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Oct. 17, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

28:39

1177 Theories of War and Violence - The Joker and Raskolnikov http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsTyfkd9nNk

An examination of moral theories of war and violence using Raskolnikov from 'Crime and Punishment' and the Joker from 'The Dark Night.'

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I hope that you will be patient enough to sit with me through this conversation, which really is Pretty much the most important conversation that you and I can have.
	And I'm going to draw from a variety of literary sources, well, two, which is the recent Batman movie and Crime and Punishment, the great 19th century novel by Dostoevsky, which if you haven't read it or listened to it in audiobook, it's available at audible.com.
	You absolutely need to.
	In my opinion, it is one of the most amazing, powerful, deep, rich and important books ever written and make it past the first 30 or so pages which are, to be true, a little dull and get into Raskolnikov's mind.
	It is a truly amazing experience.
	I sometimes get criticized because I don't care fundamentally about What are called lifeboat scenarios.
	If someone is hanging from a flagpole outside your apartment, can they kick in your window and violate your property rights and this and that and the other?
	I don't care about those questions.
	I understand that they're interesting to whack off too intellectually, but I don't care about those questions because To me, we live in a plague of ethical confusion.
	And it's sort of like being a doctor in the middle of a plague and worrying about how to treat a potential hangnail from someone who has a seventh finger.
	It is a complete distraction from the bodies falling all around and what we need to do as ethicists to save this confusion which results in all of this endless evil.
	And to me, what I've been working on pretty much for my whole life is this fundamental question that moralists struggle with so much, and we all struggle with so much, and we're all aware of this as children.
	And that question is, is there a difference?
	Is there a difference between public crimes and private crimes?
	This is the most pressing, essential question of ethics that exists in the world, that has ever existed in the world, and I would like to spend a few minutes talking about it with you.
	It's such an essential question.
	I don't know if you had that.
	I had this when I was a kid, when the glories of the Battle of Britain and the Second World War and the First World War and all of that were talked about, and my uncles showed me They're medals, and we heard of the heroes of the Battle of Britain, the few, and I remember this basic confusion.
	I couldn't follow the equation.
	That still makes no sense to me.
	And the equation is man plus gun plus victim equals murderer.
	Man plus gun plus victim plus costume equals hero.
	This has just never made any sense to me.
	Man plus gun plus theft equals criminal, thief.
	Man plus gun plus IRS badge equals stalwart and noble defender of the social contract.
	We know that outside of DC Comics, changing your costume does not change your physical properties.
	It does not grant you the ability to fly, to reverse time, to breathe underwater without assistance.
	It doesn't give you any of these things.
	But somehow, our moral natures are considered to be entirely Reversible if we put on costumes and we are told what to do.
	If you're in a cult and you kill someone, you are an acolyte of Charles Manson and face the death penalty.
	If you are in a cult called the military and kill people, you are a hero who gets a pension.
	This question, which is floating around in society and has been for a long time, This question, what is the difference between private crimes and public crimes?
	Fundamentally, in reality, outside of mythology, outside of patriotism, outside of the mad collective bloodlust of the herd, what is the moral difference?
	If the United States intervenes in Vietnam's civil war and slaughters Two to three million Vietnamese, for no purpose whatsoever.
	Domino theory, my ass.
	If the United States were so concerned about the spread of communism, why did they hand over a hundred million slaves to Stalin at the Yalta Conference?
	Well, of course, because FDR had hardening of the brain arteries and was delirious and died a few months later.
	But they don't care about the spread of communism.
	They handed over all of Eastern Europe, which England had gotten into the war to protect.
	The sanctity of Poland then handed it over to be a vassal slave state of the Soviet Empire.
	Madness. So this question, and I want to read these two works of art that are almost a century and a half apart,
	just so I can help you to understand how this question Of the difference between public and private morals is floating around and is at the root of an enormous...
	I mean, the most fundamental agony of the world is war, which is the morally justified genocide of others.
