All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 27, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:07
1467 A Freedomain Radio Class Analysis
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Steph.
It's my birthday! It's the 24th of September, 2009, and I am 43 years old.
A good age, a good year, a great life.
Thank you so much.
So, I wanted to talk a little bit about class.
I haven't really talked that much about class.
In the history of the show, other than to critique certain Marxist aspects of class.
But I think it's a very interesting topic.
It is something that is such a common theme throughout most people's thinking that I think it's worth having a look into it in slightly more detail.
I have, as you can imagine, I'm sure, a few of my own thoughts on class that I thought might be interesting to you.
I do believe In classes.
I really, I do believe in classes.
I think that the tripartite analysis of society, particularly from an economic standpoint, but I would say even more fundamentally from a familial standpoint, has some validity.
Like all broad swath cuts across the human ecosystem or psycho classes, it has lots of imprecisions and only the very broadest categories can be of use.
And it's not in particular use, I would say, of particular use in Understanding individuals, but I think these kind of categories can be very helpful.
So, these are some of my thoughts on lower, middle, and upper classes, and I've generally tended to divide these things, these classes, into three categories.
The first is, I'm sorry, there'll be a little bit of wind noise, I hope you don't mind.
The first is the lower class, and the one thing that I find particularly true about the lower class is the number of characteristics around the lower classes, and this I particularly mean economically.
The lower classes tend to be concrete, non-abstract.
They tend to be defensive, in that they feel the need to justify Their position in society, you know, keeping it real and all that kind of stuff.
And I found that one thing that characterizes the lower class, and of course I climbed right out of this pit, so I hope I have some validity in understanding this.
What I found to be very true among the lower classes is a strong, strong tendency towards anti-empiricism.
Anti-empiricism. So, I had a conversation with someone the other day, and he was saying, well, you know, I don't want to go to school because it's going to be very expensive, and this and that.
And he comes from a lower to lower middle class background.
And the one thing that is not really taught at all in the sort of lower class environment, at least a couple, I mean, I grew up in a number of lower class environments in Canada and England, The spreadsheet, right?
The empirical way of making decisions.
I mean, the way to decide about education, if finances are key to you and you're not just interested in studying a particular topic.
The way to decide about education is to...
Look at, let's say it's going to be a couple of years, three years or four years of education to up your salary by, say, 30-40%.
As you get out the spreadsheet, you say, well, this is what I'm making right now.
Here's what I'll give up by going to school.
Here's the cost of tuition and this and that.
And how long will it take for me to recoup my investment?
Will there be a change in growth, in the growth of my income over time?
You know, all these kinds of things.
You just do these basic things.
And you figure out when is it going to pay you back, if finances are really important to you.
You make that decision empirically.
If you're looking at going to a particular school, you call up that school, you say, what is the success ratio of your success rate of your placements after graduation in this particular field, and if they don't know, don't go to that school.
So you ask them for that.
You also ask them if there's an alumni association that you might be able to talk to someone who's graduated and ask them what they liked, what they didn't like, whether they were able to work part-time, how hard it was to find a job, how respected were the qualifications.
You know, you get the facts to make.
The decision that you want to make.
But in the lower classes, you don't do that.
I mean, you're not taught to do that.
In the lower classes, you make decisions emotionally, based on anxiety, and you just make up stuff.
Oh, it's too expensive, right?
But it's just something that's based on anxiety, and the lower classes are characterized, in my experience and opinion, by emotional, quote, reasoning and ex post facto justifications.
So, in the lower classes, you yell at your kid and then say, I did that because the kid was bad, or something like that.
You'll just act emotionally or make decisions emotionally, and the defensiveness comes in with the ex post facto justifications, the reasoning as to why.
If you have anxiety about changing classes, and I've yo-yoed around the class system quite a bit.
I was in a private school, a very hoity-toity private school with some very rich people and aristocrats.
I've been in upper echelons of the business world, and I grew up in sort of lower classes.
I spent a lot of time in the middle classes in my university education, and so I've yo-yoed around quite a bit.
So, What happens with the lower classes is they fear advancement, they fear moving into social circles where their bullshit is not taken for granted.
And then they will invent reasons as to why they didn't achieve what they wanted to achieve later.
