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Nov. 14, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:34
910 Outgrowing the State

The necessary steps to bring it down...

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is 11 o'clock in the morning.
This would be about the 14th of November 2007 time for a good old-fashioned podcast boy to make his appearance.
We're out testing a new windshield and...
I am taking a short break from writing the first few chapters of the book, Real-Time Relationships, Philosophy and Action, or some action-packed title of that ilk.
So I wanted to come out for a little stroll, stretch my legs.
I have an interesting, I guess interesting to me, hopefully somewhat interesting to you, work schedule when I'm working on a book.
I work during the day for a couple of hours, and then I work on other FDR-related stuff, and then Christina goes to bed around 11 or 12, and I work for another couple of hours until 2 or 3 in the morning.
I generally can't get to sleep before 3 in the morning when I'm working on a book, for reasons that escape me, but I would...
This is why I've never really been able to work on a book while I've been working in the real world, so...
I wanted to talk about something which is a thread, not on the board, but a thread that is running through these podcasts, and I wanted to elucidate it a little bit more clearly so that you could understand some of the meta-program that we've sort of embarked upon.
And that thread really is outgrowing the government.
Outgrowing the government.
So, clearly, we face an entrenched, aggressive, well-armed, violent, determined, and self-interested foe.
And by that, I don't mean just the government, but people who defend their family.
No, they're usually not armed. But not just the government or the police and so on, but everybody who...
Supports themselves through the interactions with the government, and whatever we do, we feel an almost amazing or endless compulsion to turn it into something ethical.
We simply can't survive our actions unless we can make them moral.
And that power, which is what is the elephant sitting on the chest of humanity, can be turned to our advantage with rigorous logic, passion, and clean living, so to speak, which I'll get into in a bit.
But when we look at social change, how does this change occur?
You can look at some pretty large ones, and you can try and figure out why then.
So there's a couple of important questions when you're looking at anything in the world.
The first is, compare to what?
And the second is, why now?
Which I was talking about in a recent podcast on parental intelligence or the slight statistical deficiency thereof.
Sometimes not so slight.
So when we look at something like the end of slavery, the question is, why the 19th century?
Why not the 18th?
Why not the 10th? Why not the minus 50th?
Why, oh why...
Was it the 19th century that was the magic century?
When we look at feminism, the emancipation of women, why was that?
Why did that start in the 19th century, and why did that then continue onwards through the 20th century and peak in many ways in the post-war period?
When we look at the civil rights movement, or black power, or whatever you want to call it, that It hit its nadir in the 60s.
And the question is why?
Why then? Because if we don't have a thorough understanding of how social change has come about in the past, then really any social change that we put together or try to put together in the present or the future Is going to be merely accidental.
It's only going to occur accidentally if it occurs at all.
And that's not a very good way of doing it.
You don't type a bunch of code into a code window.
Maybe some of it's not even code.
And hope that it compiles into a program people will pay a lot of money for.
And you have to understand these kinds of things before embarking on these kinds of ventures.
And the ventures of social change are...
It's highly challenging.
There's a high degree of resistance both at the economic, military, moral, emotional, familial, and religious level, the level of mythology.
So, how has it worked in the past?
What has occurred and how has it worked?
Well, the first thing that I would say is that social change has a lot to do with technology.
And I've touched on this before, so I'll just be brief about it now, but I would argue that the primary reason why slavery ended in the 19th century was because it became more economically efficient to invest in machinery than to invest in slavery.
Naturally, of course...
Everyone talked about it as a moral crusade, and it was in many ways.
But fundamentally, why was it that century and no other previous century?
Well, it was no other previous century because, particularly in the realm of agriculture, but more particularly in the realm of the economy as a whole, you got more money out of investing In capital machinery than slaves.
You had factories, the rise of the factory system.
You had a drop in free trade which lowered protectionist barriers which created far greater competition from overseas agricultural manufacturers.
And because slavery is woefully inefficient, economically speaking...
It became pretty clear that when competition increased, and the competition was on many, many levels.
Overseas manufacturers, the competition for where capital investments were going to occur, the increases in technological understanding that led to more efficient agricultural practices.
So why did it occur when it occurred?
Well, The North in the United States always did economically better than the South because slavery is so economically inefficient.
