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June 10, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:14
1083 The Machine of Evil

The cogs and wheels of evil's birth.

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. We are going to have, I guess, a wee short little podcast.
I'm just heading off to the gym after I have got one video for playing music.
Sorry, one mp3 player for playing music and another one for playing videos.
And I've got just the right videos to watch while I'm doing my cardio.
And, oh my god, I'm just an anal little electronic fuss budget, I must tell you.
But, such is what it is.
So, thanks again to everyone who made it up to the barbecue.
It's funny, we should really not call it a barbecue, but rather, in fact, a long weekend with many sandwiches.
But it was wonderful to have everyone up.
Great to meet everyone. I do suggest that we have a chat about, I guess, some people who came up from Friday night and then stayed until...
Monday morning, I suppose.
It was great. And we can talk about what we'd like to do perhaps next time and things to be improved in so on.
Though for me it was a wonderful and great weekend and thanks everyone who took the time and effort to come up and did some great work, but mostly we just had a lot of fun.
So I hope that you found it worthwhile and I hope that you can join us on the next one.
Now, I've got a Podcast idea in my listo potential podcast floating around, which I'm going to do a sort of dry run of here and now, which is The Evil Machine.
The Evil Machine.
And this sort of comes out for me, in my mind, sort of like there's some game, I can't remember what it was called now, but it's for the old Atari, and I think it was around for the Amiga, like not the 2600, but the No, the Atari 800. And it was an acronym if I remember right, not M.U.L.E., but it was some game where you got to manage a nuclear power plant and you had to keep it from blowing up and so on.
And in preparation for the third book in the Anarchy Trilogy, which will of course contain four books, that joke's already been taken by Douglas Adams, but I enjoy recycling.
This evil machinery or evil machine or evil reactor or something like that is the idea that what it is that sustains corruption or evil is highly complex.
And that is why it's so hard to dismantle the state and other kinds of corruption like the church and so on.
And the reason why I focus on the family hopefully will be at least somewhat clear.
This is going to be like a warm-up podcast for the topic, and then I want to do a presentation with lots of beeps and burps and machinery and so on, and building up the lower intestine map of the machine of evil.
And then I will go into it in more detail.
In the third book, my first book was Practical Anarchy, the second book...
Anarchy, the first draft of that, is done.
And the third book is Achieving Anarchy, which is how we go from here to free.
I mean, the whole hog, not just personal freedom, but political and theological freedom, or freedom from theology as well.
So that's going to be my stab at helping us move past the question of anarchy, just as the book on UPP helped us move past ethics and And we build this foundation brick by brick as we keep moving this Tower of Babelfish up to hopefully the stratosphere of action in our lives and changing the world.
So, I would like for us to be able to get past Anarchy because the success of the free books has brought a lot of people into the conversation who are less familiar with the arguments about Anarchy or for Anarchy.
So, of course, they're like, well, DROs would just become...
Dictatorships and so on. So I'd like to be able to have a reference where at least the case could be made that that wasn't going to happen so that we can move to the next thing.
So, the machinery of evil, and you could sort of start and end at any place, more or less, but the machinery of evil works a little bit something like this, at least as I conceive it, and I'm sure that I'm missing more than a few cogs and whistles, but this is the way that I see it.
Running along, that clearly the focal point of transmission of corruption is parent to child.
And I simply say that because in most cultures, and certainly in Western cultures, the parents are the primary transmitters of values to the child when the child is in a preschool At a preschool age.
Zero to four or five or whatever it is in your local neck of the woods.
And when I say parents, I don't necessarily mean parents directly because, of course, I am fully aware that lots of families don't have two parents at home or even one parent at home.
The parents choose to have the care to choose to stay in the career, those that do, which means that they then must choose a daycare, and they do so based on according values and so on.
So, the parents are either transmitting the values directly or choosing the proxy substitute that does it for them.
And that is the first transmission of values.
And, of course, the values that are transmitted are Almost always wrong or bad or corrupt or something so that the parent is the first transmitter in this sense either directly or indirectly and then from the parent of course we go to the school and we go to religion and from the school and from religion we then go to to university and so on and then we go to the ones professional professional success which involves a lot of compromises of values Even if you simply socialize or like the social ease that comes from mainstream values.
