All Episodes
Previous Next
May 15, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:58
1355 Political Parties: The Greens and the State

The best idea I've had so far this year...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning everybody, hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is the 15th of May 2009 and I just must tell you, this is a podcast really to tell you that I am now officially frightened of my lawn.
It has become so thick and deep I'm afraid of mowing it.
I'm quite concerned that it will eat the mower and possibly me up to my shins.
So it's nice that we talk about my fears for once.
So, this is a show somebody suggested, and I think it's a great idea that I do a show on the greens.
So we're going to start with arugula, which actually does make me feel rather Spanish, and gives me an additional chest hair, bringing the grand total to 22.
And you see how I started a show with the Greens by talking about my lawn?
This is the kind of subtle metaphorical integration that you have come to expect from a quality show like Free Domain Radio.
So I'm out walking with Isabella.
The neighborhood, she is alive with contractors as everyone attempts to get useful things done to their house.
And so there was, of course, a very large amount of background noise.
As usual, I'm so sorry.
I wish I could do podcasts in a studio.
It would be good and helpful, but...
This is not how the brain she worketh.
So, we follow the muse as best we can, hopefully not off a cliff.
So, the Greens.
And this really applies to anyone who's heavily into environmentalism.
This is a complete opinion cast.
But I still think I'm going to try and bring some useful stuff to the table in terms of evidence.
But I'm not going to claim any of this as proven.
These are just my thoughts on the issue.
Now, general rule of thumb, when you start to look at political activism with regards to anything, but, you know, we'll talk about this in terms of environmentalism of the Green Party.
When people act, In a resolutely and seemingly permanent, anti-empirical way, you know that psychological defenses are at work.
That, to me, is basically the...
It's the sincunnon of the essence of the issue, right?
So there's no God, obviously, but people behave as if there is, right?
So that's trauma and defenses, right?
The government fails at everything except...
Predation and destruction, but people continue to turn to it as a white knight, and therefore you know that some psychological defense is occurring, without a doubt.
Oh, how cute. Isabel is halting the microphone.
So, when people are environmentalists, and are political environmentalists, You would assume something like the following, that they would look at the world and say pollution is a problem.
And let's say that it is.
I don't particularly believe that it is, given that I compare the pollution of the modern world to, say, the Middle Ages, when the pollution of the bubonic plague was significantly more dangerous to human life than a little bit of BPA and some plastic, right? So I kind of look at lifespan.
I kind of look at general health.
I kind of look at the success of cultivated and cultured human civilizations.
And the only culture that's really been useful to human beings is that which produced penicillin.
So I view, sort of, when I look at pollution, I look at the big picture and notice that human lifespan is increasing and health illness is decreasing and major illnesses have been wiped out and You know, we have antibiotics, we have medicine.
And so, for me, it's not...
It's...
Pollution, yeah, it's an issue, for sure.
We definitely don't want to unnecessarily pollute, but the reality is that the environment in which we live, which really is definitely the health of the environment in which we live, has vastly improved.
I mean, staggeringly improved.
I mean, think of dentistry, for heaven's sakes, right?
Mouthwash. Fluoride.
Anyway, it's staggeringly improved since the Middle Ages, and so for me, pollution is pretty low on the list of things that need to be dealt with.
But, you know, that hasn't been said.
I certainly think that soot factories should not coat people's apple orchards, and free society would take care of all of that.
But let's say that pollution is an issue, and people looked at the world logically, rationally, empirically, and said, okay, well, what we need to do is to rank The social institutions in terms of their polluting, right? In terms of their pollution. And forget about words and mission statements and brochures and look at what actually happens.
And people would say, okay, well...
The government is the largest polluter on the planet.
And so we have to deal with that issue.
And if people were, say, concerned with forests or the rainforest or whatever, right, they would say, well, what is a very large producer or consumer of wood?
Well, obviously, the housing industry is one of the larger consumers of wood in the world.
And then they would say, gosh, well, this housing boom, which has now left, you know, what, tens or hundreds of thousands of homes vacant throughout the U.S., has been ridiculously bad on the environment because, I mean, wood is just one component, right?
But the houses and bricks and machinery and labor and pollution and gas and this has been catastrophic for the environment for there to be a housing boom and bust.