So, as free trade spread and competition for capital and investment and resources increased, then it became increasingly clear that it wasn't going to work economically.
And there we have a pretty intense crusade towards the elimination of slavery.
But that's only because slavery had become fundamentally impractical.
Because slavery had become fundamentally impractical.
And in the absence of philosophy, ethics, nine times out of ten, follows economics.
So, when slavery has a certain kind of economic viability, why then, the priests thunder that it is our education, sorry, it is our Christian duty to educate and ennoble the black savage.
And then, when it becomes economically inefficient to have slaves, then suddenly the priests thunder that slavery is a moral crime and must be abolished.
Priests are, you've got to give them this.
They're sensitive to the prevailing social wins.
And then, if you look at something like feminism, and we talked about this before again, I'll just touch on it briefly.
Feminism arose out of two main technological advancements, which was The automation of home chores and the introduction of the birth control pill.
And this secularized a whole lot of society.
And although there was a more Christian influence in the suffragettes in the 19th century, there was a much more materialistic, communistic-slash-socialistic influence Tendency in the feminists of the mid to late 20th century.
I wrote in a section of the God of Atheists that got cut, which is basically feminism is just socialism with tits, in the same way that black power is just socialism with a tan.
So, the potential...
For women to be something other than the dray horses of the homestead, of all the endless cooking and cleaning and washing and procuring and tidying and all of that sort of stuff,
the possibility for women to achieve lives beyond this awful dray horse situation that they were stuck in for most of human history, and it wasn't like It wasn't like the men had it a whole lot better.
Women had lives of dray horses and men almost always had lives of war and labor that would half kill a dray horse.
But the fact was that there became a large source of potential capital.
Of potential capital.
And whenever society sniffs out a large source of potential capital, lo and behold, the morals of that society shift.
So slaves as slaves rather than as somewhat free economic agents was...
A large source of untapped capital and the market forces, and particularly the intellectuals, sense this kind of stuff out and begin to spout the opposite ethics than they had before.
And similarly, when women no longer had to work 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day as beasts of burden and beasts of reproduction, then they had time on their hands.
So here you have a large source of untapped capital Capital or potential economic gain or benefit.
So that is another prerequisite for change.
If you look at the black power movement, the civil rights movement, it's a similar kind of tragedy as all these other damn things.
That in struggling to pull the last fronds of a net off, they encased themselves in concrete.
Because the...
And just talking about the US here, the initial surge that occurred of anti-slavery, anti-racist ideologies certainly got some of the beast, some of the burden off the blacks back, but...
Of course, it took quite some time, and blacks were still predominantly in the armed forces in World War I and World War II, but in World War II, they had access to increased educational opportunities after the war through the GI Bill, and what happened was they got...
They got exposure to European socialism.
As I've talked about before, the GI Bill was the first mass exposure of the middle class and sometimes the lower classes to European-style socialism.
And the reason that European-style socialism had taken root in America's educational faculties was because all of the socialists, the professors and the teachers and the writers and the intellectuals and the artists and so on, Who had seen the fruits of their labor in Europe,
particularly in Germany, but also in Austria and also to a smaller degree in Russia, fled to the United States, where they could be viewed as a kind of cross-oceanic infection, which poisoned and corrupted the minds of the young.
And, of course, they had to reproduce.
So we've talked about when you do not acknowledge a horror, you must reproduce it.
And if you as an intellectual have weakened people's capacity to see the gun in the room and have led them off baying into the desert of violence, screaming and clawing for the gun in the room while claiming virtue, and that has resulted in the horrors of fascism and national socialism and communism,
Well, it's a little hard to live with that kind of blood on your hands, so you have to go and say, well, it was the other people's fault that it all went wrong.
It wasn't my fault. It's not like the ideas are evil.
It was other people's fault why the ideas went wrong.
So I'm going to try it again.
And because you're trying it again with the same variables, the same results occur.
But... The 60s, of course, had a lot to do with the infection of socialism in American intellectual life, to the point where now, well, now, of course, it's impossible to think of solutions that aren't, I mean, in the general public sphere, it's impossible to think of solutions that aren't focused on violence.
And it took, of course, a war, which is...
A massive advertisement for the virtues of violence.
This is why I fight so hard against the hagiography of the Second World War, the noble war, the greatest generation and all this nonsense.
