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July 27, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:17
1114 Freedom, Desire, Slavery
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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is Friday, late July 2008, and going for a walk.
It's been a staggering amount of rain.
I've been living in a car wash for the last week or so, but it's a beautiful day out today.
So I thought I would go for a walk while Christina is seeing a patient and talk to you about a brand spanky new idea that is a cooking in the old brain and see what you think.
This is one of those ones that is officially trippy.
So feel free to trip my birthrin and sistren about this idea and hopefully I will be able to explain it with some justice.
Thank you.
Thank you.
As you know, I try to take nothing for granted and try to discipline myself to always look at first causes and try to understand why something is the way it is or isn't.
And from that standpoint, I've been sort of thinking about this desire for freedom that we have, this yearning for freedom that we have, political freedom, personal freedom, economic freedom, psychological freedom, freedom from history, or at least from the limiting aspects of our histories.
And When you think about something like this in evolutionary terms, it's real hard to figure out why we would have this desire.
I mean, for almost all of human history, all we were were slaves.
Why would we have a desire for freedom?
Why would we have within us, let us say genetically, A yearning for freedom if it was just something we never had throughout our history.
It was never even possible throughout our history.
It wasn't like your average Egyptian slave could overturn the social order.
Why would we have this desire?
It's like suddenly discovering that dogs have a yearning, burning desire to be ballerinas.
Well, you can't be a ballerina, so why would you...
Develop, as a dog, a yearning-burning, restless, rootless desire for freedom.
Freedom is something that is unachievable in human society and certainly has been throughout history.
Why would we...
I mean, when we have more freedom than just about anybody in history, why would we still feel this yearning for more freedom?
Why do people... Feel depressed when they're not free.
I mean, if a lack of freedom is the natural state of human affairs, why would we feel depressed?
It's like being depressed about breathing.
What would be the purpose of developing such desires?
Or to put it another way, why would such desires not have been weeded out of the gene pool?
I mean, if a yearning for freedom puts you in conflict with the rulers and gets you killed...
as a rabble-rouser, as a Socrates and of course you would raise your children to do the same thing to question and to oppose authority and to talk about freedom and the hypocrisy of hierarchy political hierarchy if this was the situation how could this not be weeded out?
Sorry, Bug Central.
It's beautiful out and buggy.
But how could this not be, why would this not be weeded out of the gene pool?
Those who oppose the rulers tend to do rather badly indeed.
And as we can see from biblical records and other archaeological records, when a man opposed a ruler, it was not just he who was killed, but often all his male heirs and sometimes even his entire extended family.
So if a yearning for freedom puts you in conflict with the rulers, who then eradicates your gene pool, how could this yearning for freedom conceivably exist?
It really doesn't make much sense.
A yearning for power, I can sort of understand.
Because... The social Darwinism of an amoral hierarchical power structure within society needs replenishment through competition and thus the yearning for power keeps the rulers on their toes and ensures that rulers who are suboptimal are replaced by those who are more optimal, at least for themselves.
So it just doesn't make much...
Why would we have this...
Why would an Egyptian slave yearn for freedom?
And we know that they did because We know that they were miserable.
And we know that they are miserable because all slaves are miserable and because slaves do not leave the residue of joy.
Art, the residue of joy.
Slaves do not leave behind the poetry, the art, the novels, even the sculptures.
If you say, well, they couldn't read or write, even the sculpture.
Well, they don't have any time.
You say, well, all of this would contribute.
Lack of literacy is not positively correlated with happiness.
So, we know that the slaves were unhappy, which means that they heartily, or at least unconsciously, disliked their slavery.
And because they disliked their slavery, they had a desire for something other than slavery, which had never existed.
You could even say that the rulers themselves are sort of enslaved by the need to continually maintain and expand and defend their rule.
So, why would we have this yearning?
Why would we have this desire? Why would we always want what we have never had?
Well, I have a theory.
It may come as a shock, but it's true.
Just crossing, there's a lovely footbridge that goes on for about 100 feet.
It's very Indiana Jones over, wow, a rather swollen river.
Good god, it looks like a large brown varicose vein.
And we cannot see any beefers today.
Sorry about the tangent.
Heaven forbid you should not get at least one of my thoughts.
