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Oct. 13, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:31
883 Statism as Self-Manipulation

How statism helps people manage their anxieties

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Good morning, everybody. It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well. Thank you for rejoining me on the podcasting series.
I'm sorry that there has been just a tad less podcasting lately.
That's because I've been working on this mofo of a book, Universally Preferable Behavior.
And let me tell you, my friends, as far as universally preferable goes, if I never have to write a book this hard again, I will universally prefer it.
So, should be out in the next couple of days.
Available for your perusal, and massive quantities of it available for gift-giving for the Christmas season.
Now, I am going to do whatever it takes to get this book into your hot little hands, and if that means sending you a free copy with a pay-me-whenever clause, I am more than happy to do that.
I am going to release it as an audiobook, I am going to release it as a PDF, I am going to release it as printed, And I am going to do whatever it takes to get this book out there.
So, if you would like to donate, I promise to use it, if you ask me to, for advertising and free copy mail-out to everyone on the planet, starting with Z. And if you would like to order a bunch of copies, please let me know, and we will arrange something.
I know that with On Truth, I could send you 12 copies, including postage, for $150.
I guess originally US, now Canadian.
So I hope that you will help me in getting out what I think is an excellent and necessary book.
So I hope that you will join me in that.
And let me tell you, on a personal note, I've missed you.
I've missed our chats.
I've missed doing this podcasting.
This book is so draining that sometimes I would work in it for an hour or two and then need to take a nap.
It's so tiring. Now, I've tried to make it a little less tiring to read, but that, of course, will be up to you.
There are certain aspects of it that are quite technical, but...
I have tried to make it as enjoyable as possible and to frame it in a fable.
So, hopefully that will work and will make some sense to you, but I'm very pleased to have this beast finished.
So that I hope that you will pick it up.
I urge you to pick it up.
I virtually, since we are in audio, I virtually insist that you pick it up for you and yours because I think that if I have pulled it off, with the help of you lovely listeners and this conversation, then we have a Quantum Leap on our hands.
And wouldn't it be cool to get your hands on the first edition of a Quantum Leap?
I think it's possible.
I think it's done. But we shall see.
So, enough of that.
On Truth, the Tyranny of Illusion, which is the setup to the UPB book, and I think well worth reading ahead of time, Is now available for download, PDF, 1195, MP3, full audiobook rendition, 1495, and a massive price reduction on the book to 1849.
So, and if you can't afford it, just let me know.
Send me an email. I will send you a free copy in the format of your choice.
Pay me when you can.
And of course, if you think it sucks, you don't have to pay me at all.
So, let us continue on with some of the topics that have been boiling in the back burner.
It's not like when I'm working on the UPB book, the ideas stop, they just pile up.
But let us continue with this stuff that we've been working on, or when I say we've been working on, I've been pounding into the ground.
This question of using others to manage your own emotions.
Let us continue with that question.
Because, lo and behold, there is a reason Why I have been grinding that one into the dust recently in listener conversations, the call-in shows, and my own podcasts.
But just before we begin, in my continuing necessary quest to rid myself of all social inhibition, I have decided to combat the wind involved in these walks.
By tying a large bag of felt around my microphone, and I think it's working pretty well.
But just so you can understand the challenges of the visualizations, I now look like I'm taking a long walk in the woods with a purple triple attached to my cheek, just so you can see how it sees.
But to return to the topic at hand, let's have a look at This challenge or this question of using other people to manage your own emotions, using other people to manage your own anxieties, and how fundamentally narcissistic that all is.
And we all have that trend, and we all have that trait, and I'm not above it.
I would be surprised if you're above it.
It's something that we're just raised with.
It's so foundational to how human beings interact with each other that it's often mistaken.
For human nature, right? In the same way that superstition would have been mistaken for human nature before the rise of the scientific method and mercantilism or aristocracy before the rise of the free market.
When something's common, it's almost always justified.
And when it's common, it means it's coerced.
Then it's almost always justified with reference to human nature.
But of course... It's like saying it's human nature to wear striped uniforms when the world is a prison.
It's not human nature, it's just what people do when they're forced to.
So, let's take a look at an interaction that is very common to us who talk about freedom and anarchy and the universalization of the non-aggression principle of the Knapp.
Let's look at an interaction that is so common that we would almost be tempted to think that it is human nature, and then it shall be revealed, at least what I've been working with, with this idea that we should not use other people to manage our emotions in a political context.
Remember, the state is just our own personal bad habits writ large.
The state is just our own personal bad habits writ large.
And when I say bad, I just mean illogical.
And again, if you want to know what that means, the UPB book will be your friend and your enemy.
So when we say to someone in a political discussion that we want to get rid of the government, what inevitably comes back?
