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March 3, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:13
1001 The Government is Not an Answer

Government, religion and the death of thought...

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In my big truck Invading those tubes Blocking consumers from things that I don't use The world has turned against this You know why?
3.8 billion dollars I don't deny that is why the internet Must die Must die Why the internet Must die Why?
We love the net And we love to surf We love bandwidth So stay off our turf We love the net Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing most excellently.
I'd like to take you on a little tour of a thought or an idea or an approach or, dare I say, an argument called The Government is Just Plain Dumb.
And by that I don't mean that things that the government does are dumb.
That is a That is a given.
That is taken for granted. But what I mean by that is that the whole concept is fundamentally retarded.
And the reason that I have such a fundamental problem with it, intellectually and morally and evil and so on, but intellectually, is that, to me, there is nothing more dangerous, more corrupting, More blocking of human progress than a pseudo-answer.
So, in the histories of human thought, there are about a billion pseudo-answers.
The most prominent ones tend to be around religion and the government.
Religion, of course, is a complete pseudo-answer, just as it is a pseudo-science.
But in religion, We have this question, or I guess in life we have this question, why are we here, where did we come from, what's the origin of the world, what are the origins of the species, and so on.
And religion is just a completely retarded non-answer to these questions.
And because it is a pseudo-answer, people stop asking the question.
That's the real problem that I have.
The great thing about philosophy and the free market and science is that they're open-ended.
And there's a strict and objective methodology for separating truth from falsehood, value from non-value.
In capitalism, it's price.
In the scientific world, it's a scientific method.
In philosophy, it's reason and evidence.
But in government and in...
In the religious world, these non-answers completely block the forward progress of human thought.
They completely kill curiosity, and they promote bigoted freaks to positions of power.
So let's sort of look at the way that religion works, and then we can see how it works in the realm of government as well.
So in the religious paradigm, when we say...
Where did we come from?
The answer is, God made us, you see.
And, of course, that's not an answer at all.
In the same way that we say, well, why should we be good, or how should we be good, or what is goodness?
Goodness is what God tells us.
That is not an answer.
And that's what so fundamentally bothers me about statism and theology, about the government and religion, is they're not answers.
What they are is willed walls of ignorant bigotry which prevent people from actually exploring the question and coming up with intelligent answers.
It's the same way with statism.
It's like, if you look at the status paradigm of the economy, the centrally planned totalitarian or fascist or communistic economy, you say, well, what goods should be produced?
Well, this council should decide.
But that's not an answer.
That's not an answer.
That's just a monopoly of bigotry and force pretending to be an answer.
It's like saying, what is the scientific truth about the origin of black holes?
Let's let this guy tell us and never question it and have no objective methodology.
That is not an answer.
And if we could sort of truly and genuinely understand the tiny little box, the tiny little box that these non-answers put our minds into, we would shudder from them, we would recoil from them, as we would recoil from a head in the road.
So, I think we can generally understand that, from the religious standpoint, the quote answerer To the question of why are we here, or what is goodness, or where did we come from?
God made us, God tells us, God did it.
It's not an answer. To say, well, gee, I wonder where the universe came from.
Someone comes along and says, you know, let me tell you.
The universe was created in some incomprehensible manner for some unfathomable purpose by a self-contradictory being For reasons we could never conceivably understand and in a way that could never ever be explained.
Because that's really when you unpack the phrase, God did it, since nobody knows what the hell God is, and it's an entirely self-contradictory concept.
Consciousness without matter.
Energy without existence.
Thought without life.
Existence without evidence.
It's a square circle.
It's 2 plus 2 is 5.
It's even worse than 2 plus 2 is 5.
It's like 2 plus 2 is green. So, when people say, where did ethics come from?
Why should we be good? What is goodness?
And they say, well, it's Ten Commandments, or it's the Koran, or it's the Torah, or whatever.
What they're really saying is, when somebody says, what is goodness?
What is virtue? What they're saying is, virtue is the contradictory commandments of an incomprehensible being who generates them in ways that we could never fathom.
And who completely contradicts his own ethical propositions, right?
God says, thou shalt not kill.
He killed the whole world, except for Steve Carell and his family.
So, when we say, what is virtue, what is goodness, saying God gives us these commandments, is a complete and total non-answer.
