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May 6, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:43:41
1056 Everyday Anarchy - The Conference Call Part 1

Some feedback and examination of the arguments of the book 'Everyday Anarchy'...

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Alright, so we're in.
We're just going to see whether there's anybody else who wants in.
Anyone else?
This is the conference call for Everyday Anarchy.
And there will be references or questions to what word is on what paragraph on what page it's a code.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, I think that's it.
I think everyone's in. So, yeah, so I wanted to...
I guess just get some feedback on the book.
I had some questions of my own around the book itself, but if people had thoughts about the book to start, that would be good if anybody wanted to start off.
Well, I just finished reading it myself yesterday, and Just a general thought.
It's... It's hard to...
It's hard to pinpoint what it is that...
I guess that...
I can't put a finger on what my reaction to this book is.
I mean, I liked it very much so, but I don't know.
I mean, it's well written, well organized.
It's compact. It's easy to read.
It's a perfect handout.
I was thinking of seeing if I could get print copies of this so I could hand it out to people.
Like if you could get those little four-inch pocket versions, like how they make the Constitution.
Yeah, I thought of that too.
That would be good.
But as for...
I mean, my general emotional reaction to it was...
was sort of...
I don't know, maybe I've just been at this too long.
Because... I kept waiting to hear something I hadn't heard before.
that i guess is it's good way to put it uh...
i don't know i i know that sounds kind of I don't know. Sorry, were you still mid-thought?
I didn't want to interrupt. No, no, no.
Sorry, I can't...
I can't seem to put words to it, so I'll just...
I'll step aside here and let somebody else go.
Okay, and did anybody else have any comments or questions?
Well, actually, comments more about the book.
just you know feedback consumer-y kind of things hey sorry hey um I kind of feel like Greg doesn't know where it's...
It's sort of hard to put it towards a little bit.
I like this better than your first one.
I think it was a lot easier to follow and a lot less complicated in general.
Compared to the first one being untruth?
Yeah, sorry.
But for the most part, it was almost like, maybe because I've been reading these for a little while now, that I'd seen a lot of what you said before.
But it was definitely a good introduction, really, to the entire concept.
And I think it will be very good to introducing others to the whole concept in the future.
And what's the concept that you see it as introducing?
Just anarchy in general.
If that makes any sense.
It was very good at explaining sort of how double-standarded, if that's not a word, I'm sorry, we tend to be about the word and whatnot and how we handle it.
Which is why it was a good sort of introduction to people, like new people coming in, if that makes sense.
Yeah, and certainly that was the point behind the book.
So, sort of like Greg, it's sort of an enjoyable read, but nothing that was particularly startling or new?
Exactly. All right.
And was there anything else that you wanted to mention about it?
No, I think that was basically it.
Okay, thank you. And was there anyone else who had comments about it?
Yeah, I agree, because unlike While UPB gives you a detailed introduction to logic and non-aggression principle, everyday anarchy just starts off easy, just gives them something to think about.
It's easier on the mind.
Yeah, no, it's, I mean, UPB is pretty horrible as far as that goes.
It's a front squeeze, but this one is supposed to be a little bit easier to digest.
Definitely. And it's also good for anybody who's...
So it's good for anybody who's new to this.
Okay. Alright. Excellent.
Excellent. And was there anything else you wanted to mention about it?
Not really. Okay.
Thanks.
And was there anyone else who wanted to mention about anything about the book itself?
I mean, I don't want to force anyone to talk about it if they're not comfortable.
I do think it's very interesting that it does seem to be hard to talk about.
And I do sort of have a theory as to why, but I don't want to go into it.
Because, well, I don't want to go into the theory if other people have other things to say.
Well, do you think it might be just the – do you think it might be just the – because this is more than just resuscitating the word anarchy.
right? You're trying to resuscitate in people the entire idea of nonviolence.
Well, to some degree, yes.
Really, the purpose in the book is not to resuscitate anarchy or even the concept of nonviolence, but simply to point out contradictions in the existing theories, to point out the ambivalence that we have towards the use of violence, that we consider are both the greatest good and the greatest evil.
And if people aren't troubled by that, then they're just mental.
And it's nothing that we can do to...
I'm not interested in that, but what I'm trying to do is find the people who go like, well, crazy as this sounds, that can't be right.
It can't be that it's both this greatest good and greatest evil at the same time.
It's like trying to just detonate the ice shield, so to speak, of the idea and just say, look...
This thing is riddled with contradictions, and this is where revolutions start, right?
I mean, in sort of my understanding of what happens is the accumulation of evidence and logical problems with the prior theory, whether it's Newtonianism or Ptolemaic theory or whatever, the accumulations of problems with the prior theories simply become large enough that they can be encapsulated and communicated,
and I sort of feel that we're At that place now with regards to political theory, and so I just wanted to start saying, look, I mean, there are problems with the existing theory, and I specifically avoided making the argument for anarchism, but rather just say that we have some contradictions here, and if they don't bother you, they don't bother you, but they sure as hell bother me, and I think there's good reason that they should.
Contradictions over the commonly accepted notion of anarchism, not the anarchism we talk about here.
Well, there's contradictions, even if we accept the blood and guts chaos theory of anarchism, and that's associated, that's why I started off by saying, even if we accept blood and guts anarchism, that anarchism is a war of all against all, That is considered to be what is present when government is absent.
But why does that seem to be the most present when government is the most present?
Even if we accept that myth, it still doesn't fit the theory, right?
We have to accept that myth in order for the contradictions to exist.
Well, even if we don't accept that myth, then the contradictions in democracy and so on all exist.
So, it's saying that the theory says the less government, the more violence, but the practice, what we actually see in practice is, tends to be the more government, the more violence.
Right. And this is what brought down Marxism as a generally acceptable theory, right?
Because Marxism made a number of empirical predictions, right?
With regards to how society was going to work and how society was going to evolve, and Marxism took as its core justification the fact that it was objective and scientific, that it was not an ideology, but that Marx had discovered, or I guess Marx and Engels together had discovered Marxism.
The core economic drivers and hidden motive forces of society and economics.
And they made a number of predictions.
They made the prediction that capitalism would result in poorer and poorer wages for workers or lower and lower wages for workers.
And that didn't happen.
Quite the opposite happened.
They made the prediction that it was the most industrialized countries.
That would have a communist revolution first.
And of course, that was completely not true.
It was quite the opposite.
It was the least industrialized countries that had the revolution.
Mexico, Russia, China, places like that.
Backward agrarian, uneducated, and so on.
And of course, there was the prediction that...
Under scientific socialism or communism, productivity would increase.
On the other hand, empirically, it completely decreased.
And we could go into a number of other ones, like the state will wither away, but what happened was the state just got larger and larger.
So what Marxism did was it said, this is not an ideology, this is science.
And we are going to make predictable ideas.
We're going to make predictions, empirically verifiable predictions about the future.
And one of the reasons that Marxism became discredited in most places outside of academia was because none of these...
I mean, you couldn't have been more wrong.
Like, I mean, they simply couldn't.
Just about every conceivable prediction that Marxists made turned out to be completely the opposite of what occurred.
And so that it's just in the comparing of the theory to the practice is where things occur.
And that doesn't really occur in academia because they exist in their own planet.
you know in the real world people started rolling their eyes at marxism because it just it's it put it's it put as its core justification the fact that it was not ideological but scientific and thus it made predictions about the real world that turned out to be completely false then by its own standard it fell on its own sword right sorry right
but it also i mean it may marx may have claimed he wasn't being ideological but his whole approach is based on a number of fundamentally false assumptions about human nature well but the um whether we accept as true or false his assumptions about human nature marx himself or let's say marxist would definitely argue that because communism is scientific it doesn't matter what human nature is Thank you.
