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May 13, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:40
1351 Political Parties: Republicans

Many chins, few ethics...

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Good morning, everyone. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. I thought it might be kind of fun to talk about Republicans.
We really haven't done a lot of this kind of stuff, but I thought it might be kind of interesting.
Because this Republican slash Democrat or Conservative slash Liberal or Whatever you want to call it, is pretty common in human thought.
It's not just limited to America, certainly not just limited to democracy, but it is in fact two paradigms that is so common, right?
So in the British you have the Labour and you have the Tories, right?
And in other countries, I mean, in France, you have the sort of leftists and the Sarkozy's.
You have this kind of dualism in politics up here in Canada.
We have the liberals, so-named liberals, and it's not as dirty word I hear as it is in the United States, and we have the conservatives, and we have the NDP, and the NDP, the New Democratic Party up here in Canada, is basically the political arm of largely public sector unions.
It's not Something that has any existence.
One of the big legal challenges up here in Canada has been the problem that unions, forced union dues, are used by the union presidents For political contributions, right?
And so they take the money from you in order for you to have a job, and then they take that money and they give it to basically the New Democratic Party, which is the really left of center party up here.
That, of course, has been a problem because, you know, you've got a bunch of union guys who are liberal or conservative who are saying, well, why is my money being taken from me and being used to support a political party I disagree with?
That's a violation of freedom of association.
It's forced association and so on.
Naturally, this didn't really get very far for obvious reasons.
But it's a very interesting dualism.
And I'll sort of go over some of the major characteristics as I see them, and then you can add your own if you like, or let me know where I'm way off base.
But with Republicans, it's sort of Old Testament, right?
And liberals are sort of New Testament, right?
So liberals are sort of dewy-eyed hippie Jesus, and the Republicans are sort of thunderous old-time, old-school, old-hickory kind of dads, right?
You know, it's the difference between conservatism and new age, right?
And you see this dichotomy showing up all over the place, right?
And it is a false dichotomy, which is a real tragedy.
You know, it's like the people who say, well, anything that is alternative healing strategies is new agey nonsense and what you need is antibiotics, versus the people who say, well, you never need antibiotics, all you need is yoga, right?
It's like, well, why can't we have both?
No, that's not on the menu.
It's one or the other, right?
But Republicans are a very interesting, to me at least, psychoclass or psychological phenomenon.
And some of the characteristics that I've sort of noticed over the years with regards to Republicans are that they are obviously square, staid, non...
The comedic skills of Republicans leave quite a bit to be desired.
You know, corny jokes.
It's all cornball dad humor, right?
And they've got that sort of heavy weight of responsibility that certain kind of dads seem to carry on their shoulders.
It's their own special form of blissful martyrdom.
And they also...
So you see them in the sort of IBM blue suits or whatever red ties you have to have.
What Republicans are, usually, are very serious, very serious people.
They employ a lot of fear-mongering, which is generally what happens with very serious people.
And I think the reason why that seriousness works is, I don't know about you, but I remember when I was a kid, oh man, I mean, the seriousness with which Things were discussed or inflicted upon kids in school.
I remember this in boarding school, you know, we went through a craze in boarding school, I think I mentioned before, where we would sort of make paper airplanes out of everything, right?
And I had a book with, you know, I think it was Guinness Book of World Records or something, and I think I tore out one of the back pages to make a paper airplane.
And this was discovered, right?
And I was hauled up in front of the class, And the teacher went through this long...
I swear to God, it must have been ten minutes, which, you know, when you're six is sort of an eternity.
Fifteen minutes or so of...
You know, telling me that the books were expensive and my mother's income.
You know, she worked hard for her money and she bought me nice things.
And it was respectful for her to respect the property that I had been given.
And, you know, I swear to God, he probably used the phrase, the foundation of civilization, at least twice.
You know, respect for others, respect for the self, respect for property, respect for my mother, respect for school, respect for country, respect for God.
Like, it just was insane, right?
Because, of course, It is...
It's a page behind the index of a book, right?
I mean, seriously, that's what it was.
And that kind of...
And this was a very weak school.
W-H-I-G, if that makes any sense to you.
And it's like...
But it was just a page in a book.
And didn't you get this all the time?
When stuff would occur...
I remember we went to a county fair.
I know this is supposed to be about Republicans, but I'm circling the topic like a piece of fluff in the drain when the water's going down.
But we went to a fair and I had an allowance or some money that was set aside, 30 pounds or whatever, which back then, you know, quite a bit of money.