So we're going to look into what really causes the housing boom and bust and really work to address these issues right at the core.
That would be the logical and empirical approach to solving the problem of pollution.
And these are just one of many, many, many things that you would do.
And you would look at, so for instance, you would look at logging companies, right?
And you'd say, gosh, you know, logging companies are definitely not so great for the environment, but let's have a look at how the ownership actually works, right?
And you would do something vaguely intelligent, like you would walk down a street, right?
And you would look at the private houses.
And then you would look at the rental houses.
And then you would look at the abandoned lots.
And you would say, gosh, in terms of upkeep and maintenance, because people have to be interested in property in order to protect it.
In terms of upkeep and maintenance, private property is on the top.
Rental is next.
And abandoned lots are full of, I don't know, condoms and used needles and junk.
And so you'd say, okay, well, in order for people to want to protect property, which is really what pollution is all about, the property of yourself and the property of what you own, clearly private property is the way to go, and public property, nobody has any particular interest in maintaining or cleaning it, and therefore we should try and privatize as much as possible, right?
So we should make sure that when logging companies buy land, that they buy the entire land, not just the logging rights, And that's what we should just privatize, right?
So any...
I mean, this is obviously a very quick argument, and I'm not saying it would clinch anything, but it would be a rational and empirical approach, right, which would lead environmentalists directly to stateless society, right?
I mean, if they consistently applied these principles, that would be the logical thing to do, right?
Because logical application of reason and evidence in any situation of social organization leads you to a stateless society, right?
Because that's valid, true, and fair, and reasonable, and just, and virtuous.
But, of course, that's not what people do, right?
People rationally examine the universe, they say, no God, right?
People rationally look at problems of pollution, and they would say, no state, right?
But that's not, of course, what people do.
So, the question is, what psychological defenses are being activated in the green movement, in the green political movement in particular?
Right? Because we can clearly see...
When it comes to something like religion, that people say there's a God because of the trauma of being lied to, bullied, and frightened as children, and because the price of saying there is no God is their friends and family, which is to say they're actually completely alone, but they don't want to know it. So those psychological defenses are pretty easy to understand, I think.
Now, you can look at other psychological defenses.
If you believe that the state is immoral and your father works for the government or your mother, we understand that these are psychological defenses, not rational or empirical problems, and that's about...
Approximately, give or take, 99.9999999% of problems that people come to you in philosophy, politics, ethics, and so on are just psychological defenses masquerading as a, quote, inquiry into truth.
All nonsense. But what specifically is occurring for the Greens, right?
Well, I'm going to go with my usual, which has worked so far, right?
It's family-based, and it's very early, and it mostly has to do with parent-to-parent relations initially, and then parent-to-child relations.
Sorry, parent-to-child relations initially, then parent-to-parent.
So, the first way that I would help people understand this problem It's to say, well, if people believe in nonsense, it's because it is a projection of stuff which is not nonsense, right?
So people believe in God, you know, the Sky Daddy, right?
It's an early childhood experience of the omnipotence and grandiosity of the Father, right?
I mean, I am 20 times larger than Isabella, right?
And I loom over her.
I can do all of these magical and amazing things.
I can pick her up and carry her and twirl her and so on.
And so that's like, I'm like a god to her, right?
And that's why I have to be very gentle and kind and all that kind of stuff, right?
Because she's easily overwhelmed.
She's so small. So we can sort of understand that as a very sort of basic thing, right?
That God as Father, that's not particularly controversial, I hope, at this point.
So in the green paradigm of the world, you look at the paradigms and then you say, well, what do they represent in the family?
That's a good place to start. It may not be the only place, but it's the most obvious place to start.
Right, I mean, the psychologist will say, tell me about your life, right?
Tell me about your childhood. When you go, they don't say, I don't know, tell me your SAT scores or tell me your favorite species of marsupial.
May not be the only place, but it's the place you start.
So in the green paradigm, and we're talking about the political activism, there are three major players, right?
There is the victim, there is the perpetrator, and there is the savior, right?
The victim, the perpetrator, and the savior.
Now, the victim, of course, is Gaia, Mother Earth, right?
Who specifically is feminine.
And the abuser is...
Industry, capitalism, which is masculine.
And the saviour is the state which is gender neutral.
So these are the three major players.
