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Nov. 22, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:47
1217 Where You Really Live?

A potential theory about where you really live...

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Time Text
Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well, our staff. Oh, the ungodly hour.
What is it? 12.30 a.m.
Sunday the 23rd, I think, of November 2008.
And I am out walking.
Why? In this minus 10 plus windchill Canadian winter eve or early morn.
Because my ferocious mews done bitch-slap me around.
While I was partaking of my evening bath and splashing happily with my rubber duckies.
And just in case you're wondering where these sorts of ideas come from, this was a combination of a book called Empire and a Gossip Girl.
And the book called Empire talks about, well, we'll get into that, and the Gossip Girl.
Was a Thanksgiving episode 2.
10, I think. Episode 10, season 2 or whatever.
And, of course, the family is reunited.
Family is everything. You should be at home.
Emancipation from parents is a bad idea.
And so on. And again, I'm going to just put all of the other stuff aside because if people want to misinterpret, they'll misinterpret.
So I'm just going to plow on and hopefully it will make some sense.
Oh, my God.
It's cold. Let us warm our cockles with some hot thoughts, shall we?
So... I was originally going to do the Statism series as a three-parter, but this is only...
Well, I wanted to sort of make part three really crackerjack.
So... I'll lay out the stuff that I was thinking about earlier this evening, and then we will talk about I will talk about and you will let me know about the thought that hit me in Le Salle de Bain.
So, about 20 years ago, maybe a little longer, I was young.
Oh, so young, back in my salad days.
I watched a comedy show.
I have no idea what it was. Maybe somebody out there knows.
And the way this comedy show worked was, there's an old phrase called Gentleman Farmer, which refers to a guy who is a gentleman, and he has a farm, but he's not really a farmer.
He's sort of a hobbyist. And I remember seeing a comedy show many years ago where the joke was that there was this grizzled Yorkshire farmer who...
Came out of the medieval old-school James Herriot All Creatures Great and Small mode.
And he actually had a bunch of guys in top hats running in a herd around a field.
He said, I'm a gentleman farmer!
Right? Because he farmed...
Anyway, I think you get the joke. He was a gentleman farmer.
He kept gentlemen as livestock.
And how strange...
A mind it is to live in.
Let me tell you. Let me tell you.
I've told you before. I'll tell you again.
And I'll probably tell you again soon.
It is so strange, my friends, to live in a brain where I don't know why I have remembered a fairly poor joke from a quarter century ago.
And just keep that in mind as we go through this podcast.
I appreciate your patience.
It's so strange to realize so much later why I remember these things.
Like the future is the dream of the past.
It's bizarre. Like I was hurling back images through time to get me here.
It's too strange. Anyway...
Sorry if there's any noise.
I have to adjust my muffle.
Oh dear lord, it's...
Anyway...
So... For status in part three, the reality of the state, as I see it, and I think there's really good proof for it, is that we don't live in countries.
We live in farms.
We are not citizens.
We are livestock. And I've used this term before, but I wanted to go into more details about it and then Close with, I think, a very interesting perspective on this, which ties a lot of what we do together.
So, originally, human beings, this is back before states, when there were only tribes, human beings really could only produce what they themselves could consume.
There was no excess, right?
Which is why everybody kind of lived on the line of starvation pretty continually.
And so they would have their border disputes, they would have their, I'm sure, fights over resources, and they would kill each other with clubs and whatever, but there was no point taking slaves, because people could only produce what they, people produced only what they themselves could consume, so there was no point having slaves, because there was no need, there was no benefit to it, right?
You wouldn't be able to get anything from them, right?
Like if cows...
Ah, forget the cows.
we'll work with other metaphors perhaps but because people consumed what they produced or produced nothing more than what they themselves consumed there was no point owning them because they were not a resource That could produce enough for exploitation.
So, sort of like if you never wanted to eat a cow and the cow drank all of its own milk, there'd be little point having one around, right?
You wouldn't need to feed it because it would drink all its own milk, but why would you even bother wanting to house it?
Because you wouldn't be able to get any of the milk, right?
It's not the best metaphor. I'll look at it.
Anyway. However, the moment that agricultural technology or innovations or approaches improved to the point where there was even a sliver of excess, maybe more than a sliver, then it became worthwhile for people to go slave hunting, right?
