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May 30, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:59
1374 True News 41: Politicians Priests Corruption
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Two little bits of bidness before we get down to the evisceration of all things political.
Free Domain Radio has just been named in the top 100 most inspiring and innovative blogs for educators.
You can check that out at the homepage at freedomainradio.com.
Also, I will be giving a scintillating, spectacular and not-so-sexy speech in Philadelphia.
July the 4th, 2009.
More details will be forthcoming, but if you would like to meet and greet with myself and, of course, my lovely wife will be traveling with me, as will our charming and entirely too vanilla-looking daughter, and so I hope that you will drop by.
It's going to be a Q&A period really around private solutions for status functions.
I can guarantee that it will be very enjoyable and enlightening, so I hope that you will come by.
So I wanted to have a little chat about moral leadership because of course this really is the fundamental question of a civil and moral society.
It's the question of moral leadership and there are four Areas, traditionally, in which moral leadership must reside if a status society is to function or a civil society is to function.
This is the historical lodging grounds for moral authority.
The first is the political leadership.
The second is the clergy or the religious or spiritual leadership.
The third is the police, and the fourth is the military.
These are the people who have the most power in society, the power of ethics and the power of educating children, both in terms of the clergy and in terms of the state, the power of violence.
In the case of the politicians who lead it and the police and the military who enact it, who hold the gun to the throats of the citizens.
So it is in these four groups that we would expect and demand and is in fact necessary to have The very highest standards of moral leadership that could conceivably be imagined.
Because if there isn't the highest standards of moral leadership in these areas, then of course it is mere predation rather than moral leadership.
So, I'm just going to take four examples, and you can, of course, come up with counter-examples.
We can have a debate about that, but I think these are pretty telling.
For those who've been following the fallout scandal from the British politicians' expense scandal, this is from World Focus.
The links, of course, are off to the right.
The Speaker of the House of Commons has resigned.
Trouble is brewing for British politicians after the Daily Telegraph reported that several members of Parliament Had abused their expensive system spending thousands of pounds of public money on questionable claims, including $3,000 to clear a moat surrounding an estate and money for diapers, comics, and hair dyes.
And this has really spread to just about every British politician has been abusing his or her expense account.
Now, personally, if I'm abusing an expense account and I have a moat and a castle and a private estate, I absolutely want to have that moat cleared off because I don't want any of the peasants walking across to exact their pound of flesh.
And it's, there's a striking accord in England.
This story is going on and on.
It hasn't so much crossed the pond because there are far bigger scandals in the American political system, but at least it's for once not a British politician sex scandal, but it is a financial scandal.
Now, I don't know if you've ever had an expense account.
I worked for many years with an expense account and if you were to put personal items on your expense account, you'd be fired and possibly prosecuted if it went on for long enough.
Certainly, the money would be recoverable plus they would probably threaten you with a lawsuit or with a criminal investigation because it's out now theft.
In the political system, of course, it's the old question, who watches the watchers?
Well, the media is supposed to watch the watchers, but that rarely happens because the media has no power.
So, when we look at ethical behavior, the conscience is a very important aspect of ethical behavior, and the conscience has been defined not too badly as that which has us acting rightly even when nobody is watching.
And, of course, in the government nobody watches and almost nobody acts rightly.
Well, why is this important?
Because it's so fundamental and people are talking about, well, we need reforms within Parliament and this and that, but it's much more fundamental than that because what this reveals is the character, or lack thereof, of the British politicians who are clearly abusing the public funds for second homes, for moats, for comics, for diapers, for all things which could not conceivably be associated with.
The actual running of their duties.
So catching these people is not really the point.
The fact that they're doing it in the first place indicates no respect for public money, a sense of entitlement, a sense of narcissism, clearly no internalized fundamental moral standards.
So the fact that they're caught and the people saying, well, let's put in safeguards, that's not the point.
The point is that the people who claim to be the moral leaders of the nation Those who claim to have the ability to use violence in the pursuit of virtue, surely one of the most morally challenging, difficult if not impossible tasks in the ethical landscape of the species.
Those who claim to be the most moral, to be able to use guns and bombs and invade countries and throw people in jail and harass and tax and theft and steal and educate the children, all significantly challenging moral tasks.
Can't even not steal from you in their expense accounts.
And again, if I claim that I can bench press 300 pounds, and you doubt my ability to do so because I'm 98 pounds of sinew and Dungeons and Dragons no tan skin, The first thing you'll do is hopefully not put 300 pounds and crush my chicken chest.
Hopefully what you're going to do is say, okay, let's start off small.
You claim that you can bench 300 pounds.
You really don't look like you can, so let's start off small.
I'm going to give you 40 pounds to bench, or 30 pounds.
Now, if I can't bench the 30 pounds, surely my claims that I can bench 300 pounds prove completely ridiculous.
And if people in the upper echelons of the political, statist, criminal gang Can't even not steal on their expense accounts.
Can we even remotely believe their claims that they are perfectly competent to educate the children, invade other countries, throw people in jail, use violence to achieve their goals?
All things which we would consider, well, that's bench pressing infinity.
