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March 13, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:40
1297 The Death of Concepts Part 2
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Hello, everybody. It's Defend Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
I hope that you are doing well.
This is The Death of Concepts, Part 2.
This is Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which I am slowly wending my way through the tree, nay, forest-slaughtering thickness of the book, and it is a very instructive book to read.
I would recommend it. She's an excellent, excellent propagandist.
And I will give you some examples of that.
Some comments on the threads that have been coming up is, and I don't want to get into a whole thing about forests and trees, but when I say that forests do not exist, I mean that in the same way that the abstract concept numbers don't exist, right?
There are three coconuts In a room, there are three coconuts, three physical entities, but there is no number three that is associated.
To take away the three coconuts, there's no residue on number three.
Three is a concept in our heads.
The coconuts existed within objective reality.
And the forest and tree example is confusing for some, and I apologize for that, because they say, well, but a forest is an interconnected bunch of trees with undergrowth and an ecosystem, and so how can you say it doesn't exist because a tree It's just a bunch of atoms which are gathered together.
And that's true to some degree, but there still is a kind of clear delineation between atoms, molecules, and cells that are bound together in a single entity like a tree, which you can't separate, versus something which is like a forest, which is just a conceptual aggregate of a whole bunch of things which are not bound together physically, right? So there's some difference, right?
A crowd of people has a slightly different gravitational mass than an individual person, but the concept crowd still does not exist.
You take away all the people from a square, there's no crowd residue left, right?
So anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
You can watch the Introduction to Philosophy series.
There's also Understanding Concepts video, which I think you could have a go at if you want.
But it's really, really important. This is an Aristotelian essence question.
You can also read Aristotle on this.
The question of the difference, like what is a concept and its validity to, or application to, or as I would say, its derivation from, individual physical instances of things.
But it's very important to understand, concepts don't exist in the real world.
They exist as ideas within our head.
If I say there are three coconuts in the room, I may be saying a true or false statement.
But the number three doesn't exist in the room.
The concept truth does not exist in the room.
It is merely the accurate representation of the ideas in my mind to that which exists within...
Reality. So, logic doesn't exist in the world.
Truth doesn't exist. Virtue doesn't exist.
Values don't exist in the world.
They are mere... That doesn't mean that they're subjective, right?
The scientific method does not exist in the world either, but that does not mean that the scientific method is completely subjective.
Numbers don't exist in the world, but that does not mean that mathematics is subjective because of the logical rigor required.
So, you might want to look into more of that, but until you get that down, this isn't going to make a whole lot of sense to you.
I'm just going to read two little bits from the shock doctrine and just talk about how there's such a terrifying lack of actual content in the language that it's really chilling when you start to see it.
This is from page 18.
The chapter is entitled Blank is Beautiful, which is actually quite a...
could be an unconscious nod towards her own pro star.
She writes, a more accurate Term for a system that erases the boundaries between big government and big business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist, but corporatist.
Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor, and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security.
For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society.
But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance, once again with governments and large corporations trading favors and contracts, mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties, and often, though not always, torture.
And so let's go through this.
A system that erases the boundaries between big government and big business.
I don't know what that means.
Because there's just people doing stuff, right?
And big government is people who have the right to shoot people who don't give them money and obey their codified whims, right?
The laws are just codified whims, right?
Government should have a slogan.
Government, free evil!
That's what it really is, right?
You get to steal and other people pay for the enforcement of that stealing through the taxes that pay for police and prisons and so on.
Government is free evil. It's freevil!
Big government and big business, the boundaries between big government...
The government is just a business.
Government is just a business that has a monopoly of force or claims and has an effective monopoly on force.
I don't understand what the difference is between government and business in a statist society.
Government is just The business that won a monopoly over the initiation of the use of force.
All revolutions and social upheavals and tribal warfare, it's all about who gets to dominate or justify the initiation of the use of force.
And when you look at the aristocracy, it's just a It's a business of evil, right?