One of these thoughts could escape us on a podcast.
So why do we have this desire?
Well, I'm going to put forward a theory as to why we have this desire, which I think is quite interesting.
Ruling is impossible if it requires direct coercion of everyone involved.
Thank you.
Right? I mean, if you have a hundred slaves, and you need a hundred people to beat each one of those slaves so that he works every day, then clearly slavery is not economically viable.
Slavery is only economically viable, as I've talked about in podcasts and in RTR, if the slaves police themselves.
If the slaves police themselves, then the total cost of ownership of slavery diminishes.
Slavery is horizontal. It is only as a result of the horizontal slavery that the vertical slavery becomes possible.
It is slave-on-slave violence that is slavery.
Which, of course, perfectly accords with what you and I experience as philosophers or thinkers or teachers, which is that we never get attacked by people on authority.
We only ever get attacked by our fellow slaves.
Just another empirical fact that bears some examination, to say the least.
So, why would we have this desire?
Well, since it is impossible to rule without self-policing on the part of the slaves, The rulers must have something that the slaves want in order for rulership to work,
to be possible. For a hierarchy to work, the person at the top has to have something that we at the bottom really want.
So, for instance, it is impossible To tax a population that wants to be in jail.
It is impossible to tax a population that wants to be in jail.
And that basic fact is, I think, foundational to the basic reality that human beings have developed a desire That, for all intents and purposes, during the time of its development was completely impossible to attain, which is counterintuitive, to say the least.
It would be like zebras developing a very strong desire to negotiate with lions.
Well, it can't happen.
If they're hungry, they jump.
Ooh, I do so love the woods, but man, I just get itchy coming in here.
Anyway, so... Wow, I'm sorry.
That is one wildly fuzzy caterpillar.
I actually thought it was a piece of dandelion fluff.
So the rulers, in order to have control over us, must want us...
They must have something that we want.
They must have something that we wish for that they can take away.
There is a funny, not quite reference to this, but depiction of something like this in Monty Python's Life of Brian, where there is a crack suicide squad, right?
Which you think means fight to the death, right?
That's the sort of typical meaning of it.
And this crack suicide squad approaches Brian when he's on the cross and seppuku themselves, kill themselves, cutting into their stomachs.
Crack suicide squadron reporting for duty, and off they kill themselves.
And that's funny because if you have soldiers who only want to die, Then they won't be soldiers.
You say, well, they're kamikazes.
But kamikazes wanted to away the emperor and get into heaven, not to die particularly, any more than suicide bombers just want to die.
Because if they just wanted to die, they'd slit their wrists, right?
They wouldn't do all the martyr stuff, the bombs, the planes into the American warships or whatever.
They want to get into heaven and please the emperor, and that's what they're up to.
So, we have to have a desire...
That the rulers can thwart, or at least give us some relief to.
We have a desire for hunger, because food can satisfy the hunger, and of course we need it to live.
So, of course, if you withhold food from someone, you can make him or her do just about anything that you want, or water.
We have a desire for the absence of physical pain, Which of course means that if you inflict physical pain on someone, you can get him or her to do just about anything that you want.
We have a desire for life.
But all of these things can be satisfied.
We have a desire for freedom, though.
Political freedom, economic, personal, psychological.
And in history, that has never been attained.
To my knowledge. I mean, there is no human being who has had a stateless existence, a tribal-less existence.
So why would we have these desires?
It is, of course, an excitingly baffling question.
And so I'm going to put forward a sort of absolutely untestable thesis that is really more of a thought exercise.
I think it could have some validity, but let's see how it goes.
Let us say that in prehistory, a hierarchical tribal organization was the best mechanism for human survival.
If you don't have a tribe, you're toast.
And we can sort of understand this, that When tribes would be rolling around the countryside, picking off people as slaves and eating their brains and stuff, you kind of needed to be in a herd, right?
You kind of needed to be a pack animal in order to survive.
I mean, even if you can't fight back, like those little birds relative to hawks, you still want to have the capacity...
To be lost among the shuffle of people fleeing, right?
I mean, if you're alone...
So you know all those birds, they sort of dart around in formation.
And the reason they do that is so that each individual has a greater chance of not being picked off.
Anyone who gets separated from the herd is more likely.