And for some Greens, though not that many in the political arena, but a few, the solution to the problem of victimization is to eliminate the perpetrator, to eliminate the abuser, to eliminate corporations and capitalism.
You know, these are the back-to-the-land.
Imagine hunting elk down the abandoned canyons of Rockefeller Center, as is said in Fight Club.
Complete back-to-the-land trashy nonsense.
That's one approach.
Now, another approach is, I mean, even more, deep ecological madness is to eliminate human beings as largely as possible.
And that is, humanity is inherently abusive and therefore is like a cancer, you know, that sort of matrix stuff, right?
But the most common approach is to view...
The perpetrator, the masculine corporation, As a necessary evil that is inherently immoral and must be restrained through the might of the populist state, right? So, the Mother Earth is the cowering victim, the osophallic miners and pillagers and rapers of the Earth, as they're called, right?
You understand? This is not accidental, right?
Only one gender can rape. Fundamentally, if there's rape of the Earth, that is a man against woman, right?
A great deal of the mythology of ecology is phallic, right?
Oh, the endless smokestacks with the vaguely cloudy sebum of the pollution coming out.
You see this sort of stuff.
Big machines plunging rods into the earth.
I mean, it's all very...
It's like, you know, metaphor porn, right?
I mean, that's... If they could figure out how trains going into tunnels, right?
They wouldn't understand, right?
So... So, I don't know, digging in to pull up trees and stuff like that.
It's all very phallic, at least in my approach to it.
So, what...
So we understand the fantasy, right?
There's the trembling, helpless, victimized Mother Earth, the phallic, penetrating, raping corporations, and then there is the white knight of the state who will restrain these corporations.
And the state is pure, and the state is clean, and the state does not pollute, and it's only the corporations, right?
So you understand, right? And clearly this serves the state, right?
And this serves the power hungry.
It does not serve And it certainly does not serve the minimization or elimination of pollution in the long run, right?
So, I mean, sorry, this is to, if you've read the skeptical environmentalists, there certainly has been improvement in certain aspects of pollution.
Absolutely for sure.
Absolutely for sure.
I mean, to be clear and honest about that.
But I don't believe that that fundamentally is due to statism.
And, of course, statism would not be necessary if you had a functioning court system, which the DRO system would do, which would penalize people for polluting other people's property.
You wouldn't need a state for that. But let's be fair and recognize that some aspects of pollution have improved as a result, or at least correlated with, statist punishments.
And for sure, absolutely, you know, if...
If your kid is doing something you don't like and you beat the crap out of them, that behavior will diminish, without a doubt, right?
It just doesn't strike me as fair and just and virtuous, but for sure you can get people to stop doing stuff, but unfortunately it just shows up in other areas, right?
So when you give the government the power to minimize pollution by passing laws through the EPA or other kinds of institutions, what happens is you end up giving the government the power to do all these other things Which creates a highly polluted and destructive to the environment, right? So giving the government all this power also gives them the power of fiat currency, which gives them the boom-bust cycle, which creates huge pillaging of resources for no purpose, right?
Complete waste of resources. So it's easy to look at the stuff which has gotten better and not say, well, what are the opportunity costs in a sense, or the hidden costs of this kind of legislation?
Not to mention... War, not to mention Ritalin, not to mention public schools, which are definitely toxic to children's minds, not to mention welfare, which shaves IQ points off children.
So, in terms of, you know, if there was something in the water which cost children IQ points, everybody would be going completely nuts, but because it's the welfare state, it doesn't have some...
Oh, and the baby has gone to sleep.
So we will lower our voice slightly, and we will slither home.
Actually, let me pick this up at home.
Good heavens, let's try one at home when I'm not actually distracted.
So I think we can all pretty much understand where these two paradigms come from, where these two mythologies come from, right?
The first is the pillaged earth, that of course is the child's mother, and the pillaging and destructive and invasive corporations, capitalism, that is the father,
right, who Has a job, brings home the money, works, and again, this may not be true for everyone, but I think it's a general, whereas the mother, particularly when she's at home, when she's young, is more passive and accepting and nurturing and so on, which is, you know, the child gets us food from the mother the way that we get her food from the earth and so on, right?