To go and Enslave others, and you could enslave part of your own tribe, and of course there were the women who were enslaved for the most part, bound down with local hunter-gathering and childbirth, but to go and conquer other nations, or to go and conquer other tribes, and to make them your slaves, allowed for the creation of an aristocratic class, right?
A class of farmers and their crop Was humanity.
And this, of course, is the foundation of the state.
And people say, oh, it's a fucking social contract.
It was nonsense. The foundation of the state is the harvesting of human excess through enslavement.
People become owned, and their excess productivity is soaked up by the upper classes.
And they are kept around through threat of death, right?
And this, of course, I mean, if we look at the early Egyptian, Chinese, and Roman empires, and Spanish empires, all the way through to the 16th century, they're all slave hunting farmers, right?
That's what they are.
They have a crop called humanity, which produces excess for the ruling class, and you need a constant replenishing of the crop.
And if we look at, and I think reasonably so, if we look at human history in this light, it's a lot easier to understand what a state is.
That's why I say we don't live in countries, we live in farms.
Now, there's a problem with human ownership, though, that there isn't with any other kind of farming.
right? And the problem is that human beings are cunning, and of course, fundamentally, human beings are indistinguishable from the ruling class.
You can tell a farmer from a cow You can't as easily, at least at the beginning, tell an aristocrat from a servant, right?
I mean, assuming they could switch clothes or you could steal your clothes or whatever, right?
And so that was a problem.
So, of course, branding of slaves became common.
Snipping an earlobe or an entire ear, cutting off a little finger, things like cutting off a toe, these sorts of things to mark that person as a slave became...
Ways to distinguish it, right?
Because, you know, if you're the slave to an upper-class dude, you can mimic his accent, you can steal his clothes, you can steal his money, and you can, you know, flee, right?
So that's one of the problems, is how to keep your slaves from blending into the general human society.
That's a big problem. But it really wasn't a huge problem until the 17th, 18th century.
Now, in the 17th and 18th century, something amazing happened, which was, well, as I've talked about before, you had the enclosure movement, which made farming so much more efficient, and threw a lot of people off the farm,
created an excess crop which could be soaked up by Proletariat labor within the cities, and so everybody came swarming in to the cities, and you had the growth of capitalism, right?
Now, capitalism is considered to be a free market ideology, and this, of course, is constantly confusing and confused for people, right?
When objectivists say capitalism, they mean something enormously different.
Than, or libertarians, than what Noam Chomsky means when he uses the word capitalism.
So, excuse me, sorry, kind of gross, but it's cold.
Did I mention that? I think I did. But I'm going to sort of submit an alternate way of looking at things that I think explains a lot about the modern world, that capitalism was not freedom.
Capitalism was better farming of human livestock, right?
Sorry to say right, like it's true, but if you understand, right?
I'll try and make the case.
Just as the agricultural revolutions of, I mean, you could say pretty much from the 14th even back to the 12th if you want to do the invention of the harness that didn't choke the horse and oxen when it was used.
But if you look at the agricultural revolution that preceded the Industrial Revolution, it produced a huge amount of access.
Five, ten, twenty times the amount of crops per person.
A similar thing happened in the 20th century.
At the end of the 20th century, 80% of people involved in farming.
At the end of the 20th century, it's 3%.
It's massive, right? It's almost a 30 times improvement in productivity per person, right?
And so, this massive growth in agricultural productivity, which allowed for the Industrial Revolution, created a second wave of growth where property rights And,
quote, freedom for your livestock meant that they were unbelievably more productive than they were in the past, right?
This was the fundamental economic difference between the industrialized north, which was of the U.S., which was non-slave-owning, and the agrarian south, which was of the northern economy, without stripping the southern economy.
And so, if we look at the genius that the ruling class hit upon in the 17th, 18th centuries, which coincided with the discovery of the New World, but not only that, which was, look, if you give people more freedom, they will produce more excess.
They will innovate.
If you give them the right to keep most of the results of their labor, they will work harder.
They will be entrepreneurial.
They will innovate. They will invent.
meant they will create, they will trade.
Now none of this meant freedom, as we would understand it, as a principle, a fundamental principle resulting from property rights and the non-aggression principle.
But it's way better farming to...
I mean, the more excess you can coax out of your livestock, the greater productivity you can coax out of your livestock, the better your farming methods, right?
And so if we look at the Industrial Revolution, what we're seeing is an innovation in human farming, right?
in tax livestock.