Well, what inevitably comes back, of course, is...
The reaction... It's hard to call it a question, because it's just a reaction.
The reaction of, what about the poor, the ignorant, the sick, the old, and this kind of stuff?
What about those things?
And the interesting question, of course, is, do the responses that come back to us, do these reactions, arise...
From a reasoned examination of the evidence, or are they just an anxiety-reducing reaction on the part of other people?
And I think the way that I approach this kind of stuff is to evaluate the rapidity of the response.
So, when I was a kid, I remember one of the nicest memories I have, and one of the few nice ones with my brother, other than the fact that he's a pretty funny guy, is when I was a kid, I remember being very young and thinking that the world, that the moon was the Earth, right? It looks like there were little continents on it and so on.
And, of course, where that placed us, I hadn't really thought through, or where that placed me in that cosmology world.
But of course I'd seen all these pictures of the world and it was round and had shadows like continents and so on and so I looked at the moon and thought that was the world and I remember our mom would drop us off at a babysitter's and go out and this was an older woman and I guess one night my mom was out for the evening and we slept over and in the bedroom my brother using fruit and marbles and stuff like that explained to me the solar system and I thought it was really cool.
And that sort of began for me a fairly lengthy interest in astronomy, which results in me getting a telescope and recording sunspots and all that good geeky stuff.
Now this was all new to me, and because it was new to me, I did not have any particularly rapid reactions to it.
So if I've never heard of Buddhism and I fly to Thailand and somebody says, let's go see a Buddhist temple, and I'm like, I don't know what that is, I'm not going to have any particular opinions about it.
Just as I didn't have any particular reactive and strong opinions about the solar system when I was a kid.
Sort of an exploration of the solar system.
Now, it's important to understand that when you begin talking about anarchism with people, you are introducing something that they've never heard before.
I mean, yes, they've heard the term anarchism, and they have all the negative connotations, but market anarchy, the non-aggression principle, the illegitimacy of government, or whatever.
This is all new information.
And it's important to understand What is going on for these people emotionally?
Because you don't want to argue at an intellectual level when somebody's being defensive at an emotional level because that's incredibly frustrating for you and I don't want the truth to be something that makes you frustrated and upset and alienates you from people and makes you hate the world and so on because we can't change the world unless we love it and it is hard to love a corrupt world for its potential without disliking its actuality but still we must struggle too because if we do not approach people with love and that doesn't mean that it's not tough love at times then we are not going to get Anywhere other than taking away our own happiness,
because you don't want to give up the pleasures of collectivism, and those pleasures are many, otherwise human beings would be completely irrational to cling to them.
You don't want to give up the pleasures of collectivism and receive only frustration as a reward for your adherence to truth.
So, you must find a way to love those you're debating with, and if you can't love them, don't debate them.
That's essential for your happiness and for the progress of the truth as well.
So let's have a look at somebody's emotional reaction to the idea of a stateless society and try to understand what is going on for them.
And again, I would give you reference to the rapidity of their emotional response, just so you can understand what's going on and unpack it.
Not just from a philosophical, but from a psychological standpoint, which is where I think our focus needs to be.
If I am a five-year-old kid and my brother explains to me the nature of the solar system, I don't have any investment in anything.
I haven't gone on record as saying that the solar system is Earth-centered.
My income does not depend upon people thinking that the stars are a bowl of spotted light around the world.
And so I'm just curious. Well, this is just new information.
Tell me more, right? Maybe agree, disagree, but I'm not going to be hostile, and I'm not going to have a rapid reaction.
And we've all been in those debates.
In fact, sometimes it seems like those are the only debates outside of FDR, and sometimes within it, that we get into.
Which are the debates where people immediately snort at us.
Anarchism! Ugh! Crazy!
It'd be instant chaos. Corporations would take over the world.
Everybody would be enslaved. It's a system of hatred, saith Noam Chomsky.
So, when we get these very rapid emotional reactions, we know that this is not an intellectual evaluation of our position.
If you compare my receptivity, or my reception of, the question of, what does the solar system look like?
Compared to, say, the cardinals, priests, bishops, and popes' reaction to Galileo saying exactly the same thing, we can see that there's a difference, right?
There's a significant difference.
I did not try to torture my brother to get him to recant that the earth doth move.
I was just curious, because I had no investment.
I had no stake. It did not provoke anxiety.
In me to hear the nature of the solar system.
And this is where philosophers, we philosophers, and of course I definitely include myself in this category of people who fall down regularly, this is where we get confused.
So I've just noticed, of course, recently on the board, which is why I wanted to advance this topic and not string out the don't use others to control your own emotions thing anymore, is that people go out and they get whammed, they get smacked down.
Oh, we shouldn't have a government.
Well, what about the poor? With charity?