And, of course, for a lot of these people, at least I've never met anyone in the business world who was a staunch or deep ecologist, and so for these people, the corporations are like a distant thing that can't really be very well grasped or understood in the immediate sense that they don't have any direct experience.
And this, of course, is for people with distant or absent fathers, right?
That's how it sustains itself in terms of believability, right?
And the reason people cling so desperately To these things is that it allows them to ignore the actual pain, right?
By acting out in a mythological or redirected manner, they get to actually ignore or ignore the actual pain of their real experiences, right?
And that, my friends, as I have seen on more than one occasion, can pretty much go on for someone's entire life without missing a beat.
So that's the second aspect.
So I think we can understand that there's a brutal father who is cold, who is distant, who is aggressive, and the mother who is passive-aggressive, plaintive, inert, depressed, and so on.
And in that kind of environment, right, so the question then becomes, well, where does the state come from in this fantasy?
Where does the state come from in this fantasy?
Because there is no state in the family.
Right? Big, big question, right?
If we have the brutalized mother and the brutalizing father, and this, you know, could be genders reversed, they'll just go with the typical, then we have these two players, but where does the fantasy of the state come from?
And this is something that I would argue occurs in a much larger context than just with the Greens, but where does the state come from?
Well, The state is the child who witnesses this stuff.
Guaranteed.
The state is the child who witnesses this stuff.
So let's talk about that a little bit, and then you can understand how socialists are more pro-state, right?
Because the Democrats are more pro-state, at least in language, than the Republicans, and this is for the exact same reason.
All right, so what do I mean by this perhaps somewhat startling statement?
Well, let's go to the usual source of psychological insight and wisdom, the television show The Big Bang Theory.
This will be part of a series that I'm planning to do on superheroes, but let's touch on it because it's so relevant to this particular question or topic.
And in the television show, if you've not seen it, it actually can be quite funny, though.
Sheldon really is the only character that's of any real vividity, but it can be cute.
It's time well wasted.
It's an amiable time waster.
But in that show, and this is something we all understand, right, that the nerds, for want of a better word, are still into comics well into their 20s and 30s, right?
And I think we all know a number of people like this.
In fact, I think some of them who were desperate to go and see The Watchman were at the last place I gave a speech to.
So why would First of all, why are there such a thing as superheroes, right?
And the second is, why are children so into hyper-powerful things, right?
Like dinosaurs, and for me it was trains which seemed all kinds of powerful, and dinosaurs.
And superheroes and all that kind of stuff.
Why is there?
Well, that's partly because the child's system is, you know, neurological system is immature and therefore needs more stimulation.
Usually, which is why children's cartoons are so garish, right?
It needs more stimulation, but it's not just that.
But even if we say it is just that, why would it continue for so long?
Why would this phase continue for some people well into adulthood?
Well, My case is this, that when we are in a situation as children of powerlessness and fear, right?
Well, the way that we survive that We create a fantasy of omnipotence, which is another source for God, but we create a fantasy of omnipotence.
So if we are in a family, and to take a stereotypical example, our father is beating our mother, then we find this unbearable, and we know that we are helpless to intervene, and also our nature commands us Not to intervene, because if a man can beat a woman, he can certainly beat a child.
And while a woman has legal recourses, some protections, then at least an adult personality, at least digitally, the child does not.
And of course, the physical risk, when you strike a child, the physical risk is enormous that some significant damage will occur to the child in some way.
So, the child can't intervene when the father is beating the mother, but the child wishes to retain his belief in efficacy, right?
Because if a child loses his belief in efficacy, the child ends up catastrophically depressed, which is obviously bad for the personality and survival of the organism, but also will result in further punishment, right?
If children are If abused children become overtly depressed, the aggression of the parents will escalate, right?
Why are you pulling such a long face?
Don't be such a gloomy guess.
All you do is sit around moping and the anger will escalate, right?
So depression and a sense of the real futility of one's own capacity to affect positive change in one's environment, that all vanishes.
So what can, how does the mind sustain itself in this impossible situation where the desire for intervention is very strong, right?
The possibility of intervention is nil, zero.
And accepting that the possibility of intervention is nil is going to trigger more abuse, right, which creates a bottomless cycle and results could result in death, but certainly will result in significant harm physically or psychologically.
So what, what, what, what, what, what do we do in this situation?
We're helpless.
We desperately want to change the situation.
