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Sept. 27, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:32
1466 History is Religion

Another moral narrative of control...

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Hi everybody, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
It is September the 23rd, 2009.
My last day to be 42.
The answer to the question, what is the meaning of the universe?
The answer to the ultimate question.
For those Douglas Adams fans.
So I wanted to put out an idea that has been floating around in my head for a couple of months.
And this is a prequel, you know, perhaps to something a little bit more formal, but I thought I would put it out there as an exploratory possibility, non-syllogistical, non-proven idea.
Religion is a moral story based on a lie.
The moral story of obedience to the priest.
There's no such thing as obedience to God because God doesn't exist, so it means obedience to priests and parents and so on.
And in that vein, it's fundamentally not the supernatural part that is the essence, to me at least, not the supernatural part that's the essence of religion.
It's the moral part that is the essence of the religiosity.
Morals based on lies to me is the essence of religiosity.
Whether it's supernatural, Or some other form of authoritarian or perhaps dictatorial lie, to me is not particularly important.
Whether the lie is believed because of God or some other falsehood, to me is not particularly important.
What is the most fundamental aspect to religiosity is that it is a morality tale that is entirely false, but it's presented as if it is true.
Now, if we look at religion that way, I think that you come up with a very interesting perspective.
And I'm hoping that the definition doesn't force this, but you can let me know if you think it's unrealistic.
Because, I mean, we see religions twist and turn all the time.
They dislike...
Darwin, they like Darwin, they dislike Galileo, they like Galileo, they dislike science, they like science, right?
That all twists and turns.
What is constant is the moral control over people, the greatest lever in the world, that is sadly most understood by the worst among us, and least understood by the best among us, which is certainly, I wouldn't say I'm the best among us, but I certainly have misunderstood it for most of my adult life, the degree to which people are run by ethics.
It's very well understood by the corrupt and very little understood by the virtuous.
And so it's not some god's eternal commandment and so on.
It's just, you know, they change, religions change with the times to accommodate whatever is the most current belief that they can't overcome.
They'll just absorb it and borg it and digest it, you know, like some very small snake with a very large antelope.
So it's not sort of any eternal word of God, it's just something that mutates relative to the current mores.
So if we look at religion as a moral tale that is a lie, that is used to exploit and control people, I think, I think, I put forward as a possibility that we are inevitably led to To the conclusion that history is religion.
History is religion.
History falls into the category of religiosity.
Is it a moral lie told to control people through ethics?
And this sort of came to the fore.
I haven't published it yet. I guess by the time you hear this I will have.
But I had a debate with an objectivist who...
Like most libertarians who have this fetish for the Founding Fathers, the Triple F, he had a view of history that was so far off base, and yet so much the bedrock of his moral position, that it's hard for me to see it as different from religion.
For me, when people say America was great because of what the Founding Fathers wrote and did, to me that is exactly the same, fundamentally, as saying God is great because of what Moses and Ezekiel said.
It is fundamentally identical to religion.
And it has most, if not all, Of the characteristics of religion.
In both history, and we'll just focus on this Founding Father fetish, though you could apply it to many other things.
In both religion and history, you have this Golden Age, right?
The Garden of Eden in Christianity, the early Republic in the Founding Father fetish.
The F... What are we going to call it?
The Garden of Weedoms?
What are we going to call it?
The Book of America. The Book of Genesis?
The Book of America? Amerisys.
Gen-America. I don't know.
What are we going to call this thing?
So I don't go nuts trying to say it every time.
Let's just go with Republicis.
Republicis is Genesis. The Genesis of the Republic.
Republicis. So...
You have the Garden of Eden in Genesis, and you have the Old Republic in Republicis.
And you have a fall from grace.
You have the original commandments, which were kept, and while the original commandments were kept, everybody was in a state of bliss, which was, don't eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and stick thee to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in Republicis.