One of the main reasons that I fight so hard against that is that ethics cannot stand if one murder is moral.
Science cannot stand if one miracle occurs.
A scientific theory cannot stand if one exception is found.
And that's why the fantasy of the good leader, if you want to see this nonsense, you can have a look at the movie Bobby, Bobby, by Emilio Estevez.
Great cast.
Writing is not bad. Some scenes, particularly the ones with Laurence Fishburne, are great.
But it's all just nonsensical hagiography.
Oh, if only Bobby Kennedy hadn't been killed, we'd be living in the land of milk and honey, and everything would be wonderful.
That's all just complete nonsense.
And this fantasy that there is a good war, a good murder, a moral possibility for politicians...
I mean, it's just completely mad.
It's just completely mad.
This kind of hagiography, it's absolutely unsightly, it's absolutely inhuman, and it's absolutely ghastly, and it's what drove Nietzsche mad when you look at the rank and wild hypocrisy of the people who say, well, see, Bobby Kennedy was the victim of violence, and he preached against violence, but he was a socialist.
So he was perfectly willing to shoot everyone who didn't give him their money at the point of a gun, but isn't it absolutely tragic that he was shot?
Oh my god, and if he hadn't been shot?
So I make a beeline.
I am drawn like a gravity well towards the most fantastical points of light, to the highest beacons of fantasy, to extinguish them, because those beacons are what people guide themselves by.
And if a war can be moral, any one war, one war anywhere, anytime, if a war can be moral, then there is no such thing as ethics.
It's not in order to damn war, but to save ethics, that I oppose these fantasies.
And the evil that the elder generations do, they tarred up as fantastical virtues to the younger generation, who then had stampede down the blood alley towards the same abattoir.
there.
We know of the horror and the squalor of the First World War, the war to end all war, as it was said.
Wilson's Twelve Points, self-determination and all that.
Paris 1919 is an instructive book to read about the absolute amoral, vicious horror of the Paris Peace Conference.
Margaret Macmillan, I think.
She's a U of T professor, actually. Granddaughter of Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, who was there.
Not exactly an unbiased source, but if you read it, and I'd skip all the stuff about Eastern Europe just because I don't understand.
You can do what you want, but I did.
But they understood that, and then the First World War led to the Second World War, which led to the Cold War, which led to the War on Terror.
So what happened, of course, was that war, through the application of savage levels of genocidal violence, put through the application of savage levels of genocidal violence, put black men in uniform and Rosie the Riveter and women in factories.
please.
And then when the black men came home, they had access to higher educational opportunities.
And the women who had put aside their beasts of burden for the family and had adopted the pose or the reality of beasts of burden for the state found that they were no longer quite as content to be the beasts of burden for the family.
And the increase of wealth that was occasioned by the monstrous success of the post-war economy, particularly in America, was something that propelled...
Sorry, which created the wealth which allowed for the purchase and introduction, and therefore, of course, the creation of labor-saving devices around the home, which gave women excess leisure, and...
Also put the blacks into the universities, which gave them access to European-style socialism.
And after that, it was doomed.
I mean, it was doomed. I mean, of course it was doomed in the 19th century.
We're just inheriting all of this, quote, indigestion.
But... After you have an entire wave...
Of intellectuals. And it doesn't mean that all of them became socialists.
It can only be 5%. If it's the right 5%, it might as well be all.
Because until the internet, those were the 5% who had the only microphones.
But then, as soon as it was established as a fundamental or foundational proposition for people, that all virtue...
That all virtue is through the state.
Then it becomes impossible, impossible, for people to think of moral solutions that do not involve or require the state.
And this, of course, is the blood-gorged monster that feeds on everyone and is swollen by this massive fantasy that all virtue is through the state.
I mean, all social virtue, all grand virtues, all collective virtues, all large-scale virtues, not like, you know, I returned a wallet or anything, but the large-scale social virtues, that all virtue, all social virtue is through the state.
And to the degree that efficiency can be created through capitalist corporations, or capitalism, that is considered at best a necessary evil, insofar as, let's say, redistribution of income is considered a virtue, Well, you've got to have some income.
And everybody recognizes the state doesn't create any income.
The state is like an elderly patriarch, retired, but all-powerful.
The state doesn't create any income, so sadly we have to have these amoral Gordon geckos create the wealth for us so we can do all the virtue with it.