	And war and soldiers occupy an opposite moral category from everybody else.
	What is evil? In one circumstance becomes not only not evil but virtuous if you put a hat and a green costume on.
	And my approach to philosophy, and not just mine, but my approach to philosophy is fundamentally around this question.
	What is the difference? I have spent years and years trying to figure out the difference.
	My book, Universally Preferable Behavior, which is available on my website for free, is my attempting to work up from first principles Is there a way that this difference can be justified?
	And logically, it just can't be.
	So, there is no other moral question that stands before us except for this question, is there a difference between public crimes and private crimes?
	Is there a difference between Charles Manson and Norman Schwarzkopf?
	Is there a difference between murder and war?
	Is there a difference between a hitman and a soldier, both of whom are paid to kill for the sake of a gang that claims loyalty, morality, family and ethics, but has no right to.
	So, I'm going to read a bit from Crime and Punishment.
	This is when Raskolnikov is being queried on an essay that he wrote by Porfiry, who is a policeman, a detective, you would call him.
	And I'm going to read a few sections from Crime and Punishment, and then we will have a look at the late Heath Ledger's declaration.
	You can see the similarities and how this question is haunting.
	Our minds is haunting society and is really like a ghost in an opulent and bloody ballroom that you can only ever see out of the corner of your eye and every time you turn and stare, it vanishes.
	Or if it has full form, it is draped in a cloak of evil so that we can speak the truth while calling it evil, which is a tortured relationship to the reality that there is no difference between public and private crimes.
	There is no difference between war and murder.
	Costumes do not give us the ability to fly.
	Costumes do not give us the ability to bayonet, rape, torture, murder, stab, explode, decimate, and have it be moral.
	So, Porfiry says to Raskolnikov, who is a murderer?
	I don't think that's spoiling anything.
	It's a well-known And Raskolnikov replies after Porfiry mischaracterizes his essay that he wrote, and he says, That wasn't quite my contention.
	Yet I admit you've stated it almost correctly, perhaps if you like perfectly so.
	The only difference is that I don't contend that extraordinary people are always bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it.
	In fact, I doubt whether such an argument could be published.
	I simply hinted that an extraordinary man has the right, that it's not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea, sometimes perhaps of benefit to the whole of humanity.
	You say that my article isn't definite.
	I'm ready to make it as clear as I can.
	Perhaps I'm right in thinking you want me to.
	Very well. I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred or more men, Newton would have had the right, indeed would have been duty-bound, to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity.
	But it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people right and left and to steal every day in the market.
	Then I remember I maintain in my article that all, well, legislators and leaders of men such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, We're all, without exception, criminals.
	From the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people.
	And they did not stop short of bloodshed either, if that bloodshed, often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defense of ancient law, were of use to their cause.
	It's remarkable, in fact, that the majority, indeed, of these manufacturers and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage.
	In short, I maintain that all great men, or even men a little out of the common, that is to say, capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals.
	More or less, of course.
	Otherwise, it's hard for them to get out of the common rut, and to remain in the common rut is what they can't submit to from their very nature again.
	And to my mind, they ought not indeed to submit to it.
	You can see that there's nothing particularly new in all of that.
	The same thing has been printed and read a thousand times before.
	As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it's somewhat arbitrary, but I don't insist upon exact numbers.
	I only believe in my leading idea.
	That men are, in general, divided by a law of nature into two categories.
	Inferior, ordinary, that is to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind.
	And men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word.
	There are, of course, innumerable subdivisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked.
	The first category, generally speaking, are men.
	Conservative in temperament and law-abiding.
	They live under control and love to be controlled.
	To my thinking, it is their duty to be controlled because that's their vocation.
	And there is nothing humiliating in it for them.
	The second category.
	All transgresses the law.
	They are Destroyers, or disposed to destruction according to their capacities.
	The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied, but for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better.
	But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood.
	That depends on the idea and its dimensions.
	Note that. It is only in that sense that I speak of their right to crime in my article.