We're helpless to change it, but we cannot accept that we're helpless to change it.
Well, we invent a superhero, right?
I mean, that's inevitable, right?
That's what the mind does in that kind of situation.
It invents some kind of omnipotence that can be fantasized about redressing wrongs in some other environment, right?
That is how the psyche survives this impossible situation.
Imagine that in some other city, in some other world, in some other universe, in some other dimension, in some other place, there is a superhero who can redress all wrongs.
We cling to that fantasy of the superhero, which allows us to avoid feeling helpless in a truly helpless and destructive situation.
So that is the essence of why we have these beliefs.
In superheroes, right?
And I would argue very strongly that the degree of child abuse in a society can be directly correlated with the grandiosity of the superheroes it worships.
And those superheroes, as we can see with certain presidents, is not always entirely fictional.
It's always fictional, but it's not entirely fantasy, right?
Because people make superheroes out of Obama or Bush or whoever, right?
I mean that's pretty common.
But you don't see those same kind of eschatological superhero grandiosity fantasies in societies where children are treated better.
You don't see those quite so badly, right?
It's, you know, G.I. Joe versus What's the Asterix and Obelisk?
Chief Vital Statistics, right?
I mean, where they're not superheroes, right?
Or Rin Tin Tin, right?
Not with the Thompson Twins, right?
Not superheroes.
Because children are treated a little better, at least not in the same kind of way that those societies where the huge fantasies of omnipotence are, right?
I mean, if you look at societies where children are treated badly, like, I mean, look at the Oriental cultures, for instance.
Japan, right? Conformity and powerlessness and child abuse is quite high.
And then, of course, you have the fantasy of the all-powerful Kung Fu ninja god, right?
That's in the Bruce Lee and all that kind of stuff.
It's very sad, but that is the way that stuff shakes out.
So... This understanding that we're talking about here that the state is viewed as a savior because it represents the grandiosity of the helpless and brutalized or witness to brutalization child is why The fantasy of statism is so hard to break for people,
right? I mean, if the state would have vanished tomorrow, sorry, if the state would have vanished tomorrow, people would actually have to deal with the pain.
They wouldn't have this poison container, this receptacle for their own childhood helplessness and anger.
And so it's not...
I mean, that's why people resist getting rid of the state.
Get so upset about it, right?
Because they need this fantasy superhero, right?
Which is also the Star Trek myth, of course, right?
Fly around the galaxy, teleport and so on.
Why would people want all those powers?
Well, because they felt powerless in their own life and they needed a place.
to put their feelings or their desire for power but of course by abstracting it they ensure that they won't gain power back in their lives right?
They're putting it out there and it ends up of course because it is a Simon the Boxer we project our powerlessness the need for power onto these grandiose superheroes who end up then taking our power from us right?
Nobody believes that the nerds who are into comic books will ever Use those comic books to achieve a sense of power and efficacy in their own life, right?
They will either treat their comic book addiction as a guilty secret, which is, you know, not powerful, or they'll talk about it openly, in which case they'll be viewed as geeks and it will take away credibility, authority, and power for them, right?
Or they stay in some subculture where it's accepted, which is going to be a powerless subculture, right?
Anyway, we're going to have to get into that.
I'm sure you understand. So...
If we look at, again, we're still talking about the Greens.
I know we wander a little, but it's actually very related, though this would probably be a separate podcast.
Let's leave it here.
So, for the Greens, they grew up with some distant or cruel father and some passive-aggressive victimized mother, and they were helpless to intervene.
They were attacked for any expressions of helplessness, such as depression or ennui or whatever, right?
And so they have to create this fantasy of omnipotence, which allows them to live with their helplessness.
And, of course, grandiosity is a form of helplessness, right?
And so we see that quite continually.
And, of course, superheroes, at least the ones that I've seen, are always helpless in some manner, right?
And it's usually because of the secret identity, right?
A secret identity robs them of intimacy and of love, right?
Because they are a projection and therefore they have to be helpless.
You know, Bruce Wayne can't get a girlfriend and Peter Parker can't get a girlfriend and they have these secret identities, right?
Because secret identity always means projection, right?
right, in the metaphorical sense, right?
So I think that's, I just think that's a really, really important thing to understand why the green, like who the state is in this equation that the greens come up with, the ecologists come up with, right?