And whoever wins in that context gets control over society, right?
So founding fathers were the founding father gang, the mafia, who were taking over or attempting to wrestle control over from the British mafia, right?
So it's just another kind of business.
And that is a corruption of the term business because business is often used to mean, you know, voluntary peaceful exchange of values in a market economy.
But there is an economy called the monopolization of force in violence in society, and that is a kind of business.
It is not a free market.
It is the opposite of a free market, but it is a source of immense A profit, again, to abuse the word slightly, but I think you sort of understand what you mean.
So the system that erases the boundaries between big government and big business, I don't understand what that means.
A government has money that it extracts through force or fraud in terms of printing extra money from the population, so it is a violent entity that exists as the most successful criminal enterprise in the world.
And it's enormously profitable to be around the government and to be in this circle for sure.
The profits in the statist paradigms within governments vastly outstrip the 3% to 6% profit that is the most that can be ratcheted out of a free market system.
And so I'd erase the boundaries between big government and big business.
It's like this use of the word public and private.
I don't know what the hell that means.
I mean, there's not two different species.
There's not like a reptile human that's called public and a mammalian human that's called private.
Public-private means nothing to me.
I don't understand what it means.
Some people can use guns and some people can't.
Violent or non-violent.
Voluntary or coerced.
You know, brutal or optional.
I mean, public and private, again, it's just one of these words that is used to erase the reality of the evil of violence that the state is.
So, she says, its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands.
Huge transfers of public wealth to private hands.
And again, I don't know what that means in any kind of real way.
I have no idea what that actually means.
Public wealth has simply been robbed from private citizens.
I mean, there is no such thing as a public citizen or a public servant.
There are only people doing stuff.
And those people who call themselves the government use force and fraud to extract trillions of dollars from their fellow citizens, drape themselves in flags and nonsense.
So there's no such thing as public wealth.
There's only private wealth.
There's no such thing as public wealth.
Because there's no such thing as a public human being.
There's only a human being. So huge transfers of public wealth to private hands.
But the public wealth only comes because it has been already transferred through the threat of violence or violence itself from other citizens.
So there's no such thing as public wealth.
Often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor.
I mean, the language is great. As far as prose poetry goes, it's absolutely got no meaning, but it's just wonderful.
For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society.
Absolutely. Violence is very profitable.
Violence. Works!
The threat of jail works biologically.
Of course, those who preferred resistance to violent hierarchies to submission died, usually before they would reach reproductive age, and even if they did have kids, those kids may not survive.
So, absolutely, obedience and conformity to violence is foundational to our survival as a species, and yes, violence is extremely profitable.
But, like all socialists, she...
It wants to divide violence into good violence and bad violence.
I call it the myth of the golden gun.
That if someone gets a hold of this gun and points it at just the right people in just the right way, a magical fountain of dazzling and glorious and firework-y virtue will erupt from the golden gun and turn the world into a paradise.
Where we can all drink milk from the udders of unicorns.
It is, of course, a complete fantasy that the violence can be used for virtue, but this is why public versus private, government versus citizens versus corporations versus unions, all of these entities are created in order to erase or at least befog that dividing line between violence and voluntarism.
So, for those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there could be no more profitable way to organize a society.
I mean, since the government is, when you break it down to people doing stuff, it's absolutely indistinguishable from organized crime.
It is simply the most successful organized crime unit.
Can you imagine that if I described the mafia extortion of helpless and broken shopkeepers and restaurant owners, right?
You know, the guys who come in is like, hey, it'd be really bad if something happened to your restaurant.
You know, it looks kind of flammable, right?
That the threat would be clear. So if I was speaking about the Mafia and I said, for those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society.
It would be meaningless. Threatening people with violence works.
People will pay off those who point a gun at them in order to be left in relative peace.
Extortion works. Violence works.
Brutality works. Incarceration works.
And torture, of course, is the definition of statism because jails are torture, right?
You've got cockroaches in your food.