So that's, of course, the direct causal view from a child.
Parents, preachers, teachers, and professors, and work situations or work environments.
But that, of course, is a very simplistic model, which is like looking at the tide and saying the water is decided to finally march upon the land and overwhelm it, without recognizing that it is a sequential or cyclical pattern of, I guess, lunar-driven water motion, water migration.
Because, of course, the parents teach the children certain values, but where have those values come from?
The parents have not invented these values.
They have not made them up.
They don't start themselves from a blank slate, a tabula rasa.
They themselves have been produced from the culture that they inhabit, or highly influenced by, or we could in a sense say programmed by, the culture that they inhabit.
So who is it that creates this culture?
Well, we could say that the artists create the culture.
Well, where do the artists get their ideas from?
And, of course, who are the artists selling their ideas to?
They do not invent the culture that they themselves inhabit.
And, for instance, artists who are making kids' movies who are focusing on...
You know, the endless environmental mumbo-jumbo that goes on and fears of global warming and the need to recycle and Gaia is dying and, you know, all the propagandistic crap that children imbibe.
Well, do these artists invent these topics or these issues or make them sort of cool or necessary to instruct to children or at children?
No, they don't.
This comes from other sources.
And so the artists themselves are imbibing a culture and also are targeting a parental market, right?
I mean, the kids don't buy the movies themselves, the parents buy the movies on behalf of the children particularly, or in the case when the children are very young in particular.
So there is a demand for this kind of propaganda, which the parents grew up with and also which You know, if you have a Walter Block story where he starts talking to his daughter about the nonsense of environmentalism and his wife sort of intervenes and says, no, don't say that, right?
And because if all the kids are propagandized about recycling and you say to your kid, well, recycling is just a statist cash grab, it's a complete waste of time, just a bunch of And so on,
right?
So, where do the parents come up with these values or these necessary values that they need to inflict on their children in order to allow their children to maintain social norms and so on?
Where does this come from? Well, they don't invent it themselves.
And where do some of these values come from?
Well, they come from the scientists, of course, right?
And the scientists themselves are...
Coming up with all of this nonsense in order to get the funding.
And where does the funding come from?
Well, the funding comes from the government.
And where does the government get its money from?
Well, of course, the government gets its money from the taxpayers.
And why did the taxpayers hand over the money?
Because they have been propagandized from a very young age to believe that the government is virtuous and the corporations are evil and without the government...
Welcome to the desert of the real.
We simply have a nightmarish horrorscape of manufactured landscapes where everybody dies.
It's the same kind of propaganda.
So where does the propaganda come from?
Well, it comes from the artists, but the artists get their information from the scientists, and the scientists get their money from the taxpayers, and the taxpayers pay their money because of the artists, and so on.
one.
So you can see the challenges and the problems around this question of the machinery of evil.
And so we continue at the gym.
Oh, come on. I know you've missed the gym cast as much as I have.
And frankly, after a weekend of entertaining...
Daddy needs to get buff!
So this is the challenge, at least one of the challenges, with regards to this question of this machinery of evil.
And of course, because it is such a machinery, the word evil is to some degree what you might call that there, dramatic lessons.
Because, I mean, people don't invent the history of the culture that they move into or swing around, they don't come up with any of that stuff, any they don't come up with any of that stuff, any of this stuff.
So it's really hard, I think, to call it just evil, because it's not invented by the people who inhabit it, or rather, that it inhabits.
We have only a part of ourselves, In many ways, it's not even a very large part of ourselves that we can claim as significantly individual, if that makes sense.
I mean, we inherit the culture, the language, the education, the parental culture that sort of comes floating down or rather slamming down upon us.
All of these things we simply inherit and When you sort of peel apart these things and say, who am I without being born in this country, to these parents, with this language, with this history behind me, that we are 99% inhabited by history and other people's thoughts, and we can, of course, carve out a certain amount of authenticity for ourselves, But that is really hard.
