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Sept. 7, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:02
859 Minarchism as Enabling (audio to a video)

Politics as addiction

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Good afternoon, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing most excellently.
It is the 7th of September, 2007, 12.25 p.m.
Don La Afternoon. My book, On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, available for a mere 18 bucks and change plus shipping, will, I think, give you some wonderful, wonderful tools to bring truth, philosophy, virtue, happiness, and joy into your very natural-born daily existence.
Now... I wanted to talk today about, I think, an interesting way of understanding the problems around minarchism.
And for those who aren't philosophy geeks like moi, minarchism is the philosophy that the small government is very good.
The smallest government is best. This is libertarianism and the people who are keen on Ron Paul and getting rid of the income tax and the IRS and Medicare and Medicaid.
But a small government is required for courts.
National defense and, you know, maybe roads and things like that.
So I'd like to talk about some of the problems involved in that philosophy, which I consider to be one of the most dangerous philosophies around, and I'll make the case you can let me know what you think.
Let me start, though, with a couple of things that have popped out of the Planet Paul world.
And this is a third-party report.
I haven't really found anything that he said.
I haven't looked. But this seems to be a thing that is reasonable.
Somebody wrote to me and said about Ron Paul.
He said, "Ron Paul is still to this day critical that Washington has not pursued bin Laden in Pakistan.
Ron Paul is not an anarchist, we get that already.
It is his minarchist constitutional view that if they know or have strong evidence of who committed the 9/11 attacks, that it is Washington's responsibility to bring them to justice." And, uh...
I'd like to sort of point out the perils of politics and the nonsense hypocrisy lies falsehood and corruption that is involved in making a statement like that.
So, if Ron Paul did make a statement like that, and this is a pretty common statement for even libertarians and particularly the bloodthirsty objectivists at the ARI to hold, Then what they're saying is that if we can find the man who ordered the attacks upon New York that killed 3,000 people, and please, if you believe that the government did it, don't fill my inbox with this nonsense.
I have no interest in figuring out who committed 9-11, who was behind it, and, you know, at what temperature steel melts and all that kind of stuff.
I can consider it completely irrelevant to the purpose at hand, which is talking about ethics in the real world.
So... If Ron Paul has criticized Washington for not bringing to justice, finding and bringing to justice the man who ordered the deaths of 3,000 Americans, then I have a pretty basic question to ask Ron Paul and all of those who bay out in support of him,
which is this. If it is a moral crime to order the deaths of thousands of people, Then I'm not exactly sure why anyone is talking about bin Laden, who is hiding somewhere in the bowels of Pakistan, nowhere to be found, perhaps, when we have one George W. Bush, who ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis sitting right there in Washington.
If it is a crime to order the deaths of thousands of foreigners, which is why bin Laden should be brought to justice, put on trial, put to death, put in jail, who knows what.
Why are people talking about some guy who's floating around somewhere we don't know, when we pretty much know the address of George Bush, who committed a far more egregious international crime through ordering the invasion of Iraq?
Similarly, I think that those who support al-Qaeda, those who write checks to support them, who give them the means and the ability to pursue the crimes that they do, are also considered to be Complicit or accountable to the terrorism that results.
Well, I can understand if you vote for George Bush the first time.
I don't think there's anything moral about it, but I can understand that you may have been in a state of nature if you voted for George Bush.
I know somebody who did. And then he goes to war under these crazy pretenses by lying to everyone and going off and killing hundreds of thousands, displacing half a million after the bombing campaigns of the 1990s, which killed half a million Iraqi children.
Um, but if you voted for George Bush after If you found out that the war was based on a lie, a falsehood, a pretense, a manipulation, total mounds of blood-soaked bullshit, then it's hard to see how you're not to some degree complicit in the continuation of the war.
So we wish to prosecute bin Laden as a war criminal, as the mastermind behind attacks that kill civilians.
I'm not sure why we focus so hard on trying to find him on the foggy planet of Pakistan, When Pennsylvania Avenue is not that hard to find on a map, and I don't know that Ron Paul has talked about sending George Bush to The Hague or trying him for war crimes, but if he hasn't, then his ethics, his supposed ethics, are mere demagogic and manipulative and vile bullshit.
Because if you're going to stand on principle and you're going to say that people who ordered the deaths of others must be put to death or thrown in jail but tried for war crimes and this is why we must be in hot pursuit of bin Laden, well...
How about starting a little closer to home with somebody who awarded far more deaths?
I mean, do you realize Iraq has a population of about 27 million, which is less than one-tenth of the population of America?