And then there is a fall, and there are villains, and Hamilton is some, and the Federalist Papers are some others, and the corruption of X, Y, and Z, and you pick your villains, right?
Whether it's a snake in the Garden of Eden, or some demagogue in Republicis, we have a villain, a damned, damned, damned smiling villain, and there is a general sin.
The sin is transferred from the villain to the general population, from the snake, from the serpent in the Garden of Eden to mankind as a whole through original sin.
And in Republicis, the sin is transferred from whoever they pick as the bad, you know, Lincoln or whoever they pick as the bad president.
It then is transferred to the people as a whole.
Why? Because those people as a whole did not stand up to fight the growing tyranny.
So, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, as they say, and because people have failed in their eternal vigilance against the armed might of the monolithic state, as if that would do a damn bit of good anyway, they are guilty.
Of the tyranny that they inherit from a destructive system.
So, you know, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots.
The death wish that comes from wanting to confront the biggest armed mafia in the world is the sin of the people.
It's transferred from those who initiate the immorality, i.e.
the serpent in the Garden of Eden, or whoever it is that they pick as the bad guy who started the ball rolling.
In the republicis.
But this sin is then transferred to the general population.
And you will hear libertarians talking about, you know, well, if people don't monitor their government, if they don't restrain their government, or as Harry Brown used to put it, if the federal government was no longer chained down, bound down by the chains of the Constitution.
A wonderful metaphor that means absolutely nothing.
You can't bend down a concept with a piece of paper that has no power.
I'm sure he didn't tie up his boat with a Kleenex.
Anyway, so this question of why is the world the way it is, why is the world bad, is what religions try to explain.
And they explain, always in the same way, that there was a golden age And there were commandments.
Those commandments were not kept.
And although you weren't around at the time, you're to blame!
That's the reason that they always give, right?
And the reason they do that is that there is no evidence for their god in the present, and there is no evidence of virtuous politicians in the present, right, in Genesis and Republicis.
There's no evidence of the virtue that they claim to have existed.
And therefore, the virtue must have existed in the far past.
God was present and visible and talked to everyone and glorious, and his effect was seen everywhere in the Garden of Eden.
He talked to people and so on.
But now he doesn't. And he doesn't intervene anymore, God, to save people and so on, at least in any kind of scientific way.
And we don't see any virtuous politicians around now, but statism can't survive as a philosophy if politicians aren't virtuous.
And so, lo and behold, the politicians who are virtuous and magical were invented in the far past.
And all these mythologies, of course, were set up.
You know, George Washington with his wooden teeth.
I cannot tell a lie.
It was I that done chopped down the cherry tree.
See? Always with the goddamn trees.
Publicist and Genesis. Anyway.
So, you have this golden age when the system worked, and then you have a catastrophe, and whatever that catastrophe is, a civil war, eating the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and bad things happened, and it all snowballed from there, you see, and it's your fault.
Right? It's your fault as a citizen for not restraining the federal government with its nuclear weapons and its aircraft carriers and so on.
And it's your fault that The rib woman listened to the talking snake and so on.
And so you have to pay.
And the reason that this all has to work this way is because if there was not a great glorious and virtuous situation in the distant past, then a great goodness cannot have resided in that distant past And made...
and been broken, right?
So, I mean, this is a great myth around society, right?
You see this all over the place.
Those who've commented on my recent reading of Damas' The Origins of War and Child Abuse, chapters 7 and 8, I think, have...
you see the same phenomenon.
There's this idea that...
In the distant past, in the noble savage or the happy tribes of Margaret Mead, Samoa or whatever, that there was a golden age, right?
The noble savage, a golden age of human society.
And you see this in the way that Native Americans are portrayed at peace with nature and contentedly smoking their peace pipes and with their happy, laughing, dancing children and so on.
There's this idea that there was this...
Virtuous paradise in the distant past, and we have fallen from grace then, and we're somehow responsible, or whatever, right?
That's the way it usually transfers, even down through the Native American thing.