To have a direct relationship with language while navigating through everybody else's perceptions and beliefs is hard, to say the least.
It's really complicated and difficult.
And that's why a lot of people try to avoid this process of individuation because you realize at some point how little individuation is really possible and what a tiny slice of the pie we actually inhabit as individuals.
I mean, it's like the brain and the body.
A smaller percentage than that.
You and I share pretty much the same kidney and 90% of the same brain structure, I would imagine.
Maybe 95%, but there is a corner of individuality that we can reserve for ourselves if we're willing to work hard enough at it.
So, everything that we inherit, everything that is inflicted upon us, was also inflicted on those we inherit it from, and those they inherited it from, and so on.
This is the chain of culture, for want of a better word, that just goes back over time.
And peeling away from this is very, very difficult, of course.
I mean, it really is like coming out of a matrix, as we've talked about before.
And so this machinery of evil is a very tight, tight, tight structure.
I dreamt about it, actually, and had visions of it when I was going through my own First slice individuation back in the day, I guess 99 to 2001, and I was going through therapy.
I dreamt of it as an enormously tight and compact and dense and heavy and all-encompassing kind of machine that you couldn't open up, that you couldn't alter, that you couldn't even find the power source of.
It was a kind of puppet master machine that hummed and controlled the world.
You know, like, it'd be weird if you...
I guess it's sort of like the determinist argument that you think that you're free-roaming like a tumbleweed or a car in an infinite parking lot.
And then when you learn some philosophical truths, what happens is you realize that you were in fact on train tracks the whole time and didn't even know it.
it, and that can be, well, disorienting to say the least.
And those who attempt to change society without recognizing how dense and how complicated this machinery is, this machinery of reproduction, they're like those, maybe this is what came out of the 20th century in this regard,
this sort of the mad scientist vision that scientists would just try to alter life without having any respect for its, you know, the power of DNA and existing structures of life.
But people who attempt to change this structure without having respect for its density and its complexity and its self-defensive, self-protective nature, those people, I think, tend to be enormously irresponsible and quite frankly tend to get a whole lot of people killed.
I mean, I'm thinking about the sort of fascist, nazist, totalitarian experiments of the 20th century where you simply believe that you can Take over this machinery and change it to your liking, but that is not the case.
If we look at culture as the collective personality and we accept and understand that culture at an individual level, which is personality, is incredibly inert and that it takes an enormous amount of stress and unhappiness to change I mean,
we've all gone that, you know, climb up with your teeth, slip down while you're sleeping, aspect or approach to personal growth or personal change.
We've all felt that. And how much we have remained the same, even with the amount of change that we attempt to inculcate or create within ourself.
And culture is The collective expression of what is called a personality, and there certainly are personalities to cultures.
And it is much harder to change a culture, and when you get the ecosystem idea you'll feel this even more strongly, but it's much harder to change a culture than it is to change a mere personality, because with a mere personality You're dealing with a single ego and with a culture you're dealing with a self-reinforcing system that is very broad-ranging, very self-reinforcing.
It's a Hydra or it's like one of those beasts where you take a sword to it and your sword goes right through it or it cuts it and then the thing reseals up right away.
And this is why working with first principles is so inflammatory.
So, how is it that we're supposed to change this self-reinforcing, how is it that we're supposed to change this self-reinforcing, tightly packed machinery of evil?
How is it possible for us to be able to do that?
Well, of course, the insight that I've tried to bring to this equation, and I certainly was not the first, I imagine, to bring it.
I haven't read of any others, but I'm sure there were others, so I certainly arrived at it with independent honesty, I think.
But in the past, what people have done is they have said, well, there is this agency called the state, which is that which controls culture.
Culture is the state, or the culture is the effect of the state.
And so if we gain control of the state, then we can rewrite culture.
So if I'm a communist and I gain control of the Russian government, then I gain control of the Russian culture.
And that has been how change has been perceived as occurring in the past.
And it's sort of like saying, once I become a parent, I can change the direction of the family.
And that's true, but only if you reject...
I mean, change it positively, and that's true, but it's only true if you reject most of what was done in the past.