So, I mean, if you imagine that, if you cram all these chickens together, I'm a farmer, right?
But if you cram all these chickens together, they're not very productive.
They peck each other, malt, and get sick.
But if you give them some space, if you give them some freedom, then they do better.
They produce many more eggs, right?
Get less sick. So the reason you give them more freedom is not because you want to set them free at some philosophical level, but because you want them to be more productive.
In the same way, cows, if they're confined in very tight quarters, will actually swing their heads back and forth and bang their heads against the walls of their enclosure until they're dazed and bleeding and they get sick.
Open source infections.
And so, if you give the cows more space, more room, more ventilation, then you can sell their meat for more.
They'll get less sick. They're less expensive to maintain.
More expensive to build broader enclosures, but less expensive to maintain.
And so, the reason you give these cows more space is not because you want to set them free, right, at some philosophical level.
But because you want them to be more productive livestock for you, right?
Now, in the same way, I think there's been a fundamental misapprehension.
And Lord knows I've fallen for it too.
But again, this is just a thesis, or even a possibility, a sketch of a thesis.
But this...
The expansion of property rights and some political liberties and so on throughout...
The late agricultural and industrial revolution.
Was that born out of a fundamental desire for the non-aggression principles?
Of course not, right? Because then there would not be a government.
But it was a growing recognition that if you give, The livestock more room, you get more milk.
If you give them more freedom, they will be more productive.
Now, we can see this same process occurring in China and Asia, Vietnam, India and places, where there are huge increases, double-digit growths.
And the economists, and I thought, the spread of freedom.
It's not the spread of freedom.
It's the spread of better farm human livestock management techniques.
Right? It's like the guy figures out that the turnips should be planted six inches further apart so that bald weevils can't eat them, and the turnips all cheer that they're being set free.
Bad metaphor again, but I think you understand what I mean.
Right? The cow is taken out of his tiny enclosure and put into a larger enclosure where he has room, he can turn around, and he's like, yay, next step, next stop, the posture!
But of course, the next stop is never going to be free.
It's just better farming.
Now, one way to look at what is commonly called ideology is that it's all farming theories.
Theories on how to be a better farmer for the ruling classes, right?
For those who actually run the show, right?
The 5% that have the 60% of wealth, or whatever it is, right?
That, you look at socialism.
Well, see, socialism is a farming method, right?
And it says this produces healthier and more productive cows, right?
Now, fascism, well, it's tougher, and it produces tougher and more aggressive bulls, right?
Now, capitalism, well, see, capitalism is like a free-range philosophy.
I mean, of course, everyone's still in the fence of the state, but, you know, if they're free-range, they produce more eggs, and they're stronger and more vital, right?
And in that general discussion, the capitalism school of human management, of livestock management, has kind of won the day.
I mean, frankly, it's kind of won the day.
It's spreading, right?
You look at something like communism, and communism did not survive for very long, 70 years or so, as a really go-get-em philosophy.
You could say even less than that.
But this is because it was such a bad human management program, right?
Such bad farm practices that it just couldn't last, right?
So they're trying to tortuously switch over to...
Capitalism, as it's commonly described, which is free-range farming, right?
Again, the next stop is not freedom, right?
There is no next stop.
This is the farm. And we can play around with the idea of freedom is on its way, brothers.
All we want. But it's like the cow going to a bigger pen.
The next stop is not the jungle, where he can roam free to his cat's content.
These are tough metaphors because, of course, in a jungle a cow can be eaten, right?
He's actually protected, but that's not the case.
I guess a better metaphor would be to say that if you upgrade a cow's little holding pen, the next stop is not to turn the cow into a farmer, right?
So, if we look at these ideologies as manuals for owning humans, right?
I think that it all makes a lot more sense to me.
Again, my brain just might be half frozen, but it seems to make some sense to me.
Now, when we get into the 20th century, I'm sorry, I wanted to mention, you know, this Laffer curve where if you reduce taxes, you get more taxes.
Well, the point of that is not to reduce taxes, right?
The point of that, the goal of that is to get more taxes, right?
It's not like we're in principle opposed to violence and we're trying to eliminate taxes.
It's like, well, this is an example of a theory of human livestock ownership, right?
It's a farm theory.
Which is, if you give the cows more room, you will get more milk.
If you don't get more milk, that won't last.
That won't work, right? But if you try it, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, that...
Ooh, let's go in the crunchy snow.