Thank you.
Oh, I see. Right, because he says that human nature flows from, human personality flows from class conflict, but even if that were completely falsified, it doesn't matter, even if it turned out that it doesn't flow from class conflict, it doesn't matter whatsoever, because he made very specific predictions about...
Right, but those predictions are based on the way he thought people would behave, right?
No, he would say that they were based on iron laws of economics, that they have nothing to do with human nature.
Which, to me, is a confusing statement.
Because economics is...
Essentially about the way that people behave, right?
Well, sure, but an economist will say people respond to incentives, right?
And Marx, of course, would say that people respond to incentives as well.
I mean, he didn't say that people got their ideas or perspectives from some orbiting spaceship.
Marx would say people respond to incentives and the unalterable Unescapable incentives within the capitalist system are for the few of the rich to get richer and the majority of the poor to get poorer, and for the middle class to be erased and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he said that this would occur in a free market situation.
And, of course, we have found that this has occurred over the 20th and 21st centuries, but it's only occurred as a result of the destruction of the free market system and where the free market system operates the most, in places like Singapore and so on, that this is occurring the least.
Right, exactly.
So what he was missing was influences over those incentives, or the nature of the incentives.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what that means.
Well, the difference being between a free market and a mixed or a socialist or a communist or a government-run society is the imposition of power, right? Political power.
Well... I think that's certainly true, although he would be the first one to admit that a communist state does have a lot of power.
He was just saying that the power is in the hands of the workers, quote, rather than the capitalists.
But no, I mean, Marx basically messed up because he didn't understand profit.
And profit is a damn hard thing to understand economically.
Because for Marx...
He felt that you simply underpaid workers to make money, right?
So you would pay the worker $10 and you would produce something worth $20.
And the $10 was the profit.
And that's where profit comes from, is paying the worker less, right?
So of course he said, given...
Sorry, I know this is a bit off-tangent, but it actually does have something to do with the book.
But Marx said...
That because capitalists want to maximize their profits, which of course is completely true and nobody would disagree with that, because capitalists want to maximize their profits, their incentive, since profit is price minus labor and other things,
but labor being the biggest variable, he would say, since capitalists want to improve their profits, The only way that they can do that, or the most substantial way that they can do that is to drive down the wages of the workers, right?
Right. And that's why his theory was, because he thought, this is his labor theory of value, that profit comes from screwing the wages, sorry, from screwing the workers' wages, or screwing the workers.
Since profit comes from screwing the workers and capitalists want to make as much profit as possible, what they're going to do is continually screw the workers.
And more and more and so on, right?
Right. So because he fundamentally did not understand profit, his entire theory was, like, everything flowed from that era.
Yeah, I think I see what you're saying.
Because that's not what profit is, right?
I mean that's sort of like an effect rather than a cause and it certainly is true that you have to pay your workers less than what you sell something for in order to turn a profit but that's not the definition of profit.
The definition of profit is some sort of improvement in productivity through specialization, through the division of labor, through increases capital investment in labor-saving devices and so on.
The definition of profit is fundamentally being able to produce more with less.
He doesn't understand that, right?
As you produce more but less, you release workers to do other things.
Which means that society as a whole can produce more and everyone gets wealthier, right?
Right. A surplus of value derived from efficiency.
Yeah. I mean, so the drive is...
The profits of a capitalist arise because he invests or has some innovative thing.
And it doesn't have to be a huge capital investment.
Henry Ford, revolutionized production...
Right.
but having the car go down a conveyor belt and having everyone work on their own piece.
And so he was able to double workers' wages very, very quickly, right?
Because in that Marxist thing too, right, in the idiot economic view of the universe, if you replace workers with machinery, somehow this is considered to be that which drives down the demand for workers and allows you to pay them less, right? somehow this is considered to be that which drives down Quite the opposite is true.
Well, and it changes the nature of the work, too.
Yeah, it does. It changes the nature of the work, and it takes an intellectual to imagine that a worker is happier working on ten things than he is working on one and making two or three times as much money.
You know, well, he used to polish the hubcaps and do this and do the other.
Now all he does is polish the hubcaps, right?
It takes an intellectual to think that that is a massive drop in the quality of a guy's work relative to getting two or three times the money and being able to go on vacation, being able to send his kids to college and all the other things that – because intellectuals work – they live to work, right, because they enjoy what they do.
They don't understand the psychology of people who work to live, right, who go and put up with a job in order to get other things in their life.
Right. Right, exactly.
But anyway, so it's when the evidence accumulates that the theory is simply not panning out.
And I think we're at a time in history where the evidence for democracy is beginning to pile up against...
I mean the practice is not meshing anymore with the theory.
Has it ever meshed with the theory?
I don't know. I would certainly say that there are times when people are flushed with the success of something, right?
So, I mean, if you look at the 60s and the civil rights movement, everybody was flushed with success and they felt they'd made massive strides forward and this was really going to help the black community.
And, you know, you fast forward a couple of decades and, you know, it's a mess.
Massive strides backwards. Yeah, well, certainly.
And of course, there are certain kinds of cynical theories, which I think are relatively unprovable, but interesting to mull over that.
It was black activists who got most mad at the blacks because they were getting themselves out of poverty and into the middle class in the post-war period fairly rapidly, and so they had to step in and help, right?
In the same way that when people get happier, religion does worse, and so, you know, religious people want to step in and help people avoid that unpleasant thing called happiness.
We want to help you get rid of your happiness.
Right. Because happiness, if you're happy, we can't sell you anything, right?
It's like, I'm here to save you.
From what? We can't brainwash you.
Right. Right.
So, yeah, so, I mean, that was sort of what I was thinking about in terms of the book, was really just along those lines, which was that I did not want to make the case for anarchy, but simply point out the logical inconsistencies, which I think it's hard for people to see.
I mean, there's so much propaganda.
It's really hard for people to see.
And that was sort of the idea behind it.
And... That having been...
Sorry, and was there anything else that people wanted to say about that?
I put everyone to sleep.
Should we talk more about Marxism?
Does that keep everyone alert? Yes?
So, I think that...
I mean, the thing that I found to be interesting about this book is that I've had very little feedback on it other than, yeah, it's good, I mean...
Nothing really new, but well put out.
It's good for other people.
It's useful for other people, but not for us.
And I strongly, which of course does not mean it all correctly, disagree with that assessment.
I also disagree with the assessment that there's nothing new in the book.
In fact, I think one of the best ideas I've ever had is in the book, and I don't remember talking about it before because I remember it hit me like a lightning bolt during the writing of the book.
And so I just wanted to talk about sort of that one core idea, and if people don't think it's new, that's great.
Or if I did talk about it in a podcast already, I'd be more than happy to go back and refresh my aging brain on what happened.
But I think that the concept that the state works on principles of anarchy is just such a mind-blowing idea.
For me, that I'm sort of surprised, I guess, that nobody's noticed that idea.
And it could be because I've done 12 podcasts on it before and for some reason can't remember it.
But in talking about how democracy itself relies on unwritten contracts that are not enforced through the state, Which is the very definition of anarchy, right?
Anarchy is the idea that we do not need a coercive state to enforce our contracts, whether they're, quote, social contracts like property and crime or business contracts and so on.
And so the idea that the government itself, democracy in particular, works on these unenforceable contracts around giving money to campaigns in return for political favors afterwards, which are not even contracts that are written down, The idea that the state itself only exists because these unenforceable,
unwritten contracts are almost perfectly respected is so fucking mind-blowing to me that I'm sort of surprised that it either is something that everybody else understands and I didn't, or it's something that I've talked about before and didn't seem new, or it's something that people didn't notice.
