All Episodes
Previous Next
March 19, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:50
1015 The Physics of Whoredom: Intellectuals and the State
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing very well.
I wanted to just have a quick tootles through this question of statism and intellectuals.
Now, I've dealt with this in some podcasts, and don't forget, there is the fabulous new Philosophysician, available at freedomainradio.com, which allows you to step through and categorize the podcast according to the criteria that most meet your needs, so you can really zero in on the stuff that means the most to you.
But... I wanted to just, this is from the Globe and Mail, Saturday, March the 8th, 2007.
This is a book review of a book called The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter by Helen R. Quinn and Yossi Nier.
And I'm going to just read a paragraph or two from the beginning and give you a couple of thoughts on it and you can let me know what you think.
A few years back, I was with a group of Cambridge University particle physicists.
Astronomers and students in the back garden of a pub on a warm summer night, sipping pints of good British ale and debating the next big breakthrough in physics.
Since some of us had just returned from CERN, that giant particle accelerator that straddles the border between Switzerland and France, the implications of discovering new particles was very much on our mind.
But what impact, we wondered, would the discovery of a whole bunch of exotic new particles have on the world?
Why would anyone who is not a physicist care if new experiments could finally explain, for instance, why there is now such an imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe, when there was, in theory, an equal amount of both at the time of the Big Bang?
The humbling answer...
is that most people wouldn't care, simply because it would have little noticeable impact on the politics, philosophy, or economy of the world, and no tangible effect on everyday life.
That's just fascinating.
I mean, to me that is absolutely, delightfully, completely, wonderfully fascinating.
Of course, if it has no real impact on people's lives, This kind of theoretical physics, why does it exist?
Why does it occur?
Why is there such a thing as the CERN? This is a huge particle accelerator.
Well, of course, the simple answer is that it exists because of violence, because the government points guns at taxpayers' heads, and if taxpayers don't cough up the requisite money, To pay for these things, either directly or in the form of inflation, then the taxpayers are shot if they resist arrest or imprisoned if they do not, thrown into these rape rooms of modern prisons.
And this is sort of what I mean when I say we live in a culture of violence.
Our culture is steeped like a blood-soaked rag in violence.
Violence intertwines everything that goes on in our culture from farming subsidies to state subsidies for the arts to, in this case, state subsidies for science.
Now, one of the questions that might occur in this sort of situation Why would the government pay for physics?
Well, the government pays for physics because physicists are a very intelligent group and the government needs to buy their allegiance.
Lord knows the number of times that an atheist is told that Einstein believed in God and since Einstein was so intelligent that Einstein must have had something that he understood about the nature of God and who are we to dispute with or debate with Einstein and his brain-bending universe-spanning genius?
Well, this argument from authority is very common and nowhere more common in the justifications for the state.
If you look at Your average physics geek, let's be honest, I'm a software guy, so the term is not being used necessarily pejoratively, that you have a hobby called physics.
You're fascinated by math, you're fascinated by the universe, you're really interested in being an abstract scientist.
You could say a pure scientist.
And that, of course, to me, is what is properly termed a hobby.
It is a hobby.
It is what you like to do with your spare time.
It is like podcasting.
Well, okay, it's not quite as much of a hobby as podcasting is or should be, but it is a hobby.
It is like doing crosswords that are very, very, very complicated.
You may love to do crosswords.
You may wish to be paid for the rest of your life to do crosswords or Rubik's Cubes or Sudokus or all this other stuff.
But the idea of making it into a profession, of course, would require that there be people in the world who would wish to pay for what it is that you're producing.
Now, it is possible in a completely free society that there may be Societies for the studies of physical abstractions that would rely on donations or would rely on generic R&D grants from certain sectors of the industry just to play around with stuff and so on, but for sure there would not be very many positions open in this particular area.
And everybody who's in physics, everybody who's in science, Who's not working for a private corporation, or even those who are in science who are working for publicly leashed corporations like pharmaceuticals and so on, they kind of get, they kind of know, they kind of understand that without the guns of the state, well, they would have to get real jobs.
And this fear of real jobs drives an enormous, if not the vast majority, of artists and thinkers and writers and physicists and mathematicians and historians and all of these sorts of people drives them into the arms of the state.