A farmer who gives to charity and who wishes all he wants to do is to give to charity...
He has cows to generate income as a regretful necessity, but he never thinks that that's the focus of his moral efforts, that's the means to the end, that's what enables his ethics, is the productivity of his cows.
And we, as taxpayers and corporations and capitalistic organizations of every kind, are considered an amoral necessity for the virtue of state coercion, like cows, to a farmer.
The metaphor is not perfect because he's given away his own money, but I think you understand what I mean.
So when you can get people, or when people can no longer think about virtue without violence...
Then everything is wonderful.
You have a situation then where the state has all the epistemological verification of a priest.
So a priest makes non-falsifiable statements continually, perpetually.
I mean, it can't happen any other way.
So, a priest will say, follow my God, and your harvest will be great and bountiful this year.
And then, if the harvest is great and bountiful, good things occur, good things accrue, right?
Like, yo, you see, I was right.
right you worship my god and good things happened if on the other hand sorry to tie my shoe if on the other hand the harvest is bad why then there are sinners among us so Who have offended the God, and that's why he has withheld the bounty of the harvest.
And in the same way, if things are going bad, i.e., say, the Great Depression, then we need government power to rectify those things.
If things are going really well, well, sadly, a rising tide does not lift all boats.
And so as society gets better and better, or more and more wealthy, lo and behold, there are those who are left behind and thus the government must increase its power to return and gather those people stuck into their necks in the sand as the tide comes in.
All roads lead to the holy gun, the golden gun.
So, if we sort of understand...
Oh, sorry.
The last thing I'll say about that, of course, is...
And this was going to be another podcast, but I don't think it's enough meat for a whole podcast, so I'll just throw it in here and hopefully it will make some sense.
Do you know just how unbelievably tragic it is to think of the vast amounts of human energy, capital, resources, labor, money, that...
Is wasted, destroyed, and turned rancid and malevolent through these false premises of the golden gun, state virtue.
All virtue is through the state.
It's so impossible for people to think of non-coercive solutions to social problems.
Shaquille O'Neal, noted philosopher and ball bouncer, Was, I think, Florida?
I think he's... He's all hot and bothered, all fired up about, we need to improve educational standards, or something like this, that, and the other.
And, like every blind jerk on the planet, he can't conceive of that occurring without the state.
Without a state program.
So off he toodles to the legislators and he gets a meeting because he's a star and he talks about this, that or the other, like Bono, like Schwarzenegger, like all these other people.
We need to do something about education and I have a plan.
And here's my plan on a piece of paper.
And if you can give me some of this stolen money...
This plan can be put into effect.
This is the wild misallocation of resources that comes out of a state system.
What does Shaq know about educational theories or how to improve education?
Well, probably not a whole lot. Maybe keep your marriage together.
Then worry about the virtue of strangers' children.
But... This is just what people do.
It's the same thing with the environmentalists.
They can't conceive of a solution that involves a reduction in violence.
They can't conceive of a solution that involves a reduction of violence.
It's not even remotely thinkable because, and the reason for that, is that it is impossible It is impossible, if you have an IQ above 12, it is impossible to think that a moral solution is a reduction in violence.
This is an either-or proposition.
This is the hump that we face.
And this is why it so often and so inevitably goes the other way.
You can't be an abolitionist and say, I think that the perfect moral solution is for slaves to get Sundays off.
Or maybe the weekends.
Or for them only to be beaten twice a week.
Any more than that is immoral.
But that is perfectly moral.
I mean, that's just crazy, right?
That's just insane. Because you can't...
I mean, we all tend towards absolutes.
We all tend towards consistency and integrity.
We have no choice about that.
I'll do another podcast.
Why do we want to be moral?
Because morality, I think, as UPB proves, is rational consistency, and reality is rational and consistent.
And because of that, because we are constantly immersed and embedded in perfect rational consistency, which is sensual reality...
We have a constant undertow or pressure for perfect rational consistency, because that's the world we live in.
Not the social world, but the physical world, which the social world is a subset of.
We are drawn towards consistency because reality is consistent.
And so you can't say morally...
That a reduction in violence is the ideal goal.
That the reduction in violence is the ideal goal.