It is an anti-answer.
It would be better to simply stare blankly in response to the question, what is virtue, what is goodness, what is truth?
Just have no answer at all.
Just give that thousand-yard stare.
That would be much, much better than to say, God did it.
Because the moment you say, God did it, God said it, God commanded, God ordered, what you're doing is setting up a complete and total fuck you non-answer.
And when you set up a non-answer to an essential question, what you do is you create an environment where The most corrupt liars will float to the top.
Everything is in the beginning of things.
The real ethics, the real virtues, are the tiny, tiny decisions that we make at the beginning of things.
So when you're faced with the anxiety of the question, Where do we come from?
What is truth? What is virtue?
What is goodness? What is reality?
Why are we here? When you're faced with the anxiety of that question, and all questions driven by anxiety and desire, right?
The desire to know, anxiety being the gap between where we are and what is the truth, which is what helps us close that gap.
It's a propulsion. It's a healthy thing.
When you face that anxiety, if you just make up a magical answer, Crazy guy in the sky that we can never explain gave us orders, right?
Which is really not an answer.
I mean, can you imagine being in a business meeting and saying, well, who should we market this product to?
And say, well, God told me we should market it to X, Y, and Z. I mean, nobody would take you at all seriously, even in a religion.
But when we create an environment, it's like when you start a company.
If you start a company and you say, well, we're going to create a product that doesn't work, sell it for inflated prices, promise support, and then we're going to take the money and declare bankruptcy.
We're going to be a total shady fly-by-night operation that's going to defraud our customers.
When you set that up as your original business model, and that's the goal, and that's the approach, What kind of business people are you going to get percolating in that environment?
Are you going to get honest, intelligent, virtuous business people with integrity in that environment?
Of course not. They're going to smell that a million miles off and they're going to go elsewhere.
The only people that you're going to get bubbling up in that environment are corrupt and cynical and nihilistic manipulators, greedy, broken people who want to break others, right?
And in the same way, when you have a question called what is virtue, what is goodness, what is truth, where did we come from, why are we here, if you create this environment where the answer is crazy-ass bullshit, C-A-B, then what's going to happen is if you come up with an answer called God did it, and since God doesn't exist and nobody knows what the hell it means anyway, and it's a complete non-answer, it's really just designed to block off questions, not answer them.
When you set up the environment called God did it, what kind of people do you get percolating up into that environment?
Who succeeds? In a world of pious lies, who succeeds when bullying and frightening and manipulation become the intellectual order of the day?
Is it virtuous people with integrity who succeed in that environment?
Of course not. The only people who are ever going to succeed in that environment...
are severely screwed-up liars and manipulators.
Cheats, intellectual thugs, brutes, people who love to terrify children because, of course, religion could not survive without preying on the dependence, credibility, and susceptibility of children, the helplessness of children in the face of the commandments of their elders.
If an adult raised rationally had to be convinced that he was evil because a woman listened to a talking snake, then you'd just be laughing at somebody like that.
Religion is a parasitism on children.
Its effects are adherence from adults, but its cause is the parasitism on children.
So, when you come up with an environment which says, we're going to create these crazy-ass non-answers to essential questions, you completely invert integrity and virtue, consistency, logic, and you create an inverse pyramid where the crap floats to the top, the junk, the shit floats to the top.
And good people flee the entire environment.
We can see this in the realm of academia with postmodernism and so on, when pious lies, self-righteous lies, manipulative lies become the core of what is considered to be answers in society.
Only liars and corrupt people float to the top of that kind of environment.
And you can see this in the humanities, and having spent quite a bit of time in university myself, I promise you I've seen this firsthand.
If you're interested in knowing more about this sort of stuff, it's a pretty strong theme in my novel, The God of Atheists, which is available at freedomainradio.com.
So, we can sort of understand that, I think, in the realm of religion, that these non-answers are highly corrupting, destructive to children, and create a bigoted little claustrophobic box Of self-righteous bullying where genuine curiosity and openness and exploration are attacked as sinful and destructive.
It's a cancer, right?
If you have an organism that grows within you that attacks the healthy cells and cannot be attacked by your immune system, it's a cancerous cell.
The metaphor is very accurate.
That children are born healthy intellectually, mentally children are born healthy.