Like, the bosses are idiots, the system is stacked against you, the man, and I never wanted it, and I'm keeping it real, and all that kind of stuff.
The sort of hatred and distaste for bosses, which really can only be born out of a thwarted sense of desire, and it's really the only possible way that you could end up with that kind of hostility, that is something that I've really seen as a characteristic.
So this anti-empiricism, this emotionality of judgment, which is then followed by justifications after the fact.
That is something that is a difficult characteristic of the lower classes.
The other thing that is, of course, the case with the lower classes is because these justifications are all invented after the fact, what happens is anybody who breaks the emotionality of these decisions faces a lot of class resentment, places a lot of resentment from everybody else.
Alright, so if everybody bitches about bosses, And then somebody wants to become a boss from the lower class, they're implicitly criticizing that assumption, right?
That the system is stacked against you and the bosses are bad and it's all exploitation and they're all assholes and this kind of stuff, right?
So, the lower classes...
I don't really think that the lower class enforcement occurs from the upper classes.
To some degree, yes, but what I've found is that the lower class tends to really enforce lower class restrictions on each other.
Because of this emotional, quote, reasoning followed by ex post facto justifications, anybody who breaks those justifications Makes the other people in the lower class feel uncomfortable, feel upset.
And that's a big problem.
So that's something that I think is an important characteristic of the lower class.
And we can go more into it if you're interested, but I just wanted to sort of sketch out a few things that I've noticed.
Now, the middle classes are a little different.
The middle classes are much more empirical than the lower classes, and in my opinion and experience, the middle classes have the best of both worlds in a way.
Like, they're empirical, and they also seem to have a fairly good sense of honor and integrity.
They take ethics quite seriously.
The lower classes don't take ethics particularly seriously because they have this hostile universe, And because of this hostile universe, it's like, well, the boss is out to screw me, so I can call in sick when I'm not, and have a mental health day or whatever.
So the lower classes don't have that same sense of integrity because they live in this hostile universe.
And so, because of that, they're kind of stealing back, right?
They're lower classes, because the system is stacked against them.
And so they're going to steal back from the upper classes, or from the managers, or whatever.
So they don't have quite an internalized sense of integrity.
The middle classes do. And the middle classes are definitely better at empirical reasoning.
It still tends to be a little bit emotional, like, education is good, without necessarily going through the steps of figuring out something like education versus entrepreneurship.
You know, Bill Gates dropped out of, I think, Stanford or something to found Microsoft, so clearly for him, Education was not as good a value as entrepreneurship.
Middle classes tend to be very conservative, and they tend to look at, you know, socially safe markers for achievement, right?
So, you know, go to a good school, become a dentist or a doctor or a lawyer or something, which I guess would be a little bit more in the upper class.
But, you know, go to school, get a degree, get a job, work hard.
It's that kind of work ethic that is...
It's more rational than the lower classes.
It's less of a hostile universe, but it is a little bit of a train track, right?
It's like you get on this train track and You will achieve.
And unfortunately, of course, that's taken quite a blow, quite a series of blows, from the recent economic meltdowns, really over the past 30-40 years.
That whole get a job and be secure is a little bit different.
The lower classes have that to some degree as well, but it's more around get a job, you know, get into a union, or get into public sector employment or whatever, and they go with that.
So the middle class does tend to be more respectful, sorry, it tends to be a little bit more like, take this particular track, a little more, certainly more risk-averse, not as risk-averse as the lower classes, but more risk-averse than the entrepreneurial classes.
To me, the upper class is divided really into two categories, which we'll get to.
I mean, again, you can sort of slice and dice this cake into subatomic particles, but these are the very sort of broadest things that I've found to be of use.
The middle classes also seem to be a lot less sentimental than the lower classes.
Lower classes are sentimentality and brutality, sort of two sides of the same coin.
And the middle classes tend to be a little less sentimental, but very much You know, do this to get the good rewards.
Good drones is sort of the middle class thing.
And this is sort of where you get some salespeople, some, you know, sort of lower to middle managers, some team leads, but they don't really tend to think outside the box very much.
And I certainly have had that.
Experience and been that way.
The middle class is always a little bit delighted to have any scrap of good fortune, whereas the lower classes are suspicious of good fortune because it threatens their sort of hostile universe and the man is out to get me kind of thing.