So, did you notice that one or is it not new?
You're talking in terms of the backroom political handshaking that goes on during an election process, or the drafting of new legislation, or that kind of thing, right?
Yeah, there were two that I pointed out in the book, although there's more that could be extrapolated, but the two were The fact that the democratic state runs on these backroom deals, which is purely anarchic in principle.
In fact, it's even worse than the kind of anarchism that we talk about.
Because people say, well, DROs are risky, right?
And if we said, look, the way that we're going to run society is all of these backroom deals that are completely unenforceable, that will never even be written down, that are multi-year...
And people would just say, well, that's completely impossible.
DROs are dangerous enough if you're not even allowed to write down the contract and you can't enforce it using any violence whatsoever, and you can't even speak about it with anyone because it's a kind of dirty secret.
They'd say there's simply no way that could work, right?
People are skeptical of the DRO theory.
If we proposed how democracy works and we'd say this would work perfectly, people would never believe us, right?
Well, and they often don't.
What do you mean? Well, people are always dismissing the DRO theory.
Well, sure, I understand that, but if we put forward this thing which says society's going to work on these backroom deals that are never written down, completely non-enforceable, and nobody can even talk about them or admit to their existence...
Oh, right, right, right.
People would just say, well, that's completely insane, right?
Those would never work.
Well... That may be the...
Well, I don't know.
Most everybody I know would just say, well, that's what we have now.
Okay, maybe I'll try this again.
Because maybe I'm not getting something to cross.
Or maybe it's not that big an idea to get across, right?
But... There's a lot of criticism about the feasibility of the DRO system where the rules can be open, can be signed upon, can be agreed upon, can be public, and can be enforced through a very wide variety of objective and open social mechanisms, right?
Agreed. And people say, well, that seems like that wouldn't work, right?
Right, because they insist that there has to be some sort of force behind it.
Right, right. So the DRO system is almost infinitely more likely to work than if we proposed a system which said the deals can never be written down.
It's entirely based on a handshake.
It involves billions of dollars.
you can never talk about them and you can't enforce them in any way, shape, or form.
Well, they're enforced.
No, they're not. Not to donate money to get political favors.
Well, they're enforced through social ostracism, right?
Well, they're enforced through a process of selection for corruptibility and so on that I talk about in the book.
But what I'm saying is that if we propose that as the system, people would definitely tell us there's no way it could ever work, right?
And furthermore, and furthermore if this was all going on in in complete opposition to the primary armed military might of a one successful dro we would say that could never even come remotely work right wait you you lost me there Well, all the stuff that occurs in a democracy, these political deals, they're actually illegal.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But they work almost perfectly.
Sure, because the enforcement mechanism there is that people don't want to be found out.
Well, that's part of it, but as I talk about in the book, there's a lot more selection that's going on for the people.
It doesn't just work on blackmail, right?
Because blackmail is a gun that goes off in the blackmailer's hands, right?
I mean, they're in a situation of mutually assured destruction, so to speak, right?
That's true. That's true.
But whoever has more power in those situations usually tends to come out with less mud on him than the other guy.
Right. So the state itself only functions on a crippled kind of anarchy.
And it functions really, really well.
Billions of dollars get moved around to just the right people based on just the right influence, with no contracts, with no enforcement, in opposition to the laws, and with a hungry media sniffing around looking for scandal.
It works almost flawlessly.
The state is the best argument for anarchy that could conceivably exist.
Because it actually functions on a crippled form of anarchy, and if a crippled form of anarchy works this well, imagine what an open form of anarchy would look like and how well that would work.
Okay, yeah, that makes sense.
I mean, that makes perfect sense.
I mean, there's all... Like you're saying in the book, there's all sorts of...
Unwritten contracts all over the place.
And so if unwritten contracts are possible...
Well, but it's not a possible, right?
And this is the argument that I don't think I made as effectively as I could in the book, because I'm not sure I'm making it even that effectively now.
They're not out there potentially.
This is the foundation of how political society, which is more than 50% of society, this is how political society actually works, let alone academics, right?
Right, handshakes. Well, yeah, handshakes, and in academics, there's no rule about it at all.
There's no rule that says don't have anarchists in academia.
Yeah, but it's just those unspoken rules.
Ostracism. Right.
Ostracism, self-interest.
I mean – and this is – oh, sorry.
Somebody said that they're confused by the term works with regards to this.
What I mean is that it functions beautifully.
And that doesn't mean it works morally or anything like that, but it functions beautifully.
There is – I mean the whole political process runs on a crippled form of anarchy and the right people always get elected.
And the positive selection for what works and how these deals get made, who gives money, who gets back favors, it works really, really, really well because no one knows about it, right?
And it works under extreme duress and it works under a hungry media and a legal system that is tuned against it.
It works fantastically well because people do get what they order on the buffet even though there's no contracts and there's no enforcement whatsoever.
And when you say the right people get elected and the right – You mean the very wrong people?
Well, the right for the people who are doing the purchasing, right?
Yeah, but wrong for everybody else.
Well, but that doesn't matter, right?
We're not talking about the ethics of the system.
We're talking about how well it functions.
Right. Right. In terms of...
Sorry, go ahead. In terms of...
You're talking in terms of the transaction taking place.
Yeah. I mean, people criticize the DRO system as being unfeasible.
And what I'm pointing out in this book is that we have an example...
Of an entirely and completely crippled DRO system functioning almost perfectly in the form of the government.
And if we have this pseudo-anarchy in the government, then imagine what can happen without it.
Right, right. I mean, you know, we can say that if you look at, I mean, another example, of course, although it's very much crippled by sort of popular media, but if you look at illegal immigrants, illegal immigrants have no recourse to the law courts, yet 10 million of them work perfectly well, or at least relatively well within America, right?
Say again? Well, illegal immigrants operate in a state of anarchy.
They have no access to legal protection or to a state of any kind, really, right?
In fact, they have to avoid it like the plague.
Right. And that all works relatively well, right?
Well... Well, it depends.
It depends on... What aspect of it we're talking about here, because I don't know if the folks jammed into the back of some coyote's van are going to say that it's working really well.
Well, no, but what I mean is that they get paid.
Obviously, otherwise they wouldn't be in that van, right?
They get paid and they find that they can live in a society which is not only without a government but where a government is actively trying to catch them and throw them in jail or deport them, right?
It functions, right?
I mean, obviously it's not optimal, right?
Any more than the drug trade is optimal but it all functions, right?
I mean, drugs make their way from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, right?
Or any other person you name with no contracts, right?
And nothing that's enforceable.
That's true. And all of that...
Sorry, go ahead. And you have the black markets of the Soviet Empire where nominally the state controlled the food distribution.
In reality, you had this huge black market where food maybe was more expensive but you could still eat.
Yes, but see, that is the way that I've sort of approached this question of looking at how anarchy could work.
We say, well, it works despite government.
But for me, to return to sort of hammer this point home, which I'm not doing a very good job of, but I'll keep giving it a try if you don't mind my patience.
Oh, I don't mind being patient. But the idea that...
The government is by far the best argument for the validity of anarchy that exists because it all relies on unenforceable contracts.
Anarchy, of course, would not rely on unenforceable contracts.
But if the government works on entirely anarchic principles...
And hidden and subterranean and non-codified and non-enforceable and non-objective.
If that amount of deal-making can work without violence, then the government is the best argument for the efficacy of anarchy.
And for me, it was just a brain-trippy idea.
And again, I'm not sure if people are getting it or if it's maybe not that to everyone else.
But I think if you do get it, it's completely mind-blowing.