It's not going to be enough. Are people so absolutely certain?
And there is, of course, an undertone of hostility, which is why one guy was having a debate with somebody about self-ownership, and the guy said, well, I don't own my arm.
My parents own my arm, and the government owns part of it, and I only own a portion of it.
Well, that's mad, of course.
It's completely insane, biologically untrue.
But people will grab onto that stuff.
And of course, the real question we're always trying to answer is, why?
And how do we undo it?
How do we get the truth across to people who are defensive?
It's a very, very interesting challenge.
Let me continue to work my way through this issue.
So, when Galileo goes to the Pope and says, the Earth moves and the Sun is the center of the solar system, then the Pope immediately gets angry.
Immediately! Immediately! Whereas when I'm five and I'm told that the sun is the center of the solar system, I'm like, cool, interesting.
I mean, I'll look up some more and learn more about it and so on, right?
So I don't have the same reaction that the Pope does.
And when I first heard the proposition, and the taxation was coercion, and that...
The poor were not helped by welfare.
Well, it wasn't hard for me to accept it.
I was, I guess, 15 or 16 or so.
It wasn't hard for me to accept it, and, of course, it perfectly accorded with my empirical experience of welfare, which was that I grew up in some pretty dirt poor neighborhoods, and it was very easy to see that this kind of, quote, charity was detrimental, deleterious, disastrously so, for the poor.
So I reacted to that proposition in the same way that I reacted to the proposition that the Sun is the center of the solar system.
It's like, oh, that's interesting. Tell me more.
So the question is, why do some of us react with curiosity to the question of a state of society, and why do some of us react with curiosity?
Hostility, contempt, and rapid and aggressive, or sarcastic, which is another form of, or passive-aggressive, oh, I guess you just want the poor to starve to death, right?
Why is it that some people react in that way, while other of us are just like, well, that's interesting, tell me more.
I'm not saying I agree, but I can't have an emotional reaction to something that is very new to me, because I don't know the nature and the scope and this and that, right?
So it's pretty easy to see the difference between my personal experience of being told that the sun was the center of the solar system when I was five, and the popes during the time of Galileo, because the pope had gone on record and had his entire power structure, his allegiances,
his income, his very reasons for existence as far as manipulating and controlling other people and so on, went, that if it had turned out, since he was supposed to be infallible, that he had spoken a falsehood, That would be pretty detrimental, of course,
to his entire reason for being, and the reason that he does what he does, and the whole justification for the power of the Church, and whether the Pope at the time attacked Galileo because he felt that Galileo was evil, and was motivated by Satan, and that this The noble pope was attempting to rescue Christendom and the virtue and souls of humanity and blah blah blah.
Or whether he was like, holy shit, if this is true, we're going to lose some income.
And we don't know. I mean, maybe there's some evidence.
I doubt it. But we don't know what is the motivation.
But we do know that when people who are invested in an existing power structure, when they...
are challenged with new information or contradictory information.
They react with hostility.
You know, in the same way that Noam Chomsky, who's embedded in the state intellectual left-wing ecosystem, reacts to anarcho-capitalism with hostility, and without reasoned arguments, but just with hostility.
It threatens an existing power structure.
And of course, that's a lot of what Untruth, the Tyranny of Illusion, the book, NPDF and audiobook, is about.
It's this question of questioning power, speaking truth to power, asking questions of power, questioning the legitimacy that power claims as its justification.
Now, I'm certainly not going to argue that we should try and love those who are defending exploitive, destructive, violent, hegemonic power structures Through appeal to false morality.
I mean, you can't love people like that because that's just so corrupt and degraded that love in that sense would be impossible.
But we can love people, I think, who make emotional mistakes for good reasons and don't know any better.
And that's sort of where, in talking about how it is that we can end up loving the world that we are trying to change, That's where I would suggest we could spend some fruitful amount of time talking about it.
That's what I'm trying to do here.
So, I'm going to put forward a way of looking at those people who have strong or even violent emotional reactions who themselves are not...
Bound into or exploiting an existing power structure.
So we can look at the Pope facing Galileo or your average philosophy professor or public school teacher facing the question of the non-aggression principle of a stateless society.
We can easily understand why those people would have some significant emotional hostilities towards the question of a stateless society.
What's harder to understand... So forget about them.
When you hit this kind of hostility from somebody who's embedded in a power structure and justifying that power structure, you don't go to the police chief and talk about a stateless society.
I mean, you could, but it would be sort of pointless, right?
As a doctor, or I guess as a nutritionist, You don't generally speak about good dietary habits with somebody who's two days away from dying of cancer.
I mean, that's just pain specialist, right?
