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Jan. 8, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:31
955 An Open Letter to Ron Paul Supporters

Don't give up hope - liberty is at hand! :)

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Hi everybody, I hope that you're doing well.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, and this is an open letter To the Ron Paul supporters, it's Tuesday, the 8th of January 2007, post-Iowa, post-Wyoming, pre-New Hampshire, but I think we can all see where this is heading.
And I wanted to put some words of encouragement out there for what it's worth to see if I can't possibly help Inject some hope into what obviously is a very difficult situation.
Emotionally, politically, perhaps even financially, it is very sad and disappointing.
Totally do understand that.
What has happened to the Ron Paul campaign and the results that have occurred, which of course are not what the supporters, what you all hoped for.
And again, you know, like my heart goes out to you in so, so many ways.
And I mean this, I know that there have been some words between us because people have misinterpreted my criticisms of political action as being against freedom, against Ron Paul, which is really not the case at all.
So my heart really does go at you.
It is a very, very sad and disappointing thing when you have placed your hopes for achieving freedom in a particular process or a particular goal or perhaps even a particular individual and when that hope clearly is not going to come to pass, it is a very, very sad thing.
I really do understand and empathize and appreciate the difficulties that you're feeling.
I, myself, went down a similar road about 20 years ago.
I founded a political party and I was going to...
I wrote speeches and articles and had meetups and get-togethers and started down that whole road of attempting to gain personal freedom through political means.
And I guess everybody has to have their cherry popped in that way to realize that it doesn't work that way.
So I'm going to throw out a couple of ideas and then talk about some possibilities of how to avoid the danger, right?
The danger when you throw yourself into a cause, and I'm talking here particularly to the Ron Paul supporters who really do yearn and burn for freedom in their lives, in their environment, in their worlds.
For what it's worth, and I know you don't care about my opinion, but I absolutely, completely and totally respect Honor and admire the dedication and devotion with which you have thrown yourself into attempting to work towards liberating not just yourselves but others from a kind of tyranny that is truly awful and terrifying and the morphing or mutation of the Republic into what it has become,
which is an ugly beast that dominates the world.
And its own citizens and the new tyrants.
I mean, I really do admire and respect for what it's worth the energy and the devotion that you have poured into and the charity because I know it's been financial, it's been time, it's been friction, it's been conflict, it's been Energy that you have thrown into this pursuit.
I believe that for most of you it comes from a really good place.
Even your hostility towards what it is that I have been saying I believe comes from a really good place.
And what happens though when you pour your heart and soul into pursuing a particular goal and then that goal Gets sort of smashed up and you don't have a plan B, like a fallback position, which says, okay, well, if I'm not going to be an actor, I guess I'll be a dentist, right?
Or something like that. When you don't have that kind of fallback position, what happens is you are tempted into bitterness or possibly even nihilism, right?
I mean, don't you feel a little bit in your heart just a contempt and a disgust and a resentment towards the existing system, the mainstream media, the The whole mess of US politics.
And you feel a kind of anger and contempt towards the sheeple, your fellow citizens, and so on.
And that is a dangerous situation to be in.
I mean, for your soul, for your spirit.
It is a very dangerous situation to be in, to be tempted by that kind of nihilism.
There also may be those among you who are going to invent scapegoats as to explain sort of what happened and why you didn't achieve the goals that you wanted, which was liberty through the election of Ron Paul, that you may be tempted to invent scapegoats and get mad at each other and castigate yourself, get mad at yourself. Why didn't I do more?
Why didn't I convince more people?
And I can fully understand that as well.
I don't think that's particularly productive, but I can certainly understand that.
So I just wanted to throw some thoughts out there so that you might be able to, if you're heading down that dark road, that you might be able to turn around and, you know, come back a little bit towards the light.
Because your energy and your intelligence and your verbal skills and your debating skills and your passion and your resources are still needed.
To free the world. They're still needed to free the world.
If it didn't happen this way, then you still can help the world.
You still can free the world.
And you won't be dependent upon politics and your fellow voters and how much money gets donated.
How much time and energy.
You won't be subjected to that which you cannot control.