No, I think I do get it, but I'm just kind of wondering why.
I mean, when I read that, I thought, well, that's an interesting argument.
But I didn't fall out of the bus when I read that.
And that's interesting, right?
Yeah, I wonder why.
And there could be a failure of the writing, and I'm perfectly aware of that, but the difference is that, because everyone's saying, everyone who's written to me about the book, who's had any involvement in the conversation, is like, yeah, yeah, it was a good rehash, right?
Yeah, that was my initial reaction, too.
But it's not. I mean, of course, there's some stuff in there we've talked about before, but this idea, which I talked about in two realms, of the near-perfect enforcement, the near-perfect non-violent enforcement of an unwritten rule,
which occurs all over the world, Because it's all based on social ostracism.
Yeah, it's all based on self-interest and social ostracism, and there's no central organizing agency.
Because everyone says in society, well, you need a central organizing agency.
But you don't.
I see what you're saying.
So when you say crippled form, what you're talking about is that That fear of exposure before the law.
But what really motivates the whole thing is just all of this unwritten social ostracism and self-interest.
Right. Right.
Because the whole idea of the market is to have a central agency particularly setting price and the movement of goods and so on.
It's incredibly destructive and you don't need it, right?
In the narrow context of the government, all the interactions are voluntary.
All the handshake.
Sure. Running for office is voluntary.
Giving money to political candidates is voluntary and so on.
And it's voluntary and it's hidden and there's no central agency which enforces any of it whatsoever and it all works beautifully.
Yeah, there's no political regulatory committee or whatever.
Right, there's nobody who says...
If you look at academia, right?
There's no one who says, well, you have to submit the applicants to us and we have to make sure that there's no anarchic elements in this person's thinking.
Right? It just happened spontaneously and naturally.
Sorry, go on. Let me ask you this.
I mean, there's a...
There's a good deal of fear of social ostracism, especially in politics, because of the implications,
right? Somebody gets exposed, they're Sure.
Sure. Well, I don't know about life and death, right?
I mean, it's not like if a politician in his third term gets exposed.
I mean, Eliot Spitzer is not going to be in the poorhouse, right?
No, that's true. Right, he'll just go back to practice.
He'll lie low, he'll write a book, he'll whatever, whatever, right?
Right. But that kind of stuff, you know, takes a huge bite out of their net worth, right?
Well, for sure, and none of this is organized by anyone.
None of these interactions, none of this enforcement, none of it is organized by anyone.
So the central organizing agency runs on principles that are entirely against its own principles.
The state runs on anarchy.
Yeah, within the government, you don't have everybody pointing guns at each other.
Right, and if I donate money, nod, nod, wink, wink, to a campaign guy, I know.
Like, we talk about these contract ratings.
We talk about these contract rating agencies in the DRO system, that somebody who keeps his word is going to have lower transaction costs and people will know and they'll build up their reputation, like the rating on eBay.
But this doesn't even exist within the government.
How do you know if you give this mayoral candidate some money that he's going to throw some goodies your way?
So even if contract rating agencies were specifically outlawed And if DROs were specifically outlawed through some magical means in an anarchic society, it would still function beautifully.
Yeah, so the anarchic principle is really...
To draw a less dramatic example or metaphor from...
From your example of the will kill, it's like everybody in politics has a magic wand that they're carrying around that they could stick you with that would sort of like a weapon of incapacity.
Well, sure, but what we're saying, at least what the book is arguing, is that you don't need a will kill because only people who have proven their integrity to corruptibility ever get into that position anyway.
Right, and the first person who turns will get poked with the stick of incapacity.
Right, right, for sure, but he'll never even get in there.
Right. Right, that's a good one.
Because there's too much at risk, right?
It takes years to build a reputation, only seconds to lose it.
Exactly, exactly. And given the consequences of making a bad decision in this area...
I mean, this is how...
I was listening to this book...
Sorry, this is a lecture by a guy who studied the beginning of the stock market in Holland in the 17th century.
And because it was so new, the government had no laws and no regulations, but it was all perfectly well enforced through ostracism.
So all the deals were made on a handshake, but if you didn't pay when you were supposed to, nobody would do any business with you, so everybody paid on time.
Interesting.
Okay.
The social conformity model of anarchy...
Right. And the idea that, because people say, well, I don't think the DROs would work, and we can say, well, absolutely they will work.
Look at the state. The state functions on anarchic principles, even with an open hostility to DROs.
People say, well, contract rating agencies won't work.
It's like, nope, because the backroom deals in a democracy are all enforced and people are given millions or hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
It's all word of mouth.
It's all word of mouth. There's no contract rating agencies, and it works beautifully.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Anarchy is an improvement on the bad anarchy of a state.
Of the state. Right, and what makes it a crippled form is the...
just the the the the the the the well it's the state right I mean Sorry, I don't mean to jump into the pauses, but the funny thing is, people say, well, what if one DRO conquered all of the other DROs, right?
Anarchy would still work.
How do we know that? Because that's the situation that we have right now.
Right. Anarchy still works.
Sorry? Yeah. Even if the one DRO magically rose to power, there'd still be all the underground negotiations and stuff.
Well, that DRO would function on anarchic principles.
Because it would be a state, right?
And the state functions on anarchy.
The state runs on anarchy.
Right, the people within it.
Well, the movement of goods and services, the promotion of people, everything runs on spontaneously generated, uncodified, unwritten, written down, non-enforceable rules.
That even if you triple anarchy by putting it inside a government, it still runs that government.
That's how incredibly resilient and perfect it is.
That if you took anarchy out of the government, the government can't work.
I see. Right, so you're saying that the state is actually kind of a...
It exists inside of anarchy, not the other way around.
Go on.
It exists in...
The state exists...
Well, the state runs on anarchy.
I just said one inside. One or the other, I think, would be...
I know I said it, but it was sort of a dramatic way of putting it.
But the state runs on anarchy.
The state is the best proof for the efficacy of anarchy that I can think of.
Right. So why then is...
Why is it so easy to just kind of breeze over that point?
Well, I think that's really interesting, and I don't know the answer to that.
I have a couple of theories, but y'all tell me.
I want to theorize when we've got people here who didn't.
Well, um, sorry.
Personally, it wasn't that new of a concept for me.
I don't know if maybe it's where I grew up or whatever, but I actually sort of, not to the point that you had stressed it in your writing, but I kind of already knew that it was sort of the legs for the state.
That, sorry, the anarchy is the legs of the state?
Yeah. I know that may sound crazy, but maybe because I spent so much time watching the backhand deals and everything like that, it really wasn't a completely mind-blowing concept.
Am I right in remembering, if I do remember correctly, that you have politicians around?
Yes. Like they're in the family, right?
No, not in the family.
Sorry, go on. No, not in the family.
I live like half an hour from the California capital.
Oh, okay. So the idea that there are all these backroom deals that are not enforceable, which is fundamentally in the realm of anarchy, this was not a huge shock to you.
But did you make that connection that you can then make a fantastic argument for anarchy simply by talking about the state?
Yeah, and I've actually done that before when talking to my friends, which is probably why that concept was kind of more of a hash over for me, because I've already been using it.
And that's great.
And did you see that in the realm of academia as well, or was that something that was relatively new?
The academia one was, I didn't see it to the extent that you did.
But I sort of also knew that it was there, mainly because, you know, college student, I'm immersed in it all.
And I've had to commit some of those backroom deals, in a way, to get a passing grade, as sad as that sounds.
You'd be sort of like, I'll only wound my principals, I won't shoot them, just so you give me a grade.
Exactly. Sell my soul a little bit, please let me pass college.