But the middle classes are always kind of delighted to have any kind of good fortune, which is really quite fascinating to see.
And because they feel lucky to not be in the lower class and they don't really aspire to the upper classes, there's that Icarus paranoia in the middle class, right?
Like if you fly too high, you're going to get struck down kind of thing.
There's a lot of hiding under rocks of conformity in the middle class, in my experience.
And this is the petit bourgeois.
And the communists, it drives the communists kind of nuts, right?
The communists have this great hatred of the middle class, almost more so than the upper classes.
And that's because communism just doesn't appeal.
It doesn't appeal to the lower classes in particular.
The lower classes don't drive communism and the middle classes don't really drive communism except these sort of intellectuals which tend to be more around the upper class.
So the middle class is like it's good, it's stable, it's secure.
It works less and less as statism continues to grow.
So that's certainly a problem.
But it's not It's not as paranoid as the lower class.
It has a wider latitude of action.
It does not tend to be quite as hostile to those who break class conventions, like to people who want to be entrepreneurs or whatever.
It's not hostility that the middle class expresses towards those who want to become entrepreneurs.
It tends to be more anxiety.
They're not angry at those who break class conventions, but there's a lot of projected anxiety at such people, and I think that's an important thing to remember and to recognize when thinking about the middle class.
It's not like, you know, oh, you just want to join the man, you just want to be the boss, and, you know, you're just a bad guy.
It's not that if you want to do something entrepreneurial in the middle class.
Middle class is all about, well, you know, that's okay, but what's your plan B? If you want to be an artist or a musician or an entrepreneur or something that's outside of class convention, it's like, well, that's all well and good, but what's your plan B? The anxiety, right?
There is this anxiety. There's also this class anxiety, and this, I think, comes from, I mean, again, we all started lower class in the Middle Ages, right?
Even the aristocrats. When you move up the social ladder, There is this great fear of falling back down, right?
So, you know, the poorer parents who produce the university-educated middle-class kids transfer a lot of that anxiety about You know, we fall down, go boom, back down to the lower classes.
There's this little bit of a sense of hanging from a thread from the middle classes.
And because of that, entrepreneurial risky things are much more frowned upon.
They create a great anxiety that you kind of fall back down the stairs that you've so laboriously climbed by the very skin of your teeth.
So there is that, let's not go back down there.
And I can understand that.
I mean, heavens, it's hard to get out of the lower classes.
It's really hard because you get a lot of criticism and a lot of attack and a lot of snarkiness and a lot of, you know, who do you think you are and you think you're better than us and there's a lot of that kind of stuff.
You know, I'm not saying it's all explicit and like people hurling beer bottles and stuff, but it's definitely there if you kind of make it up.
There is a real sense of attention or betrayal that comes out of people from the lower classes.
It's not quite the same with the upper classes and with the middle classes, but there is this anxiety if you want to break class convention and go entrepreneurial or go artistic or whatever.
As a friend of mine An ex-friend of mine, as they almost all are, said once about his kid was a real violin prodigy, and his teacher said, you know, kid could go all the way, and he said, I tell you, this is the future for my child.
He is going to be the doctor who is the best violin player, and he's not going to do it.
There's too much risk, right? The risk was just...
Because the capital has not been accumulated to fund the dreams of generations, what happens in the middle classes is the parents do not want to squander the capital that has been so laboriously achieved, and the escaping from the lower classes that has been so laboriously achieved, they don't want to squander that on a risk, right? Like, if you're a millionaire, you can sort of bet $10,000 on a roulette wheel, and it's not that big a sting, right?
Not a millionaire, then the $10,000 is a lot of money to bet.
So that is something that is really, really important.
They're very conscious of the accumulated capital and the hanging before a fall thing.
And that is something that It's really, really strong in the middle class.
You'll face a lot of anxiety for most middle class people if you want to go the road less traveled.
There is a sense of, like, we just got out of that mess.
What are you doing dangling yourself back over it again?
And so on.
So there is that conservatism in the middle classes that can be quite difficult and tends to keep people in the middle class, right?
I mean, they don't tend to fall back down, but they also don't tend to rise very much to the heights.
So I think that's That's something I've really noticed in the middle class, and I certainly would be happy to hear your thoughts on it.
