcissism.
They are completely dependent upon you.
They do not challenge you. They do not criticize you.
They do not look at you skeptically.
They do not question you. They do not disobey you.
So for narcissists, babies, other than the irritants of sleeplessness and so on, babies are great.
Because narcissism is an infantile personality.
So the narcissist, in a sense, has the most in common with a baby.
But then cometh, oh, the sadness, oh, the horror!
Then cometh the terrible twos.
Then cometh the time when the child doth have the temerity to question and to disobey, and to resist and to rebel, and to throw food across a table, and to say no, and to be inconvenient in a psychological, right? And then, fundamentally, the narcissist is enraged.
It is a betrayal of fundamental proportions.
And, of course, it is an evocation of the memory of the trauma that produced the narcissistic stunted growth situation to begin with, right?
When the baby becomes a toddler and begins to assert his independence from the mother...
The mother who was herself crushed at that age feels a great deal of anxiety and hostility.
The very independence of the child is threatening the stability of her narcissistic character traits.
And the child's independence, growing independence, not only threatens the mother's narcissistic character formation...
But she also believes that as she was a child and was attacked for her independence, so her child is going to be attacked for his independence.
And so she must smother him.
She must control him.
She must. It's only humane from this perspective.
There was a MASH episode, it was the last MASH episode, where...
Oh God, I'm dating myself.
Hawkeye Pierce was miserable, and actually I think in an institution, because he'd been on a bus with a crying baby, and there was great danger.
I don't know, the Viet Cong were...
Oh no, it was not the Viet Cong, it was the Korean War.
North Koreans were there, and they were hiding.
And the baby was crying.
And he kept turning around and said, get that baby to shut up!
We're going to get killed!
And the mother ends up smothering the baby.
That has resonance for people because that is...
Right, I... I must crush you because I'll do it more gently than the world will.
Right? So, not only does the narcissistic mother feel that the growing independence of the child attacks her own narcissism or begins to reveal it, because the narcissism is an absolute, no choice but, and if the child is independent and successful, the narcissism is revealed as a choice, which means that the mother did not have to be attacked when she herself were young, which means that her parents were bad, which means that her marriage is probably bad, which means, which means, which means, let's back up from that chasm, shall we?
Get back in the box! So the mother is like, hey, you know, it's the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down.
It's the tall poppy that gets beheaded.
I can't let you grow or you'll be forever attacked in this world.
So for your own good, I must do that which is painful for you, and I must attack your independence in the same way that I must make you brush your teeth.
You don't like it, maybe it's annoying, maybe it feels bad, in the same way that I have to take you to get yourself inoculated from smallpox and diphtheria and typhus and typhoid and all this sort of stuff.
Yes, it's a needle, yes it's painful, but the alternative is far worse.
And so she begins to become angry at him.
For not understanding that she's crushing him for his own good.
And also because he evokes great anxiety in her through his growing independence because she didn't make it.
and she must believe that it is good to not make it because the alternative is far worse.
So if we understand this pattern, pattern, then I think we can understand what is actually going on with the fantasy of, boy, back in the day, back in the prehistory of the species, all was wonderful, all was harmonious.
And then, insert evil here, control was needed to be instituted and suffering began.
Not because of the sins of the parent, not because of the sins of the God, but because of the sins of the child, right?
Because the most powerful thing that you can say to a child is, that's bad.
What you're doing is bad. Because all children want to be good.
All human beings.
Almost all human beings. I think all human beings want to be good.
good.
It's just some people have to burn that out of themselves and become sociopathic because they're just given such self-destructive ethics.
And so the child believes, or is taught to believe, or has this belief repeatedly inflicted upon him.
Thank you.
That it is the disobedience to the mother that is wrong, that is evil, that is immoral.
Just as the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was the evil which caused the fall, which caused Adam to have to labor and Eve to have to experience childbirth.
So... If we understand that the child perceives that he is bad for disobeying his mother,
whereas formerly he existed in a pure state of harmony with his mother, and that the subsequent rule of his mother was provoked by his disobedience, that he is the proximate and immoral cause of his mother's controlling behavior,
If he is to blame for his mother's dictatorship, then we can see how this translates, of course, into how people view the prehistory of the species, the tribe, the state, and so on.
So it is because human beings are willfully disobedient and bad that we need a government.
Oh, we must have a government because people are willful and disobedient and bad.
The government, the existence of the government, is provoked by the evil of the citizens.
In the same way, the dictatorship of the mother is provoked by the disobedience, read, independence of the child.
Don't make me hit you.
Well, this is how we rescue the virtue of our parents, is we take the blame on ourselves.
I mean, that's the genius behind original sin, right?
You don't even have to be in the room to get charged with the crime.
You can have a perfect alibi and still be convicted of the crime.