That's just a pain specialist. So, when you talk to, and let's just pretend it's your brother who's not, you know, maybe he's a software guy, doesn't work in the public sector or whatever, he's not dependent upon state largesse directly and is not Embedded in a power structure and so on.
And when you say to him, I think stateless society is the only moral approach to organization, and he says, bullshit, the poor will get poorer.
He comes up with all of these instant, no curiosity.
When people don't show curiosity, they're almost always being defensive.
Almost always being defensive.
So the question is, well, what are they defending?
What are they attacking, so to speak, when you bring up a stately society and they're not embedded in a hegemony?
Well, if you recall, I was sort of talking recently about the idea that we spend an enormous amount of time and energy in our lives manipulating other people to manage our own anxiety.
I'm going to put forward the proposition that the government, that the state, is little more or less than a massive fabricated mechanism is little more or less than a massive fabricated mechanism or concept through which everybody manages their anxiety about ethics.
And religion, of course, is just another massive fairy tale wherein everybody attempts to manage their anxiety about ethics and physics or science, right?
I mean, empirically, you've got to really hate the poor to advocate welfare.
State-enforced charity, minimum wages, government controls, unionize...
You've got to really hate the poor to advocate this, just empirically.
I mean, even if you didn't know anything about the theory, the morals, just looked at the data.
The number of poor was declining until welfare came in.
The number of poor began increasing.
You've got to really hate poor kids to want to inflict government education on them.
Fourteen years of brain-stultifying, mind-numbing, propagandistic, soul-emptying repetition.
You've got to really hate the poor if you work empirically with regards to the facts of state education.
You've got to really hate the sick if you want to subject them to socialized medicine.
Again, not some of them. Some sick people do very well of socialized medicine.
As a whole, the price of medicine keeps going up, the treatments keep getting fewer and fewer.
So, just empirically, you would not have the reaction of a sickless society, oh my god, that would be disastrous for the poor, the old, the sick, whatever, and the ignorant.
So, what is going on?
Well, I'm going to put forward something here and let me know what you think.
I think that if I say...
If you say to your brother, stateless society, and he says, Oh, the poor!
What about the poor? The poor will become poor.
Well, since we assume he's not bound up in the hegemonic structure, he must, I think, care to some degree about the poor.
He must. He must care.
Or maybe he's just taught to care or told to care he's a bad person if he doesn't care, or whatever.
But let's assume that he does care about the poor.
Now, With the state, he believes that there is a solution in place to take care of the poor.
This is essential.
You say to your brother, state and society says, what about the poor?
Well, of course, if he doesn't care about the poor, but he likes violence, then don't debate with him.
But we have to assume that he does care about the poor.
Now, the government is a massive conceptual mechanism not by which the poor are taken care of, but by which the anxiety about the poor can be dismissed.
Say that again. The government is a massive mental fiction, not through which the poor are taken care of, but with reference to which our anxiety about the poor can be dismissed.
And that is a very different thing from wanting to actually take care of the poor.
So I said earlier, you don't want to use other people to manage your anxieties.
Well, if your brother has anxiety about the poor, and he gives a moral sanction to a group of thugs with guns to, quote, take care of the poor, he is using the government to manage his own anxiety.
He is using others, not just in terms of the state, but in terms of the state's victims among the poor.
He is using Others to manage his own anxiety about the poor.
What to do with the poor? What to do with the poor?
Ah, we got a state. So, in the same way, if we have anxieties, as we do, and I hope the UPP book will put a nail through this vampire's chest, but if we have anxieties about the nature of morality,
what is good, what is virtuous, what is right, If we have anxieties about that, then religion is not designed to answer our anxieties with knowledge, but rather to repress our anxieties.
Right?
Not to cure our anxieties with knowledge, but to repress our anxieties with fantasy.
So we can imagine somebody who feels very anxious when he is alone, and therefore just grabs someone and invents virtue for that person.
So some woman who's terrified of being alone just grabs some guy and makes him into a good guy in her own mind and somebody worth dating, so that she doesn't have to face the anxiety of being alone.
Well, she's creating a fiction called This Guy is a Great Guy, which does not solve her anxiety, her codependent streak, her need to be with somebody.
Otherwise, she faces the emptiness of her false self.
She's not inventing this fantasy in order to solve the problem of anxiety, but in order to repress and bypass the problem of anxiety.
And in so doing...
We'll get to that in a sec.
And if we look in the realm of physics, right?
So in the Middle Ages or whatever, even to a lot of people in the modern world, particularly in America, they feel anxiety...
About maybe what happens when they die.
Maybe they feel anxiety about where they came from.
Maybe they feel anxiety about they want to be certain about morals.
That they're doing the right thing.
And so rather than sort of manfully face that anxiety and use it as a propulsion to gain knowledge.
And I remember this.