Now, in the upper classes, though, things get really interesting.
And as I said, I'm going to sort of slice and dice up the upper classes in my ridiculous as usual way into two major categories.
So the upper classes that are the upper classes, because they are Risk embracing.
And the reason, of course, they're risk embracing is not because they're innately braver, but because they have more accumulated capital.
They can gamble because they can afford the hits, right?
Gambling on a career when you're a trustafarian is not such a big thing as if you are middle class, right?
And some of the hostility towards risk that comes from the lower classes comes partly culturally and partly, of course, because of a lack of accumulated capital.
Both physical and human capital, right?
The human capital being like education and emotional skills, EQ, right?
I mean, I think that's really important.
So the upper classes, I'm sort of going to divide them into two groups.
One group is they've got money, they can take risks, they have contacts, they can invest, they have all these skills that have been accumulated and passed down, right?
So Bill Gates' father, I believe, was an attorney.
Who specialized in intellectual property, something like that.
And so, of course, he could really coach his son on the legal aspects of business, and it's probably one of the reasons why he ended up with such an advantageous contract with IBM, right? So that helps a lot.
A friend of mine who's an economist and a professor, his father was a professor as well and actually ran the engineering department at an Ivy League school.
So that helps in terms of What do you do?
How do you go about it?
And what steps do you take to get your PhD, to get an academic job?
I mean, it's like having an in-house coach or consultant, which you get for free, having that accumulated.
That's more on the human capital side, right?
How to navigate these particular shoals or fog banks or whatever.
How do you get through?
How do you get it all done?
And that's the real challenge.
If you've had access to that kind of knowledge, that's really important.
I mean, for somebody who's not had any experience or any of that kind of stuff, it's really tough to figure out how to get all this stuff done.
How do you go about getting an academic career going?
That's not an easy question to answer, and getting people to help you can be very expensive.
It tends to be a big barrier if you don't know anyone who's done it.
It just becomes too much of an effort to invent the wheel yourself.
There's a lot of accumulated human capital in the upper classes.
This I mean in terms of context and so on.
The human capital, just so you can understand the distinction, at least as I put it forward, the human capital side of things is if you lost all your money, what value would you still have?
If you just got wiped out financially, what kind of value would you still have?
So if you're a member of the upper classes and you get wiped out financially, you have a Rolodex full of people you can call to get jobs, to get an investment in a business idea, to help you out in a variety of ways.
You are probably quite well educated.
So the human capital is like, what's all the goodies that you can bring to the table if you have no money?
The middle classes are really interested in adding to their human capital, which is why they're very focused on education.
The lower classes are paycheck to paycheck.
They find it... they resent having to add to their Financial human capital.
They view it as a rip-off.
They don't understand the cost-benefit.
The delay of gratification goes higher and higher as you move up the classes.
EQ, part of which is around delaying gratification, goes up and up.
And accepting that you may not necessarily know exactly why you're doing what you're doing, but as long as you're adding to some sort of capital of yours, that's a good thing.
That is a good thing.
So, I took this Master's in History.
It did turn out to be, I think, quite helpful for Free Domain Radio, but it certainly added to my human capital.
I mean, a Master sets you apart a little bit.
I did lots of presentations, lots of reasoning, lots of evidence-based argumentation, and the public speaking, and the things that I did on the site, debating and all that through my university career, have actually all proven quite helpful.
So if you have the ability to engage an audience, that's a very valuable skill to have.
And again, you sort of understand, right?
Although it cost me money, it added to the income that I was able to achieve after I graduated.
Once I combined my EQ or social skills with my technical skills, which I really acquired as kind of a hobby, that was all Something that wasn't clear to me at the time, but has value later on.
If you're adding to your human capital, you just never know exactly how it's going to pay off.
But it's usually, I think, a good idea, a good thing to do.
So, that's, I think, a very important aspect of the upper classes.
Human capital to burn in the form of contacts and skills.
I mean, this is going to sound ridiculous, but it's true.
Accent and good looks, right?
I mean, the upper classes, because the rich men tend to marry good-looking women, they tend to be tall, good-looking, they have those plummy Christopher Hitchens accents, and certainly in England that's a big deal.
So these are all intangible But very powerful aspects of human capital which accumulates to the upper classes.
And just to take an example, right?