You've got shivs in your stomach.
You've got dicks in your ass.
It is extremely brutal, medieval, violent, destructive, and of course, ends up festering even more criminal behavior from those who are subjected to such brutality.
So, government is founded upon torture.
Jail is torture, right? The threat of jail is the threat of torture because, or the reality of torture, because modern jails and all jails throughout history have been mere Torture fests where sadists, whether they be gods or prisoners, get to re-enact their brutalized childhoods with everyone else.
So, statism is torture.
Statism is the threat of torture and murder.
So, violence works.
Violence is very profitable, absolutely.
But you can watch The Sopranos to understand that.
Look at the house he lives in. So, on page 24, she says, quote,"'I am not arguing that all forms of market systems are inherently violent.' It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity.
A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy, like a national oil company held in state hands.
It is equally possible to require cooperation to pay decent wages, to respect the rights of workers to form unions and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth, so that the sharp inequalities that mark The corporatist state are reduced.
Markets need not be fundamentalist.
Keynes proposed exactly that kind of mixed regulated economy after the Great Depression, blah, blah, blah.
So, she's a smart woman and a good writer, in my opinion.
Not to say a virtuous writer, but a good writer.
A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care.
So, of course, a free market fundamentally is characterized by the non-aggression principle and a respect for property rights.
And you can't have the non-aggression principle without respect for property rights because property begins with personhood, right?
And if people can violate your personhood, then that's violence.
It's stick you with a knife or shoot you with a bullet.
And so without property rights, there's no such thing as the non-aggression principle.
And without those two things, there's no such thing as a civilized Group of people.
There's no possibility of a virtuous society where there is acceptance of violation of the non-aggression principle.
Simply not possible.
So she says, a free market in consumer products.
What that means is that violence is not used to extract money from people, but rather the free exchange of voluntary value characterizes human interactions.
can coexist with free public health care.
Sorry, short circuit reboot.
So, free market means no violence and respect for property rights.
Free public health care, of course, is a complete lie.
There's no such thing as free anything.
Free public health care...
Free market, free public healthcare.
Free market voluntarism and a respect for property and the non-aggression principle.
Free public healthcare is the initiation of the use of force, stripping people of property and of their lives, right?
If I steal your money, I'm stealing your life, making you into an involuntary ex post facto slave.
If I steal $100 from you and you make $20 an hour, you have been my slave for five hours.
So it's a temporary, after-the-fact enslavement.
It's an initiation of the use of force, and it is always under the threat of torture, because government jails are torture.
It is all Abu Ghraib in there.
So free market and consumer products, free public health care, public schools, it means absolutely nothing.
Other than voluntarism equals violence.
Voluntarism can coexist with violence.
What this means is that if you have a girlfriend, raping her can coexist with lovemaking.
These two are morally equivalent.
That would be completely insane.
It's to say that a bunch of merchants voluntarily trading with customers in a market, fruit sellers or whatever, are morally identical and can peacefully coexist with a mafia who sticks guns in their mouths and takes their money.
There's no difference between these two.
And of course, this is just insane.
And it comes because people aren't talking about people doing stuff.
They're talking about weird abstract concepts that are the opposite of understanding and moral clarity.
With a large segment, she says, of the economy like a national oil company held in state hands.
Ooh, held in state hands.
Doesn't that sound like a beautiful government baby that's being cuddled and nestling in the teat of statism?
Held in state hands, what does that mean?
It means that the state doesn't create a national oil company.
It simply expropriates it through the threat of force.
And you say, well, but the government, Allende, offered the corporations the fair market price for there.
But that doesn't matter because the government doesn't have any money.
So when the government offers to pay an oil company, it is simply stealing from the taxpayers through the threat of force to pay for the oil company.
There's no fair market value, it's just a rip-off, right?
And held in state hands, what does that mean?
It means that the government forcibly steals, right?