That's why they all turn together. So, if you're found in the woods alone by some guy who wants to capture you as a slave, he's going to chase you and catch you.
Or not, but at least he's only going to be focusing on one person.
But if you're with a group, then you're a bunch of bare-ass savages heading off into the woods, and in the general crashing and melee, you have a greater chance individually of escaping.
So, if we understand that tribal hierarchies were the only way that...
Human survival could be maximized in a nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw prehistorical primitive society or primitive environment.
Then the question is, how can this be automatically created and sustained?
If this is the most efficient social organization In this kind of world, and this doesn't apply to modern states or anything, we're just talking about this kind of world, then the most efficient groups will be those who can automatically create and sustain this sort of hierarchy,
right? If children are born wanting or needing or preferring or being drawn towards Just this kind of hierarchy, then those societies will flourish.
I mean, to take a silly example, if it took an enormous amount of personal indoctrination to convince people to follow the leader, to convince children to follow the leader, Then that would be pretty exhausting,
and that would require that people not go hunt for food or other people, but rather indoctrinate the children, which you can do when you have an excess of crops or resources, enough at least to support a priestly class.
So if it took an enormous amount of indoctrination, and children were naturally, they did not want to follow the leader or obey the tribe, Then those, in the competition for scarce resources that characterizes prehistory, those tribes that had to indoctrinate their children heavily would be less successful than those tribes where the children were sort of, quote, born indoctrinated.
Now, if being born indoctrinated is better for the survival of the tribe, then the question is, How, oh how, can this be achieved?
Well, the best way for this to be achieved is to create, or for a desire to be created in the children, or for the children to be born with a desire that can never be achieved, and which the ruler has control over.
Which is two ways of saying the same thing.
So if I'm born with a yearning not to be in prison, and this pretty much is an inbuilt yearning for people.
I mean, obviously there's a few exceptions.
Homeless people in winter will commit crimes to get into prison.
But the vast majority of people will do a lot to stay out of prison.
Again, we're not counting the Simon the Boxer abused and abusers.
Because if they did not want to be free, the rulers would have nothing to take away from them, and therefore they would have to impose their will through force alone, which is not efficient.
The more force that you have to deploy at home to keep your tribal followers in line, the less force is available to fight off and combat other tribes.
And this, of course, is why slave-on-slave violence is so popular, because it is so efficient.
For survival, this is why slave-on-slave violence or the emotional desire to attack a slave who actually seeks consummation of the desires that everyone has, the desire to attack that person, is so strong in everyone.
Because if that person says, well, I have a yearning for freedom, you have a yearning for freedom, Being in this stupid-ass hierarchy is the exact opposite of that freedom.
So let's get rid of the hierarchy.
Let's get rid of the rulers.
Let's get rid of the violence of the tribe.
And let's work towards voluntarism.
And we all know that voluntarism is perceived to be a danger in a time of danger.
Which is why you give up your liberties when Al-Qaeda attacks you and the war of Islam and Christianity is underway.
In a time of danger, voluntarism is considered to be an expensive luxury that we must do without in order to survive.
So, the tribe's survival requires That people have a yearning for freedom, that the ruler will not grant them, that they will not lose, and which is enforced horizontally and not vertically.
Yes, there's some indoctrination with the kids and so on, but in the absence of indoctrination, it still needs to work, as indoctrination is a later I mean, indoctrination arises from the nation-state when you already have a vast degree of surplus relative to a truly primitive Stone Age or post-Neanderthal community.
I mean, let's put it this way, a Stone Age community or a Bronze Age community cannot put their kids into public schools for six hours a day with two hours of homework for 14 years.
It's not possible. They would not survive.
So the true propaganda requires an excess of resources.
So, just to sort of go over the argument again, why is it that we have a desire for freedom that in history has...
And even if we count the last couple of hundred years as freedom, I mean, that arose out of our desire for freedom, which existed in contradistinction to all of human history prior to that, and it only came out of that desire.
So, it's not like we have this desire for freedom because we've tasted freedom.
We only have tasted freedom because we have a desire for it.
So, when you just look at the social Darwinistic aspects of things, what is the most efficient way to enforce and perpetuate a violent hierarchy that is considered necessary for survival?