And what is it that they do with this, with these powers, with this ability, with what it is that they are able to do?
Well, what they do is they play entirely within the sandbox, as if the sandbox is the universe.
And what I mean by that rather obtuse comparison, sorry, it's that they do not talk about the violence that the society is embedded in.
The society, the culture has soaked up like an overused bandage.
They simply don't talk about it.
And they don't talk about it because They're guilty about it.
I mean, if you've listened to or read Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, highly recommended, we process everything so incredibly rapidly, and consciously we create all of these lower intestine London subway maps, convoluted nonsense to ignore the basic realities of what we experience.
But physicists know, as historians know, as very many publicly funded artists know, as all publicly funded artists know, As all of these intellectuals know who are in the university systems, they all know that they are able to turn a hobby into a living because of violence.
So what is the one thing that they can never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever talk about is violence.
Of course not.
Of course not.
And that's what they're paid for.
It is paid. I mean, the government spends this money, obviously, because taxpayers, anything the taxpayers will accept, the government will do and take the money from.
It gives the government a huge amount of power, a huge amount of power to be able to distribute it to people.
Once the government has the money, then it has the power to buy people.
And the act of being bought and paid for, the act of being bought and paid for really amazingly and in a very powerful way changes the way that people think and interact with their society.
The act of being paid for with blood money and the greed that leads someone to do that It completely changes the way that people view violence and the core nature of their society.
It gives them a huge, dare I say it, black hole that they have to constantly veer away from, that they can never be drawn close to.
And if you are an anarchist or a thinker of this ilk, you've had this...
A million times over, where you are talking with someone about something sort of very foundational and fundamental, like the fact that the state is violence.
And what happens is like trying to push two incredibly opposing and powerful magnets together.
It's like asymptotic.
They get closer together and you just can't get that contact to occur.
And that occurs because of guilt.
Because it's a lot more fun to play around with a blackboard, to get summers off, to go on sabbaticals, to be paid to read and write books, to teach people.
It's a lot more fun to do that than to get a real job.
It's a lot more fun to study Métis history in Canada than it is to get a job as an accountant or as a lawyer.
It's a lot more pleasant to do all of these things that the state takes money at gunpoint and hands it out to intellectuals for it's a lot more pleasant for the intellectuals to do those things rather than to get real jobs and contribute in a meaningful way in a voluntary way to other people see if you want to understand what the government is psychologically if you want to understand what the government is the government is a big bloody electric fence around rank incompetence The government is a big and bloody electric fence around rank incompetence.
Nobody listened to George Bush before he was the president.
People say to you, well, I think George Bush is right, and I think George Bush should lead this country, and I think that George Bush should do this, and George Bush is right about this, that, and the other.
Fantastic. I mean, my perspective is great.
Well, if you believe that George Bush is the ultimate genius philosopher and wise sage of the age, then that's no problem.
Then what you can do is you can call up George Bush every morning and you can say, George, what should I do with half my day or three quarters of my day or all my day?
What should I do? If you feel that he has all of the answers to your life, then you should call him up.
Or maybe you can get a pre-recorded mp3 delivered to your inbox every day with George Bush telling you what to do.
That's perfectly valid.
But of course the reality is that if that George Bush was not president, nobody would listen to him except his immediate family, and even then they would drift off quite a bit.
Government is a huge bloody violent electric gulag around rank incompetence, which cannot bear, cannot bear that it is incompetent.
George Bush is not the most powerful man in the world, because he is so amazingly wise, because he is so amazingly brave, because he is so amazingly and Socratically self-knowledgeable.
Because he is so wonderfully knowledgeable about all esoteric and challenging forms of human thought, interaction, psychology, philosophy, art, and so on.
He is not a savage stone genius of the ages and able to dispense wisdom, and that's why people hang on his every word.
No, people hang on his every word because he's got armies and because he's got the police and because he is in charge of A continent-wide mafia, and in many ways, for the US, a global mafia.
And it is the violence that is required for George Bush to have an audience.
Without the violence, George Bush is just a pleasant-looking dunderhead at some suburban barbecue.
with a kiss the cook apron and a whole bunch of people who take a wide berth around him to get to the beer because he's just a waffle burger who's completely vain.