Right, I don't mind selling my soul, or at least renting it if I get a good price.
Exactly. And so in that way, I was always really knowledgeable to it.
But for the most part, it wasn't very new to me.
And I don't know if that was the case with everyone else, but just personally.
Okay.
Sorry, go ahead.
I think anyone who's spent any time watching CNN a little bit, at least in the States, is more than aware that most of what goes on in government is more than aware that most of what goes on in government is basically behind
handshaking. For me, the disconnect was definitely in the idea that that in itself is an argument in favor of voluntarism.
It didn't even occur to me.
And when I saw that in the book, making that connection, again, I was like, That's an interesting argument.
I hadn't thought of that, but it didn't...
I mean, I didn't...
For whatever reason, and I'm not sure why, but it just didn't seem like...
You know, it didn't like...
It didn't seem to rock my world the way it did yours, Steph.
And when you think about it now, does it feel any different?
Sorry, the idea that basically the state is the best, biggest, and most the idea that basically the state is the best, biggest, and most empirical example of you Thank you.
Well, best and biggest.
Because it shouldn't even remotely work, according to any anti-anarchistic theories, right?
I mean, we can talk about eBay and stuff.
That stuff operates in the free market, but that the state is the biggest example of functional anarchy, despite crippling anarchy itself, right?
Well, and ironically, even if you look at regulated industries, all of those regulations are essentially...
The process of getting drugs to market.
There's a huge chunk of that that's all basically negotiation between people in the pharmaceutical companies and people in the regulating agencies.
Right. And the revolving door that if you are regulating pharmaceutical companies, after you quit your job regulating them, you get a job with the pharmaceutical companies.
All of that stuff is handshake deals that's never written down.
And they negotiate salary and they negotiate all of this stuff never written down, right?
Right, right. And it all works perfectly.
Right, and that's how Dick Cheney winds up at Halliburton after his stint with the first George Bush, and then winds up back with the second George Bush after his stint with Halliburton, and why Halliburton winds up with the contracts in Iraq, and so on and so forth.
Right, all of that stuff is crippled anarchy, right?
In the same way, as somebody mentioned earlier, in the same way that the black market in Soviet Russia was a crippled free market and still worked, right?
Right. Right.
No, it's a great argument.
So this thing which is put forward, the state, which is put forward as the reason why anarchy...
Sorry.
It is put forward...
As resulting from the argument that anarchy cannot work and itself only works on anarchy.
Well, I'm curious about something that you're working on on this.
It's interesting also to me that it's kind of commonly...
The common consensus seems to be, it's a pretty good idea, but not as much of the mind-blowing nature that you're pointing out.
If you remember the Iraq War video that you put up, and you came to the conclusion that if we accept the horrors of that video, then we have to accept something else.
And I'm wondering if we accept or get the full nature of this idea, then we accept something in our personal lives.
And I'm wondering if there's something, a psychological inhibitor to that.
Yeah, I mean, again, I have a couple of minor theories, but I don't want to theorize if people have.
I think that I'm going to totally sound not vain for a moment, but I think that if something is a great idea, I'm going to go at least with the theory for the moment that it is.
If I almost fell out of my chair when the idea hit me, and I'm still as excited about it a couple of weeks later, and I'm still exploring the ramifications of it in my own mind, Right,
right. And do you have any thoughts about that or theories about that?
Well, it flashed in my mind.
Maybe does it have something to do with how we interact with others?
I don't know. I'm stuck there.
But if we accept this theory as being huge and big, then it might have ramifications on how we interact with others in our life.
It could be, and generally when I start with the state, I go to the two other things that we always talk about, right?
Religion and the family, and start to think, well, what is the role of anarchy in those institutions?
Or... Right.
Or, sorry to go off on another tangent, that perhaps...
Because people aren't allowing anarchy in their mecosystems, then perhaps, because if you're saying that even in the most statist of situations you need anarchy to thrive, then if people aren't allowing anarchy in their mecosystems and having that cold hand of the dictator, then it would mean that they can't flourish as well as they would if they allowed anarchy.
Right. And I would go just one step further.
You said even in the most anarchistic situations, people – sorry, in the most status situations, people need anarchy to thrive.
I'd go further and say that the greatest status situations are only possible because anarchy does work, right?
So you could only get the Soviet empire – And people who want to run it and people who want to be guards and people like – because all of these unwritten rules and unwritten contracts can be perfectly well enforced through social mechanisms.
So, I mean, that's just a minor tweak where I say it's not – well, we have a big state and now we need anarchy to make it run.
And it can only drop that big because unenforceable contracts are perfectly enforceable.
Right.
Well, maybe this gets to,
just tying into what Greg is saying, just tying into what Greg is saying, maybe this gets to, like, core beliefs around trusting people and trusting yourself and that sort of thing.
right? Because if we accept this as some As an important idea, then the implication there is that Well,
I would say, the thought has just struck me, that this idea could be our eclipse.
And what I mean by that is, the theories, Einstein's theories...
We're not considered proven until they sailed out into the middle of the Pacific and they saw the light actually being affected by the gravity well.
There was an eclipse and they saw that the position of the stars shifted slightly because of the sun's gravitational well and that was exactly to the degree that his theory predicted and this and that, right?
So that was his proof and after that the theory was considered proven.
And I wonder if this idea is not our eclipse because we're always talking about Theoretical future anarchy and this and that and the other, but this could be our eclipse.
This could be that which clinches.
It doesn't mean convinces everyone, but this could be that which clinches the theory that we've been working with for the last few years.
Right. Right.
This is it. This is the one that does it.
Even more so than UBB. UBB doesn't prove anarchism.
It says that anarchism is the only logical...
Approach to organizing society.
It doesn't even make that case, just NAP and no theft and blah blah blah.
But in terms of functional anarchy, this could be the eclipse.
Well, that's what makes it so huge, because you actually have something you can physically point to and show people.
Right. This situation works despite every conceivable barrier.
Anarchism works despite every conceivable barrier.
No enforceability, no written down, you know, a system that supposedly acts against it, people constantly making their living out of exposing scandal, and it still works virtually perfectly.
Therefore the theory works, right?
Yeah. Yeah, it's more than just an argument.
It's an empirical validation.
Yeah, to me, and that's why the idea was so mind-blowing to me, to me, it's perfect proof.
We don't need DROs in the future.
We don't need contract rating agencies and how they would work.
And we don't have to worry about whether one DRO conquers.
This is the only thing we need to prove the case.
Okay, I think that's what was...
I was looking at it as just another argument, but as an empirical validation of the theory.
Well, you could simply say, okay, well, what would be the worst case scenario for anarchism?
Well, it would be where you can't even write down the contracts, where you can get thrown in jail, For these contracts being figured out, there's no possibility of enforcement, and there's people who make a huge amount of money sniffing around trying to figure out whether these contracts are occurring or not.
That would be the worst case scenario for a free society or anarchist society to work, right?
And that's exactly the situation you have with the state as it exists now.
Yeah, and it works perfectly.
So if it works under the least favorable or conceivable conditions, then it works.
If you could design a lab which says, here's the most adverse conceivable conditions for this thing to work, and it works, then it works.
The state as a lab for anarchy.
The state as a lab for anarchy.
It proves everything we've been talking about.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
I was going to say, it's abiogenesis.
Yeah, it's, you know, if the man can survive being run over, he can survive a handshake, right?
It's life in, it's like, I don't know, to me, it's like the theory of life, you know?
It just is evident.
I mean, it's observable.
People talk about evolution, not this and the other thing, but you go in a laboratory, you can prove evolution 12 different ways from Sunday.
Right. This is our eclipse.
This is our evolution, right?