And probably was. I don't know enough about it, but I don't know how well anarcho-capitalism survives in a situation of brute internecine tribal warfare.
Probably not well.
So, I mean, nukes have opened up the possibility of anarcho-capitalism, as I talk about in Practical Anarchy.
So, if you had to design this machine called the tribe, and you had to make it as efficient as possible, a meme or social organism to reproduce itself, then...
If you said, well, we need a violent leadership and we need slavish and violent followers, then the way that I would design it is I would say, well, in order for there to be followers, who will follow the leader?
The leader has to have something. That they want, which he can take away, and which they're going to keep wanting, right?
I mean, the leader can't have something like, well, I mean, although this has happened, it's not enough to perpetuate the system.
The leader can't have something called, I control access to women, because then when you've had the babies, or you've had the women, then you can, the leader's power is going to diminish.
You would want the children...
To be born with that desire.
You would want that desire to follow the children all the way through their adulthood and to their death.
And you would want to make sure that you kind of didn't need to lift a finger for this hierarchy to be maintained, but you would want the slaves to maintain it themselves.
In other words, you would want As a minimal effort for your, or to minimize efforts, you would want your leadership to be a product of the slaves rather than something that you had to continually inflict upon the slaves, because again, that would drain resources.
I mean, a lot of what we have in terms of our emotional development is obviously tuned to survival.
I mean, clearly that's a truism that we don't even need to really say.
But a lot of what has developed as ethics has been, over the course of hundreds of thousands or millions of years, has been developed and selected for that which optimizes survival.
Now, I am not one who has the cojones to argue with the collected inheritance of, frankly, billions of years of evolution.
Life is, what, two billion years old?
Something like that. I am not.
It's funny because we can say, well, we like or don't like these particular traits.
I know earlier I said, well, I was half and half about it, but frankly, I'm giving up that position completely.
It takes a...
Manically narcissistic and vain, glorious bureaucrat to want to substitute his judgment for the realities of the free market.
In the same way, it takes a rather crazy amount of vanity to say, well, things should have developed differently through evolution.
Well, no.
I'm not going to attempt to reproduce the genius of the genes and the DNA over the past years.
Several billion years.
It is what it is and it's pretty universal throughout human cultures that everybody has a desire for freedom that the rulers take away and that the rulers rely on slaves to attack each other to maintain their rule.
We're just going to say that that is the most efficient state of mind or the most efficient social setup in a pre-civilized society.
I mean, and there have been refinements, of course, as material wealth and surplus has increased in human society.
The refinements, fundamentally, are around an abstraction of The rulers to a concept rather than an instance.
So in the past you would have ruling classes that were genetic, that were familial.
The son takes over from the father.
And because of that, and I talked about this before, but because of that there's a problem, which is that the old get weak.
And how are they going to maintain their rule?
They want to, but they're weak.
Well, they have to say, you're not obeying me, you're obeying an abstract, a concept.
I merely represent it.
The concept is eternal and all-powerful.
Obedience to the concept is obedience to me, and therefore my power never diminishes, biologically, physically.
I never get weaker, because the concept is all-powerful, and I merely represent it.
This is why millions of young Italians, strapping young Italian boys and lads and youths, obey a feeble and decrepit old man in Rome, Though they could take him.
Really. So as the resources increase within a tribe, they get increasingly devoted to...
Well, sorry.
The need for the tribe diminishes.
The need for the tribe's protection diminishes.
And so more and more effort is poured into propaganda.
And the... Abstraction of the ruling class from individuals to an eternal concept, the nation-state, the class, the God.
And this is how the rule is maintained when it's not necessary.
And, of course, a fear of fellow slaves, fear and hatred of fellow slaves is always inculcated, right?
And you hear this all the time when you talk about getting rid of the government.
You're told that you will simply be subjected to endless predations by your fellow slaves, right?
Who will suit up to motorcycle gangs and ride around with shotguns.
But the desire for freedom, which is the foundation of all of this, it's what the rulers have to take away.
I mean, logically, after you have reproduced...
Genetically, after you've reproduced and raised your kids, you could be thrown in jail and it doesn't matter.
Well, I guess you could be around for your grandkids or whatever, right?
So there is a genetic desire to take care of your offspring.
But you can do that in a situation of slavery.
I mean, the slave owners need the slaves to breed, right?