That the mafia that's called the state forcibly steals and forcibly pays for by using violence against others to extract the money for that purchase price, forcibly pays for some company, and then anybody who tries to compete with it generally is going to be shot or thrown into the torture cells, rape rooms of modern prisons.
So held in state hands, what does that mean?
Again, if you were just to talk about it in reality, right, if the Mafia takes over a business, you know, like in The Sopranos, Tony Soprano takes over, gets that guy, gets involved in gambling, which is more voluntary than the Mafia usually is, ends up taking over his sporting goods store.
So the Mafia comes in and takes over a restaurant directly and shoots anyone within a couple of blocks who tries to compete with that restaurant.
And we say that this restaurant is being held in state hands.
No, it's been stolen and it's been forcibly kept as a monopoly.
It is equally possible to require corporations to respect the right of workers to form unions.
Well, of course, that is no reality to what unionism is.
I mean, unionism, who cares? Voluntary association is fine.
People can join unions, set up unions, they can set up model railroading and rocket clubs if they want, but that's not what unions are.
What unions are at the moment is state-protected monopolies that have the right to shut down corporations indefinitely.
And that started in the 30s, and the relationship between unions and the state is destructive, predatory, and violent in the extreme.
And so it's not that workers aren't allowed to form unions, it's that they have all of these state benefits, state coercion, state controls, which is the foundation of violence.
It's why the mafia and the unions are in the same deal, right?
And for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced.
So redistribution of wealth, shop inequalities are reduced.
I mean, that's charity, right?
I mean, the United Way does that.
I mean, without the taxing, right?
The United Way says, well, there are people who are very poor and there are people who are generous and wealthy and we should, you know, introduce these two to reduce the inequalities.
And, of course, that to me, a charity, is a fine and wonderful thing to do.
But to tax and redistribute wealth, again, for some people to be able to point guns at other people, take their money and do whatever they want with them, right?
I mean, that's... This has got nothing to do with what actually happens in the world.
Tax and redistribute wealth and help the poor and public schools and free healthcare.
I mean, this is all nonsense, right?
Because it's all... A complete abstract, you know, unicorns will cure my illnesses, right?
I mean, it's all complete nonsense.
And this idea that there's people who can pick up the gun and use it for virtue and these other people who pick up the gun and use it for bad things is, of course, the fundamental madness in most philosophy, what's called philosophy in the world.
And it's a real tragedy, but I think it's important to remember I mean, she's, again, a smart propagandist and a good capitalist in a weird kind of way, and I'll just sort of end up with this before we move on to part three.
This market, and I use the word market again somewhat loosely, but forgive me if you don't mind.
This market that exists for blurring the line between violence and voluntarism is huge, right?
When people get involved in corrupt and violent organizations, most people who have a conscience, right?
And conscience is just UPB, right?
I mean, we absorb reality and we understand hypocrisy innately.
That's why when we create opposite rules for ourselves than for others and call morality universal, Our conscience bothers us and tortures us, in fact, because we are UPP-compliant creatures.
That's how we survive in reality and we recognize violations of that innately.
But when people get involved in a violent organization like the state, and a third of U.S. workers, I think, are involved in or dependent upon the state, corporations are dependent upon the state and so on, When people get involved in corrupt organizations, their conscience begins to really bother them.
And no one who, say, a public school teacher can fail to understand that her salary paid for through taxation, which is fine.
We may not understand this consciously, but we get it, and we get it all unconsciously.
There's nothing that people don't understand about this deep down, and that's what triggers the provocation of their conscience, right?
The nagging of the conscience. Now, when people are involved in something that is corrupt and immoral, like statism, they face a choice, right?
It's a very fundamental choice, right?
I mean, they either stop being involved in corruption and evil, or they redefine corruption and evil as good, so that they can continue to profit from their association with evil, right?
So, there's a huge market out there for...
Moral excuses, moral avoidance, moral obfuscation.
This is religion, right?
And this is statism. And this certainly is this kind of polemicized, hypocritical, covering up of, burying the bodies in the desert kind of writing.