A couple hundred bucks now. And I wanted five pennies, a five-penny piece, so that I could throw a ball at a set of, you know, these things.
They stack up some milk bottles, and then you throw, and if you can knock them over, you win something, right?
And in this case, it was a coconut.
And I wanted to taste a coconut.
Why? Because I've been reading these South Sea adventures where they talked about coconut trees, and I wanted to taste, you know, the heat of the tropics in my mouth, and...
And so I said, you know, hey, out of my, you know, hundreds of dollars allowance, could I get a nickel or a quarter to throw so I can throw a ball at a coconut, right?
And I get this long lecture from this other teacher, you know.
Well, it's frivolous and gambling and respect for money and respect for property and the foundation of civilization.
I mean, it's the same goddamn speech no matter what.
And eventually, you know, I did get...
The five pennies.
And I threw...
I don't think I got the coconut.
I think it was one of these things where even if you hurl it with your, I guess, your mighty seven-year-old frame, you know, it's like they look like they're stacked, but they're actually kind of glued together or they've got really bottom-heavy or whatever, that the glass is thicker than you think.
So they didn't fall over, right?
And then, of course, I got the lecture about I hope I've learned my lesson and frivolous and irresponsibility and gambling and hard-earned money and respect for property and...
Oh my god, it was like...
There's some metaphor in the God of Atheists about lowering a mountain onto a little fern.
And that's sort of what it felt like when I got these moral lectures from people, from adults.
And this went on in school in general, right?
So, nipping over the wall to get a ball was, you know, a lack of respect for rules and the basis for empire and...
It's just unbelievable.
The degree to which people would just twist that ethical knife into your innards when you were a kid.
And that level of seriousness and...
Embarrassing too muchness.
I mean, I'd love to do or see a parody of this at some point, because it really is...
I mean, it's contemptible, of course, insofar as these bullies only seem to really inflict it upon children.
But it is something that would be great fun to parody, because it is laughable just how pathetic these kinds of moral instructions are.
Because, of course, you know, respect for property, like, you all support taxation and the monarchy.
It's like, the fuck are you talking about respect for property with me, douchebags?
But it is, and this is an aspect of republicanism that I find so repulsive, right?
It's creepy crawly. It's just...
You know, fold the flag in the right way.
You know, the 21-gun salute.
Yes, waterboarding is okay.
Why? Because we are engaged in a deadly serious battle of good and evil, right?
Us versus the Islamofascists and the light of America in the dark world and all this sort of...
It's just so...
I mean, technically, at least as far as I understand the technical term and don't take my word for it, but what this is to me is Republicans are fundamentally hysterical.
I mean, Democrats are much funnier and more easygoing and not, you know, this sort of stone-throwing Old Testament judgmental stuff.
That's why they're, you know, less hysterical about drugs, right?
But what Republicans are, fundamentally, are hysterics.
And that's why you get the reaction formation to the hysteria, which is the You know, the really straight-laced, really repressed, really serious, you know, this is not a laughing matter, young man.
You know, and you see these guys on the talk shows all the time, and Fox is just nothing but hysteria from wall to wall, right?
I mean, I can't watch that station.
I've watched it a couple of times here and there, but it's embarrassing to see.
And it's not just embarrassing because I think that emotional restraint can actually be not a bad thing.
I know it's funny for me to say, but...
But it is so bald-facedly hysterical at all times.
Everything is dire.
The dark music, the America threat, you know, America at war.
It's just hysterical, right?
I mean, it's so over the top and it's so ridiculous.
Relative to the actual facts.
And of course, the media as a whole is pretty hysterical.
It's all just hysterical and nonsensical.
But I find Republicans as a whole are completely hysterical.
And that's why they have to come across so heavy, right?
I mean, if you look at... The Old Testament God, right?
Of the Yahweh. He's completely hysterical, right?
I mean, he's hysterical and overreacts to everything, right?
I mean, people have a golden calf and he's smashing things up.
You know, people take his name in vain and he's blowing up cities.
I mean, it's completely hysterical.
Excessive... Exaggerated, silly, ridiculous, ugly, dangerous, evil responses, right?
And this is... By hysterical, I don't mean, you know, like Blanche Dubois fainting when her pop bottle fizzes over, but I'm talking about, you know, really hysterical response.
You know, like bombing Afghani villages is a hysterical response to 9-11, right?
I mean, bombing people for the actions of the government or government-related people is exactly what the...