It's cheaper than buying new ones.
So the desire for freedom is not to be actualized.
It's not to be actualized.
And this is dense and complex, and I hope that it will make some sense, not because you can't comprehend it, but because I find it very hard to explain in a way that's coherent, which means either I'm not good at explaining it, which I hope is more likely, or it's incoherent, which I hope is less likely.
But this is the complex nature.
Of this desire for freedom, and we all know this as people who talk about freedom in a philosophical context.
Everybody says freedom and reason and sweet, all good, right?
They're values that people hold.
They say violence is bad.
This is at least the development that we've gotten to in the West.
Violence is bad, reason is good.
Science has value, and some religious people would say it has value relative to another system called faith which has value, but at least they will say that science has value, which is a distinct improvement over Calvinism and Lutheranism and early Catholicism.
So... They will say that these things have value, peace, and even dictators.
Even Hitler claimed to be a man of peace and he wanted peace.
It works, right? This is what people want.
But of course, again, this is just the fascinating empirical realities and observations that we have to deal with, as we always start from the facts.
The reality is that people say, we want freedom.
I want to be free. Violence is bad.
Voluntarism is good. And yet, when you talk to them about how this can be achieved in the world, you get attacked.
Which is baffling, and baffled me for many years.
And still does often emotionally.
But intellectually, the way that I think I can make sense of it, or the way that I think I can understand it, is something like this.
The desire for freedom is the bait on the hook of enslavement.
Now, you're not designed to be free.
The desire for freedom only came up to ensure enslavement, to ensure that the rulers had something to take away from you, and therefore that they could control you.
Good Lord, it's beautiful out there.
What a planet. Tasty.
So the yearning is not designed to be satisfied.
It is designed to be thwarted.
It's like the courtly love ideal, or, you know, that old thing about the dog chases the male van.
What does it do when it catches it?
Well, that's not the point, right?
The point is to chase it. That's why when the dog brings the stick back, you throw it away again, and he's like, yay!
The whole point is not to bring the stick back, because otherwise he'd be like, why would you?
I just brought it back, you threw it away again.
What's the point of that? So if the desire for freedom If the desire for freedom is a yearning that is specifically not designed to be satisfied that the whole point of it is to remain unfulfilled,
unsatisfied then it's easy to understand, I think why people get so mad when you say but you can have it now Why is it that people say,
I want freedom from dysfunctional, negative, hostile, virulent relationships, and they all think of the state, and you say, well, what about your friends and family?
Can you do things to improve those relationships and make them more pleasant and voluntary and cooperative and positive and loving?
They get all kinds of mad, right?
And that's a universal reaction, near universal reaction.
And that is completely fascinating.
Because it indicates that the desire is not a real desire.
It's not a true desire. It's a fake desire.
It's a mindfuck, frankly.
You know, it's like the woman who dresses to the nines, goes to the bar, sits there sighing, looking lonely, and then puts down every guy who comes to approach her.
It's like, well, there's a kind of mind game going on, right?
I say this is all that I want, and when I am given the chance to achieve it, I lash out.
Well, human beings are not innately crazy or irrational, so this near-universal phenomenon must have had a purpose.
And... I mean, I guess like the appendix when we used to eat more meat or something.
We needed it for digestion of some different kind.
We don't use it anymore. Even the vestigial tail.
It had a point at a point, right?
It had a point at some point.
It's no longer appropriate to the environment, but what we can understand from this is that the desire is not supposed to be consummated.
It's not supposed to be fulfilled.
The desire for freedom is the essence of slavery.
It puts you under the control of the masters.
So really, the point is not to achieve freedom, but to want freedom.
Which is the essence of slavery.
Because if you don't want freedom, you can't be enslaved.
If you don't want to avoid a whipping, if you don't care about your life, if you don't care about your family, if you don't have values, if you don't want things, you can't be enslaved.
And this is why The Buddhists, of course, foolishly say that an absence of desire is an absence of slavery.
No. Certainly, in a corrupt environment, in a brutal and violent environment, desire is slavery.
But the solution is to get rid of the brutality, not to get rid of the desire.
It's treating a symptom, not the cause.
It's like saying, if I put a wig on, I've cured cancer.
From those who are going through chemotherapy.