That's sort of what I want to offer you which is freedom in your life to a far greater degree than Ron Paul could have ever provided even if he achieved everything he wanted.
Freedom in your own personal life that is not dependent.
That is not dependent on things outside your control like who votes for what and what gets allowed and what Congress permits and so on.
That's what I want to offer you, which is control over the liberty that you can have within your own life.
That will never come to you through politics, because politics is dependent If you take out all the moral consideration, just from a practical standpoint, politics is dependent upon the choices of the majority which you cannot control.
It is dependent upon the backroom deals made in the political arena which you have no knowledge of and no awareness of, no more than I do.
You can't ever end up with anything other than frustration and nihilism when you put your own personal liberty, your capacity to achieve your own personal liberty in the hands of Events, circumstances, choices, groups, people who are outside of your control, as everyone is outside of your control.
The only person whose actions you can control is your own.
Let me just sort of mention a couple of ideas or thoughts about this.
Clearly the American experiment, and I think that the Ron Paul supporters are perfectly accurate for what it's worth in this assessment, clearly the American experiment in the 18th century was designed to create and maintain, sustain, the smallest government In the history of the world.
That was the goal of the Founding Fathers, the post-Enlightenment, small state, post-Adam Smith, I guess, simultaneous with Adam Smith.
The goal was, the specific goal was, to create the smallest government in the history of the world.
Now, if I say that I have come up with some cure for AIDS, or HIV infection or whatever, then if I say, you know, you drink this coffee and you'll be Immune to the infection,
or the infection will be 0.0001% of the population, and everybody drinks my medicine, and then we end up with the largest AIDS or HIV infection epidemic in the history of the planet, specifically That specifically is targeted or is inflicted upon those who took my medicine, then clearly we can say that my medicine is not only not working, it's doing the opposite of working.
It's causing people to get infected rather than curing them.
That would be the logical conclusion that if everybody who takes my medicine, which is claimed to be a cure, ends up getting sick, then clearly it's not a cure but rather an infection.
And so if we look at The history of the United States, of the grand experiment in minimal states, in small government, if we look at the history of it over the past 200 plus years, it's clear that while the system was objectively,
clearly put in place, With, obviously, no income tax, a tiny federal government, no state tax, just a couple of excise tariffs, and no standing army, and no government control of the money supply, and no national debt, and all this. It was put in plan with the Constitution, with the Congress, with all the checks and balances.
An amazingly designed system.
I couldn't do any better.
Maybe you could, but I wouldn't put a lot of money on it, because they're pretty smart people who were doing this.
The US experiment was specifically designed to create the smallest possible government and to sustain control over the government.
The goal is to cure the power of the government, right?
That was the goal. That was what it was designed to do.
And... What has the result been?
I mean, just throw politics, throw patriotism, just look at it objectively.
The goal of the American experiment was to create and sustain the smallest possible government that the history of the world had ever seen.
Ever! And what is the result of that experiment been?
Well, the result of the Experiment to create and sustain the smallest possible government in the history of the world.
The result of that experiment has been the creation of the largest, most powerful government that the world has ever seen.
Just take a moment and let that bubble through your cranium a bit.
It's really quite astounding.
The goal of the American experiment was to create the smallest government the world has ever seen.
The result has been the very largest government, the most powerful government the world has ever seen, with weapons of mass destruction, with 700 plus military bases overseas, with the capacity to wipe out the life, all life on the planet, many times over.
A government whose power would make Rome look like a local DMV office.
And this is natural.
Sadly, it's inevitable.
Because the smaller you make a government in the beginning, the faster the economy grows.
The more productive is the free market.
The smaller the government is, the more productive the free market is.
Because the free market is so productive, it can handle a lot of taxation, a lot of growth in government power before buckling.
What happens is when you make the government small, you make the profitability of increasing the size of the government that much greater.
Because there's more wealth to tax, there's more resources to control, so you attract more and more governments.
And because the government ends up with so much money when it taxes and controls a free market economy, because the government ends up with so much money and power, it can do things like develop weapons of mass destruction, have a permanent military industrial warfare welfare state.