Holy crap. And the idea actually came to me after going to see an exhibit on Darwinism.
But anyway, that's neither here nor there, right?
But... But this takes it completely out of the theoretical.
And the theory holds under the most extremely adverse conditions that we could conceivably create.
And it works perfectly.
And there's this weird paradox.
Why do people in academics not talk about anarchism?
because anarchism works perfectly.
It's like...
It's like...
Anarchy isn't just a theory.
It's all around you.
Right. And that's the everyday anarchy.
I was talking at the beginning about the state versus the non-state, right?
Well, the state is this, but marriage is that, right?
The marriage works on anarchy, and our job market works on anarchy, and all educational choices work on anarchy, and then we have the state, right?
But of course the truth of the matter is the state is everyday anarchy as well.
Oh, maybe that's where my disconnect happened too.
Because if you had posed it in that way...
Oh, I couldn't stop the book like that, though.
Yeah, that's true. I couldn't stop the book by saying, the state is anarchy.
Then people are like, okay, I'm down, black is white, right?
What are you talking about, crazy bastard?
No wonder you're not in academics, right?
Right. I can see why you're so pissed off at all of these people with tenure, right?
Right. But we don't have to go to Somalia, right?
And we don't have to go to DROs, and we don't have to go to the future, and we don't have to go to theoreticals.
We can just go to that which is.
Yeah, we don't have to go to Celtic civilizations 500 years ago either.
Right, and see, we can...
Maybe I'll put this forward as an article, but we could put forward this argument...
Which says, do you think that anarchy could work if the contracts were not enforceable, if they were multi-year, if they were hundreds of billions of dollars, if nothing could ever be written down, and if you ever got caught making one of these contracts, you'd get thrown in jail?
And they'd say, pfft, Christ no, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now I understand. You're exactly right.
And they'd say, well, then you have to explain how it works so perfectly in the state and in academics.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Because you can point to that and say, well, it's working now, so what's your argument?
Well, so you're incorrect about this, right?
Because it works now.
That's how democracy functions.
Right. So clearly, you don't have the right approach to this, right?
because you said this could never conceivably work and it works perfectly the world over.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And if this works, imagine what happens when we take it out of the shadows and we make it public and we make it objective and we make it enforceable in the open and nobody's sniffing around trying to screw anyone who's got these contracts.
I mean, if it works in the state, imagine how it can work without the state.
Right, so the question is, I mean, we all know.
Sorry, that's in the book, right?
I mean, this is the greatest argument for anarchy.
This is, you know, this is exactly why we know the state is the greatest argument for anarchy.
This is exactly how we know it will work and blah, blah, blah, right?
And everyone's like, eh, there's nothing new here.
Maybe he'll come up with something new.
Maybe something new. Man, nothing new.
Holy crap. Well, it's a nice book, but there's nothing new.
Right, so the question is, why are we blowing past it?
Yeah, what does it cost to have it proven?
What does it cost us?
And let's just go out on a limb, and maybe this is not the right...
But this, to me, is the greatest conceivable proof that we can have.
The other one, of course, is the family, right?
I mean, this girl on Sunday who was crying about going to see her rat bastard of a father, right?
Well, there was no contract there, right?
And that all seems to be perfectly well enforced, right?
Right. Right, but at the same time, if she takes her advice and doesn't go, that doesn't invalidate the notion of socially enforceable contracts.
Right, right, for sure, yeah, just as somebody who lives in an anarchic society can go and live in the woods if they want, right?
It doesn't work.
It's saying that once you're 18, there's no one making you go see your family.
It's just fear and ostracism.
Yeah, and I mean, obviously, if you look at culture around the world, which is where we started with Untruth, if you look at culture in the world, it reproduces almost flawlessly, where it has dominance, and there's no one enforcing it.
Right. Right. Well, and that's an interesting point, too, because in a stateless society, an anarchic society like the one that you're proposing, the mechanism is the same, but the incentives would be different, right? Because the incentives now are fear and guilt, right?
Incentives in the family?
In the family, in the state, in the church?
Oh, no, no, not in the state.
In the state, it's money and power, right?
I mean, the incentives for keeping the contracts, right?
In a family, it's fear and guilt.
That's true, but there is also some money involved in families as well, as we've heard from the people who say, well, I'd like to defoe, but they're paying for my college, right?
That's my situation exactly.
Right. So, I mean, there is some money, and I don't think it's unfair or unjust, or just pointing it out, right?
I think there is some of that as well.
That's true. That's true.
But what does it mean if it's proven?
If it's no longer theoretical?
And again, I'm not saying that two pages in a book are the equivalent of the origin of the species, right?
I'm not saying anything like that.
But if this is the proof, and not these two pages, but this approach, if this is the proof, and if this is the clincher, right?
As I say in the book, if we start from first principles, it eliminates endless debate.
If we have the proof, what does that mean to us?
It is impossible to argue against it.
Well, that's certainly what it means logically, although it certainly is possible to argue against it, just not correctly.
But what does it mean for us emotionally, right?
Why is it that our emotions went through this stuff and kind of went, eh, skip over, nothing new.
What else is in the book, right? Yeah, I just somehow glossed over it.
Right, and I think just about everybody did, with the exception of Ducky, just about everybody did.
And I think that's really interesting.
I mean, to me, that's interesting, right?
Because I was putting the book out there and I was like, wow, I can't wait for people to come back with this because this is like, holy shit, this is amazing, right?
This is the thing. This is it, right?
And people are like, no, it's good.
It's nothing really new.
One guy even said, well, I'm already anarchist, so I didn't read it.
I didn't finish it. I just read the first little bit.
Well, that's hardly...
And people say, well, this would be helpful for people who aren't already anarchists.
Like, really?
Because I would make quite the opposite argument.
Yeah.
What does it mean if we're right?
I mean, it's a pretty mind-blowing thing, because if we have a proof here, then that's quite something, right?
Right. Well, what would one have to do with that knowledge?
Well, I would ask, what does that knowledge do to people, right?
What if we're confirmed?
What if we're not theoretical, and we're not what-if, but if we're confirmed?
Right. And what if we don't need to talk about DROs and we don't need to talk about contract rating agencies and we don't need to talk about, as you say, Celtic societies or Iceland or, you know, Somalia?
What if we don't need any of that stuff?
In the same way we had UPB for ethics, we have this for anarchy.
There's nothing more to do then.
Well, sure there is, right?
I mean, in terms of the fact that there's, like, five of us on this call, right?
There may be some more things to do, right?
Man, I...
I think you just fried our minds with it.
Well, hey, I'm just paying it forward, man.
That's what happened to me, so...
Well, I'm just trying to answer your question of what...
I mean, what does it mean?
I don't know. I'm just, you know...
I don't know what it means, but I know that it means something to the community because very few people picked up on it.
And you're all smart enough to do that, no question, right?
Right. Right.
For sure. And we don't have to have an answer.
To me, that's the interesting question, which is Why?
Why? Because this wasn't the case with UPB, right?
UPB was like, everyone was like, well, shit, this takes a load off, right?
So the question to ask is what will we lose from applying this?
Yeah, what does it cost? I don't know, right?
I mean, I think if we compare this to UPB, which I think it's a valid comparison, although UPB obviously is much more detailed and rigorous than this, but...
But if we compare this to UPB, I mean, UPB has been great.
I mean, we don't get into those.
I mean, for those who weren't around before UPB, you won't remember this.
But, I mean, this used to be like 60% of our time, right?
Yeah, that's true. On the boards, in the chat rooms.
Actually, no, this was prior to the chat room.
On the boards and the call-in shows, it was all UPB all the time, right?