Going into the woods. So, that way of looking at things, to me, makes eminent sense.
Again, I'm not saying the case is clinched by any means, of course, right?
But, you know, just spinning, just playing here.
The purpose has never been to set us free.
The purpose is to Be better at exploiting us, right?
Now, in the 20th century in particular, this is true to the 19th, but more so in the 20th century, a huge problem began to arise.
And a huge opportunity, right?
Because there are no problems without opportunities, right?
So... There are no opportunities without problems.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be opportunities.
They'd be a sure thing. So...
In the 20th century, a new idea began to emerge in the ruling classes, which was, holy shit!
The real value of human labor, the real productivity of our human livestock, is no longer their bodies, but now it is their minds.
I mean, when the Spanish, when the conquistadors went into the New World, they...
I mean, they just enslaved.
The Incas and the Mayans, they just enslaved them all and made them work in gold and more often silver mines.
So it was just, you know, brute force human ownership, right?
The excess productivity being the additional silver that the slaves could produce, right?
So... That was one aspect of human ownership.
And, frankly, you didn't give a shit about the happiness of your subjects, right?
I mean, you obviously didn't want them to be so depressed that they would die, or kill themselves, or get involved in, quote, accidents.
You didn't want them so starved that they couldn't work.
You didn't want them to have leisure so they could think about their situation.
So, but fundamentally you just wanted, right?
You don't care if your cotton picker is depressed in the rural South in the early 19th century.
You just cared that he gave you his...
He gave you the cotton at the end of the day, right?
And if he didn't, you'd beat him or whatever, right?
But you didn't care if he was depressed because he could do his job if he was depressed, right?
But... In the 20th century capitalism, livestock model, people have to be enthusiastic, right?
And this is a huge problem.
I mean, particularly with war, right?
I mean, the reason that they all need more productivity out of their livestock is because of the threat of war.
If someone else gets more productivity, they can build more tanks and bombs and so on.
So the problem in the 20th century and 21st is that your livestock are the most productive when they are the most enthusiastic.
right? Which is a problem.
And why? Because they're livestock, right?
So it's really tough to be enthusiastic when you're a livestock, right?
So, well, what are you going to do?
Are you going to whip them up with patriotism and music and pomp and circumstance and you're going to get them to be so proud to live Or to be in the...
To be trapped in the farm they're trapped in.
You know, to be so proud of all of that, right?
And... So you're going to inflict all of that nonsense on them.
All that rah-rah-sis-boom-bah stuff.
And... I mean, you couldn't...
It's hard to imagine how not patriotic 18th and 19th century America was compared to the 20th, right?
It's the 21st, right? It's nonsense, right?
So you whip them up with patriotism and say, my farm is the best, right?
USA! My farm rules!
It rules you, yes, but...
Right, so you get all of that.
And then you realize...
That if you ban people from leaving, two things happen.
One is that the best and brightest will escape anyway, right?
Think of the 19th century, all the people who came to America, right?
So even if they were banned from leaving, they'll just sneak out, right?
So your best, your brightest, your most energetic, your best farm animals will leave for the farm that has more freedom, right?
Ooh, here I get an even bigger pen, right?
Again, Never with the goal of freedom only with the goal of better management, right?
This ties into the idea that the United States government has always had the maximum power it could possibly have, right?
It didn't have less power in the late 18th century because it was committed to small government, but because it didn't have enough weapons and guns to brutalize the population.
And in the Whiskey Rebellion, where it had that capacity, it did so without hesitation.
But it was not the government we know today, because it didn't have the capacity to be the government that we know today, right?
You know, when Mike Tyson was five, he was not a boxer, but not because he was a pacifist, but simply because he was just still too small, right?
So, So this is the problem.
That you have to try and get people to want to stay on your farm.
Because if there's competition between farms, and there's easy movement between the two farms, then you have a problem, right?
Because you'll start losing people if you don't, you know...
If it's better on the other farm, they'll start going over there, right?
So... One of the things that you'll do, and you'll do this through religion, we'll get to religion in a bit, but one of the things that you'll do to make people enthusiastic about being livestock, and thus being incredibly productive livestock, is you will make them afraid of immigrants.
This is genius, and I'm not saying any of this is conscious.
Ruling classes are damn good at what they do, right?