So, most people have this perception that What they need to do is gain control of the power of the state, and through that they can then gain control of culture.
The state is the cause and culture is the effect.
Now, of course that is entirely the opposite of my approach, or the approach that we work with here.
In the way that we approach it here, culture is fundamentally an effect of the family, and the state is culture is fundamentally an effect of the family, and the state is an effect
And so gaining control of the state, gaining control of the gun, is completely counterproductive.
It does not cause change within society.
And in fact, it tends only to escalate the justification for violence within society.
Because, I mean, obviously in the family, the perception is that, or the basic story of every family, is that there was no violence.
You know, there may have been spanking, there may have been criticism, there may have been all of these things, but there was spanking or beatings or criticisms and so on only because of love and virtue.
We did the best we could.
You were a difficult kid.
All the excuses that we've talked about over the course of this conversation.
So, in the family, you have this core narrative, in the family, you have this core narrative, which is that violence is a regretful necessity due to the evils of the child.
and So, first of all, the story is that there was no violence, and then if that story is penetrated, then the answer is that there was violence, but it was Due to the immorality of the child, right?
And that, of course, is exactly what occurs in the realm of the state.
There is no violence.
It's when you argue taxation, right?
Well, first of all, there is no violence, but then when you continue with the argument and you do finally make the case that, of course, there is violence, Then what do people say?
Well, there is violence but we choose it, or, which in which case is not violence, or if you demolish that argument, well there is violence but it's only because people are innately selfish and won't help the poor if they're not forced to.
So this process or sequence of argumentative points or argumentation points It's directly analogous to what occurs within the family whenever you start to talk about the true nature of most people's family upbringing.
There was no violence.
There was violence, but it was chosen by bad behavior, or if it wasn't chosen by bad behavior, it had to be inflicted because the behavior of the child or teenager was going to be inevitably bad.
No, they just don't listen kind of thing.
And the role of violence in creating the problems that it is supposed to be solving is always and forever ignored, right?
So parents don't say, well, my kids don't listen because I'm violent.
They say, I'm violent or aggressive because my kids don't listen.
The cause and effect is always placed with the helpless victim at the center of the instigation, that they are the first cause, and everything else is a response.
And in the same way, it is the, quote, evils of the taxpayer, the selfishness and corruption of the citizenry, that is supposed to be justification for the predations of the government.
The role of the government in creating such selfishness and exacerbating it, even if we call it selfishness, is of course never examined.
And we could go into the same thing in religion, but I'm sure you get the general idea.
And because that's the approach that we've taken in this conversation, I think it's important to understand that kind of explicitly when we look at this machine of evil, and we understand I think it's important to understand that kind of explicitly when we look at this machine of evil, and we understand that
that the state is an effect or a mirror of the family, right?
And if you attempt to get a hold of the state without changing the values being transmitted by the family, then all you end up is recreating the state in some other form.
Because the core narrative of there is no violence, the violence is caused by the...
the violence is chosen and then the violence is caused by the immorality of the victim.
Like, I didn't rape her.
Well, okay, I had sex with her, but she asked for it.
Well, if you don't undo the core narrative of this stuff within the family, then every time you gain control of the state, You do nothing to deal with or erase the real core of these kinds of issues, which is the lies told within the family to justify the power of the parents and the violence of the parents.
So it's sort of like if you don't understand that the water table that you're getting your water from is poisoned, then changing the pipes isn't going to do a damn thing.
To get rid of that is a central issue or problem.
You're just finding a different way to deliver the same contaminated water.
That's what occurs with political change, and that's what would have occurred with the Ron Paul thing, even if it had gone anywhere further.
Even if the libertarian ideal were realized, and we actually pumped less cholera-infested water into people's homes, they'd still be sick.
So this sort of central issue around understanding the machinery of evil is to understand that the family lies at the core of social instruction and social communication.
That insight, of course, is so obvious when you see it.
That if you want to know why society is corrupt, all you have to do is look at the values transmitted by the people who get a hold of the children first.
And that is the parents.
It's not teachers or preachers or university professors or government agency grants or anything like that.
