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Dec. 30, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:39
948 The Next Thing (Part 2)

How we can free the world.

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Devan Molyneux. It is December the 30th, 2007.
And, ooh, my friends, let us settle in for a chat, which will be shockingly lengthy for a YouTube video.
But this, I promise, it will be of great interest to you and will be something that can really help you bring some real liberty to yourself and to those around you.
I did a podcast recently, I think it was 946, called The Next Thing Part 1.
You might want to go and have a listen to that.
I'll touch on the arguments briefly here and then provide some examples on how it is that you can bring some real, real freedom to your life.
And to those around you.
So, the general thesis in The Next Thing, Part 1, is that this conversation, which if you're just bungeeing in from YouTube on the fly, has been going on for a close on two years.
And we have over a thousand podcasts dealing with a wide variety of topics, from economics to art to psychology to politics and so on.
And I've written some books, which you can get on my website, freedomainradio.com.
But really the first part of the conversation was about understanding the world from an anarcho-capitalist or from a philosophical perspective.
And so we spent a lot of time analyzing various structures such as the state, the church, and in particular the family, and figuring out how we could apply reasonable moral principles to those institutions and for yourselves and in our own lives from The tyranny of the mind, which of course is where I strongly argue is where the tyranny of the state actually arises from.
So the first part of the conversation was about understanding the world.
The second was, from a philosophical and rational perspective, the second was to apply the principles that we had learned in understanding and analyzing hegemonic power structures in the abstract, the state, church, and the family, And applying them within our own lives to get corrupt people out of our lives and deal with all the fallout of that, to get better or booner companions into our lives.
And so it was really about understanding the world, followed by freeing ourselves.
And the third part of this conversation is really about freeing other people, because really that's what we should do.
So to analogize if we're in a state of plague in society, there's some horrible black death roaming the streets, Then the first thing that we need to do is to understand that the world is sick, because if everybody is sick, it's hard to kind of differentiate that.
And then what we need to do if we wish to help the world, or even just to help ourselves, we understand that the world is sick, which was the first part of this conversation.
And then we understand that we are sick and we need to be cured and we find the cure and we perform the cure upon ourselves.
And then what we should do, and my argument is, we should then go and supply this cure to other people.
So that's what this part of the conversation is all about.
So, to start, a fundamental question that is really, really important to ask yourselves is what is the state?
The state being this geographical monopoly on the initiation of the use of force within a particular region, that those individuals who claim that right and exercise that right Throughout history, the slaves have vastly outnumbered the slave masters, and the question is always, how on earth is that possible?
How can you have ten whiteys on a plantation in the south in the 19th or 18th century, and have 200 or 300 slaves, and have those slaves remain slaves?
I mean, they outnumber the masters, right?
The thesis that I put forward in my recent podcast is that Slavery, and by this of course I mean the sort of livestock slavery of taxation and control, the hyper-regulation of the state, and also control over the mind that is achieved by religion and the cult of the family, that control is only an effect of another cause.
So it's not that the slave owner rounds up all of these people And then just magically is able to control them, despite the fact that he's outnumbered and has to sleep.
So the reason that slavery comes about is not because the slave owners attack the slaves, but rather because the slaves attack each other.
The slaves attack each other.
And one of the reasons why I focused on understanding the institutions and then the people around you in ethical and practical terms is because when you really do start to liberate yourself in your own life and you put forward integrity, virtue and honesty as the criteria that you require to associate with people around you, we understand and we realize where the real power structure is in our lives.
And it's not the state. It's not the state.
When you start to become honest with people, which is what I talked about in the against me video, like are you willing to support the use of violence against me, is that the people who actually keep you down, the people who actually will attack you, put you down, undermine you.
It's not the IRS, it's not The police, it's not the soldiers, it's not George Bush, it's not any of these abstracts, not the Pope.
The reason that you are enslaved is because of those around you, not because of these abstract entities.
These abstract entities cash in on your enslavement, but it is only made possible by your fellow slaves putting you down.
I mean, just think about religion. No child is born religious.