The perfect alibi is, I wasn't in the Garden of Eden.
I didn't even know where the damn thing is.
Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if you have the perfect alibi.
You're still convicted of the crime.
And so, when we look at this situation...
And we apply it to how people view anarchism in ancient Ireland, in ancient Iceland, in modern-day Somalia, and so on.
We can see that, essentially, it's sort of a Lord of the Flies argument, right?
In the absence of a central and controlling and virtuous entity, the state, or whatever, God, then...
People act in willful and hellish and destructive and without a government all a civil war.
So the government is a regretful necessity caused by the violence and immaturity of the citizens.
Just as the brutality of the parents and let us not imagine for a moment that everybody doesn't know or that anybody forgets that the state is brutal.
The brutality of the parents is provoked by the disobedience of the children.
Not that the disobedience of the children is provoked by the brutality, the brutality of the parents.
And this blame the victim...
This blamed the citizens.
There was a time way back when, when everything was harmonious, but then we needed to state because people were bad.
No. There was never a time in the past when things were harmonious.
The state is not required because people are bad.
People are bad because they believe that the state is required, and thus they get a state, and thus they splinter and fragment their own integrity.
They believe in fundamental illusions, and illusions bring death, like really, really and completely, not metaphorically.
Illusions bring death.
And it really is only possible to maintain the fantasy of the state by transposing or imposing the child-parent template onto society.
Thank you.
I mean, it's so completely and totally obvious that if you say, when you're talking about society, you're always talking about adults, right?
If you say we need a state because people are bad, it's so obviously and completely logical, or rather illogical, right?
Because if we need a state because people are bad, as we've talked about before, then clearly the people who will run the state will also be bad.
They will just be bad with near infinitely more power than they would have without the state.
The worse people are, the less you can have a state, right?
The more murderous people are, The less you can start arming them.
If there are five people who want to kill each other in a room, you're going to provoke enormous violence by throwing a gun in there!
A loaded gun. They're all going to start scrambling for it and beating each other up to try and get a hold of it.
So even if everybody totally wants to murder each other, you can't have a state.
So the only way that that fantasy can be sustained is if people differentiate the government, the people in the government, in some fundamental way.
And the only way to do that is to project the parent-child paradigm and say that the children are bad and therefore they need a parent, and people are bad and therefore they need a state.
And the state would much rather that people were good so that it wouldn't have to be a state, and parents would much rather their children behave so they wouldn't have to hit them or scream at them or tyrannize them in other ways, abuse them, verbally, physically, emotionally, sexually.
And so this is the only way that the fantasy of the state can be maintained, through one of two ways, both of which are...
Centred on the family, the family itself, and of course of religion.
Because with religion you get two fantasies which are utterly destructive of liberty and joy.
Freedom. One is that there is perfect knowledge out there that only some people have access to.
The priests, the politicians, and the other is that God puts the rulers in place.
So these two fantasies, which of course are completely erroneous and result in perhaps more deaths than any other, I mean, families more spiritual deaths and psychological deaths and stagnation and revulsion and depression and self-hatred, but I mean, the state is the outward agent of murder, of the fantasies, of the murders that fantasies create.
Demand. Demand.
Demand. Fantasies are fed with endless blood, never full.
It's like peeing into space.
So once you have worked through the family issues, once you have worked through your family issues and you have realized that your parents did not act out of virtue, you, but out of fear and out of a desire to control and out of anxiety, and that it was all about them and not about you.
Once you understand that, then it's easy to understand the motives of the state, which is to control you for the sake of power, for the sake of money, control. - Oh, they'll tell you it's about you.
This hurts me more than it hurts you.
Leadership is a burden.
It's not an easy job.
But I'm called to do it.
Serve my people. Right?
And parents say, well, we just serve the children.
Nonsense. The parents manipulate and brutalize the children to avoid the anxiety of their own illusions.
They reproduce the control that they themselves were broken by in order to avoid the anxiety of re-experiencing and morally judging the control they were subjected to.
And thus, breaking the cycle of violence.
I didn't get to statelessness except through the family.
I didn't de-state until years after I'd de-food.
Because once you penetrate and see that what we talk about in the abstract is almost always the deepest and most personal aspects of our own histories, then we see that working on the state, voting for Ron Paul and nonsense like that, has nothing to do with achieving freedom.
In fact, it's a way of avoiding The personal freedom that we most need to pay attention to, the examination, the exhumation, and the examination of our personal history so that we do not confuse the world with ourselves, so that we do not make blanket nonsensical statements about anthropology because of our own personal prehistories,
that we do not write prescriptions for the salvation of society based on immature avoidant mechanisms within our own personalities.
That we don't say that the way that the world should be saved is to eat ice cream Why? Because, when it comes right down to it, we just like ice cream.
Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it.
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