It's the parents.
Or the parents in proxy.
And so if you can't change the family, you can't change anything. - Thank you.
Do you understand?
This is why I keep hammering on and on about this central and basic fact.
It's the latest in effect of the family.
If you can't make Violence and control and coercion visible, comprehensible, and understandable within the family, then you can't make it visible or comprehensible or understandable anywhere at all.
If people can't see the corruption within their own families, that blindness will forever end up with them being unable to see Corruption in a social sense, in the state.
Or in religion. I mean, they may see it, but they'll excuse it.
Or they'll say, "Well, it's not the structure, it's not the system, it's the individual." This is the myth of the Golden Gun, right?
that violence can be, even if it wasn't good in my family, it's good somewhere.
And that's why the moral examination of the family has to be the first place, and really in a very fundamental and significant way.
It's not just the first, but it's the last place that we need to look for our capacity to examine and affect social change.
The family is everything.
Everyone who exploits others does so.
because of the original exploitation of the family.
So the question then becomes, well, how are we going to change this machinery of evil?
What do we have to do or undo or do differently or change our approach to in order to change this cycle, this problem, this compact self-reinforcing machinery, this ecosystem?
Of evil. How are we going to change it?
Well, for most people, for most people in the past, the idea has been sort of one of two things.
One is to attack abstract ideas, and the other is to use the golden gun, right?
To change society using...
These political means, trying to get control of the state and so on.
Now, why doesn't changing abstract ideas work?
Well, because society is not a production.
It's not produced by abstract ideas.
Culture is not produced by philosophy.
We don't have these abstract ideas and then design a culture.
That's just not how it works.
I mean, there's no first course where we started from a blank slate and put forward philosophical ideas and then created a culture out of that.
There's no blueprint. It's just evolved over time, right?
So, we have abstract ideas, but they are produced By culture.
They are produced by the justifications that culture, which is error for those who know the way that I talk about it, abstract ideas, philosophies, are produced in the way that a thief will throw a drugged piece of meat to the side to distract and disarm the dog, so to speak, or a smoke grenade on a battlefield.
And we know that simply, I mean, for instance, by looking at religion.
Religion existed long before the ontological argument for religion existed.
Nobody sort of sat there and said, well, we could go from science or religion.
How are we going to define and derive the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of the species?
Well, what we're going to do, you see...
Is we are going to come up with an ontological proof of God, or some other proof of God, and then we are going to create the Bible and so on?
No. I mean, what happened was there was religion, and then when religion was attacked in the 15th and 16th centuries by the rise of science, you start to get some pretty sophisticated arguments to defend religion.
These Ideas do not precede the corruption that they're trying to defend.
They are invented to confuse and bewilder those who are questioning, attacking, or undermining the dominant corruption.
In the same way, the arguments for the government did not precede governments.
This is the bullshit of the social contract.
Governments existed and people began to question them and then people had to invent abstract philosophies and justifications to confuse and disorient and attack and undermine and so on.
So abstract ideas are a product and almost always a defensive product of culture.
They defend corruption.
They are the press releases of perfidy.
And so by changing the ideas, you are merely changing the effect, not the cause, in the same way that by attempting to gain control of the political process, you are merely attempting to control the effect, not the cause.
And people have also, you know, with ideas, changing ideas, I guess there's a third one, I suppose, but it's not particularly common because it's just too ridiculous, right?
Well, I shouldn't say. Maybe it's sort of bound into the first two.
Let's create a 2.5 category of your minor release of the updated idea.
Minor patch. And that is that people will attempt to lecture the self-interest of others.
And by that...
What I mean is that if I put out endless articles saying that free market economists should get out of the tenure system, the system of non-free market teaching that is associated or that is really the essence of modern academia.
So if I were to continue to lecture people to live according to their values in direct opposition, To their immediate and long-term tangible self-interest.
Then that would be another way that I would try to change the world.
It would be a lecture of those. Artists should make more pro-capitalist films.
Because, boy, it's really hypocritical to use a capitalist system.
Of creation, funding, and distribution and ticket purchasing.