If you ever want to put that to the test, just take a four-year-old's Halloween candy away and say, don't worry, you'll get a thousand times more after you're dead.
Children aren't even agnostic.
Give your 12-year-old son an empty box and say, ah, there might be an iPod in there so you can't get mad that there isn't, and see if he responds with, yes, that's true, I guess there is no way I can determine that.
No, he's going to get mad and upset and feel tricked and abused.
We're not born with any of this nonsense in our heads.
That's why we need so much propaganda to end up believing this crap.
But if you look at the church, you think, the church, it's the Pope, it's the people in the tea-cozy hats.
But it's not. The church is the parents who drive their children to the church.
The church is not the Pope.
The Pope can't run around stuffing crazy ideas into everyone's kids' heads.
He's not that fast, right?
The church is the parents who put their children into Sunday school and get mad at them if they don't want to get up and go to church.
And chastise them and put them down and humiliate them and embarrass them and shame them.
For, God forbid, thinking for yourself, for themselves.
That's the church.
The Pope is only an effect of the parents.
The Pope only has power because the parents are willing to brutalize their children with superstitious lies.
And the parents only do it because they're frightened of everybody's disapproval in their community.
It's our fear of each other.
That keeps us down, not the Pope, not George Bush, not any of these people.
We don't praise the troops because we're afraid of George Bush.
We praise the troops because we're afraid of being attacked by each other.
It's not the state that makes you go over to your Sunday dinners and was over at Christmas if it wasn't a great and wonderful and happy Christmas for you and you kind of put up with your family.
It's not George Bush or the IRS or the Pope or God who makes you go there.
It's fear of your parents that puts you there.
People praise the welfare state not because they're afraid of the poor being poor.
It's not because they have a great moral idealism about state programs.
They praise the welfare state because they are fearful of being perceived as cold and mean if they don't.
Which really means they're afraid of being attacked by others.
By the fellow slaves.
By the fellow slaves.
The people I've only ever really been attacked by in my life is those who were, quote, closest to me, particularly in an accidental relationship, family, teachers, and all the things I was forced into.
Those are the people who attack me and put me down, not the state.
We, we, you, I, all the people around us, who the moment they hear an original thought, a passionate ideal, a new truth, To attack that!
We. We are all the state.
The Pope is an effect of the parents, and the parents do what they do because they're afraid of the disapproval of their fellow slaves.
This is so important to understand.
If you're fighting the state, you're fighting an effect, not A cause.
Not a cause.
That's so, so fundamental to understand.
And that's why I focus so much on personal liberty.
Because when you try to be free yourself, to be honest, to be open, to have integrity, to have virtue, to have clear lines of communication with those around you, BAM! You get smacked down almost every time.
It's not the IRS. It's not the state.
It's not the Republicans. It's your fellow slaves who will spend forever and a day attacking you And yes, there's things that, you know, collective punishment and all these things that are done to us as kids that provoke that.
But it's our fear of each other that produces this cowed and broken population that can be profited from.
You can only be a farmer if you can break the will of your cows.
It's why nobody farms great white sharks.
You can't domesticate them.
So if you can make your cows docile and not want to flee or fight, then you can profit from it.
But if your cows won't be domesticated, then profiting from them becomes impossible.
If we were not fearful and broken, the state would be impossible.
It would be impossible for there to be a government if we weren't afraid of and attacking each other.
Each other, not. It's a horizontal dictatorship that produces hegemony, that produces these pyramid power structures.
It's a horizontal dictatorship.
That is the cause.
Because that comes first.
The parental attacks upon the children for not being religious, for not being patriotic, for not loving their country, for not loving their extended family, if they don't.
That comes first.
The church is an effect of that.
The state is an effect of the infighting among the slaves.
The church is an effect of the infighting among the slaves.
The cult of the family, wherein your family just has value because they're your family, that is an effect of the infighting among the slaves.
And fundamentally, hierarchical power structures, from the army to the state to the church to the cult of the family, all gain their power.
Because the parents are willing and do attack their children.
You have to attack the child and break the child and make him fearful of disapproval because disapproval breeds attack.