There's a huge market out there for providing those involved with evil moral excuses For their involvement.
And we all think, of course, of corporations who profit from statism.
But on a percentage basis, corporations don't profit from statism nearly as much as state employees.
A corporation may get 20% or 30% of its income from state contracts and its involvement with statism.
And that's not great, right?
But a government worker gets 100% of his or her income from the state, right?
So on a mere percentage basis, the actual sums may be larger for corporations, but the percentage, which is what really counts when it comes to economics and one's livelihood, the percentage is 100% for state workers.
So state workers are more involved in this kind of corruption than...
Corporations, right? If you take away 20% of a corporation's profits, it can, you know, lay off some workers, it can retrench, it can look for other markets, it can go overseas, it can shut down no longer profitable product lines, it can still survive, right, as an entity, but a tax accountant, if a status amends, a tax lawyer, you know, what the hell is he going to do as 100%?
Or, you know, somebody who works as a clerk in a, you know, the DMV or whatever, and then all their skills are gone.
I mean, they could probably get another job somewhere, but It's 100% to zero is a lot more catastrophic than 100% to 80%, right?
So, these people who are enmeshed and entrenched within status systems Have a bad conscience about it, and you can, you know, don't take my word for it, just talk to anyone you know who works for the government and talk about the violence of statism and see how they react.
They will react, because they know, right?
There's no shock, right? They're not like, oh my god, I had never thought about it.
They get tense right away, because they know, right?
They already know. We're not teaching anyone anything when we talk about freedom and voluntarism.
We are not inventing anything.
We are simply Unearthing.
We are not inventors, but archaeologists.
We are simply unearthing what people already know deep down and which tortures them already, which is why they're so volatile when we bring these topics up.
So there's a huge market for justifying participation with corruption and evil, from war movies to this kind of stuff, to blurring the distinctions between violence and volunteerism and calling it corporatism or socialism or Fascism or, you know, a mixed economy or statism.
I mean, it's all just nonsense, right?
Because the only distinction that really matters is between violence and voluntarism, between peace and war, between slaughter and peace, mutual support, voluntary interactions.
So, given that there's this huge market and people are desperate for anything which justifies and gives them temporary relief from their conscience, from their participation in an evil and destructive system, people are so hungry for that that if you write stuff, That gives people a relief, temporary relief, and of course it simply makes the problem worse, right?
It's like giving someone heroin for a toothache, right?
It may give them relief in the moment, but of course the rot only goes deeper and they become addicted to whatever painkiller you are prescribing because the pain simply increases if all you do is mask the symptoms but not deal with the cause.
And so she's very smart in terms of, as you can see throughout the book, this constant equivocation and destruction of the differentiation between violence and voluntarism is continual and people who are involved in violent systems like the state I desperately want that, and they will pay lots of money for it, because we are UPB and moral-based life forms, as I've argued elsewhere.
And remember, the book is free. Go to freedomainradio.com forward slash free and download it.
I think it could be the most important book you will ever read or listen to, and I'm very happy to have it out there for free.
But there is this hunger that people have.
And this savage guilt that they have, this hunger for justification because the guilt that they feel for participating in violent and destructive systems is overwhelming.
And they grasp, like drowning men, at a log or a raft for any kind of justification.
Of course, the raft always sinks, they end up in the water, it's even colder and they need more.
And that's why, in my opinion, the book is so successful, not because there's any logical or moral content in it, But because it is a massive pain-relieving drug that goes directly into the hearts and souls, or at least the shells thereof, of people who are involved in these systems.
And this is why the market for this nonsense anti-concepts is so strong.
Because when people live neck deep in violence, they absolutely need the idea that they're swimming in the Red Sea, not drowning in the blood of their fellow citizens.
And they will pay almost any amount of money for that justification.
So I hope that that makes some sense.
Thank you so much for listening and watching and for donating if you have.
And if you haven't, I would really, really appreciate it.
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