Otherwise, we're just idiots for being so much in the margins, but You will make people afraid of immigrants, and you can see this really rising throughout the Western world in the 19th century, and I think to some degree as a result of the increased immigration opportunities, particularly in the US. But you make them afraid of immigrants.
And this, of course, was what culminated in public schools throughout most of the Western world, fear of immigrants.
And why do you make them afraid of immigrants?
Well, because if you make people afraid of immigrants, they will agitate and approve of laws barring immigration, right?
But the stupid, dumbass livestock can't seem to grasp that when you restrict immigration, what happens?
You also restrict emigration, right?
Because if you restrict immigration from people who desperately wanted to come into your country, it's not like you want to go to their country, right?
I mean, the only way you're going to ever end up wanting to go to Cuba is if all the Cubans are allowed to come to America and Castro is left there with nothing, right?
Then he'll open up borders to get people back, right?
But the moment you restrict immigration, you restrict emigration.
Because even if there are two countries equally free on each other's border, if you restrict immigration, what happens is, if you're in the U.S. and you restrict immigration from Canada, all that happens is Canada will then slap immigration restrictions on Americans.
So the moment you get frightened of immigrants, it either becomes a U.S.-Mexican fiasco, in which case you're restricting people from coming in from Mexico, which just makes the value of getting in from Mexico even greater.
It's like trying to restrict drugs, of course.
And it's not like people want to move to Mexico who aren't fugitives, right?
And if you do the same thing with Canada, where Americans might want to, all that happens is Canada starts restricting immigration, which then affects Americans, right?
So when you restrict immigration, you have to restrict immigration.
And this is why You get things like passports, right?
20th century was the century of the passport, right?
None at the beginning. Every country had one at the end.
Except maybe Somalia, which is barely a country.
So, this is something you do.
Make people afraid of immigration.
Now, the other thing you do, you pump up, you know, the Canadian way, the American dream...
A pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
You whip people up into enthusiasm, right?
Into, I want that, right?
Into lust, into desire for material things, which makes them try to be more productive, to make more money, to have those material things.
So, that's one thing you do.
Now, another thing that you'll do To try and keep people enthusiastic, because you want them to be enthusiastic about being on your farm, but you also want to make it really hard for them to leave your farm, right?
It's the carrot and the stick. So, for those who are too smart for dumbass patriotism, what you do is you introduce something called licensing.
Licensing is wonderful. Licensing is exactly the same as one of those electronic dog collars that emits a jolt of pain If the dog strays beyond a certain radius, 100 yards or 200 yards or whatever.
And that's wonderful, right?
That's the beauty of licensing, right?
Oh, you're licensed to practice law only here, right?
You're licensed to practice medicine or accounting or psychotherapy or psychological associatism in the case of my wife.
You can only practice here, right?
And that's wonderful because then people can make money on your farm But it's like having a gift certificate rather than money.
You can only spend it in one place.
And the income potential and the income actualization of most of the major professions is only spendable in a particular farm district, right?
Only in a particular field, like a state or a province or a country.
So that's...
That's another way that you keep people enthusiastic and tethered down, right?
And you can, I'm sure, come up with dozens and dozens of them, right?
One of the things that you will do, of course, is also to...
You will have a religion that praises the leader as appointed by God, right?
That is the chosen, right?
The chosen people. It's the chosen country.
It's the shining city on the hill.
It's the glorious country of God, and so on, right?
And, of course, that makes fealty to ghosts the same as enthusiasm for your slave pen or for your livestock pen, right?
Well, God put the farmer there, and to obey God, I have to obey the farmer, and, you know, lickety-splick.
Bingo, bango, bongo.
You are tethered by another electronic tetherer.
In many ways, even more restrictive and certain than something as predatory as licensing.
Now, the other thing that you will do is, and this is true of all livestock, including the most brutal and brutalized of livestock who are the military, is depression is the great The problem of modern capitalist livestock management techniques is depression.
Because if people get depressed, again, you don't care if your cotton picker is depressed, but you do care if your doctor is depressed, or your software engineer is depressed, or your major cultural icons are depressed.
Because they then cannot be productive, and you can't put them out in the fields picking cotton, So what are you going to do with them, right?
So that's another challenge or problem with modern livestock.
People need to be enthusiastic.
But, you know, unfortunately the government keeps growing and people begin to feel that they can't get ahead.
I mean, I've certainly had that feeling for a number of years now.
Even when I was working, it was really hard to get ahead.