It's really hypocritical to use a capitalist system to attack capitalism.
Actually, no. If they were anti-capitalist, they'd say that's pretty smart.
And we have a market called being against the free market.
Oddly enough, right? Which is created by the culture as a whole and the lies and falsehoods of that culture.
So, we have a creation or opposition of abstract ideas.
We have attempting to gain control of the golden gun through the political process.
We have Lecturing people against their direct and immediate and long-term self-interest.
All of which doesn't work, because they're all effects, right?
Abstract ideas are an effect of the need to lie and justify and hide violence and promote the falsehoods of culture.
The political process is an effect of the family, which only exists because people deny the violence it contains and therefore attempting to use that violence for a good end.
The only thing that you can do is expose that violence And then there's lecturing people against their self-interest.
Professors should be free. In everyday anarchy, I don't say professors should be free market.
I just say that these people aren't going to set us free because the logical thing for them to do, if they were truly in line with their beliefs, is they would enter the free market.
But they won't. They won't ever do that.
So that's an acceptance of a basic reality.
And of course... If you are not a professor and you say, well, professors should go to submit themselves to the free market, then people will say, well, you don't know what you're talking about.
You know, you want to be a professor.
You didn't make it. Whatever.
They come up with all this nonsense because you're outside the sphere.
Or they just don't have to listen to you.
And we've seen those defenses float around, particularly with FDR and academics.
They say, well, why should we take you seriously at all?
Because you're not in the club, right?
You're not in the in-club in academics or whatever.
And so, no peer review.
So your ideas don't make any better.
Who cares, right? But then if you are in the system, then you're accused of...
So if you're not in the system, you're disarmed through...
You don't understand. You're not part of the system.
You couldn't make it. You have no credibility.
And that's how they disarm you.
And if you're in the system, then you're just disarmed because you're hypocritical.
Because you say that you want the free market, but...
And professors should...
Should be in the free market, but you are a tenured professor, right?
So, there's just no way to do that.
It's the same way that there's no way to use the violence of the state to oppose the violence of the state, because either violence is bad or it's good.
And if it's bad, the state is bad.
You can't use it to manage or control violence.
So... None of that stuff works.
You can't take that approach.
You can't tell scientists, don't take government money.
Right? I mean, the very fact that they're scientists means that they want to succeed as scientists.
They enjoy science. Someone's going to pay them to do it.
They never see the violence.
They're praised for what it is that they're doing.
So... They're not going to quit being scientists because there's government corruption at the root of their funding.
They all say, oh, I'll try and use it for good...
No one's going to blow away the investment of their entire life.
I don't talk to my friends in academia and say, you should quit being an academic and you should join the free market.
That's a choice that I made to leave a profession to pursue this, but I'm just nutty that way.
That sort of happened to me, right?
So people do all of this kind of stuff.
But even if you were to achieve some sort of good in this area, it would only be a short-term change.
It would revert back. Because these are all effects, right?
So, how do we begin to really change the machinery of evil?
Well, we go to the source.
We go to the family. The family also has control over.
And, of course, we know that voluntarism produces quality.
I've made this argument before.
I'll just touch on it here. Voluntarism produces quality, which is why there was no salmon in the state stores in Stalin's Russia.
Voluntarism produces quality and virtue.
And so we go to the family and we make the family voluntary.
That's the only thing that we have control over and it is in fact the root of everything that occurs because it's the first place where values have inculcated and the first time we see values is the first impression is the strongest impression as far as that goes.
And last but not least, of course, it's the only thing that's never been tried before as far as I know.
And if it's the first thing that's never been tried before, and we're trying to do something that has never worked in the past, and it is the most logical place to start to undo the cause of corrupt values, then we just know we're on the right track.
How does this change the actual machinery of evil?
Well, we can talk about that in the next podcast of this topic, but I hope that this has been helpful for you, and thank you so much for listening.
Please, please, please, I look forward to your donations to really help spread the word now that I've ditched the book income.
I'm looking for listeners to step up and throw me a few bucks to help me keep getting the word out about Freedom Aid Radio.
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