Mother Earth, Father Capitalism, and Superhero State.
The Superhero State is the child's fantasy of omnipotence, which is the only possible psychological response to the situation that he finds himself in.
And people will say, well, yes, but my family wasn't like that, and so on.
But I would also say that it occurs within school for people, right?
We always underestimate the effects of status schooling on people and its ability to reproduce these kinds of phenomena, right?
So I think that's...
And of course, Dungeons& Dragons, to some degree, fits into this as well.
I just sort of wanted to mention that.
So in that... A way of looking at things, what happens is this, right?
The states which we reject control us, right?
The experiences that we project or act out or, you know, repress permanently end up controlling us, right?
So the Greens are addicted to this salvation fantasy of the state, which is their own narcissistic...
Well, I shouldn't say that. Let me be slightly more precise, which is not to say accurate always, but...
That is their wounded and helpless ego projection of grandiose fantasy.
They end up projecting all of this onto the state, and thus they have this retarded answer.
The statism bothers me in many ways, but fundamentally it bothers me because it's retarded.
It comes up with stupid answers in the same way that religion does.
Where do we come from? God made us.
It's a stupid non-answer, right?
The problem of social law, like an organization, crime, abortion, violence, all the tricky things that are in the world come about.
I mean, the answer to those is never give a bunch of people a bunch of guns, right?
I mean, that's just stupid and counterproductive, right?
And it's the only way that we can understand how people can miss these incredibly obvious things, right?
Like they say, well, what if DROs become a monopoly?
It's like, well, that's what we're starting with.
And if monopolies are so bad, right, then why would you be supportive of the state, right?
At least we've got a chance with DROs.
Even if that's the best argument we can come up with, it would still be better than what we've got, right?
It's like the guy is three minutes from dying saying, I don't want to try this experimental drug because it might kill me.
It's like, well, you're going to die anyway. Or the guy's just died, right?
Oh, we don't want to try putting epi in because it might be infected and harm him.
It's like, well, he's already dead, right?
What do you got to lose? But that's because this is, of course, it's a psychological problem.
It's not... It doesn't start empirically, right?
People don't look at the world Empirically.
And they don't start as a blank slate and then say, gosh, you know, what problems am I interested in and what is empirically the best way to solve those problems?
That's not how people start. People feel emotionally invested in or attracted to a particular mythology.
And look, I'm going to put myself in that category too.
Because until I really began to think for myself, objectivism did remain for me a kind of mythology.
So I'm not putting myself outside the pale here, if that helps.
But they will put themselves in that.
They just find themselves drawn to something.
And then they will sort of keep studying it.
It becomes confirmation bias.
And that's how people end up.
And libertarians are in that category, too.
You can be psychologically driven close to the truth, although it still remains very, very distant from you until you actually work out the issues that draw you to it to begin with.
But that's where people get their beliefs from, right?
So that's why when people come up with their strong beliefs, no matter where they're coming from, my first question is, I wonder why this is...
I wonder what history made this compelling to you?
And this, of course, is why statism and statists themselves so much tend to escalate, right?
Because there's this endless frustration as to why it's not working.
You know, we gave the state all this power, and why is it not working out the way that we want?
Well, that's because your belief in the state is a psychological defense, right?
It's the ones we've talked about, right?
So then they continue to escalate, right?
In the same way that parents who use violence to obtain obedience from children tend to escalate because it doesn't work, right?
So I think if you understand, this obviously applies to a lot more than the Greens, but if you understand that aspect of things and understand that the state is The fantasy of superhero powers which come out of a thwarted and broken childhood where helplessness in the face of violence or abuse is perpetually occurring.
Then you understand that if you get rid of the fantasy of the state, which is why I tell people go to therapy and so on, you can't get rid of your fantasies unless you get real help to deal with the issues.
That they are covering up, right?
Because otherwise, you will get rid of the fantasy of the state, so to speak, but then you'll just replace it with something else, or there will be a reaction formation which will cause great hostility towards, I don't know, me or whoever has taken away these fantasies without giving you the professional help that you might need to deal with their actual source and original triggers.
So I hope this helps. It's worth listening to this more than once, I think, particularly the section around helplessness and superheroes.
Thank you so much for listening.
▲
Export Selection