But let's say it's a hell of a lot more.
They can't even lift the tiny moral weight of personal integrity on their expense accounts.
So the rest of their moral claims are perfectly ridiculous.
Because if you can't, Be honest in your expense account.
Giving the infinite power of nuclear weapons, the state, the prison system, the judicial system, the army, the police, et al, is completely ridiculous.
And this is what people are struggling to avoid.
In this particular issue, they're struggling like mad to avoid this basic knowledge that safeguards won't help.
Because if people aren't ethical in this area, a tiny little area of personal integrity, they're clearly not going to be more ethical in more challenging, complex, and corruptible situations.
So this is what everybody's struggling to avoid and this is why whenever this stuff comes out you get a massive Cluster frack of suggestions and recommendations, and let's do this, and let's have a committee, which is all designed to ignore the basic problem, which is that the people are not moral, who have control of our lives, our children's educations, the weapons of the world, and the prisons of the planet.
They're not moral even in the little things.
And that, of course, is a terrifying thing for people to look at, that you're voting for immoral people, that immoral people are in charge of all the, you know, human-destroying weapons on the planet.
Well... That's what we need to face.
That's why we need such a fundamental change in society.
But people are struggling to avoid that, right?
Because they'll always say, well, let's get some safeguards in.
But that's not the issue at all.
So, that's just a little thing which I think is worth having a look at.
The second, certainly much more grim, Rape in the US military.
So again, we would hope, in fact it would be utterly necessary, that those who had the most power also had the greatest ethical standards.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Of course in statism with great power comes no responsibility, but that of course is the fundamental issue with statism.
And so those who pull triggers on command to shoot others, we would absolutely require them to have the highest moral standards.
Because they have the greatest moral power, which is the power to slaughter whoever they choose.
And so for the military to be anything other than the most destructive criminal gang in the history of the world, the people on the ground and the people all the way up to the highest echelons would have to be the highest moral exemplars that we could conceivably imagine, because they have the greatest power in the world.
Rape is pretty much the second worst crime other than murder, and some might say it's worse.
But we would, of course, imagine that those who we gave all this power to would have the very highest moral standards.
So this is from WomenInWar.com.
Sorry, let's just go straight to this from MS Magazine.
Once again, the U.S. military scolds itself on rape, but will anything change?
Less than three weeks after Army Private First Class Susan Upchurch Arrived at her first assignment in Germany, she was raped by a fellow service member.
When she reported the 2002 crime to a sergeant, she was told to be a soldier and pretend it never happened.
As a woman in the U.S. military, Upchurch is far from alone and experiencing the terror of sexual assault and its traumatic aftermath.
Over the past 15 years, scandalous episodes at the Navy's tailhook convention Where female sailors were groped by their cohorts to the Aberdeen training grounds where army superiors raped trainees drew widespread attention to the problem.
Most recently, a report from the Miles Foundation which provides support to abuse victims in the military revealed nearly 200 reported assaults and female service members in the current theater of military operations, and that's likely just the tip of the iceberg.
If you are a woman soldier in Iraq, you have a very high probability that you will be raped, says Loretta Sanchez, and not raped just once but several times.
So, there are...
Let's see. The DOD released chilling statistics called from 21 military locations at all branches of the service, showing that nearly 2,000 incidents of sexual assault were reported in 2002 to 2003.
The number of reported rates rose 25% over the period of 1999 to 2002, a time when the number of Army personnel on active duty rose just over 9%.
So...
So the people who have the most power of violence have a very high prevalence of rape.
This is not good.
This is not a good situation.
We absolutely would require for statism to be even viable in any kind of theory.
We would require those with the most power to be the most moral, and consistently we find that those with the lowest power I find it hard to imagine why people would be surprised at this in the first place and also would be surprised that the army is dragging its feet and not doing anything about it.
Because it would seem to me that rape is a perk of army life.
That's what would draw people in.
That's what would draw the sociopaths into the army.
I mean, there are three perks of army life.
The first is an entirely regimented life where you don't have to think for yourself.
The second is The slaughter, right?
The people who want to murder and go into the army.
And the third is the rape and pillaging and torture, of course, right?
So the associated crimes short of murder, just short of murder.
But those would be the three perks that would draw people into the military.
So, of course, the military is not going to act strongly against rape because rape is a perk of the position.
I'm not sure why people are surprised, but it does indicate, of course, an entire culture of the destruction of all things good, virtuous, noble, and moral.
Police! Although it is difficult to get accurate statistics, this is from policedynamics.com, studies consistently show that the police profession has the highest rates of divorce, alcoholism, domestic violence, and suicides.
Depending on the study, this is from the US I think, divorce rate is 60-70% higher than the national average.
Alcoholism rate is two times the national average.
Domestic violence rate is among the highest of all professions.
Suicide rate three times the national average.
Again, we would hope that people would not beat up on their wives and children if they are entrusted with the guns of the state turned against largely disarmed citizens.
Because if you can't refrain from beating the crap out of your wife and children, drinking yourself into a stupor or shooting yourself, Then it's sort of hard to imagine how you can morally implement very complex regulatory policies like, say, taxation or why you would ever have a problem with bypassing such troublesome legal technicalities as habeas corpus and so on.