And then they are attacked by religion and warped and broken because of their dependence upon the power of their elders.
So, religion is a cancer that reproduces by preying upon the young.
Now, when we look at the government, it can be a little bit harder, because most of us are kind of practical and semi-scientific, at least, materialists.
So, we can see this stuff fairly clearly.
I mean, we can all see it very clearly in cults.
We can see it fairly clearly in religion.
It's harder to see it in statism.
Let me sort of make that case relatively briefly, and you can see if it rings true and makes sense.
So, with the government we have some very, very essential and foundational questions that give rise to governments or give rise to these kinds of institutions.
How do we deal with violence?
How do we deal with evil?
How do we deal with differences even of opinion?
How is it that the children should be educated?
How should the old be secure financially and medically?
How should medicine be provided?
How should roads be built?
What are the core virtues of society?
How should power be distributed in society?
How should authority be Be centralized or not centralized in society?
Fundamentally, how should we interact with each other in a global way, right?
Or in ways where it's not just personal relationships?
Those are really, really very essential questions.
And, of course, the government is foundationally around ethics as well.
The government certainly claims that its justification for existence is ethical.
So if we just, we can pick any one of these out of thin air, let's just say we'll pick the, um, how should children be educated?
There possibly is no more important question in the world.
How should children be educated?
And there are, I've got a bunch of podcasts on this topic, public schools, for instance, one to four, and the first volume of Freedom Aid Radio, so you can have a listen to those if you like.
But When we understand that the modern argument or the modern response to the question how should children be educated is this.
Give a bunch of people a bunch of guns.
That's it. That's all they've got.
Give a bunch of people A bunch of guns.
That's the answer. Now, if that doesn't strike you as a complete and total non-answer, then I don't know what will.
I mean, then you might as well go back to believing that you were evil because a woman listened to a talking snake.
I mean, you can go back to crazy-ass fantasy planet and live there for the rest of your days.
But if I were to say this incredibly essential question, perhaps the most essential question, how should the children be instructed?
How should the children of society be educated?
If I were to bring to the table, if we're all sitting around a big table saying, gee, I wonder how this should happen, if I were to bring to the table the solution, quote, which would be, see, what we're going to do is we're going to give a bunch of people, a small, I mean, minority of people, relative to the population, the whole, we're going to give them a bunch of guns, and they are going to go door to door, and they are going to take people's money, They're going to point their guns at people.
They're going to take these people's money, and then they're going to set up all these schools, and whether you have children or not, whether you like these schools or not, whether you consider them valuable or destructive, doesn't matter.
They're going to set up all these schools, and if you don't send your children to these schools, you can do that.
You have to pay for them either way, but there will be all of these rules and regulations that you can't compete with these schools effectively or efficiently.
And anybody who doesn't pay for the support of these schools can be kidnapped and imprisoned or shot.
Would you consider that a solution?
I mean, if we have this question, which the free market answers, but if we have this question, how should computers be researched, built and distributed?
If I were to say, well, I think that what we should do, you see, is give a bunch of guns to some people who then go up and down the streets and take money from people at the point of the gun and then provide them with a computer, whether they like it or not, whether they understand it or not, whether they speak English or not, whether they even want a computer or not, and the computer's going to be really crappy and nobody can compete with these guys or they're going to be shot.
Would you consider that any kind of solution whatsoever?
If you were an investor and I said, I have a way to deliver computers and my business plan is to hire an army and to shut down all of the competitors at the point of a gun and then take money from people and then, you know, produce computers if, you know, if we get round to it.
Wouldn't that just be called the mafia rather than, um, any kind of rational allocation of resources or any kind of moral exploration of the question give a group of people a bunch of guns is a complete and total and retarded and evil non-answer To the question, how should we build roads?
How should we interact with each other in the most beneficial way?
How should we educate the children?
How should we secure the safety and comfort of the aged?
How should we provide medical services to people, particularly those in need who maybe can't afford them?
If those very important, very fundamental questions are answered by, give a bunch of people a bunch of guns, Then what happens is exactly the same as religion.
We get stuck in this tiny little bigoted box and we can no longer even think of alternatives to this.
And this is where people are intellectually.
They're in this tiny little box where nothing can be done except going down that groove of give a bunch of people a bunch of guns.