If you say that it is good to beat your slaves twice a week, it is the perfect ideal moral situation to beat your slaves twice a week, But it is immoral and evil to beat your slaves three times a week.
Now, then you're a Ron Paul supporter.
But nobody can sustain that.
That can't be sustained.
It is far too easy to laugh at that.
It is far too easy to say, what?
What do you mean? Beating your slaves twice a week is the perfect platonic moral ideal, but three times suddenly that third one makes everything totally evil.
Does it make the two at the beginning totally evil?
Are you applying ex post facto moral judgments here where something is virtuous, but then if you do it once more it becomes evil?
Like if you go 110 in a 100 zone...
Suddenly the 0 to 100 is also speeding.
But this is why we tend towards consistency with premises, because that's how we have to live.
That's how we spend the 99.9% of times that we are not thinking of philosophy, but rather interacting with the real world.
Perfect consistency. Perfect integrity.
No miracles. Stable reality.
So we always tend towards consistency because we are immersed and embedded in consistency.
And if we have consistency with inconsistency, we have death.
If you say, I cannot trust my senses, you cannot get out of bed because you might not be in bed.
You have to be like someone who has just regained their eyesight.
To reprocess every possible depth perception trick that might occur.
So, the question then becomes, well, with all of this, with all of this understanding, well, how do we change things?
Well... I believe that what we have to do is outgrow the state to demonstrate a stateless society in our own lives.
I'll give you some examples of that.
If you have corrupt and manipulative and difficult and nasty parents, then if you get rid of them, you don't have to worry about fighting over an inheritance.
You know, say bye-bye.
You just don't have to worry about it.
It's just not something that shows up on your radar.
If you choose...
A great woman to marry, then you don't have to worry about getting the state involved through a divorce.
If you homeschool your children, you don't have to worry about getting the state involved in your education.
If you are an entrepreneur, And particularly a small business entrepreneur, you are exempted from a large amount of state policies with regards to diversity and environmental things and so on.
I'm not saying don't recycle, I'm just saying that you can have a life that is free of these kinds of things.
The state is sublimated rage.
If you look at The angry feminists or the angry welfare advocates or the angry environmentalists or the angry black power groups.
There's a lot of rage there.
If you have angry people in your life, your life becomes difficult and unpleasant.
If you know how to choose your business partners, If you know how to choose your employers or your employees, if you can substitute your own rational, philosophical, bang-on accurate judgment for state retaliation, then you won't be screwed around by employers.
you won't be screwed around by employees.
You can live a life where the state has become largely unnecessary.
necessary.
When you live the principle of no unchosen positive obligations, you show the success of a stateless society of one, and I've talked about that before.
If you try and stay as healthy as you can, then you don't get involved in state medicine.
If you try and stay as healthy as you can, then you don't get involved in state medicine.
You don't end up being susceptible to the state as much.
Same thing's true with your taxes if you're an entrepreneur.
That what you need to show is that the state is not only evil or corrupt or violent or any of those sorts of things.
things and you can make those arguments but I think as we all know those arguments don't really help and you will have to appeal to a new group of people This is why I talk to the young so much.
You have to appeal to a new group of people.
Slavery ended because slavery became unnecessary for the accumulation of wealth.
Now, not to those who were slave owners who'd already had their investment and so on, but to the new group of people coming up who wanted to make their fortune.
To them, slavery was unnecessary.
It was counterproductive.
It was not needed. It was not required.
And yes, great.
And it's not moral. But morality follows convenience.
And I know I've said, use the argument for morality.
I stick by all of that.
But people have asked me, how do you bring up this conversation with people?
Well, I... I think you don't.
don't.
That's sort of the answer that I'm trying to provide here.
If you're a beautiful enough woman, the men will come to you.
And then you'll see the next one.
So, and this is all shallow talk, and I apologize for the extreme, shallow, materialistic, hormonally-driven metaphor, but...
If you are a beautiful woman, you don't sit there and say, how do I attract men?
If you're a woman who's 300 pounds, and you come to me and you say, how do I attract men?
I'd say the first thing you'd want to do is lose the weight.
If you're somebody with a hair lip and you say, I'm having trouble picking up women because I have a hair lip, what should I do?
There's no linguistic trick that's going to make people see past the hair lip.
So I'd say get your hair lip fixed.
And that is...
All involved in outgrowing the state.