We're doing on 9-11 and bombing Afghani villagers because the Taliban is somewhere up in the hills with the support of the Taliban, which, you know, is what they say.
Who knows if any of this is true. But that's a completely hysterical response, right?
And so I find Republicans are just astoundingly, nuttily, excessively, creepily hysterical.
And I think for them, you know, just everything that moves, everything that breathes is life or death, right?
And psychologically, at least the way that I look at it or view it or see it, people are hysterical that way because their inner lives are dead.
Their inner lives are just cratered.
Where their heart, empathy, curiosity, sympathy should be is just not even a smoking but a just dead moon crater of nothingness.
Because the impact of their early childhoods has just completely snuffed out any possibility of a lively, curious, and engaged interaction with life!
So, when people are emotionally dead, They require drama, right?
They require danger, they require conflict, they require anger, they require self-righteousness, they require all of this false self bullshit.
Imagined conflicts, you know, eschatology, end days and nonsense, right?
This is why Republicans are so addicted to this La Haye stuff, right?
This end times books, right?
The rapture and all this kind of stuff, right?
It's because, you know, when you actually have a rich and engaged inner life and your emotions are having an enjoyable, exciting and rich free play with reality and others, you don't need drama, right?
I mean, FDR is a lot about, and particularly on the board, it's like, cool the drama, right?
And if you can't cool the drama, get lost, right?
Because, I mean, I don't need that drama on the board.
I have a fantastic life.
You know, my inner life is very exciting.
I have wonderful friends and conversations and so on, right?
So, I don't need that escalation.
Because what would it serve, right?
You don't need extremes when you have depth.
Extremes are an absence of depth, an absence of self.
And, of course, the true self is innately polarizing.
It's this or it's the opposite.
It's never, right? It's either this or it's the opposite.
You're either, you know, if you're not with us, you're against us, right?
There's nothing else that can possibly occur anywhere in the middle, right?
So this, I mean, what I'm saying is Republicans are trolls.
And they are. They are trolls.
And hysterical because their inner lives are dead.
Now, of course, Republicanism is highly correlated...
With religion, right?
And religion, of course, is fundamentally hysterical, right?
I mean, religion is complete hysteria, right?
Because the all-powerful God is obsessed with your every thought, not even your every decision or action, but your every thought.
The guy died for you.
You are bathed in the blood of a god.
The Virgin Mary weeps and bleeds for mankind.
And you're going to go to hell or you're going to go to heaven and the world is coming to it.
And you understand, it is completely hysterical.
All religions that I've ever...
And this includes Buddhism, in case you're going to write to me about that, are completely hysterical, right?
And the reason why religions survive in this kind of context is because they nuke our capacity for emotional richness, for subtlety, for delicacy, for depth, for intimacy, for curiosity, for exploration.
We've just become these dead screaming empty boxes cowering beneath the black cloaks of an empty sky.
It is hideous what religion does to the emotional life.
Everything is hysterically extreme in the world of religion, which is why you get evil bullshit like Israel and Palestine, or the Gaza Strip.
It's all hysterical, right?
I mean, when you're slaughtering people over who owns a piece of desert, you know that your inner life is completely dead and you've just become hysterical and empty and therefore vicious, right?
Hysteria is the reproduction of the lack of empathy that you experienced.
It reproduces it against others through escalation, through polarity, through win-lose, through with us or against us, through splitting, through that kind of escalation.
And so, of course, because republicanism is so associated with religion, Republicans have inherited all of the hysteria, the lack of empathy, and the deep-seated need to punish that is the hallmark of the hysteric,
right? All hysterics that I've ever thought of or read about in literature have this cruel streak, this vicious streak.
And the reason, of course, that hysterics have a need to punish others is that they are reproducing their intense punishment, the intense punishment they experienced as children, right?
When you say to a child, you know, you are drowning in the blood of Jesus who died for your sins and you are stained with original sin and you must forever apologize to the clouds for the sin of breathing and all of this kind of nonsense.
When you go through that kind of life as a child, I mean, it detonates your inner life, right?
It detonates your curiosity, your sympathy, your empathy, and you become The kind of narcissistic yet bit player in the cosmic drama of good and evil, right and wrong, and the eternal peril of your eternal soul.
I mean, that is hysterical, right?
And that makes every little decision have this bizarre cosmic eschatology and weight to it, right?
I mean, to take a silly example, if I, I don't know, if I want to masturbate, I mean, in a secular world, that's really not a big decision, right?