Because their hair fell out now, it looks like they have hair.
Sorry, that metaphor probably didn't need to be explained.
But this is the way that I'm trying to process or to work through the basic empirical facts before us.
That everybody wants freedom, everybody is denied freedom, and everybody attacks those who say freedom is achievable in your life at the moment.
And we can see this with this goddamn libertarianism, too, right?
Ah, all we want is to be free.
All we want is freedom.
I'm going to complain about Lincoln and the Fed until the day I die!
And then you say, well, but...
Libertarianism has spent hundreds of years attempting to achieve this kind of freedom and has gotten progressively less and less free.
Right? Has gotten progressively less and less free.
And yet we continue to do the same thing.
Well, this is part of the whole symptomology of wanting freedom while rejecting the achievement of freedom.
If you want freedom, you're in the power of the masters.
If you achieve freedom, you are not.
So the whole point of the social organism is to stimulate a desire for freedom that can be used to control you and then to instill in you a fear and hatred of achieving freedom.
Right? This is a good theory.
Think of it like a bell curve.
If you don't want freedom at all, you can't be enslaved.
If you don't care to live, if you don't want to be free, if you don't want to be happier, you can't be enslaved.
But if you want freedom too much, then you also cannot be enslaved because you will rebel.
So we have to want freedom enough to be enslaved, but not so much that we rebel.
This does put a whole lot of stuff together, I must say.
I mean, just thinking about the book Everyday Anarchy, talking about our ambivalence towards freedom.
And, of course, the genius of the modern slave masters, of modern tax livestock techniques, is this.
Where freedom will enhance the power of the rulers and the income of the rulers, it is a value.
Right, so if we are too depressed, we are not productive.
Depression kills higher functioning.
That much is scientifically known.
It doesn't kill. It diminishes higher functioning.
So we have to be free to choose our own careers so that we will be more productive in those careers.
It's like if the cow gets to choose the field...
Then it produces five times as much milk.
Well, the farmer's going to say, let the cow choose the field.
Well, what if the cow doesn't want to choose a field but a forest?
Well, that's not allowed, right? And if our marriages are forced, then we will be depressed, we will be less economically productive, although we may in fact have more children, they're not going to be as economically productive.
I mean, if you just look at the average income of a primitive society, it's a couple of hundred dollars a year, whereas the average income in North America is like $30,000 or $40,000 a year.
So fewer children, but more intellectual capital and desire.
So those desires are allowed freedom because they make us more economically productive to the rulers.
It increases their income. It is a better crop management technique.
I'm sorry. I hope I didn't lose too much there.
I just noticed that the pause button was on, but I think 43 minutes we should be mostly okay.
So, this reality is something I think that is so essential to understand.
Because fundamentally and foundationally we are, in fact, ambivalent about freedom.
This is... A truism, of course, which I talked about in the book, but I think this is a way to understand how and why we're so ambivalent about freedom.
Because freedom is a desire that we are supposed to have, that we must have in order to be enslaved, but freedom is something which cannot be attained.
So, sorry, as I mentioned, it's a bell curve.
If we don't want freedom, we can't be enslaved.
The more freedom that we want, the more we are enslaved.
But when we want too much freedom, again, we cannot be enslaved because we will rebel and we will take the principles that are taught to us and we will use them to work to attain freedom, real freedom. So think of it as...
Sorry to repeat this, but I'm excited by the idea.
Think of it as an inverse bell curve in terms of the ruler's...
No, think of it as a regular bell curve in terms of the ruler's power.
The ruler's power is at its maximum when we really want freedom but despair of achieving it.
Because then the ruler has something to take away from us, which is our freedoms...
But we despair about achieving real freedom, in other words, by eliminating the rulers, and therefore we do not threaten their rule.
It totally lowers the cost of ownership.
Particularly, of course, if the freedom that is taken away, or you could say the happiness that is taken away, does not even require guards that you pay, right?
You don't need to pay for an electric fence if the cows will attack any cow who strays too far.
I mean this is part of the true genius of the social evolution.
Slave-on-slave violence is the most economically productive.
You want your slaves to want to be free.
But When your slaves start thinking too much about freedom, you want their fellow slaves to attack them.
Wow, that's a loud plain.