Every time we touch the government, we feel frustrated, angry, and helpless.
Of course we do.
If I were counseling slaves who said, how can I be as happy as possible while I'm a slave?
Well, I'd say, can you run away?
They'd say, no. Can you change masters?
No. Well, my advice would be, then, don't get beaten.
Don't get beaten.
Outgrow being a slave.
And we have many, many more options than slaves do.
People believe that the state is morally necessary, and people believe even more foundationally that obedience and allegiance to the cult of the family and to and people believe even more foundationally that obedience and allegiance to the cult of
So, let's see.
When we outgrow God, when we outgrow governments, when we outgrow the cult of the family, it doesn't mean leaving your family.
If you can fix your family, make a great family, beautiful, wonderful, couldn't be happier, fabulous.
But that's still outgrowing the cult of the family because outgrowing the cult of the family requires or demands that we require from our families virtues.
That are not accidental, approximate, or biological.
No unchosen positive values includes an evaluation of the family.
the family cannot be an unchosen positive obligation or value.
If you can be financially responsible, then you don't have to rely on old age security, old age pensions, whatever your government is doing to rob you from the present in order to not pay you in the whatever your government is doing to rob you from the present here.
if you can get into an unregulated industry, like computers or whatever, so much the better.
And even if you can't change your jobs or you can't change your career or anything like that, you can at least keep non-respectful relationships you can at least keep non-respectful relationships out of your life.
Thank you.
The state is fundamentally a non-respectful relationship towards you.
It is an abusive relationship towards you.
It does not respect your choices.
It does not respect your ethics.
It does not respect your money or your property or your person.
You are a brutalized livestock.
If a farmer shot cows that did not stay in the enclosure, PETA would be up in arms.
Animal rights activists would be Storming the streets.
But, of course, for the human livestock of taxpayers and soldiers and policemen, we can't see that, right?
It's too close to the family.
But this whole process of focusing on abusive and non-respectful relationships in your life.
People that you talk to who roll their eyes.
People that you talk to who sigh.
People that you talk to who say, oh, this is just his thing.
He's really big on this whole libertarian, anarchic, whatever thing.
I mean, give him a few minutes.
minutes, the crickets that we talked about on Sunday.
The people who put you down.
The The people who accuse you of all sorts of malfeasance.
The people who disrespect you.
The people who don't ask you questions.
The people who don't listen. The people around whom you do not feel powerful.
Shun all that saps your feelings of power.
I don't mean false, nonsensical, sadistic feelings of power.
I'm talking about real feelings of being empowered, of being excited, of being thrilled, of being juiced.
Shun that which weakens you.
The state is just one of those things.
When people see...
The vitality, the joy, the power, the beauty of a moral life, a really moral life, with compassion, with empathy, with curiosity, but with strength and with resolution.
When people see the beauty of that, It's like a Krakatoa or a flash, a supernova of new possibilities in the human landscape.
When people see that, they will generally say, this person is unworthy of being bullied. this person is unworthy of being bullied.
This person is unworthy of being coerced.
This person is unworthy of being forced.
The state is a ridiculous, mutated, grotesque gargoyle relative to the beauty of this person.
To take another shallow metaphor, and I apologize to deep metaphors and women everywhere, but how do women get rid of a system of forced marriage?
Thank you.
Thank you.
by making themselves so beautiful and so attractive that a system of forced marriage looks stupid.
I mean if every woman looked like Angelina Jolie but sane and had millions of dollars do you think they'd need to come with a dowry?
No! When we approach the world with beauty and with calm and with passion and with resolution and with pride, what happens is we elevate the human.
We elevate our souls to the point where the state is revealed for what it is.
A bunch of pathetic, self-loathing parasites that have the significance of sunspots on the face of the sun in terms of a moral universe.
If you're not attracting people to the cause, to the truth, to philosophy, to this conversation or whatever conversation is powerful and positive and beautiful in this world, If you're not doing that, it's because you're not beautiful enough.
Yet. When we see a beautiful woman chasing an ugly man, it seems indecent.
We can... I mean, it's easier to think of these metaphors in terms of physical looks, but I mean the soul, right?
When we see Angelina Jolie chasing after Danny DeVito or the Elephant Man, and he is rejecting her, she looks, like, disturbed.