It can buy off massive sections of the population and embed them into dependence on the state.
It's like if you find a way to get your cows to produce ten times as much milk, all you do is make those cows more valuable to be owned by farmers.
So when you have a small government and you make each individual citizen that much more productive because of a lack of government interference, that citizen becomes that much more profitable to rule From the state.
The smallest governments always produce the largest governments.
It's completely impossible for it to occur any other way.
Never has in history, never will.
The smallest government that came out of the separation of church and state and the taming of the aristocracy in England in the 18th, 17th, 18th, early 19th century, that was the smallest government in Europe.
What did it produce? Why?
It produced the British Empire.
Whenever you minimize government, you increase the value of the economy, which means that the government can grow larger and larger.
The further you push it down, the higher it bounces.
So, even if we were able to get back to some magical constitution-limited government, all that would happen is the whole process would start all over again.
And I know that there's this theory, you know, like, well, that's fine, but I want freedom now.
I want freedom now. Well, you can have freedom now, but it's not going to come through politics, and it's not going to come through pounding lawn signs into turf, and it's not going to come through marching down and carrying signs, and it's not going to come through voting.
Because that's all Surrendering the power of your life, your choice, your individuality, to things outside your control.
You don't get power and freedom in your life by surrendering to things that are outside of your control.
You just don't. I mean, it's tempting.
But there is...
There is another way.
There is another way. Sorry, it's kind of dark and lumi in here.
It is a grey day up here in Canada.
There is another way. There is another...
Approach that you can take to really get free in your life.
To those of us who are...
I shouldn't say those of us.
To me, right? I'm a mountaineer climbing towards freedom and I tried sitting at the base of the mountain and willing my way to the top of freedom with concentration and I tried talking to everybody else and saying, well, we'll get to the top when at least half of us want to go to the top.
But that didn't do me any good.
That didn't make me free.
Running around base camp saying, let's climb Everest, let's climb Everest, let's all get together and climb Everest.
Everyone's indifferent. They don't care.
They're sitting there saying, hey, I snapped my fingers, I'm at the top of Everest.
I just choose not to. Why would I climb?
I can fly, right? And that's politics.
You need to run around trying to get everyone to go up the mountain.
In my particular perspective or belief, and based on my own experience, which is not to say it's objectively true or anything, but...
When you run around base camp trying to get everyone to come climb the mountain with you and saying, well, we can't climb the mountain until we have 60% of people who want to go up the mountain, what you're basically doing is you're avoiding climbing the mountain.
I did. I did for many years.
I tried to exhort and convince people to believe what I believe, to see the truth, to think, to reason, to work from first principles, to work from evidence, to love, liberty, freedom!
I was just running around wasting my time and surrendering my personal liberty to the acceptance or rejection Of other people, and that's what politics is, and that's what mere debating is, and that's what political libertarianism is.
Not only does it not work to bring you freedom, it actually makes you enslaved.
It actually specifically and completely lowers the total freedom in your life.
It lowers the freedom in your life, just as chasing after Ron Paul and God hoping that he's going to make you free.
It takes power away from you.
You surrender your capacity for human liberty and joy to whether you can convince indifferent people, please set me free!
Well, you don't need to convince anybody.
You don't need to run around base camp saying, oh, let's climb the mountain!
Because you know what you can do?
I'm sorry to be annoying, but let me just make the point.
You can just climb the mountain.
Right? The base camp is politics, climbing the mountain, being a mountaineer.
That, my friends, It's philosophy.
Philosophy is your choices.
Philosophy is giving the power to you.
Philosophy means that you don't have to wait, and you don't have to hope, and you don't have to pray, and you don't have to beg, and you don't have to pay to become free.
You can just climb the mountain.
Now, the mountain is a complex thing.
I want to get into it here.
I've talked about it in some recent videos.
But it's about setting yourself free from fear.
It's about setting other people free.
It is about showing people what a free life looks like, which is far more convincing.
To get people to think about liberty and to live freedom.
It is far more convincing to live a free and beautiful and loving and happy and joyful life yourself than to send people links to how bad the Fed is.