I'll come back to that. What they do is they invent an answer.
Not... Because they want to solve the problem, but because they want to rid themselves of the anxiety that not solving the problem, or knowing that the problem is not solved, generates.
It's a form of self-medication, self-drugging, emotional control, emotional self-repression through the manipulation of others.
I remember every time I had a debate using the Randian approach to ethics, I always felt some anxiety.
Like, something's not right about this.
Something's not right about this.
Something doesn't click. Something doesn't work.
And it was only when I began to really face up to that anxiety that I began to gain what I think is some real traction in terms of provable ethics.
But if I just ran back to Ayn Rand and kept reading and reading...
In order to...
Or if I said, well, my anxiety is because I don't understand, I don't know, I don't...
whatever, right? If I did not respect my anxiety as a tool for knowledge, then I just get stuck.
Like, if I'm driving in the wrong direction, I want to feel anxiety, don't I? You know, because I'm so bad with directions, this happens to me continually, right?
Like, I'm driving somewhere, and even if I have fairly decent directions...
You know that vaguely uneasy feeling that you get when you're driving along, you're looking for a particular street, and the streets keep going by, and that street is not there?
Especially when I used to travel for business.
That was killer. Happened all the time.
But I wanted to feel that anxiety because that's what helps me turn around.
And, of course, another option that I have is to stop, crumple up the map, and draw a new map that says you're going in the right direction.
Just make up a map that says you're going in the right direction.
I mean, it's not rational, but it certainly is viable.
Now, of course, one of the challenges that occurs with this is that the anxiety does not vanish.
When you make up a mythology To manage your anxiety, you don't get rid of the anxiety, you just drive it underground.
You make it evil, so to speak.
I mean, in particular areas, you make it evil.
So, if I stop the car when I'm supposed to sort of get somewhere for a job interview and I can't find the place, but I just stop the car and start to go through this whole charade, I make up this whole map, I pretend to have a job interview with a hand puppet or, you know, just to take a silly example.
If I just make up a mythology, which always involves other people and is inflicted on other people, in order to manage my own anxiety, it doesn't get rid of the anxiety, obviously.
Taking heroin does not rid yourself of an infection.
It just means you can't feel it anymore.
It means the infection grows unchecked.
And so, you know the truth in your heart, in your gut, in your soul.
You know the truth. And you know that you're doing an unjust thing.
Because if you really do care about the poor, and I do believe that people do, I really believe that people do, and we know that because that's how the brutality of statist mechanisms, education, welfare, healthcare, that's how it's sold, it's out of concern to the poor.
We know that people care about the poor.
Otherwise, the power mongers would, the rulers would use some other mechanism, or some other mythology.
To sell to the poor, or to sell people on state programs.
But of course, if you make up this mythology, then in a sense, this is where things get really tortured, and this is the root, I think, of the hostility that we face.
If I really care about the poor, and I make up this fantasy that the state is taking care of the poor, Then I'm turning my concern for the poor, which is, we can say, or assume benevolent and nice and decent and all that good stuff.
I'm turning my concern for the poor into a narcissistic self-indulgence that, in fact, really harms the poor.
And this is the sad Distorted mirror of statism.
I think people do care about the poor.
They want the poor to have opportunities.
And the state takes that, inflicts a false and violent mythology of, quote, solutions upon them.
And then they cling to that justification because they care about the poor and they believe that there's some kind of solution which they know deep down is not a solution but is in fact violent and destructive to the poor.
So here's the horrible irony, right, and the incredible complication that goes on at the root of these people's minds.
People say, we need welfare, we need minimum wages, we need unions, we need state protection, this, that, and the other.
Because there are people out there who would harm the poor by exploiting them.
But the very act of imagining that state solutions are helping the poor, which you believe in order to manage your own anxiety about the poor, is itself an exploitation of the poor.
Your concern for the poor is manipulated, and your fear that the poor will be exploited Is turned into you exploiting the poor.
Because I feel anxiety about the poor, I'm going to feed them to the false solutions of the state and of violence.
So that I can feel better about things.
So that I don't have to feel the anxiety about the poor.
There's a solution. Where do we come from?
God made us. I don't have to feel anxiety about my origins.
Just make up an answer.
Am I lost? No!
No! I can deal with my anxiety about being lost just by redrawing the map.
Of course, redrawing the map is an indication that you don't want to be lost.
So the question "what to do about the poor" creates anxiety in people.
And they feel bad if they're a poor people.
And there's reasons for that.
We'll have to get into all of that.
Of course, Christians should feel great that they're poor people because Christ said, cast off all your belongings to those who would follow me.
Christians should hate welfare.
I guess some of them do, right?
But it's more racism. So people feel concerned about the poor.
They want the poor to be helped.
