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Oct. 26, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:43
893 Socrates: Mystical Hit-Man

The moral nature of our moralists...

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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Moly from Free Remain Radio.
We're going to limber up and stroll around a little bit.
I get tired of sitting at the chair.
So, this is to continue with regards to the last days of Socrates.
And I wanted to talk a little bit about What's in the text and what's not in the text?
Because it is always so amazingly obvious when you see what is missing from somebody's moral justification for their position.
Because what is missing is what is assumed by the framework of the argument.
What is missing is what is assumed through the framework of the argument.
What I mean by that is You have to have a whole lot of propaganda to make people believe in something called the fatherland before they will submit their lives and their children's lives and their futures and their money and so on to the fatherland.
Right? So, when you make a moral argument with the assumption that something called the fatherland or the state or the class or God or the virtue of the family, whatever it is, whatever you skip over is the most important part, right?
So, this is the process of understanding the unconscious and why it's so important to look at what is missing rather than what is present.
So, here, we're going to jump back to a piece of text I talked about yesterday when we were Oh, in bed together.
And it says here, this is the laws talking to Socrates, says, Do you not realize that you are even more bound to respect and placate the anger of your country than your father's anger, that you must either persuade your country or do whatever it orders and patiently submit to any punishment that it imposes, whether it be flogging or imprisonment?
And if it leads you out to war, to be wounded or killed, you must comply.
And it is just that this should be so.
You must not give way or retreat or abandon your position.
Both in war and in the law courts and everywhere else, you must do whatever your city and your country commands, or else persuade it that justice is on your side.
But violence against mother or father is an unholy act, and it is a far greater sin against your country.
So this idea that you have the right to patiently and pleasantly and rationally attempt to convince your country of the justice of your position, but if you fail to convince the country of the justice of your position, Then you must submit to your country.
And this, of course, is translated to the modern fetish about voting and the idea that if you get to choose your slave masters and attempt to influence them while still being a slave, which, of course, is fundamentally impossible, that it is your sanction then, right?
You get to choose between different slave masters, as I've said in a podcast.
Democracy is the suggestion box for slaves, which is never opened.
But this goes all the way back to this argument or debate From Socrates, and before, of course.
Now, I'm going to talk about what's not present, and then I'm going to talk about why it's believable, why everybody reads this and just glosses over and goes, well, I may not agree, but it kind of makes sense, or I understand the argument, but there is no argument here.
There is no argument here from first principles, and trust me, having written a book arguing for an ethical framework that is rational and secular from very first principles, from the proposition that there's no morality, I know when there's no moral argument.
I have struggled for 20 years to write one, and it's available for a couple of bucks.
I'd really, really suggest you get a hold of it and be part of this amazing revolution that we're working on here.
But I know when there's no moral argument, so let's just break down a couple of these sentences so that we can see both what is not talked about, why it is not talked about, and why it is still believable.
So, naturally, first and foremost, the argument that Socrates is making through the laws as to why we must obey the state is all fundamentally predicated on obedience to parents.
If you take away the obedience to parents paradigm in Socrates' argument here, there's nothing whatsoever that makes any sense whatsoever.
And that's really, really important to understand, that his entire argument is based upon the innate and natural virtue of parents, and the obedience that we owe, the enslavement that we owe to parents.
And yes, we can try and reason with our parents, but if they reject our rationality, it doesn't matter.
We are their total, complete, and perpetual slaves, and we can beg them for a little bit of freedom here, there, Hope for a few scraps of common sense and empathy to fall off the table of power, but we can never assert ourselves in any fundamental way in the face of the power of the parental structures of the family.
And... This, of course, permeates its way all the way through Greek thought.
Aristotle had nothing but contempt for the rights of women.
Nobody even talked about the rights of children.
And Aristotle believed that slavery was a virtue, and clearly Plato, through Socrates, is making the same argument, that we can protest and we can ask and beg for a little bit of freedom and rationality, but if it's not provided, too bad, sucks to be you.
Get back into your chains.
So if you take away from Socrates' argument here the duty, the obedience, the obsequence that we owe to our parents, there's no argument here whatsoever.
There's this fictional entity called the laws, the state, Greece, and whatever it is, logos, actually logos in this case, and It could be anything.
I could make up a fictional entity called Boango and say, Boango demands your obedience, and you owe Boango your obedience, and if you do not agree with Boango, too bad.
It means nothing to make up these fictional entities called the state, the country, the culture.
If you don't In a completely nefarious way, tap into people's enslavement to their parents, and particularly in this time in ancient Greece.
So there's nothing there if you take away the power and supposed virtue of the power of the parents and your supposed obedience to it.
Socrates, or Plato, or whoever we can describe this to, is not so dumb as all that.