Particularly when you're a teenager, right?
Unless you've got a couple tunnel. But of course, in the hysterical world of Republican religiosity, it becomes, you know, to what degree is the secular pleasure of an orgasm?
How does that weigh against the eternal damnation of my God-given soul, right?
You see, it becomes completely hysterical.
And because this omnipresent threat of eternal perpetual torture and punishment, people don't talk about this, right?
To what degree is a belief in hell correlated with the belief that torture is the virtuous punishment for sinners?
America's addiction to torture, a growing addiction to torture, comes directly out of religiosity, which is that God tortures when people are bad, so of course we're going to waterboard bad people.
It's... Hi, sweetness!
It's simply perfectly car-related, right?
At least I would imagine. I certainly can't prove it, but that's, you know...
Psychologically, it makes complete sense.
Hello, sweetness! Hi, darling.
I'm right here. I'm just chatting with everyone.
Say hello to everyone, darling.
Oh, now she's stopped with the talking.
Fair enough. We're just out for a walk.
I have her on my... I've got this fabulous snuggly, which...
lashes her to me like a marsupial, which is just great.
So, Republicans have these characteristics of hysteria, polarization, a too serious, too much seriousness There is a...
There is a kind of gentleness that comes with good humor, and a kind of empathy that comes with good humor, and a lack of a desire to punish for minor infractions.
So people who have good humor, and I don't mean having a good sense of humor, which to some degree is perhaps not learned but innate, but being good-humored, it's hard to stone people for adultery and so on, if you've got good humor and recognize that human beings are capable of We'll get to that when we start talking about Democrats.
But to me, the Republican mindscape is simply a reflection of the landscape of their early childhood.
Where there is this hysterical assumed danger and authority and responsibility and compulsion to virtue and fear of punishment and desire to punish, right?
The fear of punishment is always associated with the desire to punish, right?
Because when you are frightened and you lack self-knowledge, then you want to go out and frighten other people in order to restore, right?
Your equilibrium and sense of power and to some degree contentment.
There is also a hysterical...
Hysterics also believe that everything is personal responsibility.
Everything. And this, of course, is a huge problem.
If you are gay, then a hysterical Republican is going to say that that's your fault, that's your moral responsibility.
It's your moral responsibility to fight these evil impulses.
And the evil Republicans, the historical Republicans, will also not take into context family situations.
So if you become a thief, then you're just a bad guy.
There is no context, right, in how you were raised and was your mother a crack addict and so on, right?
And that's because there is this need to punish.
And so in the absence of enemies, enemies will be invented, right?
Because that's what religiosity is, is the invention of enemies, right?
And I don't mean external enemies because the whole point of religiosity particularly The base restraints of Protestantism and Catholicism, of course.
The whole purpose is to invent an enemy called your true self, your curiosity, your reason, your human nature, your sexual life, your skepticism, your empiricism.
You can't survive without the invention of enemies, and so it's no surprise to me that religious people We're constantly inventing enemies to attack because they have invented a god that attacks them constantly.
And in order to restore any kind of, quote, sanity or equilibrium, they have to invent enemies to attack because the whole religion is the invention of an enemy called itself, which they have to attack, right?
This is why religion is such a cancer, right?
And of course, you know, Clinton and Obama bomb people and so on, but they're religious as well, right?
So I mean, this falls within the correlation of that sort of stuff.
So I think it can be a little bit hard to see Because Republicans have a reaction formation against their hysteria, the religiously based hysteria, of which patriotism...
Patriotism, of course, is another piece of hysteria, right?
My clod of earth is imbued with magical virtuous powers, and your clod of earth is crap, right?
Just as... Addiction to geographically based sports allegiances is a kind of hysteria, right?
My jerseys are imbued with a magical, benevolent, beautiful power.
And yours are bad, right?
And I know that there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek stuff, but the fundamentals of sports addiction is still hysteria, right?
It's the invention of enemies, right?
And what would the world be like if we didn't invent enemies?
I mean, wouldn't that be a fantastic world to live in if it's like, hey, you know, your sports team is as good as mine, as much might to win, right?
Well, of course, all that nonsense would collapse and we'd be able to use that money for something productive, in my opinion.
Sports is a colossal waste of time unless you're actually playing it, right?
But, yeah, imagine what it would be like if we didn't have to invent enemies, if we didn't have these tax farms to mark and to put down, and these sports teams to mark and put down, and these races and genders and cultures and all religions to mark and put down.
Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing?
But, of course, if we want to have a world where we're not endlessly inventing and attacking enemies, we have to stop endlessly inventing enemies called the true self and causing children to attack themselves, right?
I mean, this is why... This is why you can't oppose human conflict and war without opposing religion.
Because if you understand psychologically the effects that this kind of evil superstition, these evil superstitions have on children, the provocation of hysteria and the need to invent and attack and destroy, and then invent, attack, and destroy more enemies than others, You're missing the whole point, right?
I mean, this is why we have a state, why we have religions, why we have wars, why we have people in prisons.
Because, you know, we just want to invent enemies and attack enemies, right?
And you'll notice that Republicans are distinctly ill at ease when they're without an enemy, right?
I think that's kind of an important thing to process, right?
What would their life be like if they weren't allowed to attack anyone?
Liberals, or communists, or hippies, or al-Qaeda, or the Taliban, or whatever, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or whatever, right?
I mean, people have this great mystery that everyone has about republicanism.
Why on earth did they attack Iraq?
Well, if you don't understand the psychological roots of the need to invent and attack enemies, that is the foundation of religion and patriotism.
Then Iraq remains incomprehensible.
I mean, yes, there is a practical element of it that has to do with pillaging and so on, right?
The money, the treasury, and I still believe that.
But psychologically, it's not just a question of why was it floated.
The question is why did everybody historically jump onto the bandwagon of fearing attack from an obviously impotent nation that spends a tenth of a percentage point of the American defense budget.
And it's thousands of miles away, and it never uttered a threat.
Well, when people believe a threat is real, when there is no threat, it's because the threat is real, it's just in their own heads, and they're looking for an external place to put it to give themselves relief from that, the endless attack, which is their own propaganda, right? Their own superstition, their own inflicted religiosity.
And, of course, Given that human beings have to live and that sensual pleasures, whether it's food or sex or whatever, are hard to overcome.
In fact, to try to overcome them permanently would just be a suicide, right?
Republicanism is fundamentally hypocrisy.
And so is the Democrat approach.
So is the liberal approach, but we'll get to that later.
But Republicanism is fundamentally hypocrisy, right?
I mean, which is why Republicans claim to worship a God and Jesus.
And Jesus says, you know, get rid of all your possessions if you want to follow me.
And Republicans seem completely addicted to gathering money, even more so than Democrats.
That's why you have these, you know, and then there's a certain aesthetic that you're not supposed to be susceptible to the sensual pleasures of this world.
And unfortunately then, a fair number of Republicans seem to be rather triple-chinned and rotund, which again would not be.
So they're rich, triple-chinned and rotund.
The dalliances of Republicans, the homosexuality, the repressed and sometimes not so nice homosexuality, right?
Like the guy who was doodling or sexually suggestive towards the pages.
There is that fundamental hypocrisy.
And because there is this fundamental hypocrisy, The enemies, of course, are within themselves, right?
So these hysterics float between, you know, the smug and grim self-satisfaction and self-righteousness that comes from inventing and attacking an external enemy to the shame and guilt of their own hypocrisy, which then causes them to invent new enemies to attack.
I mean, they're just hysterically swinging between.
There's no peace of mind in that life at all.
No contentment, no, right?
They cling to each other, they're vicious, they're hysterical and all that.
It's really a grim, grim spectacle to see.
And this really shows up, of course, in the free market, right?
The Republicans are always talking about the free market, right?
And yet, they stay very often as far away from the free market as they humanly can.
Like, I never met a Republican or a conservative in the software industry.
They're all Socialists and liberals and so on, right?
And you'd think that the software industry, which is the most free market industry around still, you don't need licenses to be in there, you would think that the free market would be, you know, awash with Republicans because, you see, Republicans so much want to be a part of the free market that they would never do something as base as go into politics or into the defense industry or into large corporations that get a lot of largesse from the state or anything like that because, you see, they're all about the free market.
But that, of course, is complete nonsense, right?
They're not at all about the free market.
They just like talking about it because they know they're not going to do it.
And it's just another setup for the hysteria of self-attack, followed by the attack of others, followed by self-righteousness.
You know, there's just a pinball machine.
They don't have souls in the way that you and I would understand them.
They just have hysterical, exploding pinball machines that are regularly and depressingly inflicted upon the invented enemies.
Who are really themselves. So I hope that has some help in clarifying, at least what I think of, in terms of republicanism.
And if you're interested in this kind of stuff, I'd be happy to do more.
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