And this optimized model of human ownership precisely mirrors what we see in the world, what we experience as individuals in society.
Philosophical conversations.
I mean, what the libertarians, political libertarians, don't understand is that the success of capitalist democracies largely has to do with the fact that it is a more efficient human ownership program.
Because it benefits the rulers to have a more capitalist system.
Because by giving certain social and economic and political freedoms to their livestock, their livestock flourishes and produces more to prey upon.
It's not because people value freedom as a fundamental.
In other words, it's sold by This will increase your tax revenues.
If you give people more freedom, your tax revenues will increase.
If you plant your crops wider apart, they will produce ten times as much fruit.
Well, it's not because they want their crops to be free that they plant them wider apart.
They give them more latitude, more freedom.
It's because they wish to reap the greater rewards of human ownership.
And really, when you think about it, libertarianism is one of the most Amazing aspects of this.
It's one of the most amazing instances of this.
Because libertarianism, and talking about the political style libertarianism, you know, the Fed and Lincoln and all that crap, that is really around provoking a desire for a freedom Which simply cannot be achieved at all.
It is about making people yearn and burn for a freedom that cannot be achieved.
None of us are getting rid of the Fed, right?
None of us are revamping the cult of Lincoln.
There was some article in the Freeman magazine recently about The government employees do stuff that's wrong and people will sue the government.
The government employees don't ever suffer personal responsibility.
It's a long thing about how bad this is and how we should have personal responsibility and so on.
In other words, they are provoking a desire for freedom that no individual can conceivably attain.
And of course, those people who really want freedom, what you want them to do is to believe that they can achieve it within the system, within the Democratic capitalism.
Democratism. Democratalism?
Anyway. Cappadocracy?
And if you look at one of the most foundational aspects of human ownership is to provoke desire and thwart its achievement that renders people ownable.
Then you simply could not invent a greater beast for this than someone like Ron Paul.
I mean, he provoked people's desire for freedom, and then they collapsed into depression and lethargy afterwards, thus effectively rendering them both ridiculous and futile.
That's why I say if Ron Paul did not exist, the ruling class would have to invent him as a way of rendering inert people's desire for freedom.
Now, with some notable exceptions, particularly people who've been turned on to this conversation, it is almost universally the case that my experience with the Ron Paul people, and this is with thousands of them over the last year and a half, I mean, nobody has attacked me more than the Ron Paul people.
And the only way to understand this is that something like Ron Paul or political libertarianism or this sort of stuff, this examination of politics and economics, that it is not about the achievement of freedom, it is about the thwarting of the desire for freedom.
Because by constantly gravitating towards frustration, I mean really it's about frustration.
Political libertarianism is founded on frustration.
Look at all these wrongs!
Free market economics, Austrian economics, all founded on frustration.
Look at all these wrongs that we cannot solve.
It's like spending years becoming a doctor.
Moving to Burundi, or Rwanda, and trying to Give people help and not speak the language.
I mean, that would just be a crazy exercise in creating frustration.
In you and in them, of course.
And then, along come the we.
The us, the FDR. The philosophers.
And they say, or we say, or I say, I guess to make it more responsibility-centric.
I say, Well, you can achieve freedom.
You can achieve freedom.
It's not easy. But you can achieve real freedom.
Real, honest to goodness, freedom.
And, oh dear Lord, I am attacked from all sides.
And sin, to a large degree, from the political libertarians.
If they desperately and genuinely do want freedom, then they would accept that writing another article about the Fed is not going to do anything other than provoke frustration in themselves to reinforce the basic reality that freedom is unachievable, or rather, that no individual efforts can attain or achieve freedom.
As freedom, fundamentally, is freedom from illusion.
The state is an illusion.
God is an illusion. The virtue of the family is an illusion.
Unchosen positive obligations are illusions.
Freedom, fundamentally, is freedom, well, not even fundamentally.
Freedom is freedom from illusion.
And so, when I say, well, you can drop all of this crap and you can achieve freedom in your own life, in your relationships.
No unchosen positive obligations means no patriotism.
It also means family not virtue.
It also means God not exist.
Now, if political libertarianism was about the actual attainment of freedom, then two things would occur.
One, they would have given up on what they were doing, because it hasn't worked for hundreds of years.