Without the state, what do these people's lives look like?
If you want to understand why people are so dedicated to maintaining the state, you just have to ask yourselves, in the absence of the state, the absence of the state, What do their lives look like?
What do the lives of most teachers in public schools look like if parents are actually paying their salaries?
Do they still get, say, two months off in the summer?
Do they still get professional development days?
Do they still get to live without the possibility of being fired?
Not really. How many of them would actually keep their jobs if they had to satisfy, excite, enlighten And energize the children into wanting to learn.
How many of them would keep their jobs?
Very few. Very few.
If you look at the excessive amounts, and any amount is excessive, of police brutality and so on, if the people that the police were paid to protect were the ones who actually paid their salaries, What would the police force look like without a monopoly, without a union, or at least a union in its current state, without a blood-soaked, guarded union?
What would the police look like?
What would universities look like in the absence of the state, in the absence of 70, 80, 90% state funding, without tenure, without all of the stuff that goes along that academics hang on to in order to maintain their livelihood?
Would they still get A couple of months, three, four months off in the summer, would they get years off to write sabbaticals?
Sorry, on sabbaticals to write books, and would they get to be flown off to all of these great conferences everywhere?
It seems a little hard to imagine, doesn't it?
And so people know that they're standing on bodies, that they're standing in blood.
And what goes on in the world of intellectuals, in the world of journalists, in the world of writers and painters and thinkers and scientists of just about every shape, color and hue is a massive avoidance mechanism.
It is a black hole. See, the black hole is the center of the galaxy, but we can't see it.
But the black hole of violence is the center of intellectual life.
In every country that I have ever read about, violence is at the center.
The violent redistribution of wealth and privilege is at the center of intellectual life.
And therefore, you have a black hole that nobody can escape, but nobody can see.
And it's hard to see that.
It's like the discovery of the unconscious.
It's like Freud saying, well, there are motives that are not conscious in our minds.
And whatever you think of Freud, the discovery of the unconscious was an amazing leap forward in human understanding of the self.
And in the same way, anarchism is a great leap forward in the human understanding of society, that there is violence that nobody can talk about because they're all bought and paid for.
There's violence that is in society that is at the core of society that runs society.
Up here in Canada, we have all of the artists who are completely up in arms and shocked and appalled by the fact that the government that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into various kinds of Canadian art now is putting something forward which says, That it has the right to not fund offensive material.
Of course, the artists are going completely mental, right?
They're going completely mental, and they're like, oh, censorship, and oh my god, it's so terrible that this and that.
And of course, when you're an anarchist and you're looking at things clearly, it is a disgusting spectacle.
It's like flipping the light on in a kitchen and seeing all the cockroaches swarming.
Because, of course, they have no problem with the violence that is used to fund them and the money that is taken from the majority at gunpoint.
So they have no problem accepting the Mafia's money.
But the moment the Mafia then says, we have some rights to control what it is that we, quote, pay for, the artists get completely up in arms, shocked and appalled, horrified, amazed, appalled.
Well, of course, right? They have no problem with violence.
They only have problem with any sort of control over their activities.
And they claim that this is a big moral right of theirs.
And of course, they never ever talk about the source of their funding.
Because the moment that they did, the horror of their own existence, which is at the moment unconscious, would rise to the surface.
And they would become as men who suddenly admit the commitment of terrible crimes.
They spend their whole lives evading the crimes that they have committed, I mean criminals and so on, and that distorts and destroys all of their capacity for empathy and intimacy and honesty.
If you live in the core, if you live a lie, if you say that you are a virtuous human being who lives off the fruits of violence, then at your core you are living a moral lie, which completely distorts everything else that you see.
And if you don't see that, if you haven't reached the clarity of understanding the violence that is at the root of all of your culture, then society will remain completely incomprehensible to you.
It's like trying to understand physics without understanding gravity.
It just can't be done.
So I hope that that's helpful.
I just wanted to touch on that so that you can understand why it is that anarchists seem kind of crazy because we talk about a violence that nobody else is talking about, but we're not bought and paid for.
Most of us live outside this predatory, disgusting, violent system.
We're not bought and paid for.
▲
Export Selection