You have to attack and break the child in order to serve him up as a low rent source of income, a low maintenance source of income for the slave owners.
It is because the parents are willing to attack the children That the children grow up to be profitable to the slave masters.
So if the slave masters can...
Let me stay within the metaphor.
If the slaves teach each other that slavery is virtuous and that trying to break free is evil, unpatriotic.
We're for the family no matter what.
Our God is right and righteous and all other gods are wrong.
Therefore breaking free of religion, of accidental geography, of the biological cult of mere proximate genetic relations called the family, there's evil.
Loyalty is good.
If the slaves teach each other that, then it becomes possible for slave masters to profit.
But the slaves have to do it to each other first.
And there's no way to undo the power of the state, of the church, of the cult of the family, unless you and I stop attacking each other.
I'll say that again. Sorry to be annoying.
There is no way to undo the power of the state, of the church, and the cult of the family unless you and I stop attacking each other.
If we stop attacking each other, and particularly if we stop attacking our children, We will raise people too independent to be harvested.
We will make the state unprofitable.
We will make the church a losing economic proposition if we stop attacking our children.
Because the church will pay For the churches, for the proselytizing, for the conversion, for the preaching, for the lecturing, for the books, for the heeding, for everything they pay for.
And they won't get the harvest of perpetual donations from broken adult children.
You won't attack the church and can't disprove God.
You've just got to stop attacking your children, forcing them to go to church, telling them that ribs and talking snakes have anything to do with reality.
Jewish zombies can come back from the dead and telepathically understand your love for them and put you in a paradise.
Stop inflicting insultingly ridiculous fairy tales on your children and layering in the moral dimension of evil.
That's how you break the church.
You just stop attacking your children.
And you stop attacking each other.
Somebody says, I don't believe, you don't go, bam, you have to believe.
Bad person, get back in the box.
You say... Tell me more.
We approach each other with curiosity and with benevolence.
Doesn't mean we don't disagree with each other.
I disagree with the Ron Paul people.
I don't attack them. I just ask them questions.
How is it that you can prove what it is that you say you're going to do?
to do?
Why is it that it is right to want to gain control of this gun called the state and think that you, you can use it rightly?
Nobody in history ever has.
But we have to stop attacking each other.
Now, the way that this works, and I'm sorry to make this so long, but it's so, so important to really, really get this in your gut.
The way that we free ourselves from the state is we stop attacking each other.
We stop attacking each other.
We set each other free.
And once we get used to and can taste that freedom, once we get used to and can taste and live that freedom, the idea of being controlled by others in any hierarchical structure will be ridiculous.
It will be laughable.
It will be embarrassing to hold that position in the same way that it's embarrassing to be pro-slavery now.
I'm sure there are some idiots out there who are pro-slavery, the same way there are flat-earth people But it's embarrassing to hold that position, and thus, it has no power.
But with broken, angry, frightened, self-lacerating, other attacking people, yeah, it looks like we need the state, because it looks like people are kind of nuts.
Right? If you bind the feet of Chinese women until they are a little curled under stumps, Then yeah, it looks like people need crutches.
How could we have no crutches?
People can't even walk.
But you don't continue to bind the feet of Chinese women and then say, well, we don't need crutches, because clearly we do, but it's not out of biological necessity that we need these crutches.
It's because we have been attacked, abused, undermined, crippled.
Scorned, ridiculed, treated with indifference, treated as objects, whether by our parents or our teachers, our extended family, our priests, doesn't really matter.
We barely even, except in the form of public schools, we barely even encounter the state until we're out of high school or university.
And then we are fully broken and prepared to be ruled because we have been layered in With the emotional hair-trigger response of attacking anybody who shows a spine!
So I'm going to give you some minor examples of this.
This is not to pick on anybody in particular, but here are some minor examples of this.
At the Free Domain Radio website, there's a chat room, which I think is a lot of fun, and we do have a lot of fun in there.
But every now and then, something comes up which I think is very rich as a discussion point to help shine a light on a particular area that is very often or so often unclear to us.
So, we don't really have to talk about the provocations.
It's not particularly relevant.