They fell from grace because of Westerners, and now we owe them, apparently, casinos and the capacity to drink photocopy fluid or something.
And this, of course, is fundamental to statism.
There has to be a golden age of statism in the past, right?
Because if there wasn't, if statism is part of mankind's brutal, originating, vile, murderous, child-killing history, and was less functional in the past than it is now,
and certainly I would agree that it was less functional in the past than it is now, Then, statism as a philosophy has no golden age to look back at, and therefore it has to look at the actions of states in the world at present and say, well, this is what it's evolved to, not what it has evolved from, right?
It's sort of like, in biology, it would be like putting forward the idea that there was a perfect man somewhere, somehow, at some point in the past, a platonic ideal perfect man, Who never aged and never got sick and, you know, of course his hair would fall out because it's part of perfection, at least, you know.
And that somehow we have been degraded from that perfect person.
Well, it wouldn't make any sense, of course.
Perfection is a form of complexity and biological evolution tends towards complexity from simplicity through, of course, the time-honored tradition of natural selection.
And as Dawkins has maintained, as I've argued in my own amateur way from time to time, you can't have God in the past, because God is the ultimate in perfection and complexity, and therefore he can't have been the start of things, because perfection and complexity only result from billions of years of evolution, or at least hundreds of millions.
It can't be at the beginning.
It can't be at the beginning. And so if If we give up our idea of looking for the perfect man in the past, whether that perfect man is Adam before the fall, or the founding fathers, or the golden noble savage,
if we give up the fantasy of looking for the perfect man in the past, then we actually end up with something much more productive, which is the recognition that there was no golden age, that we We came from sort of a shit planet, right?
I mean, of crime and violence and abuse and rape and war and murder and so on.
And that every step up this bloody ladder towards a higher and nobler and more honorable and more peaceful world has come out of the very bowels of a bloody, hideous, disgusting, vile and frankly criminal history.
There is no Golden Age back in the past where everything was so much better.
The Golden Age is not some massive Mobius strip loop back to history, but rather a continuance up the ladder.
The ladder that goes up to the sky does not end up at the bottom of the mine where it starts.
The whole point of the ladder is to get away from the bottom of the mine.
The bottom of the mine being the filth and iniquity of the origins of our species and of the ethics in our species.
Because if you lose the golden age, if you lose the golden age of perfection in the past, then you have a real problem, right?
I mean, if we got rid of the noble savage, right, and we recognized that, you know, primitive societies are just vile and brutal and disgusting and rapey and abusey and so on...
Then we would look at, with suspicion, the social institutions that arose out of the past, right?
I mean, we all accept, now that slavery is gone as a moral concept, as an elevated moral concept, as a necessary moral reality.
Now that slavery has been disproven, we no longer look back and say, oh gosh, if only, if only, if only, if only...
We could get back to the golden age of slavery.
You know, slavery, oh yeah, okay, well, it ended up in the Harriet Beecher Stowe nightmare.
Yes, it's true, there were lashings and beatings and so on, though they weren't as common as I've read as some think.
But still, slavery and unadulterated evil.
Then nobody looks back and says, well, Slavery.
Sadly, we had to get rid of it.
But boy, when it first started, it was beautiful and harmonious and happy and wonderful.
Everybody sang and danced.
After picking cotton in the sunlight, they sat and danced a jig and drank moonshine in the moonlight.
And there are some of those, if you look back throughout the history of slavery, you will find some of those writings.
You know, the people who say, ah, you know, what an ideal it was and How happy the slaves really were, and then they got riled up by these northern rabble-rousers and so on, and wasn't that terrible and bad and awful.
So if we came from, you know, if we crawled out to the sunlight from a pile of shit, then everything that comes out of the past is going to be suspicious, is going to seem suspicious to us,
right? And once we pass over the moral threshold of universalizing the basic ethics that we all believe in, which was really the end of slavery, once we go through that process, we don't look back, we break the curse or the fantasy of the Golden Age in the past, right? Once the UPB crushes the fantasy of the Golden Age, right?