The equivalent deaths, if we assume that only 100,000 Iraqis have been killed, which is not the case, the equivalent deaths in America would be about 1 to 1.2 to 1.3 million people.
1.2 to 1.3 million people.
So, if somebody, some foreigner that we knew exactly where he was had ordered the deaths of over a million Americans, Anyway, so you sort of get where the moral problem is with politics.
You simply can't say this stuff or you're never going to get elected.
But you have to appeal to this on principles.
And those who appeal on principles but from a demagogic populist rhetorical standpoint are sophists, as Socrates pointed out thousands of years ago.
So this is just the old enemy come to life.
The enemy of truth or the enemy of integrity who appeals to ethics while really actually just stoking the fuels of the mob, right?
So I'm going to put forward a metaphor, and you can let me know what you think about it.
This is my particular heydon for minochism, and you can tell me if it's reasonable or not, or if you find flaws in the argument.
I'm always happy to correct my viewpoints based on better reasoning or better evidence.
Let's say that I am a raging alcoholic.
I am just crazy for the drinking.
And whenever I touch a drop of booze, I escalate my drinking very rapidly to the point where I end up going on drunken drives around town, shooting out the window, clipping people in my car, running over children, wounding people, throwing kids in wheelchairs into the ditch, and running off a cliff, and so on, right?
And then I go and steal everybody's money to pay for my medical treatment.
Right, so if every time, every time I start drinking, this is the inevitable and relatively rapid result, what would you say to someone who gave me the advice, Steph, I know that you can't handle alcohol in any way, shape or form. I know that every time you take even one drop of alcohol, it escalates to this drunken binge when you go around mowing people down in your car and shooting into crowds.
What would you say to somebody who said to me, Steph, Steph, Steph, Steph, Steph.
What you need to do, you see, is you need to cut down on your drinking.
Every time, every time I do so much as touch alcohol, it escalates into a drunken, raging, destructive, violent, bloody binge.
And your advice to me is not Don't drink.
Don't ever touch alcohol.
Don't even go near the planet alcohol.
But your advice to me is, just shave it down a little, friend.
You can handle drinking. Drinking is good.
Drinking is great. You just, you've gone too far.
You know, just cut back a little.
But for 20 years, every time I've touched a drop, I've done exactly the same thing.
What would you say to somebody like that?
Other than... What are you insane?
Every time this guy touches drink, he goes on a rampage, kills people.
And you're telling him to cut down on his drinking?
But this is a binary proposition.
I drink, I do this.
Wouldn't it not be completely mental to say, just, you know, shave back the drinking, cut it back.
You've taken ten drinks an hour, you should take one drink an hour.
Switch to light beers.
But it doesn't matter. Any alcohol does this to me.
Like a Native American, I have the enzyme to process it.
I just go completely nuts.
So if you're somebody who says to me, not Steph, you're a raging alcoholic, you should never touch drink again.
And now that you know this, you're completely and totally responsible for any drinking that you do.
You cannot handle alcohol.
There's no possibility that you can handle alcohol.
You have proven for 20, 30, 40 years that you've never been able to handle alcohol.
You have got to never touch alcohol again because you are a raging alcoholic.
That would be A rational statement to make to such a person, to such a hellish addict.
But to say, yes, Steph, drinking is good.
Drinking is good. Drinking is right.
Don't let all these people tell you you shouldn't drink.
They're just squares who want to, like, take all the fun out of your life.
You can handle it. Just, you know, cut it back a little.
Or a lot. Well, this is what is known as, in psychological circles, enabling.
Now, enabling is The habit that people who are around alcoholics, codependents they're called, who are around alcoholics, it's the habit that they have of covering for them, paying for their bills, making excuses for them, going to buy them alcohol, even while nagging them to quit drinking.
It is the actions that they take that allow the person to be an alcoholic.
In other words, if I have a wife who'll pay for my bills and call in sick for me if I'm too hungover to go to work and just never leaves me no matter how much I drink or whatever, then she's actually allowing me, enabling me, encouraging me to drink because she's not letting me accept the consequences of my behavior.
She's shielding me from those consequences, which is a very sadistic thing to do in its own way.
It's a very subtle kind of sadism to shield people from the consequences of their actions.
It infantilizes them. It keeps their addictions rampant.
It destroys their souls.
It is a very destructive thing to do, this kind of enabling.
And it really is the most destructive thing in a lot of ways.
Somebody who comes up and says, you're a raging alcoholic, just stop drinking, is telling the truth.
You can't force anyone, but, you know, you're telling the truth.
Somebody who says, ah, drinking's good, you can handle it, just, you know, cut back, you've gone too far, blah, blah, blah.
This is enabling. So I'm going to put forward the proposition.