So, police.
And you can go through all the professions in this realm.
As far as the clergy goes, this is just going on in Ireland at the moment, where shocking abuse has been coming to light.
It happened here in Canada, where the clergy was in charge of the aboriginals, and regularly killed them, refused to provide medical attention, raped, beat, and so on, and just tortured them.
And so, the Catholic clergy moving around the pedophiles from diocese to diocese, We understand that the moral leadership of mankind is utterly corrupt in its present form.
And it's because they're not philosophers.
They're statists. They're supernatural, superstitious theists.
They are people who have entirely brutalized histories, who grew up wanting to point guns at people who can't fight back.
They're bullies, they're brutes, they're monsters in the police and in the military.
And this goes all the way through the chain of command.
Moral men and women, you see, do not want to be put in charge of murderous rapists, say, in the military, or, you know, wife and child beating sociopaths in the police force.
Moral men and women simply would not want to be in charge of those people, so the corruption goes, you know, bounces up and down, all the way through, pendulum side to side.
It fills. The entire system.
Because if you've got these sociopathic soldiers and police officers and pedophilic priests, you simply don't want to be in charge of those kinds of monsters if you're a moral human being.
You'll run completely to the other side of the planet and burrow through it if you have to.
If you are a moral man and you are in the British Parliament and you begin to lecture or threaten to expose or whatever people about the very basic and minor misdeeds of fudging or stealing from expense accounts, what happens to you?
It's very clear. So, there's sort of two points I think that's important to get at this.
One is that the screw-up-ness of the world is not that hard to figure out if you look at who we elevate, or rather who is elevated over us, the moral leadership of mankind, which is utterly corrupt and monstrous.
So, of course, if you have somebody who doesn't know how to cook, you're going to get bad meals.
And if you have people who are corrupt and immoral to the core, you're going to end up with a corrupt and immoral society.
It's interesting to me that a reform of the rules is proposed for people fudging expense accounts or stealing from the public purse in the British Parliament, yet if you were to try this with your local tax authority, right, so if you claim things, completely outlandish things as deductible expenses in your income tax form, and they then come back and catch you, well, they're going to threaten you with jail and fines and really mess up your life.
But, of course, that's not what happens in the political world.
At most, people will lose their jobs, which means they shuffle over to the private sector, milk their contacts for lots of money, and still get their pension.
This is not really a punishment at all.
It's like getting caught with an expense account theft and then getting a promotion.
This is not what happens to the private citizens.
If you screw with your expense account Versus vis-a-vis the government, they will come after you with the tanks, right?
If you screw with your expense account in the government, you'll get scolding from the press and you might have to resign, but it's not like you get any threats of repayments or jail time.
And everybody just talks about a reform, right?
So if you, you know, just claim everything you want in your next tax rent, and when they come after you say, no, no, no, it's not my fault, it's the rules, and what we really need is a commission to look into this, which is going to take a couple of years and produce no No real response and maybe we'll work on reforming the rules but for heaven's sake you can't come after me for claiming these personal things and see how well that works when you use the standards within the government against the government when you're outside of it.
See how well that works.
The last thing that I'll say is that the basic concept of having a state, of having a government is the idea that in the absence of negative consequences Like arrest and jail time and so on.
In the absence of negative consequences, immoral behavior increases.
This is the idea. Well, we need a government, you see, because if people aren't going to be arrested and go to jail, they'll just run around stealing and biting their heads off chickens and, you know, raping pigeons or whatever, right?
So, in the absence of negative consequences, immoral behavior increases.
That is the basic argument for statism.
Now, I think that there's some real truth in that.
I think that the last thing you want as a government to do that, for reasons I'll get into in a second, but let's say that the argument is valid, right?
Because if it's not valid, then we don't need to state at all, even as a possibility.
So, if the absence of negative consequences causes an increase in immoral behavior, the last thing you'd ever want is a government, because in the government there are no negative consequences, right?
You can be Bill Clinton and you can use personal assistants as personal geishers.
Nothing happens. You fill out your term, you get a full pension, you get speaking tours, you get books published, you make millions of dollars.
If you are George Bush, you can invade foreign countries and nothing negative happens.
You cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and you get full pension and you get ticket tape parades and all these kinds of nonsense.
If you're a soldier and slaughter the innocents, you will get medals and promotions.
If you are a policeman and you just...
If you choose not to enforce an immoral law, you will simply get bounced from the force and if you obey whoever tells you who to point the gun at, you will get promotions and end up as police chief if you want.
Right, so if we say, well, in the absence of negative consequences, immoral behavior increases, then if we create this alternate universe called the government where evil is rewarded with promotions, extra money, and extra money, then we're actually creating a situation where immoral behavior, evil behavior, is rewarded rather than punished.
So if we need a government to punish people for bad deeds, we have created automatically a realm where people are praised, rewarded, and promoted.
For the most egregious and immoral deeds that can be imagined.
And that's why statism not only doesn't work, but promotes the greatest evils on the planet.
Thank you so much for watching.
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