That doesn't set people free.
Right. If you want to be a beacon for freedom, you have to be free.
And if you're running around trying to convince people to vote for your guys so you can all be free, you're not free!
Because you're begging other people, please let me free.
Please join me, all of you, so we can climb the mountain.
No, if you want to climb the mountain, climb the mountain.
Just be free in your life.
No unchosen positive obligations.
No relationships. Except those based on virtue and integrity and joy.
No seeing people in your life because you're just historically obligated to and if you don't take pleasure.
Being really honest with people in your life about your thoughts and feelings and not just about the fact that you think we should have no income tax.
It's just an abstract political debate.
I'm talking about living freedom in your life today, tomorrow, next month, next year.
Showing people what freedom really looks like.
Not just describing it in abstract political, economic terms.
By showing them.
Showing them with the example of your life and what it is to live as a free human being yourself regardless of taxation, regardless of regulation.
When we truly live as free spirits, as free souls, By God, we outgrow the state.
You make the state seem ridiculous.
You spread joy and freedom and virtue in your life to the point where people will think, why would we need a state?
We have to outgrow the state.
We can't out-argue the state.
We can't out-debate it. We can't vote it out of existence.
We have to just grow as human beings to the point where The state just seems ridiculous.
If you want to get rid of slavery, and you're a slave, as we all are, you don't argue that slaves ought to be free.
None of that works.
What you do is you educate yourself, and you become articulate, and you become intelligent, and you become joyful as best you can until you tower above your slave owners.
Until the idea of calling you a slave is ridiculous to people.
That's how you get rid of the state.
This is a multi-generational project that starts with you and not with voting, not with research about politics.
We're studying the Constitution.
The Constitution's don't stop bullets.
We've seen that for 200 years.
But it starts with you committing to living a free life yourself, to showing people what freedom looks like in their faces, in your life, in your example.
Living life without fear, without self-subjugation, without guilt, without having to manipulate people, without having to beg people.
But living life with such a strength and independence of pride That the idea of being ruled by some ass clown like George Bush is comedy!
That's how we get rid of the state.
We grow ourselves so large that the shackles will simply fall away of their own accord.
And that you have control over.
You don't have to wait for someone to get voted in to do that.
But that, but that is hard.
That is really hard.
It's beautiful, and it goes without saying, it's beautiful.
But it's really hard.
It's a lot harder than donating to politics and signing petitions and forwarding articles.
And I know that all that comes from a good place.
Do you think that's going to work? But it's not going to work.
It's not going to work. Never has, never will.
We've been trying these political solutions as a movement for hundreds of years and the state gets bigger and bigger and bigger all the time.
But we need to become so large and so powerful that the state is smaller than we are.
that the soullessness of the state is dwarfed next to the size of our souls.
To have such freedom that it is infectious to be in your presence That is what we need.
That we can control.
That we can do something about.
That we are not dependent upon other people's permissions to be free.
You show people such a white light of freedom that the state becomes a laughable entity.
I know this is all nonsense and abstractions and it doesn't really connect with anything that you...
Yeah, I mean, if you want to listen or learn more about that, you can listen to the podcast or drop by the board or watch some of the other videos.
But that's really what I'm talking about, that you have the complete power to create a free society called you, with you at the epicenter.
I've said this before and I'll say it again.
I would rather have a joyful marriage and 50% taxation than no taxation and a crappy marriage.
Or a crappy divorce.
Or a bad relationship with my children.
Or negative and draining friendships.
Or dull obligations to a family that I don't like.
That I follow.
That's the real state that you have control over.
Not dipshits in Washington.
And even if it doesn't work, let's say you say, ah, Steph, I want to outgrow the state, what are you talking about?
Like, boots? No.
What I'm talking about is, even if it doesn't work, even if what I'm talking about is complete nonsense and it never ever does a single damn thing to dislodge a single bad law, well, so what?
If really living as a free man and a free woman doesn't bring down the state and you die with the state still around, So what?
So what? If the least that you achieve is a free and joyful life, is that really such a terrible thing?
It's philosophy that sets us free, not politics.
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