Because there is one word that is absolutely missing from this text, and I'm passionate about it because this is the one word that is missing from this text, that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, the murders, the slaughters, the gulags, that is responsible for the deaths, murders, homelessness, fleeing, Mass evacuations, concentration camps, modern prisons, war.
The one word that is missing from this text is the keystone of the arch to this entire hellish monument of state power.
Can you guess what it might be?
Let's have a look at the one sentence with the word that is missing.
And if it leads you out to war, the state, the laws, to be wounded or killed, you must comply.
And it is just that this should be so.
You must not give way or retreat or abandon your position.
I'm going to read this. See if you can figure out what is missing here.
That you must either...
Sorry. And if it leads you out to war, the state, to be wounded or killed, you must comply.
And it is just that this should be so.
You must not give way or retreat or abandon your position.
What is the one word that is missing there?
The one word that is the absolute root of everything that he is talking about.
Do you see how hard it is to see it just because we're so trained from birth onwards to not see what I call the gun in the room, the violence behind state power and so often behind parental power and certainly behind Religious power.
The two actions that Socrates argues occur to war are being wounded or being killed.
Man, oh man.
What a son of a bitch. War It's only tertiarily, tangentially, inconsequentially to do with being wounded or killed.
That is a mere effect of what other action that is studiously being avoided here as it is in all texts justifying the might and power of the state?
The word that is missing, my friends, is murder.
The word that is missing, my friends, is murder!
I'll read the sentence again so you can see how amazingly beautifully this challenge is bypassed.
And if it leads you out to war to be wounded or killed, you must comply.
And it is just that this should be so.
You must not give way or retreat or abandon your position.
How believable would it be if Socrates The supposed wisest man, according to the oracle, the supposed wisest man, the man who is so obsessed and concerned with morality and righteousness and honor and upright living and virtue,
how believable would it be if this moral paradigm, this moral paragon of Western virtue were to say And if the state tells you to murder, you must murder.
Do you see how that sticks a little bit differently in the mind?
Do you see how that reveals the basic reality of the state as a hitman organization, as a mafia group?
To say, well, if the state asks you to go to war, to defend it, to be wounded and even killed, to hold your position, then you must go and do that!
That has a kind of noble flags of Iwo Jima kind of thing to it.
But this has nothing to do with the power of the state.
The power of the state has almost nothing to do with being wounded or being killed.
The power of the state is based on people's willingness not to be wounded and get killed, but to wound and to kill.
To murder! To initiate the use of violence against other people.
That's the power of the state, and that's what Plato does a beautiful little sidestep around.
And this is why Plato, technically speaking, is a complete and total state slut asshole.
Because he knows exactly what to bypass, what to slither around.
What to nimbly step over?
There's no hole there, but I'm going to walk around it anyway.
This is what ethicists cannot see, or refuse to see.
It's so obvious, it's impossible to imagine that they don't see it.
Dear God, I saw it when I was 15!
A child can see it!
War is only possible not because people are willing to go out and get shot or stabbed or skewered.
What kind of army would that be?
We're not going to give you any weapons.
We're going to give you a whole bunch of bullseyes.
What we really want you to do is go out there, get knocked over like a bunch of bowling pins.
That is the obedience that you owe to the state.
What a fabulous army that would be.
No. War is only possible.
Because people are willing to murder for the state, and that's what Socrates says absolutely nothing about.
Of course. Of course.
It's not believable if you point out that is the willingness to shoot, to stab, to kill, to bludgeon, to imprison.
That is the root of state power.
It's really hard, you see, To talk about the virtue and necessity of the state if it's this.
And this is the state!
This is the state!
And to miss that takes a lot of effort.
Right? It takes a lot of work to not point out that war is only possible because you have soldiers who are willing to murder.
And also that war is even more fundamentally only possible because you have policemen willing to steal.
Right? You can't have a state.
You can't have a military in the way that it exists at the moment, which is an offensive military.
You can't have the military.
If soldiers are not willing to rob citizens who are usually legally disarmed or relatively disarmed by the state, If policemen are not willing to shoot people who don't pay their taxes, the whole goddamn thing falls down.
It means nothing doesn't exist.
I mean, the state is a cathedral of blood.
Murder, imprisonment, slaughter, torture, rape, what goes on in state prisons.
It's a satanic monument to hell on earth.
Only stays that off in the short run by deficit financing and borrowing, but that's where it always ends up.
Without the policemen willing to take your money from you by force to pay the soldiers and the bureaucrats and the special interest groups and all that other parasitical fatbags
of corruption and exploitation that circle around the blood money of the state, without the policemen willing to shoot you for not paying your taxes, There is no state.
There is no war.
There is peace.
There is plenty. There is productivity.