I mean, that's all we ever did was do the UPB fight, right?
Right, because people would read the article.
You had two articles, and people would read the articles, and then they would come on the board with all kinds of misconceptions from the articles, and we'd have to argue them out all over again.
Right, and since that, since UPB came out, God help us, I mean, it really was a stake through the vampire's hut, and I can only think of one or two times where the debate has flared up, and it's quite quickly gone away.
Right, right. So we got that part squared away, which is great, right?
I mean, that was huge relief, right?
So the implication then is that there are no more, there are no more, if this is the eclipse, then there are no more intellectual arguments that people could use as an excuse.
Right. Well, we have a way of making it enormously efficient, for making this argument enormously efficient, right?
Right. In the same way that the UPB book has...
I mean, the UPB book is very efficient insofar as it's pretty short, right?
Right. So...
And we viewed that as a relief, as a way to move forward...
And what I've noticed, the reason that I wrote this book was obviously we've got a lot of new people coming in as a result of the work Greg and I did on the groups and also because of the advertising and so on.
And people were getting into these arguments about DROs and stateless societies and so on and this and that and the other, right?
And so I wanted to write this sort of intro book to say, you know, and to make it free, right, so that we can...
But if that...
And I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying this book makes this case in a kind of clenchy way, but to mull over the idea that's in there, in this one in particular, helps you make that case literally in about a minute, right?
Right. Yeah, yeah.
It makes it very efficient.
It makes it very efficient.
So that's not happy go-go pleasure juice making for people.
Right? Because if it was, it'd be like, holy shit, fantastic.
Here's a way out of the caverns, right?
Well, it's not going to convert anybody.
That's the thing. Oh, absolutely it will.
It will convert very few people, for sure, but it will save an enormous amount of time.
Right. If you present this argument to people and they just say, no, you're wrong, then you can say, well, my work is done here.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. In the same way with UPB, right?
If someone comes in and starts blathering on about ethics, and they either won't Read UPB, and that's another reason why I made it free, so it doesn't sound like any kind of teasy cash grab.
If they won't read UPB, or if they do, and they can't find any particular flaws in it, and assuming they don't take the academic route and just start making stuff up, then, I mean, isn't this wonderful?
I mean, how much of our life has been freed by not having to have arguments about ethics?
Yeah. Yeah, we had a...
We had a guy come in the chat room earlier today, and he's like, oh, does Stefan address this argument in the book?
And it's like, well, read the book.
And he's like, well, I'd rather have a five-minute discussion than have four hours cost.
And it's like, well... We've all spent that time, too.
It's free. It's not like it costs you anything.
I mean, in terms of the money.
Well, it's entertaining.
I mean, it's not a dense and harsh plowing through the critique of pure reason or something, right?
No. It's pretty entertainingly put together.
It's got the null zone idea, which even if you don't even like the ethical argument is a pretty useful one.
And so, yeah, I mean, it's wonderful because then we can say, okay, so this is just a circle jerk, right?
So this is another reason why I wrote the books and make them free.
It's like, I really care about ethics, so I want to come in and debate them.
And it's like, okay... I don't get to launch myself straight into a graduate school, graduate level course in astrophysics, right?
I have to go through a course or two beforehand, right?
I don't go into advanced astrophysics forums and say, what does matter, right?
Because it would be embarrassing to do that, right?
And what we have here is a pleasant four-hour self-directed course that's free, right?
And if you don't want to do that, if ethics isn't worth four hours of you going for a walk or going to the gym and listening or whatever, right?
Then obviously you don't care that much about ethics, right?
Right. I was thinking about my reaction to UPB, which was sort of lukewarm.
And I have to admit, I didn't read Everyday Anarchy all the way through.
I got about halfway through it, and then I didn't finish it.
But when I heard about this theory now, I just became filled with Kind of like excitement and a little scared.
Okay, let's get to the scared part, because that's the core, I think, of the challenge of the book.
Yeah, I mean, and like I said, I didn't read all the way through, but hearing about this readily verifiable experiment, this criteria...
For me, it's kind of like, well, geez, now I can't not talk about it with people because it's going to be a long, involved conversation.
I don't have an excuse anymore for me to not discuss it.
Not to say to go out of my way to talk to people if I don't want to, but if someone comes by and says, oh, the DROs, this, that, and the other thing, all these things...
Then I can take that time and say, well, this is the thing here, but it also means something to my personal life, I think, too.
It does, and I think whoever mentioned that before was quite right.
You say it means something to your personal life.
I'm wondering what that is.
Sorry, what Greg means by that is, what is this thing you mean called a personal life?
Oh, poor Greg.
Like I'm one to talk. Anyway, sorry.
Yeah, I'm not one.
I'm not much of one myself, but, you know, I mean, out of the three of us, I do go into a job.
No, but... I mean, in part, interacting with the new people on the boards, but also anybody I might interact with just face to face.
My co-workers.
But what I'm asking is, what are the implications on those interactions of this particular idea?
What is this idea going to do to change those interactions for you?
Yeah, James. What?
Sorry. Get up against the wall, white boy.
Hey, no, no, no. It's a totally fair question.
And, well, honestly, it means that I can't really hide.
I don't have a good reason to hide.
Not that it was a good reason before, but...
You know, it's sort of been this...
I guess for me, this private, quirky thing.
And now it's like, you know, five minutes...
Not even, really, to put this forward to people if I want to talk about it.
And there's a part of me that desperately wants to talk about it.
Talk about this particular idea?
Yeah, just stateless society in general.
But the stateless society is the idea, right?
Yeah, I know, I know.
It's going to blow people's mind, and I think it's going to cause aggression in them.
I think that's what we all think. Yeah, yeah.
Maybe I'm not hitting the right chord or anything here.
What do you mean? Just exactly what it means.
I know it means something, but I guess I'm not really sure what it means.
Oh, I think that you are, and I think that if we have a very efficient argument for anarchy that is proven, right?
Or rather, I could say, if we can very easily prove...
It's like if Obama becomes the president of the United States and there's some bigot who's never followed any elections, right?
Who says blacks are stupid.
And you say, oh, so by your theory there's no way that a black should ever be president of the United States.
He's like, hell no, they're not intelligent enough, right?
And say, okay, we now have a blackish president of the United States and therefore your theory is incorrect, right?
Yeah, but you know what happened then.
I know. I know exactly what happened then.
Oh, he just got in because of some backdoor deal with some white guy loving whatever.
Right, but you see, that is revolting to see, isn't it?
Yeah, of course.
That is stomach-turningly, sickeningly disgusting, make you want to scrub down with a loofah the size of Utah, disgusting to look at, right?
Sure. Well, sure.
What do you mean? Do you not find that disgusting?
Does anybody else not have that skin-crawling thing when someone puts forward a theory and you disprove it and they just switch stories?
Isn't that just revolting? Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely. Absolutely disgusting.
For sure. And this is what this argument does, right?
Because you can put forward and say, well, no, I think a state, a society should have completely unenforceable contracts that people get thrown in jail for attempting to enforce and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they'd say, well, that could never work, right?
And they'd say, oh, well, actually it does.
And then we see what they do, right?
Do they go, holy shit, you're totally right.
I have this theory. The evidence is completely against it.
Tell me more. What are they going to do?
So the implications then are that it's going to make it extremely...
Efficient?
Volatile. It's volatile.
It's going to... It's going to very quickly expose people's corruptions.
Yeah, like in a minute or less, right?
And that's going to...
That's going to be pretty...
Horrible?
Difficult to deal with personally?
Well, in a long-term relationship, people are just going to attack you, right?
They're going to get ugly, they're going to get vicious, they're going to get vitriolic, they're going to get difficult, right?