	You remember it. It began with the legal question.
	There's no need for such anxiety, however.
	The masses will scarcely ever admit this right.
	They punish them or hang them, more or less, and in so doing quite justly their conservative vocation.
	And in so doing fulfill quite justly their conservative vocation.
	Ah, but the same masses Set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them more or less.
	The first category is always the man of the present.
	Second, always the man of the future.
	The first preserve the world and people it.
	The second move the world and lead it to its goal.
	Each class has an equal right to exist.
	In fact, all have equal rights with me, and vive la guerre etternelle, too, until the New Jerusalem, of course.
	This, of course, this Nietzschean overman was a big problem in the 19th century.
	It really, really worked on focusing, a lot of ethicists worked on this problem, then began to fade from view.
	And when Raskolnikov later talks to Porfiry about his own crime, the murder of the old woman, he says, ah, it's not picturesque, not aesthetically attractive.
	I fail to understand why bombarding people by regular siege is more honorable.
	The fear of appearances is the first sign of impotence.
	I've never, NEVER recognized that more clearly than now, and I am further than ever from seeing what I did was a crime.
	I've never, never been stronger and more convinced than now.
	So he's saying, as he talks about trawling like a spider under the bed of the old woman looking for her money, that it was not aesthetically attractive.
	It was not Napoleon's whiff of grapeshot.
	It was not noble. It was not heroic.
	It was not the Rough Riders charging up a hill.
	It was not a man in costume with a plume on his head on a horseback.
	The fear of appearance is the first sign of impotence.
	If I cannot do something grand in military, I will not do it.
	it that is his he's saying I discard that when he's talking to Sonia he says he says to her I wanted to become a Napoleon That is why I killed her.
	Do you understand now?
	No, Sonia whispered naively and timidly.
	Only, speak, speak.
	I shall understand. I shall understand in myself.
	She kept begging him. You'll understand.
	Very well, we shall see. He paused and was for some time lost in meditation.
	It was like this.
	I asked myself one day this question.
	What if Napoleon, for instance, had happened to be in my place?
	And if he had not had Toulon, nor Egypt, nor the passage of Mont Blanc to begin his career with, but instead of all those picturesque and monumental things, there had simply been some ridiculous old hag, a pawnbroker who had to be murdered too to get money from her trunk for his career, you understand? Well, would he have brought himself to that if there'd been no other choice?
	No other means? Wouldn't he have felt a pang at it being so far from monumental and sinful, too?
	Well, I must tell you that I worried myself fearfully over that question, so that I was awfully ashamed when I guessed at last, all of a sudden, somehow, that it would not have given him the least pang.
	That it would not have even struck him that it was not monumental.
	That he would not have seen that there was anything in it to pause over, and that if he had had no other way, he would have strangled her in a minute without thinking about it.
	Well, I too left off thinking about it, murdered her following his example.
	And that's exactly how it was.
	Do you think it funny?
	Yes, Sonia, the funniest thing of all is that perhaps that's just how it was.
	Sonia did not think it at all funny.
	You had better tell me straight out, without examples, she begged, still more timidly and scarcely audibly.
	He turned to her, looked sadly at her, and took her hands.
	You're right again, Sonia.
	Of course, that's all nonsense.
	It's almost all talk.
	You see, you know, of course, that my mother has scarcely anything.
	My sister happened to have a good education and was contemned to judge as a governess.
	All their hopes were centered on me.
	I was a student, but I couldn't keep myself at the university and was forced for a time to leave it.
	Even if I had lingered on like that, in ten or twelve years I might, with luck, hope to be some sort of teacher or clerk with a salary of a thousand rubles.
	And by that time my mother would be worn out with grief and anxiety, and I could not succeed in keeping her in comfort while my sister...
	while my sister might have fared worse.
	And it's a hard thing to pass everything by.
	All one's life. To turn one's back up on everything...
	To forget one's mother and decorously accept the insults inflicted on one's sister.
	Why should one, when one has buried them to burden oneself with others, wife and children, and to leave them again without a farthing?