There are not a lot of people...
I shouldn't say that.
When it comes to Obama picking his cabinet, I mean, his advisors or those who are going to run the various departments in the federal government, it's not like they put an ad out on Workopolis or Monster, right?
And they get resumes. It's all people that they know.
It's all people that they've had experience with.
This is what I mean by the human capital, right?
So you could be wiped out financially, but if you were roommates with Barack Obama in college and he's, you know, got some respect for your work skills or whatever, what's that worth?
Well, as George W. Bush said, In Hollywood, access is everything, and my father will always take my call, right?
So, access is everything.
It's everything. And there's a huge amount of human capital that's stored up, even if you're broke.
So, there's the productive upper classes, which is those who've accumulated a lot of human capital and income savings.
And they do business stuff, and they can be very philanthropic and so on.
And those are all just...
They've got the capital to take the risks and to succeed and fail, and sometimes they will slither back down to the upper middle classes or even lower, but it tends to be hard to blow a fortune unless you're a complete idiot, right?
So, those people tend to...
Have a lot of confidence. The kind of confidence that comes from having a very large safety net.
That is something that gives you a lot of...
I mean, to be, in general, good-looking, and to have all the latest toys.
In my high school, there was two sons of the guy who ran the Toronto Stock Exchange.
His name was Rocco, which kind of blew my mind.
They had just polo shirts and nice sports cars when they were 16 as their birthday presents and all the latest gadgets and toys and so on.
They had a lot of swagger and confidence.
They could not fail and they were both, one in particular, pretty good-looking kids because of course this guy was very rich so he married a woman who was very beautiful.
And that tends to translate down into the kids.
So they've got toys and social status and symbols and goodies and looks and so on.
Lord knows what they're doing at a public school.
But that is something that, if you've not experienced it, I think it's pretty hard to imagine what it's like to have that kind of Safety net, that kind of confidence.
They simply could not fail.
They simply could not fail.
And that, I think, is quite an important thing to understand.
But I'd like to talk about the other side, the darker side, the quasi-fascistic side of the upper classes, because I think that's really, really important.
And what I mean by that is that there is...
Ooh, I smell cookies.
Oh, distraction, distraction, stay on target.
On the other side of the coin of the upper classes is the moral manipulators.
And their human capital is literally human capital, right?
It's the ownership of the unconscious of others through the manipulation of history as religion, if I just did this on the last podcast, which may be of interest to you.
But these are the people who manipulate.
at all times when it comes to moral issues and they actually end up owning people through guilt and through manipulation and these are sort of political masters and the media and the intellectuals and the professors and all these sorts of people who just make up extraordinary amounts of cow dung and spread it like manure not like manure,
it is manure over the potential harvest grounds of humanity And so their human capital is literally, they have the power or the capacity to own the labor of human beings through guilt.
Now this can occur at a micro level in the family, right?
I mean, as I've said many times, the family is neither innately good or bad.
Like marriage, it's neither innately good or bad.
It takes a lot of investment.
It takes a lot of capital investment and investment in your EQ and your humanity.
It takes a lot of time and effort to break bad emotional habits, like if you're a yeller or a hitter or something like that, or you have this sort of knee-jerk reaction to put your kids down or something.
It takes a lot of It takes a lot of investment.
I mean, lord, lord, lord.
I mean, how many books did I read?
Years of therapy, three hours a week, 20,000 bucks or more, just on the therapy itself, not to mention everything else.
Countless hours working on journals.
That was like a part-time job for years.
That's a huge investment.
If I had spent that time and energy on furthering my education, I would have had a PhD instead of just a master's.
Just a master's. But I think that's really important.
It is a huge investment to up your EQ, as those who are fighting to expand their humanity can definitely attest.
It is a tough row to hoe to up your EQ. Now, I believe, I mean, what I do believe is that through upping my EQ, EQ, I'm so sorry, I should have mentioned this, Emotional intelligence.
It's like IQ for abstract intellectual reasoning, but it's more around empathy and sympathy and self-knowledge and so on.
So I've invested huge amounts of time and energy into that, probably the equivalent to my education.
And I think that the payoff for that has been...
I'm not gonna get divorced.
You know, I hope that and I believe that my daughter is going to grow up to love me as she gains knowledge of virtue and greater knowledge of me.