Right. And unfortunately, that's all you need to know, right?
I'm sorry? No, I was saying, did you have any friends left?
Just in case there's one still standing in the middle distance, the EA sniper will take him right down, right?
Well, I wonder if maybe the problem is that this idea is a clincher.
Personally, right?
Like, there's no excuse left anymore To think that this is some kind of weird, freaky, fun thing to do on the internet ourselves.
This is like...
We can no longer pretend...
Well, there's no fence to sit on, right?
Right. We can't have...
There's no excuse for doubt anymore in our own minds.
Right. And when we remove doubt from ourselves, we place, in a sense, ultimatums towards others, right?
Well, if until...
Until the theory of evolution came out or until it was proven, you could be on the fence about it, which meant that you could be friends with people who rejected it, right?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But once it's proven, right, once the theory is proven, and this is wholly different because this is what I tried to make in this book and what I've been trying to work with lately is these self-contained arguments, right?
I don't need to go and look up the robber baron history in order to be able to argue about the robber barons.
And I don't need to go and look up what's happening to gas prices in order to be able to talk about gas prices, right?
Just working from principles, right?
First principles, right.
I have an idea.
Sorry, go ahead. I was thinking, you know, if you point out the state is not necessary, people will get aggressive.
But I think the thing is, people, or at least I'm tempted to play this fencing game of abstract ideas, but now with this theory, you have no real reason to do that.
Right, which means that it's no longer, as Greg was saying, it's no longer an intellectual exercise, right?
It takes down the shield. Go on.
It takes down the shield of abstraction, the shield of...
For me anyway, hiding behind the...
Because I'm not outspoken about These ideas with most people I run into, and probably for good reason.
There's been a couple of people that I've talked to about it at length, but...
I mean, this pushes the envelope...
well, into reality.
It moves it from this abstract...
It totally makes it concrete, and that...
Yeah, it's no research anymore, right?
You don't need to look up...
People say, well, show me an example of a stateless society and we can say the state, right?
We don't need to look anything up and we don't have to convince anybody...
And that was the goal behind UPB as well, right?
We don't have to convince anybody that our historical facts are correct and the other historical facts that they've heard about.
Like if you're trying to talk about the ethics of Lincoln, right?
I mean, it's ridiculous, right?
Because you're either preaching to the choir or nobody's going to listen to you, right?
Because it's like, well, I've heard this and you're now telling me that and who knows who's right, right?
Right, and at that level you're just swimming around in their mythology anyway.
Right. Whereas with this...
So that's why I tried to make that self-contained argument about robber barons in the book and on that presentation.
Which, you know, you could go endlessly on it, and I added some more bits just before the book went out, because somebody was saying, well, the robber barons...
You know, got where they were because they killed people.
It's like, okay, well, let's say that's true, right?
It still doesn't help your case for the state.
In fact, quite the opposite, right?
But if you go there and you say, well, but the robber barons did this, and then there was this legislation, and this guy pushed this legislation saying he was a friend of the consumer, then he switched to the robber barons.
That's all, well, says you, right?
Whereas this thing doesn't appeal to any knowledge that people don't already possess, right?
Because everybody knows about these, you know, you pay politicians and you get special interests, right?
Or special favors. Nobody doesn't say that.
So you don't need to go outside the debate, right?
If you have this argument, you don't need to go to Iceland, you don't need to go to Pennsylvania in the 17th century, you don't need to bring up all these historical facts or all these theoretical arguments which could go on forever.
You don't need to leave the table, so to speak, right?
So did you bring up the gas foe debate with Rich on the call-in show about a week ago and then the video about the robber barons as sort of a preparation for the community for these self-contained arguments?
Oh yeah, no, and I was pretty explicit about that.
So like, I'm really working on these self-contained arguments.
And why? Because the non-self-contained arguments don't work.
And of course, the stuff that has worked the best for us, UPB, is a self-contained argument, right?
And it's something you've been saying from very early on in the podcast series anyway, just to work from first principles to not go searching the library for this fact and that fact, but to think to be a philosopher.
Right, but I haven't been able to come up with one for anarchy until now.
Right, right, right.
I mean, you can talk about the family, but when you start talking about the family, I mean, it gets all volatile, all kinds of volatile, right?
But in terms of... Of anarchy, I haven't been able to come up with a self-contained argument that references knowledge that everybody has, which clinches the case.
Right, and this is a perfect one.
Yeah, I mean, this to me is an irrefutable one.
Because it's more than just an argument.
I mean, it's empirical evidence right before our eyes.
Yes, that's right.
That's right. And it leverages knowledge, which everybody has, right?
And so there's no need to go.
It's very efficient.
There's no need to go to do any kind of research.
You can make this argument without reading anything about DROs or anything like that, right?
Yeah. Yeah, you could.
Absolutely. In fact, you should, right?
Mm-hmm. And that's just the part that I want...
And I guess my concern...
I don't want to take you guys' entire evening out, but my basic concern was that this stuff was sliding past people, which meant that I was concerned that there may be either a sense of complacency or a sense of, you know, yeah, yeah, I got it, right?
And not an alertness.
And also there's a...
But I don't think that is the case, right?
I think James and Greg and other people who said it, I think this point about the emotional volatility of these kinds of succinct and self-referencing arguments is pretty intense, right?
Yeah. Because nobody can say that the government doesn't work on these principles, and nobody can say that they're enforceable.
And nobody can say that there's a central agency which makes them all work.
Right, because there isn't.
No, there isn't, right? So the facts that everybody accepts perfectly proves the case for anarchy, right?
Yep. And so I think that that emotional volatility of this solution or this eclipse or this evolution idea is one of the reasons why people just kind of, oh yeah, that's interesting. Let's keep moving.
Nothing to see here. Just walk past it.
Right, right, right.
Okay, well, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Oh, also, maybe why the general, I sense the consensus was, yeah, this would be a really cool pamphlet to give to people.
Right, let the book do the work.
Right, like, they can deal with it rather than, like, let you make the argument for them.
Right, but if you're not going to see the argument They're not going to see the argument.
Right, right. And that would explain why it was seen as a nice piece of propaganda rather than something that we could actually look at.
Yeah, people say this is the most useful for other people, but I don't think that's true.
I think it's the most useful for us.
Steph, are you going to rewrite the book so the argument's more clear, or...?
No, I don't think that I am.
In fact, I was just mulling that over during this call.
I don't think that I am.
I'm not sure exactly why yet.
If that makes any sense.
I'm not sure exactly why, but I don't feel any impulse to do that.
In fact, I feel the impulse...
To not do that.
And I'm not sure exactly why.
But we have this recording, of course, which we can put out.
But I'm not sure why.
But I'll have to sort of mull it over.
Maybe because...
Maybe it's most important for those of us in this community because this is supposed to be a social thing, right?
This is supposed to be something that...
I mean, it's a conversation, right?
Yeah. The idea isn't to go out and hand out pamphlets, it's to engage people in these ideas, right?
It's not like, oh, read this book, it has all the answers in it.
Yeah, that sounds perilously close to guys in suits knocking on doors, right?
Right. Jehovah's Witnesses.
Yeah. So, I appreciate it.
My dinner is ready, but was there anything else that you wanted to mention real quick, or was this useful?
I'd like to send it around and have a listen, but I think this would be a useful conversation for other people to hear.
I'm not sure at what level, but is that okay with everyone here?
Oh, yeah. Okay, good.
It's okay with me anyway.
No, you speak to them all. Oh, excellent.
You have that power. I have the power.
Fantastic. Alright, well thanks everyone.
Have yourselves a wonderful evening. You too.
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