They want the poor kids to have opportunities and to have the possibility for a decent education.
They want that. And then they punk out.
And then they chicken out And they turn bullshit, narcissistic, and exploitive towards the poor.
I am so concerned about the poor, I feel bad that there are poor people, people say.
And then, what do they do?
Do they attempt to alleviate poverty with creative and imaginative and proactive and personal solutions?
No. No.
I feel bad about poor people People say.
The existence of poverty makes me anxious.
So what am I going to work to get rid of?
Poverty? No! My anxiety.
I feel bad that there are poor people.
So the way that I solve the problem is to make up a mythology so I don't feel bad anymore.
I fear for the future of poor people.
Because, lo, they are exploited.
So rather than trying to actively and creatively solve the problem of poverty, I'm going to feed the helpless poor to the maw of the state and dust my hands and call myself content.
I'm afraid that the poor will be exploited, so I throw them into the furnaces of the state so that I don't have to worry about their exploitation, which is exploitive.
And I guarantee you That this is what is occurring when you bring up a stateless society with people and they immediately start lobbing rejections at you, objections.
Without taking the time to process, without asking a single question, without showing any curiosity whatsoever, what they're doing is They're just making up answers to avoid their own anxiety.
The capacity to handle anxiety and to use it as a propulsive force for knowledge and growth is the essential mark of a mature and wise human being.
Not to view anxiety as an enemy.
Not to view anxiety as a negative.
In the same way that to be a healthy human being we need to welcome pain.
Pain is an indication of ill health or problems.
We need to welcome anxiety, not make up mythologies that let us wish it away, repress it, hurt others, throw others into the soft prisons of state welfare, throw other people on the bus,
it's under the bus, throw other people under the bus or on the bus for state education, When we worry about the poor, the solutions that we should demand are rational solutions to involuntary poverty.
When I worry about the poor, I should try and solve the problem of poverty, not the problem of my worry.
Otherwise, my virtue and concern, my empathy, is turned to stale, defensive, and aggressive narcissism.
So I'm going to toss something out there.
As a solution, as a possible solution, let me know what you think.
So when you say, stateless society, and somebody says bullshit, why don't you ask them, real-time relationship, why don't you ask them, when I said stateless society, what did you feel?
Now somebody who's worth debating, somebody who's mature, somebody who can think, And not just react.
He's not just a programmed mythology bot.
Somebody who can handle anxiety will sort of pause and say, you know, when you said stateless society, I felt really uneasy.
You can say, well, because that's what I got.
I got that you felt like you kind of panicked a little bit, right?
And that doesn't mean that you're wrong.
Like if I said, kill the Jews, you'd probably feel uneasy too, because what I'm saying would be evil.
So I'm not saying that you're wrong to feel anxious.
But let's talk about the real issue here, which is not any intellectual opposition to a stateless society, but the anxiety which the concept of a stateless society provokes within you.
Because if you don't deal with that reality, you're all just talking around the elephant in the room.
If somebody's response to stateless society is based on reactive anxiety, or a reaction to their own anxiety, then don't pretend or imagine that an intellectual debate is occurring.
I'm trying to help you save some time.
And not get involved in debates.
You don't want to speak Spanish when somebody else is speaking Urdu, and pretend that you're debating.
Then you'll end up as a determinist, because the outcome of everything will seem to be the same.
You say, stateless society, and it can be anything, right?
I mean, we're just talking stateless society because it's a little easier to talk about than the cult of the family.
Parents, priests, politicians are all feeding off this manipulation of others to reduce the anxiety of ignorance, of error.
So, when you say, I don't see my family anymore, or I'm taking a break from my family, if other people say, oh, that's terrible, don't argue about whether it's terrible or not.
Don't bring rationality to defensiveness.
It's an insult to rationality, and it's a waste of your time, and it's incredibly destructive, of course, to the other person.
Don't pretend that people are being rational when they're not.
And the way to find out if they're being rational, that doesn't mean being non-emotional, but the way to find out if they're being rational is to say, what happened for you just there, like emotionally?
And if they have the capacity for introspection and to be able to separate their feelings from reality or the truth, right, and so on, then they'll say, wow, you know, that's really interesting.
I did just feel, I felt like a kind of panic there.
It's like, well, let's talk about the panic, right?
Let's talk about the anxiety.
Let's talk about the reality.
Let's talk about the truth.
Philosophers, myself included sometimes, always want to spin truth into the abstract.
They want to spin truth into the clouds.
But the truth is dealing with what is actually happening in the present.
It's dealing with what is actually happening in the present.
So you say, state the society, there is no God, Do not honor thy mother and thy father.
Love is our involuntary response to virtue.
Use the argument for morality.