Now she likes me because I'm a source of pleasure to her, which is great and I think appropriate.
But I think that's one aspect that is...
It's the payoff, right?
And given how expensive and depressing divorces are, and how much they, you know, crush the very living lifeblood out of your heart and soul, and how tragic and awful it is to split children's custody and so on, I think it was a damn good investment.
Not just in terms of the happiness, but in terms of the actual...
Sorry, I'm just trying to adjust this.
Just in terms of the actual cost-benefit.
It's been worth it. Now, one of the things that is going to occur, I believe, and I can't guarantee this, but this is my belief as it stands or at the moment, at the present, one of the things that is going to occur is that when I get old, and for those who are younger, this doesn't mean my current age.
When I get really old, 70, 80, 90, when I get really old, I will have, you know, hopefully, you know, if they haven't died in some horrible accident, a wife and a daughter and perhaps some friends who will, you know, be there and help me and so on as I age and need help be there and help me and so on as I age and need help with getting around and getting fed and bathing myself and all
Now, you have this choice, right?
When you want resources when you get older, and everybody does need those resources, right?
They need trips to the hospital, to the doctor, help around the house, expensive things maybe need to install, you know, the little seat things that go up and down stairs and so on.
You need those things, you need those resources.
One of the things that occurs is you have that choice, right?
So you can either... Use the positive economics, as I call it, where you sort of invest in the quality of your relationships with people and then you reap the rewards of that quality later on in life because they want to help you because they care and they want you to be happy and so on.
It's not out of guilt. It's out of a desire to see you happy and so on.
But to do that, you have to really up your EQ and be really positive and empathetic and kind and compassionate and considerate.
Addition to their life.
That sort of irresistible depositing in the bank of relationships.
But that requires a significant amount of investment.
A part-time job called self-improvement, which goes on for years.
If you've come from a dysfunctional background.
If you haven't, then obviously bypass step number one, or at least to some degree.
Self-knowledge is a virtue, irrespective of your origins, but it's a greater virtue, I think, if your origins are more difficult.
But you have this other option, which is to not invest in self-improvement and to continue to act out badly, such as your habit as a parent or as a husband.
And then people are less likely to want to help you when you get older, right?
And if you can get people to have this heavy, leaden sense of obligation towards you, despite the fact that you have not Invested in improving your relationship with those people, then you plunder, right? You get the goodies without having done the work.
You get the pay without having to show up at the job.
And of course a lot of people, some people would have too much pride to continue that for a long period of time, but certainly a significant number of people are more than willing to take the goodies without having invested, right?
To reap the rewards without having put in the labor for self-knowledge and self-improvement and virtuous actions.
With regards to others.
And so there's a great skill that comes out of creating obligations through negative economics.
It's a very powerful, parasitical kind of skill set that you develop.
And statism and religion and, to a certain degree, negative aspects of certain family structures come directly out of this.
Right? I'm not going to do the work to earn Love.
The effects of love.
Helping you when you get older or helping you with other things.
Wanting to spend time with you at all.
I'm not going to work to gain those things, but I'm going to create moral obligations to provide these things to me.
It's a way of stealing.
It's a counterfeiting. I'm going to create obligations.
So rather than earn...
You understand the parallels here between guilt-inducing parenting and the state and religion, of course.
Rather than earn your business, I'm going to attack you if you don't give me your business, so to speak.
So rather than earn your tax money by being incredibly productive and helping the poor and being a good DRO, I'm simply going to attack you and throw you in jail if you don't give me The money, right?
GMTFM, give me the frack and money, is the state, right?
And in the same way, with religion, rather than having people respect your arguments because of the quality and the empiricism and the work and the compassion and the time and the philosophy and so on, that you put into creating quality arguments and perspectives, Hopefully I'm one of those people.
Rather than do that, rather than gain adherence to a particular worldview or to philosophical arguments based on the quality of those arguments, you simply create a God who attacks anyone who disagrees with you, right?
Who doesn't give you the, quote, respect and, of course, the money that you demand.
You simply create a God that will attack them and throw them in hell and guilt and all this kind of stuff.
In the same way, rather than earn the resources that you need when you get old through...