Every time you'd make more money, you'd just get hit with more taxes and more restrictions and so on.
And the quality of life was very hard to maintain.
Housing prices just went through the roof to the point where you had to have a long commute, you get stuck on the road, and it was just bad in general all around, and real wages have been declining, of course, over the past couple of decades.
So, what do you do when the system begins to fail, right?
Well, you can't make people more free, right?
Really, because all the stuff I talk about in practical anarchy, right?
That you've sold off their future to other members or parasites of the ruling class, right?
Unions and public sector workers and special interest groups and so on, right?
What do you do? What do you do when they get depressed?
Well, you do what any competent farmer does.
You drug them, right?
I mean, that's what you do, right?
Put steroids into your cows and antibiotics and so on, right?
Because they're in unhealthy conditions, right?
They get sick and they get weak and so on, right?
So what do you do? Do you give them more freedom?
Hell no! Right?
You drug them, right? So with the slow deceleration and resulting fall in living standards throughout the West, you see an associated or comitant rise in antidepressants, right? And, of course, these are handed out like literally candy to the troops, particularly those in forward combat zones, right?
You just hand it out like crazy so that they can struggle through another day with their, quote, enthusiasm artificially stimulated, right?
So that's another thing that is necessary in the late capitalist human livestock farm management handbook is when you begin to Notice or when people begin to become depressed, you drug them, right?
You can't solve their depression with a little thing called authenticity or self-actualization.
Time-consuming, expensive, and the whole point of being a livestock is not to be self-actualized, right?
But rather to be an empty-headed, jingoistic fool shouting praise slogans at your farming masters, right?
Well, we do have some low planes today.
So, that's another thing that you do.
Of course, you keep them, you know, pumped up on envy and sex and, you know, all that kind of stuff, right?
And keep your shows kind of dumb and so on, right?
I know I say this having come off a Gossip Girl episode, but hey, I got some useful stuff out of it, right?
When you look at culture with the eyes of philosophy, you see...
A lot of very interesting things.
Now... Now I'm going to get to the bit that's going to blow your mind.
It blew my mind, anyway. And it blew Christina's mind.
Maybe it'll blow your mind. We'll see.
There's lots of other stuff to talk about with this, but let's just get to this thing.
You can tell me what you think of the idea as a whole, right?
But... When we get to...
To this part, it's pretty cool.
Now, how do you keep people bound to your farm, right?
How do you do it? And for this, and I'll put forward my theory of parenting, you know, of general theory of parenting, which we'll see whether it survives actually being a parent or not.
Four weeks to go, I guess.
Or so. And parenting is like your You're a launchpad.
The kid is an arrow, and you strain to pull the string back so that you can launch the arrow into the sky, and you're aiming to launch your children into the world, right?
Family, to me, is not something that you hang around, right?
You know, bars closing, get out, right?
Parenting is done, you're 18, you're 19, you know?
Go into the world, right?
Don't be here, right?
It's that old line from that song, I don't care where you go, but you can't stay here, right?
Of course, that's a silly way to put it as far as parenting goes, but that's the idea, right?
Because when my kid's 18, I'm going to be 60, right?
So I'm going to want to go do some travel before I get too old, right?
So I was like, go. You know, we've now done the parenting thing, and we're very happy to have done it.
We love you very much. And you go.
Now, I hope that a child or children will go out into the world and do some wonderful stuff and live great lives.
And I hope that when we get old and rickety and pathetic, they will want to help us out.
They will want to, you know, and when we are dying, they will want to be with us through the intimate descent, the incredibly intimate descent into death.
That we'll want to be there out of love and gratitude and joy and all that.
In the same way that, you know, Christina and I, one of us are going to go first, or both at the same time, but likelihood one of us is going to go first.
It's likely going to be me. Women live longer.
But she's going to want to be there with me because that will be the final chapter in the love of our lives, right?
But this idea that we just hang around our parents, hang around our parents, it just seems kind of nutty to me.
It seems like staying in grade 3 until you're 30.
Or being one of those eternal students, just not getting on with the next thing.
People I know...
Call their parents every day, go over every week.
I was like, dude, they're not your parents anymore.
You're grown up, right?
So... All of that stuff...
Again, this is nothing to do with anything that's true.
This is just a bunch of nonsense, right?
But I think it's interesting nonsense.
So... So if...
We accept that as a possibility, right?
Then what happens is, your livestock owners, the farmers, will face a problem.