But a couple of times over the past couple of weeks, I've come into this chat window, and mind you, these are people who are...
Who are like-minded. I'm not going to the, you know, statistassholeoftheplanet.com and going in and stirring feathers.
I'm not going to putting the fun in fundychristian.com and talking about atheism.
These are people who are like-minded.
And this is sort of what results.
So a couple of times I've been angry about something, as I occasionally am, and I've come into this chat room and said, I'm angry about X, Y, and Z. I haven't used all caps or anything, but I said as angry.
I've made a list of some of the responses that I get from people.
And this is not all the responses from everyone.
I just wanted you to understand that.
But when I get angry, this is the response that I get.
Steph, that sounds unusually aggressive for you.
Why did you even feel the need to respond to whoever it is I'm angry?
As a video's publisher, can't you just delete comments?
Yes, Steph, but why were you so sharp?
Steph, can you fight every battle?
Steph, what would you lose by disabling comments on your vids?
Steph, fine. Go ahead and be aggressive, but does it serve your ultimate goals to throw down with every wanker who sets you alight?
Won't they attack you more if they see you respond to attacks?
He was acting like a pompous fool, but that doesn't mean he wasn't just baiting you, and you taking the bait only encourages other trolls.
Is it moral to respond to banal arguments again and again and give bad people what they want?
Which is your intention?
I was more concerned that you were actually wasting your time and effort yelling at this loser.
And, uh... A couple more, and then I'll sort of tell you why I think this sort of fits into the thesis, and how we can really, really work to set each other free, which would be a wonderful and glorious thing, I think.
So, um... So I put forward a proposition so that I might say, put something in a video which says, if you don't have the intellectual capacity of processing a particular video, it's usually a good idea not to watch it, or if you do watch it, not to respond to it.
Like, I'm no physicist, so I don't go and watch physics lectures and then give my two cents worth about what I think is going to...
What the hell do I know about physics?
I have a layman's understanding of science at best.
So people said, you can't do that, Steph.
If you can't process it or understand it, then don't comment on it.
It's a reasonable thing to say, right?
Shouldn't need to be said, but it's a reasonable thing to say.
So they said, well, I would just feel sad and not want to watch that video at all.
Someone else says, but making people angry intentionally seems unduly aggressive, Steph.
Steph, you seem to have an increasingly hostile reaction towards negative commentators as of late.
Do you feel differently now than you did in the past?
Somebody says, well, but if you say, hey, you're probably an idiot.
If you are, don't watch my videos.
That's just going to offend perfectly intelligent people.
Do you think that it will increase or decrease the attacks upon you?
And then there was a question of whether or not people who have the capacity to intelligently process a rational argument, doesn't mean agree with it, but at least intelligently process it, do they have the capacity or do they not have the capacity?
We went into a big, big, big argument about that.
Do they have it? Do they not have it?
And then somebody said, well, yes, but you should be as accurate as possible to avoid misinterpretation.
That tiny linguistic slip-up may confuse someone who will then misinterpret what Steph is saying.
Fixing that tiny linguistic slip-up would be far easier than trying to clear it up later.
I know, it drives a lot of people nuts, says this person, when I get picky, but I spend too much time editing people's work not to do it elsewhere.
Content should always be razor sharp!
And I said, I don't agree with that.
Oh, you don't think we should be as clear as possible?
I said, well, perfect perfection is impossible.
And people believe all sorts of nonsense.
It's wildly self-contradictory.
And this person said, moral propositions that aren't consistent are unacceptable to me.
Anyway, so it was very interesting to me, and maybe this has been your experience as well.
I've certainly seen it with others.
I don't think it's just me. But it's very, very interesting when you think about it that, oh no, I put logical arguments out as best I can, and yeah, I mean, for sure, I've just got a whole bunch of people attempting to rip open my skull and take a dump in my brain, but when I put forward that a certain comment really angered me to people who are on the same page in the same world as I am,
That the person that they criticize and attempt to change is me.
That is really, really interesting.
I'm not offended by it.