So why does statism, particularly in America, The defenders of statism have a big problem with America, right?
The smallest government grew into the largest and most powerful government, so it's not a good test of the theory, right?
Or it's a good test of the wrongness of the theory, that governments are good or can be restrained.
But once you UPB your ethics, you lose this addiction or this need for the golden age, right?
Because what you do with UPB is you say, well, you know, the initiation of force is wrong and therefore governments are all illegitimate.
And then you understand the world as it is, right?
UPB is as weird, in a way, as the theory of relativity, right?
In that if you take the speed of light as constant, some really freaky shit begins to go down when you approach the speed of light and two spaceships traveling apart at the speed of light and they measure it That we're each traveling apart only at the speed of light instead of 2c.
Anyway, all of this sort of stuff. E equals mc squared comes out of that.
And some really freaky shit goes when you just say, okay, well, the speed of light is constant.
That is a universal absolute.
And light bending around gravity wells and all this kind of freaky stuff goes on.
In the same way, if you simply say the initiation of the use of force is a universal constant...
The theory of non-relativity, then some equally freaky shit begins to go down in your thinking, right?
I mean, it certainly was the case for me, and I think it's the case for other people, right?
And what happens is, when you say...
When you uphold the NAP, non-aggression principle, as a universal constant, what happens is you begin to look, in a very different way, at history.
Because if you say, well, this has not been held up as a constant before...
In consistent constant.
It's not been universalized before.
And they knew it, right?
Bill of Rights says, sorry, the Declaration, all men are created equal.
Well, then we can't have a government because that's immediate inequality, right?
And we can't have slavery and blah, blah, blah, right?
And so you begin to look back at these things and say, well...
It's like looking at the writings about slavery 3,000 years ago.
You're not going to expect a lot of enlightened stuff about slavery from 3,000 or 2,000 or 1,000 or even 500 years ago.
You're going to see a whole bunch of mealy-mouthed justifications for slavery in various forms and all the corrupting narcissistic crap that goes around artificially keeping an entire group, in fact the majority of the population in certain areas down.
All of the justifications you have to invent as to why they're down there and you're up here and all the pomposity and all that that comes along with that and the brutality.
And if you did go back a thousand years and you found a really great and cogent argument, moral argument against slavery, I mean, you'd be kind of shocked.
I mean, maybe there are some out there. Maybe you'd be kind of shocked, right?
And, of course, you would recognize that it had no traction in society because the institution of slavery continued.
So when you UPB something, you look back askance and you look back with great skepticism at that which was written before you UPB something.
So when you wave your UPB wand, baby, and slavery vanishes in a puff of moral horror, then you look back at all the institutions that supported and nurtured and encouraged and applauded slavery and you say, well, Those guys were dickheads of the First Order.
And there's not a lot of moral instruction that's going to be extracted out of that.
Certainly in the realm of slavery, right?
Because they're all hypocritical and wrong and bad, right?
And in the same way, when you say the non-aggression principle is a universal constant and statism evaporates in a mushroom-shaped puff of moral horror, Then you look back throughout history and you get that there's no golden age.
You get that the people who justified states and continue to justify states are assets of the first order.
And there is no golden age of statism because all states violate the non-aggression principle by their very existence and nature and produce the exact ripple effects of hypocrisy and destruction that we would expect from virulently and violently defending a fundamental moral contradiction.
And so bad ideas produce bad effects and the only way that they can be rescued at least pretend to rescue them.
Bad ideas produce bad effects and the only way that you can rescue those bad ideas from the moral horror that they in fact engender is to say there was a golden age when they worked, and it's your fault that they didn't.
Or don't. Garden of Eden, republicus, republicis, right?
There was a golden age when it all worked beautifully.
Okay, I don't really have any evidence for it.