Talk about the guy in the room. Whatever you're doing, somebody just comes at you with scorn or rejection or passive aggression.
They just, boom, react.
Then you say to them, what happened?
What happened to you just there?
That was really interesting. What I got was that you really felt uncomfortable about what I was saying.
And if they say, I didn't feel uncomfortable.
I'm totally fine. I think your idea is just stupid.
Then you say, bye-bye.
Bye-bye. I mean, if people that you're debating with aren't even willing to be honest about what they feel in the moment, how the fuck are they going to be honest?
About virtue and truth and morality and rationality and proof in the abstract.
I mean, if I came up to you and said, hi, I'm a compulsive liar, maybe, let's debate, you'd say, no thanks, life's too short.
People always want to argue about truth in the abstract, but they don't want to talk about truth in the present, in the moment.
And you, of course, have to become adept at monitoring your own feelings and not getting lost in the abstract defensiveness of others.
So if you're debating with somebody and they get rude or impatient or negative or hostile, we can feel this, right?
We can feel this escalation of tension that occurs with people when their defenses rise.
eyes.
We can feel it.
We feel this inevitability.
And we need to be honest.
You know, to hell with the state, the society, the abstract proof, UPB, this, that, and the other.
Free will versus determinism.
Drugs. Forget it.
Be honest about what you're experiencing in the present.
So if somebody seems to be getting tense and upset about a conversation that you're having with them, or you feel that you're being put down or diminished or insulted, then...
The real application of philosophy, the real application of virtue, is not to continue the debate and ignore the reality of your feelings.
It's to speak the truth about your feelings and say, I'm really not enjoying this debate.
I feel diminished.
This is just my experience.
I feel diminished by what is occurring here, and I don't feel that we're in a productive and enjoyable discourse on the nature of truth.
I feel like you're just rejecting everything that I say, and here's, you know, here's the evidence or whatever.
And if the person says, yeah, you know, you're right.
I mean, things are getting a little bit out of hand.
I don't know. I don't know why I'm getting so tense about it.
Let's talk about it.
Talk about the truth of what is actually happening, not the truth of what might happen in a state of society 500 years from now.
The foggy center, the exit to the cage, you don't rattle the bars, try and squeeze through, the exit to the cage...
Evolution is the foggy thing in the middle.
Vulnerability and honesty, that's with everyone.
That's with everyone.
It's not just with your parents. I say, oh, sit down with your parents and tell them the truth.
Yes, do that. But do that on MSN. Do that on any instant messaging program.
The moment you feel bad, you say, hey, you know, I'm not enjoying this.
I'm not feeling good about this interaction.
Or you say, you know, what happened for you there emotionally, right?
And if the person comes back and says, nothing, nothing happened emotionally, but you feel that something did, you feel that there's a tension, then don't debate with them.
We have to become adept at the little truths before we can confidently absorb and reflect and communicate the big truths.
Right? If you can't be honest about your emotional experience of debating with someone and be curious about their emotional experience, and if they can't do that with you, if you can't get that immediate local honesty going, then don't talk about UPB or free will or anarchism or property rights or intellectual.
Don't talk about any of that stuff.
Because you're faking it, you know, with all due respect.
It's a wonderful, incredible conversation that we're having here, but focus on the little truths first.
I spent years in therapy before, talking about philosophy, and I still make mistakes all the time, but focus on the little truths, the honesty of your direct and personal experience of interacting with other people first.
Always first. Self-protection.
It's essential for you to retain the joy that you have in philosophy.
If you feel that something unpleasant or untowards is going on, then say, I feel that something unpleasant or untowards is going on.
It's that level of truth that we need to establish first and foremost.
It's that level of truth that libertarians can't achieve.
That's why we fail.
It's one of the reasons we fail. We talk about truth and integrity and this and that in the long run.
The abstract. But in the moment, we don't talk about how we feel.
What our experience of.
The secondary layer of processing and knowledge that is available to us through our instincts and through our gut.
And we don't say that it's true.
But we just say, this is my experience, what's yours?
And if the person bullshits, it's just...
So, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to debate with you.
And then, of course, they'll say, well, you're just running away because I'm proving you wrong.
Well, this is somebody who can't handle rejection, who has to lash out whenever they feel criticized.
Well, if that's what somebody does, then why are you debating with them in the first place?
Your instincts are trying to help you.
Your true self is sending up message after message after PowerPoint after firework after email after...
You know, it's tattooing it on your back.
Run. Don't engage.
Run. Don't engage. And we think that because we have a fealty, or we wish to have a fealty to the truth, that we must continue to engage with these kinds of people.
But we don't. If you can't manage the little truths of your personal experience with somebody, don't try and take on the big truths.
Now, I'll just... Sorry, I hope you don't mind this has been long, but hey!