That after, say, 5,000 years of human history, or more, we should say 5,000, since the Egyptians onwards, states always grow, governments always grow.
No human being, no human being has ever been shown to be able to handle political power in a positive and benevolent way, because you can't use violence to achieve the good.
You can't initiate the use of force to achieve virtue.
No human being has ever been shown to be able to handle this kind of power.
No government has ever stayed in a stable state.
They grow, they grow, they grow, they cause social collapse, they cause wars, they put people either in the hard prisons of incarceration or the soft prisons of welfare and dependency.
They enslave the masses. They run up massive debts.
They overprint the money. They cause inflation.
They rob people blind.
They indoctrinate the children with all the stupid foolishness and obedient propaganda in the world, destroying the minds of the children, destroying the lives of the poor, destroying medical advance.
Governments are a freaking cancer on society.
Always and forever. There are no exceptions.
Even if you go back to the beginning of the United States in 1776, this was a small, small, small government with all of the rational controls that conceivably could have been put on by a group of highly intelligent people.
Okay, well, forget the slavery and the rights of women and the Native Americans.
But let's just say, for, you know, the old average white guy, it was a fairly good deal as far as governments went.
How long did it take to break the mounds of the Constitution?
A couple of years. Whiskey rebellion, civil war, slavery still continued.
Printing money, centralized banks, First World War, Depression, New Deal, Second World War, Vietnam, the Great Society, the Iraq War, all the war interventions in the Middle East, funding for Israel.
It doesn't take any time at all.
It doesn't take any time at all.
Less than a century after the founding of America, you've got a civil war, or the war of northern aggression, whatever the hell you want to call it, 600,000 people are killed, murdered, killed, millions enslaved.
So even if we get the government back to this size, to a constitutional 1776 size, it's going to take less than a generation for it to start incarcerating its citizens.
Violence corrupts! Power corrupts!
We know this! We know this.
No human being has ever been able to use the power of the state benevolently.
No state has ever stayed within the bounds of serving the people, but instantly becomes a brutal tyrant that begins enslaving its own citizens.
Every single time it's the same story, over and over and over again.
And if you know enough to use the term minarchism and say, I support Ron Paul, you know this.
You know this.
I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know.
So really, like just between you and I, what are you doing?
What fantasy are you living in that no human being in history has ever been able to use the power of the state for good?
No state has ever shrunken save through bankruptcy and social chaos.
So what are you doing?
What are you doing, my friends?
Saying, well, this one guy, Mr.
Ron Paul, he can handle his alcohol.
Every other human being gets drunk and goes on a spree and kills people, but this guy, this guy, oh man, let me tell you, this guy, he can handle it.
It's madness, my friends.
It is madness.
It's cruel to Ron Paul.
It's cruel to the very idea of humanity.
It's cruel to all of the knowledge that we've had.
It's destructive in its essence.
It is very, very corrupt.
I'm not saying you're a corrupt person if you support Ron Paul because maybe you didn't know this and maybe I'm wrong.
I come up with an argument. Prove me wrong.
Prove me wrong. I'd be overjoyed.
I'd be overjoyed to be proven wrong on this.
No human being can handle power.
No government does anything but expand the attacks upon its own citizens and those overseas.
There's no exceptions.
Nobody can handle this power.
Nobody can handle this power.
The point is not to cut down on our drinking, because that is simply going to Enable us to drink again and to cause more problems and more destruction.
We have to give up on this fantasy that power and violence and the coercion of the state can be used for anything but evil.
Anything but evil.
No one can take up an army and use it for good.
No one. Forget the Second World War.
That was the result of America's intervention in the First World War, and the governments of the West didn't protect their citizens anyway.
Forty million people got killed.
That's what the state did, both in Germany and in the West.
Nobody can handle this alcohol, but all we keep doing is handing alcohol to politicians and saying, hey, you can handle it.
You won't get drunk, you won't drive around, you won't shoot into a crowd, you won't mow down kids or send them overseas to get murdered.
We've got to stop.
We've got to stop handing these drinks to these alcoholics.
We've got to stop thinking that the state can be good.
It is an incredibly destructive fantasy.
And those people who are minarchists, Who know a little bit about history, who know a little bit about power, who know quite a lot about politics, have very little excuse for not knowing this and not accepting this.
This is just a mad delusion that we have to let go of.
We have to let go of it in order for the species of the planet to survive and flourish, of course.
No one, not you, not me, not Ron Paul, not George Bush, not Vladimir Putin, not anybody can handle violent power And the brutality that is the state.
It is impossible. It is inconceivable.
It will never happen. So stop enabling them.
Thank you so much for watching.
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