In fact, the evidence is quite against it.
But trust me, there was a golden age when it all worked beautifully.
And, uh...
Then it all went to shit, and it's your fault.
Because what that does is it paralyzes people's moral reasoning, and it also makes them feel guilty, and it makes them feel like they're bad for criticizing that which does not work.
Why? Because it's your fault it doesn't work.
It's like, I crash your car, and then I criticize that your car has been crashed.
Obviously, that would be an assholery of the first order.
And so if it's my fault that it didn't work somehow, then I can't really criticize it, right?
Because it's my fault it didn't work.
If I crashed your car, I can't criticize the fact that your car was driven carelessly.
I mean, I can, but just what a ridiculous thing that would be to do, right?
And this is how bad ideas are rescued, right?
You create a golden age and you tell people it's your fault it doesn't work anymore.
And that is very much the case with religion, of course, right?
But it's also very much the case with that other religion that we call, well, history.
And the reason that this is all so powerful is because, to use a hackneyed phrase, it maintains the dominant paradigm.
Thank you.
If you can get people to believe that in the past a state, any state, a government worked well, or if you can get people to believe that in the past slavery was good and moral and happy and we just have to get back to that,
then it's a pretty desperate way But effective of getting people to not question the basic premises of what is proposed.
If there was a golden age of the Republic...
I mean, this is...
It's Star Wars philosophy, right?
The golden age of the Republic are now the Empire, right?
It's all about the US. Like Elvis, from lean and hip to fat and bloated.
It's all about America, the journey...
This slow cholesterol swan dive off the cliff.
But if you can get people to believe that it worked once, we have to get back to that, then it's sort of like this back to the future progress.
You will help them to avoid questioning the basic premise.
And the reason that I say it's religious is that, A, it's false.
The American government never worked.
Except for the American rulers in terms of power and money.
And because it emits so many facts that it's ridiculous, right?
I mean, it's called a democracy, though nobody ever voted for the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
It's called a democracy, although women couldn't vote, and children had no rights, and women had no rights, and there were slaves, right?
I mean, it's crazy!
But you have to hold that up as something great and grand and good so that people don't question The basic premise, right?
Because if, in the very founding of it, America was just another exploitive gang of thugs taking over a geographical area to plunder its riches and population, which would explain why it's the same now, then people are going to say, well, shit, if it never worked, maybe we should do something different.
Like, if we truly do understand the progress of human society, which is from shit to shoeshine, right, up the bloody ladder, then there's nothing back down there that we need to regard except the general stench that we're relieved to be out of.
But if back there, there is a golden age trapped in a bubble of history that we can get back to where Honey flowed like water and the lambs lay down on your plate to be eaten.
Well, then we should go back to that and not worry about questioning the basic paradigm.
So the people will always come up with this.
There are two things that they do, right?
They invent the golden age and they invent the external enemy.
Why is the world shit?
Well, because... It used to be great, but you're somehow to blame for it no longer being great.
And also because there's an external enemy that's making it bad.
And, of course, you have the devil and you have all these external forces, the Nazis, the Spaniards, the French, the Al-Qaeda.
I mean, all of these are the reasons why things were bad.
And we don't really have to talk about it.
The external enemy has been done to death, and I don't think we need to add anything about it.
But I think if you look at it in this way, that religion is a moral tale of falsehood, particularly one concerned with the Golden Age that you're to blame for the ending of, then we understand that history is just another...
Kind of religion, with the same mythologies, the same lies, the same manipulations, the same blame game, the same original sins, the same salvation and redemption and fantasy about the Golden Age, and this same yearning, burning desire to get back to a state that never existed, to get back to a purity and happiness and a virtue that never existed.
But what it does is it rescues the dominant paradigm from essential questions.
You know, if you can get citizens to ask what kind of state should we have, you're 90% of the way there, right?
As opposed to a what?
A government? You've got to be kidding me.
Thank you so much for listening.
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