And two, they would be very excited about alternative approaches that...
had been proven and could be achieved within their own lives.
If you're about achieving freedom and what you as a collective group have been doing for the past few hundred years has done the opposite of working a schadenfreude clusterfrak then clearly you would be overjoyed or at least thrilled and curious about alternatives that had been proven to work.
But that is not the case.
And again, this is without criticism, without malice.
This is just an observation that I'm trying to process.
And people say, well, we're all about freedom.
They say, well, this political thing you've been doing, this analysis of history, this Thomas DiLorenzo stuff, while interesting, and I like it too, but it doesn't work.
In fact, it does the opposite of working.
Then, if they were genuinely interested in achieving freedom, rather than interested or obsessed with, frustrated themselves about the impossibility of freedom...
Then they would say, holy crap, you're right.
The ship is sinking, has been sinking, in fact is three miles underwater, and we are absolutely happy to jump ship because what we want to do is swim to shore.
But that's not the case. What they do is they stay on the ship, right?
Fire torpedoes at the new rafts, heading for shore.
And all that means is that Which is, of course, you can't appreciate without an understanding of the unconscious, is that the claims that are made are not the real goal.
The claims that are made are not the real goal.
A parent will hit a child saying, I want the child to obey me, but that's not true.
The child does not end up obeying the parent, but conforming to the fist.
So what people say they want is so often not what they actually really deep down want.
But you can't appreciate or understand that without knowledge of the unconscious.
Reaction formations, defenses, and so on.
Intellectualism, of course, being the most powerful defense, it seems, of all.
So, I think this is a way of understanding that this pathology...
of slave-on-slave violence.
And of course, I have sensitivity to this because of my own family history, because of the fact that it was my brother who attacked me sometimes even more than my mother, and particularly when I talked about the realities of the lack of virtue within the family system or structure.
But the portrayal of freedom as a state to be...
Enormously desired, but never achievable.
And to attack anyone who says that freedom is something that you can achieve, that you do not have to want freedom, but that you can have freedom, and furthermore, that the having of that freedom in your personal life is the only way to promote and extend freedom.
The freedom in the world.
That you have to live no unchosen positive obligations.
You have to live voluntarism in your own life and not assume that any of your relationships are carved or set in stone.
That you have to live reason and evidence in your own life.
I guess the libertarians would say, well, the reason that we believe in capitalism and the free market is reason and evidence, and then they say, but God exists, right?
Unless you're willing to live reason and evidence, I mean, it's worse than no point applying it piecemeal.
It's worse to apply it piecemeal because then you discredit reason and evidence by saying it's a picky-choosy thing.
I believe in reason and evidence.
I must go to church. Well, you discredit reason and evidence more than you discredit religion.
So, if...
Maximum service to rulers is the provocation and denial of the desire for freedom, then libertarianism is one of the most exquisitely productive state tools that has ever been created or invented or has ever come into existence.
Say that again. If the stimulation and thwarting of the desire for freedom It's the greatest service to the ruler, and I believe that it is.
Then libertarianism, the history-based, politics-based, economics-based, big-picture-based libertarianism, not personal freedom, personal philosophy, as we talk about here.
If the stimulation and thwarting of the desire for freedom is...
Foundational to state power, then libertarianism is one of the greatest servants of the state, of the rulers, because it creates the greatest desires for freedom by talking about the biggest topics in money supply, Fed, history, presidents, founding fathers, Constitution.
So it talks about the biggest, it creates the biggest desire for freedom, while at the same time, Completely thwarting that capacity to achieve freedom by focusing everyone on unactionable big-ticket items and actively attacking the extension of those principles to actionable personal items in your life.
Actionable personal items in your life.
It stimulates a massive desire for freedom by talking about the biggest topics of all And then completely emasculates any approach which puts the onus for action on the individual, right?
It's responsibility, in a sense, without freedom.
It's knowledge without power.
It is desire without the capacity to achieve or fulfill that desire.
And this is why, I think, we are ambivalent about freedom.
Liberty. Consistency.
Ethics. Virtue.
Rulers. This is why we fear our rulers and we fear our fellow slaves.
This is why our fellow slaves attack us and only tangentially are we attacked by our rulers.
Alright. That's pretty good.
Feel free to donate for this one.
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