I do find it absolutely fascinating, absolutely fascinating, that we see somebody's put forward a rational argument, Somebody has responded with an abusive personal attack, and then I want to tell this person where to go, get lost and ban them or whatever.
And the person who's attacked, who's criticized, is me.
And that is absolutely fascinating.
And you can see there's a wonderful, wonderful series of arguments that are put into place as to why I, Steph, should not be upset, you know?
Well, that's unusually aggressive.
Why are you so aggressive?
You can't fight every battle.
See, a false thesis is always put forward, right?
So if I say, this person made me angry and I'm going to tell them off, then people say, well, you can't fight every battle, but of course that's not what I'm saying, right?
So people will reframe your argument into a straw man argument and then say, you can't throw down with everyone who is a jerk on the internet.
Of course, that's not what I'm saying either, right?
But people will attack you more if you engage them, that you have to rise above it, that you have to not get mad at people so that they don't escalate their attacks on you and all this kind of stuff, right?
You're wasting your time. I'm just concerned about you wasting your time and effort, which of course is nonsense.
It's nonsense. What's happening, and you understand the other ones, right?
But what's happening, of course, is that when I get angry and I'm going to express my anger towards someone, other people feel anxious.
This is how slaves stay slaves.
And not to put anyone down, I'm just sort of pointing out the reality of the situation.
That the slave who says, I'm offended...
At being attacked. That is the person that you attack, that you undermine, that you attempt to dissolve their anger into a kind of masochistic passive self-righteousness.
So I say, I'm mad.
I'm going to say to somebody that I'm mad at them.
And people are like, oh no, no, don't do that.
It's not productive.
It's not practical. You're falling into their trap.
You're taking their bait. You're this, you're that, the other.
I'm the person. They believe whose behavior needs to be corrected.
I'm the person that they're rushing in to correct the behavior of.
Isn't that just fascinating?
Just fascinating!
Somebody's getting punched in the face, and they bring their fist back to land a punch back, and everyone's like, no, no, no, no!
Don't! Don't!
Right? But that's the essence of slavery.
Right? That's the essence of slavery.
Attack the person defending himself.
Not the abuser, because the abuser in this mental model is the slave owner.
But you attack the slave who even thinks about defending himself.
So I had a conversation with one of the people who were in this chat.
It was very helpful. Because she was saying, Steph, you should have been slightly more clear about your comments about who should watch your videos or whatever.
And I said, okay. Let's say that we have a standard call, 100%.
Perfect.
Perfectly clear communication.
And let's say that I was at 95%.
She said, yes, that seems about right.
And then I said, where does initiating verbal and personal abuse sit on that plus 100 good communication, minus 100 bad communication?
I'm at 95, where does abusing somebody verbally sit?
And she said, well, minus 70, right?
This is so important.
I'm at 95%, somebody else is at minus 70%.
And I said, so where could the person who's at minus 70 ideally get?
She said, well, maybe they're only capable of a 50.
Fine, okay. So we got minus 70 to 50, which is a 120% increase, whereas I've got 5%.
Let's say that 100% is impossible.
I can go up 1%, 2%, or 3%.
So we have a gap in behavior.
So important to understand. I really appreciate your patience with this.
We have a gap in behavior. Somebody who's abusive, who might be vaguely positive, Who could go up 120%, improve 120%, and we've got somebody else who might improve a couple of percent.
We've got somebody who's on the negative side who's attacking, and we've got somebody on the positive side who might be slightly clearer in his communication.
me.
And who do you criticize?
Think about this in your life and in terms of what you do and what is done unto you.
The default psychological position of a slave class is that in any conflict you attack the most reasonable person.
The default psychological position of a slave class is that in any conflict you attack the most reasonable person.
You align with the slave master, you ignore the abusive actions of the initiator, and you attack the defender.
You attack the most reasonable person in the interaction, and you call it morality.
So, in a number of conversations that I've had with people about some pretty vituperative attacks that I've received over the internet and in my inbox, on the board and so on, in almost every single situation, I am the one who is criticized.
I am the one who is criticized.
Steph, you shouldn't fight back.
Steph, you should rise above it.
You shouldn't fall into their trap.