If farmers have a bad year, what is the solution?
Is it negotiated? Is it discussed?
Is it agreed upon?
No. The solution is give a bunch of people a bunch of guns who then go up and down the street taking money from people and giving it to the farmers.
And if you resist, you get imprisoned or shot.
Shooting people is not an answer.
We may as well say, what is the scientific truth of the origins of the universe?
Well, we're going to give people a bunch of guns And they're going to provide an answer as they see fit, with no proof and no evidence, no choice.
And anybody who comes up with counter-proposals gets imprisoned or shot.
Would you consider that to be a just and valid way of approaching the question of the origins of the universe or the origins of the species?
And in the same way, when we ask, what is virtue?
Well, virtue is obedience to the people with guns.
Do you see how that's not even close to an approximation of a wild-ass guess in the direction of, on the planet of, in the universe, in the neighborhood of, in the dimension of a valid answer?
That that is the complete opposite of any kind of valid answer.
Give a bunch of people a bunch of guns.
This idea of a state is an anti-answer.
It retards the intelligence of the human species.
It kills, confines, chokes, strangles, curiosity, exploration, and figuring out a better way.
And you can see this in the realm of education.
As soon as you get a false answer, Progress completely and utterly stops.
As soon as there is a generally accepted non-answer, progress totally stops.
If you look at the fall of the Roman Empire through to the rise of the early Enlightenment in the 14th and 15th centuries, through the rediscovery of Roman law, the centralization of cities and so on, this entire thousand-year period, where these false answers were ascendant and dominant, You get complete halts in progress.
Nothing moves forward. As I say in my book, Universally Preferable Behavior, if you're driving home and you think you've gotten there, you stop driving.
So when you think you have an answer, you stop looking in that area.
And if you think you have an answer for everything, Religion or the state.
Whatever we do, it's either God or gun.
It's either the God or gun, gun or God, God, gun, which do you want?
Those are both false non-answers, anti-answers, retarded, stupid bigotries, destructive, violent, evil bigotries.
And both of them prey on the young in the form of public schools or baptism in child education, child indoctrination on the part of religion.
So when you come up with these non-answers, things completely stop.
150 years ago, I think it was about 150 years ago, I think it was the 1870s, when American, for instance, America, came up with public education, which, of course, had nothing to do with wanting the poor to get educated, because they already were getting educated.
95 to 99% of American children went to school and were literate.
But rather it was because they wanted to impose a centralized kind of nationalistic bigotry and, of course, a Protestant bigotry on the children.
But in the 1870s, what was considered education?
Well, it was considered to put a bunch of kids in a room and have a teacher with a chalkboard instruct them.
Was that the best solution?
Well, maybe it was the best solution in 1870.
Perhaps it was. I mean, if it was a free market solution, I imagine that it was.
But let's fast forward 150 years, and with the minor exception of the introduction of computers, which is not a government-created solution at all, what is the state of education?
Well, it is a bunch of kids in a room with a teacher up at the front, writing on a chalkboard.
And there is a mingling of the genders, which in many ways causes problems in education.
But, as you can see, it's the same thing with scientific knowledge.
When you have a pseudo-answer, you stop looking, you stop progressing, you stop thinking, and you willfully defend that which is completely false and stupid.
And progress stops, and in many ways falls backwards.
So, When we create these situations of non-answers, when we create these environments where giving a bunch of people a bunch of guns is considered to be the, quote, solution to the question of how children are educated, how roads are built, how society is organized, what laws work, how people interact, how we deal with wrongdoers, how we respect property rights, when we just say, well, I don't know, let's just give a bunch of people a bunch of guns and I'm sure it'll work out just fine.
Well, that is a complete and total non-answer.
And when we create that environment, What happens?
What kind of people percolate to the top of that environment where brutal and pious lies rule society?
Do we get virtuous and moral and ethical people with integrity floating to the top of that cesspool?
No. They flee the entire environment.
And who we do get are Liars, cheats, manipulators, rhetoricians, the sophists, the ancient enemy of Socrates, who is still with us and still rules us today, but only because we accept anti-answers instead of real questions.
Thank you so much for watching as always.
I look forward to your donations.
The book deal is still on, $79 for all four of my books.
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