There is mature and respectful and honorable human interaction.
Yeah, there'll be problems.
But so what? Relative to what we have now, 270 million people killed by states in the 20th century, a billion people killed by religions through the power of the state, it's not even close what might happen with a few deranged people, individual criminals in a free society.
Socrates, of course, takes great pains to say that, as we talked about yesterday, "I will do the right thing, I will be a good person.
I will go to Hades to speak with the philosophers who came before me and to listen to the lute playing of the great lute players.
No fiddling, even if Rome burned.
This was not until much later that fiddles were introduced.
I don't even know about the lute, but we'll see.
So Socrates, of course, was a religious and a military man, which is a massive curse at the core of Western philosophy.
But if Socrates said, I became a murderer for pay, I killed the innocent for the sake of social approval, People gave me a sword, pointed me at someone, and I pushed that sword into their throat.
People gave me a club and pointed me at someone, and I BASHED that man's head in with the club, and the blood sprayed all over my face.
And I washed it off with the joyful purity of my allegiance.
to this fictional entity called the state, populated by very real individuals who demand slavery as virtue.
I became a murderer, saith Socrates, because somebody asked me to, and I took my pay and my food from slaves and prisoners of the state in the form of taxpayers.
If the reality of Socrates' life Was laid bare, as it's so obvious to see.
As a soldier, he was a professional hitman.
Can we see just how unbelievably ridiculous and foolish, mad it is, to think of Socrates as the core of Western morality?
I mean, the Socratic method and all of the Well, life, as he says to Alcibiades in the Gorgias, life can't be just about the pursuit of pleasure, because when you scratch an itch, it's really pleasurable, but that perpetual itch that you're perpetually scratching can't be the definition of virtue.
And all of this bullshit that was talked about by a hitman!
By a hit man who can't even utter the word murder, because he is a murderer.
And that's why at the end of his life, when he was about to drink the hemlock, he said, sacrifice a cock to some god, which is thanks for a gift, right?
That you have given me the gift of death.
Life is a disease that is cured by death.
Of course it is. If you're a murderer, you want to die!
And yet we construe his courage by drinking the hemlock.
Sorry, we construe his act by drinking the hemlock as courage.
Look, he did not care about death.
Well, of course he didn't care about death.
He was a murderer! Churchill!
Same damn thing, his black dog.
Kept following him his whole life.
Depression! Self-loathing.
Terrible relationships.
Horrible marriage. Of course.
Of course he was that.
Because he was a murderer.
He voluntarily chased down and signed up for the Boer War, went and killed a whole bunch of people because the government told him to.
He was a hitman. He was a murderer.
Of course he could understand Hitler.
Of course he was depressed.
But these people are viewed as heroes.
Not to put myself consciously in that category, but I am vilified for all sorts of condemnations.
Oh, Steph is a cult leader!
Because he asks for support to get the message out.
Oh, what a terrible guy.
Worst guy ever. Cult leader.
But you know what?
I've never stabbed someone for money.
You see? I've never shot someone for money.
But Churchill and Socrates are revered.
As hitmen, they are revered.
And of course, this is why the cycle of violence never stops.
Because we don't see the simple thing, the gun in the room.
The simple thing. And if the state wants you to murder the innocent, you must do it.
Nobody ever talks about that.
Murder the innocent in terms of being a soldier against enemies?
Arguably, they're there too, they have swords, but murder the innocent is the cops who will come to collect your taxes and who will shoot you or stab you and imprison you and get you raped for years or decades if you don't pay them.
That is the assault upon the innocent that makes the power of the state possible.
And that is something that is never talked about.
This guy was a hitman.
He was a paid killer.
He was a murderer of the innocent.
And he is the core of our moral discourse.
And why does he have to constantly say that the state is virtuous?
Because if the state is not virtuous, then he is a killer.
This is philosophy of psychological defense, as it so often is, as it almost inevitably is.
If the state is not virtuous, then Socrates is stone evil.
Stone evil.
He's a paid killer.
He's a hitman. He's a mafioso.
He's a soldier. And how did he become a soldier?
Because He believed that he was a mere slave to power, as is the case with his father.
We don't know much about Socrates' childhood, other than the evidence that he became a soldier and praised the virtue of the state, which means that he is willing to do evil for the sake of appeasing power, and he is willing to praise power, as all intellectuals who perform these kinds of evil,
either directly through the murderer of being a soldier or some sort of state Gun holder, or through the corruption of selling the ignorant and the innocent into the more of state power for the sake of pay, that is always blood money, the intellectuals, the media types, the professors, all those people who are paid and protected by the state.
Every professor has this tenure, right?
It's not a free market thing, it's not a voluntary thing, it's something that's paid for by the state and protected by the state.