I think that you're being over-aggressive.
I think that you should communicate more clearly.
I think you should disable the comments.
I think you should. I think you should.
I think you should. I think you should.
Steph, you're the one whose actions need to change in this situation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. People can walk up and punch you in the face.
But that doesn't even register in my consciousness because I'm in the slave class, so I can't register the initiation of the use of force.
It's statism, right?
I can't recognize the initiation of the use of force.
I can only...
Criticize the victim. I can't see the rape.
I can only tell the victim that she should have done something differently, or that she shouldn't press charges, or she should rise above it, or she shouldn't fall into the trap of the rape.
I know that's an exaggerated example, but it scales all the way up to those kinds of moral evils.
And I'm not jumping down anybody's throat here.
I'm just pointing out an observation about how it is that we're going to go about dismantling.
Oh, let's get this question. How are you going to dismantle the state?
This is how you do it.
This is how you do it. How you dismantle the state and the church and the cult of the family.
How you get rid of slavery.
How do you get rid of slavery? How do you do it?
Politics doesn't work.
Agnosticism doesn't work. Strong atheism doesn't work.
Being a professor doesn't work. Writing newspaper articles doesn't work.
Voting, God knows, won't work.
Becoming more educated doesn't work.
Communicating clearly doesn't work.
Putting six million videos on YouTube does not work.
Having the best arguments on the planet, as most libertarians have had for hundreds of years, doesn't work.
Doesn't work. Adam Smith talked about no free trade 300 years ago.
We have less free trade now than we did then.
Every economist on the planet understands that free trade is beneficial.
None of these things work.
None of these things breaks us out of the slave class.
Being right, being rational, being effective as a communicator doesn't work.
Writing, reading, podcasting, video blogging, blogging, emailing stuff around, listening to Mises.org, great site.
None of these things work. How do we end being in the slave class?
How do we end the slave class?
Would you like me to tell you before...
Your notebook battery runs out?
Let's sidle up, shall we?
How do we end slavery?
Slavery of the state, slavery of religion, slavery of the cult of the family.
How do we end it? How do we end being slaves?
Well, well, well, all we do, my friends, to stop being slaves, all we have to do Is stop acting like slaves.
To stop being slaves, all we have to do is stop acting like slaves.
When I say that, everybody's imagination goes to, I'm gonna have a tax revolt.
I'm gonna go live in the woods.
I'm gonna go live in the hills of Montana.
And I'm going to flee statism and the society and this, that and the other.
Well, Not gonna work.
Not gonna work. We don't abandon the world to status.
Abandon the world to religious cultists.
We don't abandon the world to crazy extendo families.
No, we just stop acting like slaves.
And what that means is you have to stop this habit, which we all have.
I have it, you have it. We all have this habit that when we see a conflict, we immediately scan, we scan, we scan the conflict and we look for who has the most power and who is the most reasonable, who is the most crazy and aggressive and who is the most reasonable.
Who's not going to listen to me and who, God forbid, might turn and attack me?
Who's got the most power and is the most crazy and is the most abusive and is the most scary?
And who has the least power and who is going to be the most reasonable and who's the least likely to be abusive?
And then we BAM! We attack the person who has the least power.
We attack the person who is the most reasonable.
We attempt to correct the behavior of the best person in the interaction.
Which means that we join The crazy abusers.
That's what slaves do.
They suss out, they figure out who's got the most power, who's got the most power.
Bam! I'm going to align with that person and I'm going to call myself a moral hero by attempting to correct the actions of the most reasonable, virtuous and moral person around.
The person who is least likely to attack me back, I'm going to attack them and I'm going to call myself morally courageous.
That's what slaves do.
And if we want to get rid of slavery, we just got to stop doing that.
You know? It's like this thing that you say, Doctor, it hurts when I do this!
The doctor says, Stop doing that!
If you want to stop being a slave, stop acting like a slave.
If you want to stop acting like a slave, what you need to do is understand that your emotional anxiety is provoked by any slave standing up for himself against a crazy abuser, and that your natural habit is going to be to attack Undermine and attempt to bring down the anger of your fellow slaves, the self-righteousness of your fellow slaves.