I mean even more than she is in real life but she would look disturbed in that scenario when a beautiful person chases after an ugly person begging for approval when a beautiful person kneels in front of an ugly person begging and clasping her hands
why don't you think I'm beautiful?
We look at that as an indecent spectacle of a kind of madness.
Of a self-image that is distorted enormously.
And we want to say to this beautiful woman, what are you doing?
Don't run around after trolls, troglodytes.
Thanks.
The misshapen, the malformed, the bilious, the vile, the violent, the contemptuous, the disrespectful.
Don't run after those sorts of people.
It besmirches your noble beauty, your natural beauty.
Wax perfect in your own beauty.
Thank you.
As I've said before, be a searchlight To guide the ships at sea.
Don't run swimming out after every ship.
Try and climb on board and have a coup.
Just end up in the brig.
I know that there is a counterintuitive aspect to this.
I know that. And the counterintuitive aspect is so I shun people in order to have effect on them?
I ditch people in order to influence people?
What kind of sense does that make?
But that is the emotional trap of the codependent.
It's like the alcoholic who says, well, if I stop drinking, then I won't have a social life.
No, you will. You will.
In fact, you're not having a social life now.
Now you're just having a mutual alcohol abuse session, which is barely even mutual.
If the beautiful woman says, I can't stop chasing ugly men because then I'll never I can't stop chasing ugly men because then I'll never date.
What do we even say to her?
Of course we want to say to her, your beauty is only besmirched by your pursuit of ugly men.
The reason you're not dating Is you coming across all weird?
The reason you're not having satisfying relationships is because you are a beautiful woman in hot pursuit of ugly men.
And that is your ugliness.
That is your ugliness.
When I say that we have to outgrow the state, that we have to live lives that render the state that we have to live lives that render the state unnecessary, that show the excess capital that is currently being consumed on every level by the state,
when I say that we must outgrow the state, What I really mean is we must trust in truth and that the truth will make us beautiful to other beautiful people.
It will drive away the ugliness we currently wish to buy, in a sense, with our own lack of integrity.
But when we focus on our own joy and on our own beauty and on all the treasures of the intellect and the spirit that we can bring to bear on this benighted world, when we elevate what is considered when we elevate what is considered human to an unbelievable new plateau,
Thank you.
We render the state a clear, obvious, and ridiculous prejudice.
The way that the slave owner is fundamentally defeated is for the slaves to become glorious.
For the slaves to wax in beauty.
to the point where the prejudice of the slave owner is revealed as petty, brutal control and insecurity and self-loathing.
The way the horse throws off the rider is to grow to the size of a mountain that Then the rider can't climb on the horse anymore.
We have to let ourselves grow and to take away the restraints, to outgrow the state, to outgrow petty control, to outgrow the ugliness and the viciousness of the crushed people around us.
We have to grow. If we are to win, we have to be magnificent.
We have to be supermen and superwomen to outgrow both slaves and masters.
Humanity is in the process of outgrowing religion, but not by throwing off religion, but by amassing more and more certain scientific but by amassing more and more certain scientific and, I think now with UPB, moral knowledge to the point where religion becomes unnecessary.
ferry.
Why did the Ptolemaic system of astronomy fade and fall away?
Because it was no longer necessary.
Why did medicine supplant prayer?
Because it worked. We have to become so glorious.
I know this sounds ridiculous, and I do apologize for that, but we do have to become so glorious.
That the idea that George Bush would order us around or tell us what to do would make people laugh.
Closure in brutality does have something to do with laughter.
Laughter.
Not laughter at those who've suffered and died.
That will always be a tragedy.
But laughter at the idea That George Bush should point a gun at me and tell me what to do.
The idea that George Bush, the inarticulate liar, never worked an honest job in his life.
The idea that George Bush would tell me what to do at the point of a gun, would that not seem ridiculous?
Would that not be like me telling Pavarotti how to sing at the point of a gun, when I can barely croak?
We must make our, quote, masters seem incongruous.
So when the priests say, Blacks are inferior and the white race must guide them, must help them restrain their base impulses and so on.
When the racists say blacks are dumb, the solution, of course, Is for blacks to achieve, to become intellectually glorious, to become brilliant, bold, beautiful in their thinking.
And when that is established, when blacks achieve intellectually, Enormous amounts.