Of course they have to. Of course they have to praise the state as virtuous, in one form or another, or at least necessary.
Oh, it's too big. It should be small.
But they can't look at the evil of the state because the evil of the state is the evil of themselves through this participation.
That's why they say, well, the mafia should be smaller.
We should have a different mafia leader.
The mafia should apply its violence here and not there.
Because if they look at the Mafia for what it is, an agency of the initiation of force, evil, an evil agency, then they look into the mirror and see not evil out there, but evil in here, and there are very, very few people who have the stomach and the strength for that.
Most intelligence is a scar tissue of self-justification for participation in corruption or evil.
And these are the people who instruct us on our ethics.
These are the people who tell us what is virtuous, who tell us what is noble, who tell us what is good.
Madness. And philosophers throughout history Have had this core problem that there's a gun in the goddamn room that's pointed at innocent and disarmed people, and they have to create these incredible, weird, mad structures of quasi-logic, pseudo-logic, propaganda, distraction, intimidation, ad hominem, ex post facto reasoning.
They have to build this wonderful monument to life with blood and bodies at its center.
Of course it's weird, of course it's distorted, of course it's screwed up in the extreme.
Whenever you have a core and guilty contradiction at the heart of your thinking, everything that comes out of you is twisted and weird.
So you have, and I did this for my master's, it's available for donations, a couple of bucks, I'll give you the link to my master's degree.
Kant, Hegel, Locke, They all had this core bizarrity at the core of their thinking.
The central bizarrity at the core of their thinking.
Kant's categorical imperative, blah, blah, blah, and then he says, and I was doing receipts through and read a lot of Kant and was terrified that I was going to miss this, but he does say, at one point I can't remember where, that reference is in my masters.
He says, well, this is all well and good, but if the prince says jump, you say how high?
If the prince says do this, you just do it.
do it.
You have no right to stand against your prince.
So it's all nonsense.
Like, just screw off with your nonsensical justifications.
If we are slaves to power, don't talk to me about ethics.
Don't talk to me about ethics if we are mere slaves to the gun.
And then just talk honestly about the gun.
What do you do? Whatever this guy tells you to.
That's what you do. Don't talk to me about ethics.
Don't talk to me about virtue.
This is the reality of the life that I live.
If I don't pay half my taxes, I get thrown in jail where I'll get gang-raped for decades.
That's the reality of the life that I live as a half-slave to the sickly state.
This is my, quote, ethics.
Don't talk to me about choice and virtue.
Service. Honor.
Please, don't talk to rape victims about love.
Don't talk to kidnapped victims about agoraphobia and courage.
Don't talk to me about the virtue of staying in the room when the room is locked.
Don't talk to me about the virtue of sex when I'm being rector.
All of the thinkers that I've ever studied warp everything around this core problem of violence and the state and violence and irrationality in the church and violence and irrationality of the family.
First and foremost, that's what everything else grows out of.
We are avoiding our childhood humiliations and build these amazing edifices of reactionary scar tissue to avoid the pain and anxiety of what we faced as children, which was the rank abuse of power by our parents, by our teachers.
People just justify it so that they can say, "Well, I was a slave when I was a child, but slavery you see is virtuous." Oh, man.
I mean, it's hard to see, but boy, when you see it, it's just like...
In medieval science, they had this problem of that God was at the core of everything and miracles were possible, so everything that they came up with had to have this weird escape clause.
Where miracles became possible, or God could run everything, or God could change anything.
There were no physical laws that were absolute, because there was God who could...
And the same thing is true of modern moral laws, which don't take into account the power and violence of the state.
Nothing can be absolute, because you've always got to be bending around this gun.
You've got a portrait of life called this, and you can never talk about the gun, so you just talk about everything else.
And then you say that people abound by moral laws, moral laws that you won't even apply to the state and its agents.
I tell you, these moralists have fucked humanity worse than anybody else in history.
How many hundreds of millions of deaths have resulted from Plato's version of Socrates?
And it's only believable because of the power of the family, as I argue.
You take away the justification and the analogy to the parents.
Nothing fits anymore.
The power of the state is an effect of the power of the family.
People can't see the violence of the state because they can't see the corruption of their families.
But it's really easy to see once you start working from first principles.
I hope that you will...
I promise there are fewer mass caps in my books than there are on these videos.
I apologize if my passion is startling, but I really don't like this continual slaughterhouse of society called the state, so I am quite passionate about saving lives where possible.
So, I hope that you will pick up some of my books.
If you want something a little more gentle, you might enjoy my fiction.
My novel, The God of Atheists, is now available on truth, the tyranny of illusion, which is philosophy in your personal life, universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, which is philosophy in the abstract.
I hope that you will pick these up.
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