Which is, when you grow up, you might want to go away, right?
And a lot of people do, and so on, but just in general, right?
So... Again, ruling classes are very smart, right?
Otherwise, we're all very dumb for being owned in such a manner.
But... What are they going to do?
Well, see, if they bar you from emigrating, then they face the problem of you becoming depressed, right?
And, uh... Unmotivated, right?
And if you're unmotivated, they can't get all the goodies that they want, right?
All of the software and music and buildings you'll build and architectural things or whatever, right?
Whatever you're going to do with your life that's going to be productive for the ruling classes, you're not going to be that interested in doing it because you're going to be depressed, right?
So they can't bar you from leaving, right?
Because as soon as you see that fence, you stop producing milk, right?
As soon as you get that you're on a farm...
You don't want to produce for the farmers anymore, right?
And... So what are they going to do?
Well, we've talked over some of the things, right?
They'll give you religion, they'll give you patriotism, they'll make you afraid of immigrants and all that.
And they'll restrict you from...
Like, you can leave, but...
You know, it's a year or two of paperwork and green cards and shit like that, right?
So I was like...
Yeah, if you really want to...
But they just make it difficult, right?
Right? If the fence is so high that only one cow in a thousand can make it over, but it makes the rest of the 999 cows who can't make it over, if it makes them produce ten times as much milk, fuck, let that cow go, particularly since there'll be one coming over the fence, thinking this place is not a farm, right?
So, they don't mind a little bit of trickle back and forth because it makes those who can't make it over for whatever reason, or won't, it still makes them more productive because they feel they could leave, right?
It's like that. Like that guy in the cell on Truth, right?
Doesn't want to try and see if the door's locked.
Just likes to think it is.
Unlocked, right? He's free.
So... So here's the trip of it.
Sorry. I don't tease you anymore.
The way that I would keep my livestock close and Relatively enthusiastic.
I would tell them that family is everything.
Family is the very highest good.
Loyalty to family.
The virtue, munificence, benevolence of the family.
That is everything.
Blood is thicker than water.
And all these things, right?
And the reason, of course, you understand this, right?
The reason that I would tell them this is because the whole family ain't gonna leave, right?
When I keep them bound to each other.
Keep them bound to each other.
Now, again, I'm not talking about good families or anything.
I'm just talking about this as a generic principle, which is so completely illogical, right?
Which is that family equals virtue.
I mean, that's primitive. It's nonsense.
It's the same as saying dryads live in trees, right?
But why is it so common?
Family, community, right?
Why is it so insistent?
Why is it so omnipresent?
Well, because if you're bound to your family through bonds of virtue and loyalty and community and love, if you're bound to them, then you're less likely to go to another farm, right? Leave your family behind.
Gosh, you think you want to go and live in France?
What will your mother say?
When you tell her, I'm moving to another country.
Right? And again, I know this sounds all kinds of cold, right?
And I'm not talking about, you know, families they love.
I'll go wherever Christina goes, right?
That's fine with me, right? But...
This idea that...
To promote...
The cult of the family, right?
Right? Family is always good.
Family is always... They love you no matter what.
Blood is thicker than water. They can't do anything wrong.
Anything that goes wrong is merely a mistake or a misunderstanding.
This idea that we must remain children and our parents must remain our parents, capitalized, until they die, or we die, is so patently ridiculous, right?
And we understand this failure to launch thing, right, where people don't leave home or whatever, right?
But... I've just noticed that there's so much propaganda about the family, and the virtue of the family, and the automatic goodness of the family, and yeah, I'm sure some of it is anxiety and management and so on, but I can also see how it completely benefits the ruling classes, right? Because if we just have to be around our family no matter what, all the time, then we're less likely to leave.
But we also will still retain the illusion of And in many ways, it's not an illusion that we're free to leave, right?
It's just that what they do is keep these soft barriers to entry, keep going up and up, so we feel free.
But we're not, right? Like that frog in the water.
You throw the frog into the boiling water, it jumps out, you slowly heat the water, it doesn't, right?
It dies. And this idea that promoting family loyalty...
Is excellent capitalist livestock farm management practices.
Blew my mind.
I wanted to go out and talk about it before I...
Forgot about it, right?
If...
And sorry, I know that there's productive reasons to be around family...
I mean, other than you may love them or whatever, but productive reasons when you have kids and grandparents around is useful and so on, right?