Move the race forward. Triumphs of the intellects left, right, and center.
When there is a Nubian community of brilliant gods of the mind, then when the racist says, well, we must own the black race because they are inferior, he will be laughed at.
Right?
You have to remove the receptacle of projection in order for that projection to become clear.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This, of course, also helps turn advice into a virtue, which is the maddening frustration of all the human devils in the world everywhere.
The solution to pettiness is size.
Thank you.
The solution to control is growth.
The solution to violence is virtue.
The solution to contempt is self-esteem.
The solution to ownership is magnificence.
That we can control.
Running around after all the freaking idiots in the world, begging them to just think, just give these ideas a try.
Just try and like them. Just try and get them.
I mean, I'm going to send you these links.
I'm going to send you these articles.
I'm going to send you these podcasts.
Please, please, please read them.
It's indecent.
It's indecent.
When we grow in beauty, of course we'll be rejected and spurned by the ugly.
That's, I mean, don't even need to say that.
That's inevitable. Do you think of yourself with your family, with your friends, like you're all fat and you discover this diet that's beautiful and wonderful, hard at times. And you begin to slim down, you begin to get fit, you begin to exercise.
And everybody scorns you.
Oh, it's so pathetic.
You're just succumbing to all the social norms of physical beauty.
Ooh, we can't be fat, we have to lose weight, blah, blah, blah.
And they mock you and they deride you.
How long are you going to keep sending them this diet and begging them to consider it I'd say once, maybe twice.
Maybe. Because when you're losing weight and becoming healthy, they know what's going on.
They know what's going on. Accept the brilliance and the depth and the philosophy capacity of everyone around you.
Accept that. Accept that everybody knows exactly what's going on, exactly what you're doing, exactly what the consequences will be, exactly what the premises are, exactly what the philosophy is.
You do not need to send them a link.
The moment you ask your first question, they know exactly what's going on.
The foundation of this philosophy, of any real philosophy, is curiosity and principles.
Curiosity to admit ignorance principles to guide the acquisition of knowledge, to determine the acquisition of knowledge, to separate it from bigotry.
The moment you ask your first question, They know exactly what's going on with you.
They know to their core exactly what's going on with you.
And of course they're going to want to undermine that and diminish that and scorn it.
But not because it's got anything to do with you!
It's not you as a philosopher or me as a philosopher or this as philosophy that they are trying to denigrate.
Don't imagine that for a moment.
When people put you down for thinking and asking questions, it is not you as a philosopher that they're putting down.
It is themselves as a philosopher that they are putting down.
It has nothing to do with you.
It has nothing to do with you.
If I am too insecure to date a beautiful woman and a beautiful woman asks me out and I reject her, does she then go home and say, well, I guess I'm ugly?
No, I reject her because she is beautiful.
And then if she sends me more and more shots and she goes and gets photos and gets herself made up to look even more beautiful and she sends me these photographs and says, but look, look how beautiful I am!
You must want to go out with me!
All it does is reaffirm my first impression.
The more beautiful she becomes...
in her photos, in her presentation, the more I want to reject her, because the very premise is the rejection of beauty, which I know from the very first moment I see her.
Forget chasing after people.
Trust the truth, trust beauty, trust philosophy.
Grow in beauty and poise and stature and certainty and joy and curiosity and good humor and freedom.
And don't stoop to pursue.
Trust that beauty, when you stop pursuing ugliness, that beauty will bring beautiful people into your life.
We're all philosophers. We're all geniuses.
What we do here is still only 5% of what we could do.
1% of what we could do as a species.
We're just trying to catch up with Rod's four-year-old here.
But chasing ugliness destroys the conversation.
And destroys your own happiness and comes from a feeling of immortality like we'll have forever.
But I would give people one or two shots at this and then move on.
Because ahead of you, when you stop going through these trashy bars looking for trashy women and trying to make them attracted to your beauty...
When you move beyond that, when you move over that hump and you confront that fear of solitude, on the other side is an unbelievably beautiful life.
An unbelievably beautiful life where you're not trawling after trawls and trying to turn them into princes.
But you enter into a land where your beauty attracts Beauty to you.
And you don't have to lift a finger for boon companions and a better life.
You don't have to chase after people and try and turn them into good and beautiful people.
But the very contact you have with others ennobles and beautifies your existence.
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