It's been a while, and it's good to be back!
It's almost like having a social life again after being entombed with the UBB book for these many months.
Ron Paul is a mechanism by which people manage their anxiety about government power.
And it is the very use of things like political libertarianism, Ron Paul, whoever, whoever, Free State Project.
It is through our addiction to these false methods of solving the problem of state coercion that we extend and propagate the very problem of state coercion.
So I'll relate a A sort of metaphor, if you don't mind, from my days as a coder.
So I was writing the architecture for a particular program that we used, all the querying and reporting mechanisms, the infrastructure for displaying the data, data entry, editing, and so on.
And my habit at the beginning, as is the habit with many people, is to sit down and code.
Just sit down and start, you don't write any class objects, you just sit down and start coding.
Code, code, code, code. Here's a screen, here's a...
And then...
What would happen is, as you sort of went along, things would get more and more complicated, right?
So you'd have all of these problems, which you then start to solve, because you didn't plan ahead of time.
Oh, these two classes are sort of similar, maybe I should sort of put them on the list of things I need to combine, or this code is redundant to this code because I wrote this, and then somebody else wrote that, and so on, right?
So you end up with this mess, the spaghetti code.
You can code behind the buttons and stuff like that.
And... What happens is you get this growing anxiety about the sustainability of the whole structure.
And you then face a choice, right?
So you can either manage that anxiety by tidying things up a little bit here and there, throwing some comments in, so that the whole spaghetti mess is sort of vaguely...
You can imagine that it's sustainable and so on.
And that will allow you to...
I don't know, repress your own anxiety for the time being, because you sort of made up a solution, and you say, okay, well, it's done.
But of course, at some point, if you don't give yourself permission to keep tidying up a monstrous spaghetti code program, but you say, okay, for the next version, we're going to start again.
With all the knowledge that we've got here, we're going to design it properly, we're going to, you know, maybe automate the creation of the class, whatever it is, right?
But we're going to do it right. But if you keep thinking that tweaking is going to solve the problem, then you actually are continuing to exacerbate the problem.
And this, of course, was the reason for the failure of a lot of dot bombs, was that they took this approach.
I did end up doing a pretty substantial rewrite my last year there, but...
That's sort of the situation that occurs, right?
And people get into this in relationships, too, rather than looking at the base values that they share or don't share.
They sort of tweak themselves on, well, the problem is that, not that we disagree about money, or that we don't respect each other, but that I spend too much on beer, so I'm going to spend less on beer.
And people just work on the surface.
They just work on the inconsequentialities, the symptoms, rather than the cause.
And this, of course, has been occurring For hundreds of years in the realm of liberty.
From the Enlightenment. Three, four hundred years.
Even talking about getting rid of the state to a large degree.
Separation of church and state.
Free trade and property rights and so on.
People have been trying to tweak that crap for hundreds of years.
And so everyone who's alive wants to see freedom in their own lifetime.
And so we get drawn into trying to control the anxiety that we basically have, that we know we're not getting freedom in our own lifetime.
We know that. Accept it.
You will never be free.
You will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be free of the government.
This is a multi-generational project.
And the longer that we try to achieve freedom within our own lifetime, the more we're postponing and exacerbating the problem of slavery.
We have to accept the anxiety and unpleasantness and difficulty of the world that we live in and not imagine that tweaking this, that, or the other, voting this guy in, moving to New Hampshire, is going to solve the problem of the state.
I need to take 500 steps back and start aiming, not just swinging wildly in a fog.
Start laying out the plans.
We're trying to go on vacation by driving around blindfolded.
And instead of stopping, taking off the blindfold, checking a map, figuring out what we actually want to do, we just keep throwing ourselves into pointless activity which only sustains the power of the state.
Politics is to libertarians what the welfare state is to those who care about the poor.
It is a manipulation of others in order to avoid the anxiety of the enormity of the task.
When you look at the task of freeing the world, it's ridiculously huge, right?
And so people don't want to face that.
So they'll throw themselves into this doubt or the other, rather than face the genuine anxiety of looking at the enormity and intractability of the problem.
But it's not intractable if we start from the bottom up and if we start from the family up.
And if we start from personal honesty in our interactions up, it's not an impossible task.
It's a multi-generational task, but that's okay.
That's okay. Galileo, Galileo, did not get to see the spaceship Galileo.
I mean, science is one of the ultimate multi-generational projects.
Galileo did not get to see the spaceship Galileo.
But for sure, if Galileo had not done what he did, We would never, any of us, have seen this spaceship, this future world, this free planet.
Thank you so much for listening.
I wish you the best of luck in these conversations.
I look forward to your donations, my friends.
I hope you know that I have been continuing to work even harder on this, and I will talk to you soon.
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