I'm not saying you do it to get these resources, but rather than earn love and the effects of love, which is an investment of resources when you need them, when you're no longer of utility to others, but instead become a demand upon them that they want to do it because they love you, rather than earn love or earn taxes or earn allegiance to...
To moral arguments.
You simply will attack people if they don't give you what you want.
Right, so the government will attack you with the police, military.
The priests will attack you with hellfire and damnation and guilt and so on, with evil.
And your parents will, if this is the family structure you're in, your parents will attack you with ingratitude and selfishness and give you all these kinds of negative labels.
If you don't provide them what they want, right?
And because they haven't earned it, they have to end up attacking you.
So I'm not sort of here to pick on, in particular, the state or the church or particular kinds of parents, but what I do want to point out is that the upper class is, I believe, at its most dangerous when it works to create This sense of unilateral, guilt-ridden, unearned obligation on the part of citizens towards the state, towards obeying the president.
And see, it doesn't matter whether it's left or right.
These both occur the same way, right?
I mean, for the Republicans, you have to obey the president because he's like dad, and for the Democrats, because he's like mom.
But still, it's the same.
It is the same kind of nonsense, right?
And the upper classes that are the most dangerous are those who create this guilt-inducing and horrendous mythology that is used to extract the effects of love and virtue from people through evil and attack.
And since, of course, intellectuals can't come around and wag their fingers at us and so on, what they do They create horizontal attacks among classes.
As I've talked about in RTR, we attack each other because that's sort of what we're trained to do.
It's a very efficient way. It's a virus that goes into particular classes and attacks horizontally if we don't cough up the effects of virtue and provide them to those who are Exactly the opposite of virtuous.
So, taxes are an obligation that we must pay because we live in a civilized society and the government has all these good things for us and blah blah blah.
And there's a sense of obligation.
And if we say, well, I don't want to pay my taxes because I think it's immoral, I don't like kowtowing to the use of force and blah blah blah, then other people will attack you.
And they've been trained to do that.
And it's the upper classes that are quasi-fascistic who create this cultural environment wherein we attack each other, not even for our actions, but even for basic ideas about, say, questioning the virtue of the state.
I mean, questioning the virtue of violence, or even pointing out that we have this ambiguous relationship to violence.
Shocking, though it is to even say it.
And these people who create this predatory system of horizontal attacks, and each one tends to be tailored to particular classes, right?
The lower class ones tend to be more macho, the middle class ones tend to be more anxiety-based, and the upper class ones tend to be more, you know, we got ours kind of thing.
And it's around pride, right?
Like we're at the top of the food chain, let's not rock the boat.
But those who have the skill to create these unchosen positive obligations, who have people, who can convince people to accept that there is a contract that they're welching on if they don't provide the corrupt with the resources that are only really justly earned by the virtuous, those people are incredibly valuable.
And they're incredibly well paid.
I mean, it is the greatest farming improvement, right, is to allow people a certain amount of economic freedom and then have them attack each other for questioning the moral nature of society and our ambivalent relationship, as I recently talked about, to violence in society.
It's an incredibly useful skill.
It's the ultimate. Fertilizer in terms of growing the human crops and livestock of tax farming.
These people are incredibly valuable, so they're really well paid and they're given a lot of media time, a lot of media air.
And this works on two ways or in two levels.
The first is the people who directly come up with this stuff, right?
The Peggy Noonan's and the Friedman's and so on, right?
They all come up with this stuff and it just becomes the usual, right?
Even Christopher Hitchens, right?
He was interviewed recently on EconTalk about George Orwell.
It's a very interesting interview, if you get a chance to listen to it.
And, you know, he's saying, he talks about how people who have problems with the medical bills and so on, that it's not free to be frightened of your medical bills.
Come on, he says in a very aggressive way.
How could you even think otherwise? What nonsense!
And those people are very well paid to make these arguments, as is Michael Moore and so on.
And so that's sort of the direct propagandists who create the moral necessity or absolute of, quote, caring for others by using a large amount of violence to shuffle things around.
Those people are sort of one aspect of things.
But the other aspect of things is everybody else who creates the sort of zone of silence, right?
It's the cone of silence spell that is cast over society.
And you simply can't talk about the coercive realities at the root of social hierarchies.
If you're like a movie star or a writer or anything like that, you can't be...
A movie star and an anarchist, right?