	So I resolved to gain possession of the old woman's money and to use it for my first years, without worrying my mother, to keep myself at the university, and for a little while after leaving it, and to do this all on a broad, thorough scale, so as to build up a completely new career and enter upon a new life of independence.
	Well, that's all.
	Well, of course, in killing the old woman, I did wrong.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's enough.
	I divined then, Sonia, that power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up.
	Bye.
	There is only one thing, one thing needful, one has only to dare.
	Then, for the first time in my life, an idea took shape in my mind, which no one had ever thought of before me.
	No one. I saw clear as daylight.
	How strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil.
	I wanted to have the daring.
	And I killed her.
	I only wanted to have the daring, Sonia.
	That was the whole cause of it.
	So that is some examples of Raskolnikov's Torture, his desire for greatness and his recognition that what is called military, political and religious greatness in the world is all founded upon a crime, is all founded upon murder, is all founded upon destruction and theft and violence.
	But then for him to assume this in his private life and to take the principles of political and military power and to act upon those principles in his private life In his private life is evil.
	And his conscience, which is activated by his pursuit of murder for the sake of advancement in his personal life, his conscience which comes to life and tortures him, is invisible in the realm of politics.
	Is invisible in the realm of politics, in the realm of the military world.
	A man who believes that an evil ghost is watching him and that he is evil because a rib woman listened to a talking snake several thousand years ago Would be considered delusional and psychotic, if not schizophrenic. But if you aggregate enough of these people together, we blind ourselves to the moral reality and epistemological reality of the world.
	When enough people get together, they begin to live in a collective fantasy.
	Human beings in aggregation begin to live in a collective fantasy that blinds us to the craziness of how we operate within society.
	That we invent gods and priests and governments And ascribe to them ethics that would be unthinkable in our private lives.
	If we stack the bodies of the hundreds of millions of victims of democide, of state slaughter, vertically they would reach halfway to the moon.
	The pillar of bodies rests upon the grave of reality and reason that allows us to create these fantastical projections And utter ethical reversals.
	The state. Prisons.
	Priests. Churches.
	Military. The war.
	Where we need to get to as a species.
	And I know that people are confused by this focus that I have on the stateless society.
	People are like, well, isn't that the biggest?
	Like, aren't there bigger issues to deal with?
	But there are not bigger issues to deal with.
	There are no bigger issues to deal with than the questions of the violence of the state and of the destructive illusions and child abuse called supernatural indoctrination called religious quote instruction which is the destruction of a child's self-esteem and capacity to reason and the infliction of a lifelong terror and self-abuse.
	This Chinese wall that exists Between public and private crimes.
	This is no bigger moral question in the world.
	There is no bigger damn buster run to make than to bring down this Chinese wall and to have people understand that what is called the public and the private realm is a complete fantasy.
	There is no difference.
	You take a man off a farm, you put him in a costume, you put him in a rack, He's no different morally than from a man who goes into a McDonald's and opens fire on families.
	And the torture and the horror of the world will only continue and will only continue to escalate if we continue this fantasy of the public and private realm.
	This is what the Joker talks about.
	You know what I noticed?
	Nobody panics when things go according to plan.
	Even if the plan is horrifying.
	If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blowing up, nobody panics.
	Because it's all part of the plan.
	But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!
	When he says, nobody panics when the expected people get killed.
	Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying.
	If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics.
	Because of this fantasy that there are these two worlds, the public and the private, the government and the citizen, the state and the individual, there are There are no such different worlds.
	There are no such vortexes where morality is reversed and destroyed through collective fantasies.
	We only imagine that we can fly when we put on a costume or vote or wrap ourselves in a flag.
	The fate of those who falsely believe that they can fly is to plummet to the rocks below and the sole goal and the sole purpose of moralists in the modern world in any world, but in the modern world is to relentlessly attack this imaginary wall between public and private actions and to spread the sweet universality of rational ethics across the world evenly.

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