But... If you can keep these family bonds welded, then people will feel free to leave, but it'll be functionally nearly impossible for them to do so.
Because they're family, and they love you, and we can't go, and all that, right?
It's that horizontal statism I talk about in RTR. And this will be, of course...
Because you don't need to promote stuff that people really want to do.
You don't need propaganda, right?
I mean, you'll have advertising that plays off sex, but you don't need endless propaganda telling people sex is good, right?
Because we get that.
We understand it.
We know it, right? I mean, you have to have a food group reminding you to eat vegetables.
You don't have to have a food group saying, remember to eat your candy, because people want to eat candy, right?
So, wherever I see a lot of positive propaganda, I immediately do not believe that it is a human instinct, right?
So, wherever I see a lot of positive propaganda about the family, I automatically look for who it serves, right?
Because it doesn't serve ordinary human instincts, because we wouldn't need propaganda if that were the case, right?
We'd just be there, the force, right?
You don't see ads saying, uh, eat when you're hungry, right?
Because that's what we want to do anyway, right?
That's automatic. So...
Hey, I should be able to get this into a ten-minute video, you think?
I just wanted to get these ideas down while they were still floating around in my head.
I'm really quite fascinated by a lot of the stuff that sort of popped out of the old Noggin-o-rama this evening.
And I'd like to thank Gossip Girl and other things like that.
And I wanted to talk to you about it.
I think there's some really good stuff here.
This is, of course, all horrendous and probably impossible to prove, but there's a kind of click, or a series of clicks, that this does in terms of pieces of the puzzle, or I guess locks in the tumbler, that I quite like.
I think it does a lot to frame this problem.
Because the fundamental problem, the reason why this shit never works in the long run, this status crap, is because the greater the productivity, the greater the parasitism.
This is this wave back and forth all the time, all the time, over and over.
So the farmers figure out that if they give the cows more headroom, they get more milk.
Right? So what does that do?
Does it make the cows free?
No! It just makes them more valuable, and it attracts more farmers, right?
But that's all that happens.
Right? So the United States is relatively free, because the U.S. government is new and has to promise goodies, right?
And doesn't have the power to inflict its will.
And so it says, as a five-year-old Mike Tyson, I'm not going to take the heavyweight championship yet!
Right? I don't really do impressions.
But as the productivity goes up, right, so people are, oh, freedom, oh, I get to keep my goodies, ooh, your tax is very low, yay!
You know, they get all entrepreneurial, they are creative, do all these great things.
And what happens?
Well, this massive productivity causes a massive increase in the ruling class, right?
When the cow is only producing a liter of milk a day, the farmer and his wife and their child, and maybe two children, can survive off that, a couple of turnips, right?
But when the cow is producing 2,000 liters of milk a day, one shrunken-headed cow, what happens?
Well, the farmer can have more children, right?
The farmer can grow, the farmer can build an empire, the farmer can buy up other farms, right?
The excess in productivity that arises from increases in headroom or liberty for the livestock...
It doesn't last, right?
Because the exorcist is soaked up by massive increases in the ruling classes and those who feast on them, right?
Public sector, the creditors to the nation, and so on, right?
Military. So, that's why it never lasts, right?
That's why it doesn't work. And that's why capitalism is understood in these two ways.
Which are actually kind of compatible.
Yeah, there's more freedom. But the goal is increased productivity of the tax herd, not freedom.
Yes, the cows have more headroom and they produce more milk.
The goal, the next stop, is not setting them free.
They're only given more headroom so they can produce...
More milk, right?
More meat. And that's why there's such skepticism about capitalism out there, right?
And that's why there's all this bullshit about the Founding Fathers and the mythology of freedom and all that, right?
It's like, yeah, well, that's what they used to sell, right?
We're under new management, right?
That's the farm, right?
1776, under new management, right?
And they came up with a fantastic way of gaining a lot of productivity out of their livestock in the short run, but of course that simply, like all empires before, causes a swelling in the ruling class until there's a collapse, right?
And that's what we're heading to now.
So I want to put this out there.
I think it's interesting. Please, my friends, if you can...
Donate a little bit.
I'd hugely appreciate it.
Been a bit of a dry month since the shenanigans that popped up in the mainstream media last week.
If you could throw out a little bit more, I would massively appreciate it.
I would appreciate it if you could step up to that.
And thank you so much for listening.
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