Whenever you see a fellow slave getting angry, what are you going to do?
Oh, no, no. Don't do that.
Don't do that. No, no. Think about it.
Reason about it. Rise above it. Let's be Zen.
Let's be Buddhist. It's okay.
Forgive. Forget.
Let's move on. Your mother didn't know what she was doing.
Your father has the best intentions at heart.
You're the one who needs to not get angry.
Everybody else can be crazy angry assholes and from here to eternity, but you, you can't.
No, please don't.
Don't get angry.
Don't get mad.
It's okay.
I can do it.
I'll go talk to them.
I understand.
It's okay.
I'll get...
That's how we slaves fuck each other.
here.
Your brother gets mad at your mom.
You know, mom called me a jerk on the phone yesterday.
Do you say, I totally sympathize with you?
You call up your mom and say, what are you calling him a jerk for?
That's totally abusive. That's absolutely unacceptable.
No, what you say is, I know, mom can be that way, but it's okay.
It's our job to just try and rise above it.
Fuck the person who's the most reasonable.
Align yourself and protect the interests of the person who is the most abusive.
That's what slaves do. That's why there are slave masters.
Because we attack and undermine each other for our assertiveness and our independence and our integrity and our courage and our virtues.
That we make having virtues, having independence, God forbid, getting angry!
And not like crazy psycho angry, abusive angry, but reasonably angry.
Setting boundaries, setting personal limits, pushing back abusers.
We make that a punishable offense.
We attack people who do that!
We attack them! We, slaves!
You know, there's this Japanese proverb, it's the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down.
It's the tall poppy that gets cut down.
But, not by the gardener or the carpenter, but by his fellow nails and his fellow puppies!
Because when someone stands up among we slaves, when somebody stands up, suddenly We feel like slaves, right?
When somebody stands up.
I'm not talking about Ed Brown and not paying your taxes.
I'm talking about inner life, in the power structures that we intimately inhabit.
Family, religion, patriotism, of those around us, not abstract, of the power structures that we inhabit.
Somebody comes in and starts questioning something, starts asking questions.
Everybody else gets tense. You immediately want to stop that person from asking those questions.
That's your solution!
So if everybody's sitting around the Christmas table, And your brother pipes up and says, you know, Mom, Dad, I really want to talk about the fact that we were beaten when we were kids.
You feel anxiety.
Oh, that's going to give me indigestion.
And what's your response to that?
Shut up. Shut up.
You get mad at your brother, right?
That's slavery.
That's the state.
The IRS is just an effect of our willingness to attack each other.
So somebody says, there is evil in the land.
There's a gun in the room. There is corruption in the air.
That makes you feel tense.
Right? So what do you do?
BAM! You put that person down.
Put him back in his place. Shut up!
I can't believe you brought that up at dinner!
You know Dad's heart? Why did you bring that up?
As it confronts your, appeases your illusions about your level of freedom.
Right? How many times have I been at these sorts of gatherings and I bring up something that's true?
And people get mad at me.
Right? Because I'm the reasonable one.
I'm the one who's speaking the truth.
I'm the one who's not going to attack them back.
I'm not an abuser.
So when I speak the truth, people side with the abusers and they attack me.
Your behavior, Steph, is that which is the problem.
Your behavior needs to be corrected.
That is the state.
Our willingness to attack each other for honesty, for virtue, for courage, for integrity, for honor, for dignity, for boundaries, for independence, for the insouciance of original thought and rationality.
Saying what is, is.
The fact that we attack each other for bringing the message of truth into a corrupt environment.
Don't. We'll all get beaten.
That's what collective punishment of slavery is all about.
Getting the slaves to attack each other.
Not for their vices, but for their virtues.
So, we end statism by setting each other free.
You understand? We end the state.
We end the church.
We unlock the shackles of the cult of the family, not by attacking the slave owners, because they're just an effect of us attacking each other, but we free the world by setting ourselves free But most of all,
by setting each other free, somebody says, I'm angry.
You say? Tell me more, my brother.
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