I mean, you can to some degree be a movie star and an atheist.
I think Daniel Radcliffe, the Harry Potter dude, has come out of the cubicle, come out of the confessional, so to speak, and revealed himself as an atheist.
You can call yourself an atheist, but you can only call yourself an atheist as an opinion.
You can't make the case from first principles.
And if you do, then you will be roundly mocked and ridiculed and attacked.
I have some experience with that.
But you can say, I'm an atheist and here's why.
You can just say, I'm an atheist and then people can say, well, I guess he just doesn't like God or he has some emotional problem or something like that.
So, I think that aspect of things is really important to understand.
That there are those who create all these positive obligations as a huge cone of silence.
Everybody gets this, deep down.
Everybody gets this. I mean, try to imagine being a movie star or even a famous actor of any kind or artist.
And, you know, you sort of talk to your publicist and you say, well, I want to come out and talk about the violence.
In the society that we live in, I'd like to write a book about voluntarism or anarchism or advocate for a stateless society, your publicist will say, are you crazy?
Are you fucking nuts?
You'll never work again in this town.
You're paid to act. You're not paid to be some armchair pseudo amateur philosopher, right?
Someone else already has that job.
So, there's this cone of silence that is the price of being in the upper class.
The price of being in the upper class is to exaggerate the peacefulness of society and minimize the violence.
And, of course, on the other side of the coin, to be in the lower class is to artificially exaggerate the violence in society, like the man's going to get you and it's all rigged and this kind of stuff, and to minimize the peaceful cooperation aspect of society.
See, Really good ideas, really good true ideas, moral ideas that threaten this avoidant harvesting system of the corrupt upper classes.
Ideas like strong atheism and anarchism and questioning the innate virtue of unchosen positive obligations or unearned positive obligations The universalization of ethics, right?
Because all corrupt power relies on absolute but non-universal ethics that are portrayed as universal, right?
Property rights are good, but you can't talk about taxation as a violation of those, right?
I mean, this is why UPB has been such a 25-year crusade for me.
To achieve and to propagate because if you want to end tyranny and war, it's nothing more or less than absolutely universalizing the ethics.
I mean, that's the only lever that will fundamentally end and oppose injustice and institutional violence in the world.
The only way to do it is to accept the universalization of values and work with that because The universalization of values.
True, real, valid ethics.
I mean, you simply can't talk about where the universalization breaks down, because the whole point is to create a universalization of ethical obligations on the part of the owned, on the part of the citizens, not on the part of the leaders and the owners, right?
Unchosen positive obligations.
We're only morally enforceable from a pragmatic ownership standpoint upon the slaves, not upon the masters.
To universalize the ethics that are imposed upon the slaves ends slavery, fundamentally.
It ends slavery.
To universalize the ethics that are claimed to be universal but only actually applied to the slaves.
To actually extend that universality is to end the ownership of man by man.
To end the state.
To end... And to end corrupt injustices within certain kinds of family structures.
And actually extending this universalization is such a naturally great idea and such an irresistible idea.
You understand, right?
It is such an irresistible idea.
When an ethic is claimed to be universal but is only imposed upon you as a slave, it can't be universal.
Resisted or rejected by those who've imposed it upon you because they have claimed it as universal.
Right? So, if respect for property, initiation of force is bad for the slave, and the slave says, well, then it must also be bad for the master.
There's no answer to it.
Right? The only answer is aggression and obfuscation, which persistence and reason and evidence will always overcome.
But it's unanswerable to universalize the ethics that are inflicted universally upon the slaves, but claim to be universal in nature.
To actually stretch the universalization to include the masters ends the master-slave relationship.
And because it is imposed as universal by the masters, they can't resist it and say, well, no, it's not universal.
Because if it's not universal, then why should it apply to the slaves?
And because there's no good answer to the simple stretching out of universality to include the masters, Because there's no good answer.
In fact, it is revealed within seconds.
That's how close we are to this kind of reason, to this kind of understanding.
It takes literally seconds to blow the whole bullshit bandwagon right off the map.
Right off the mental map.
That's how close we are.
There's no good answer, and so you simply can't talk about it.
There's no good answer.
And all of the answers which are used only dig the hole deeper.
There is no good answer as to why the ethics claimed as universal should not be accepted as universal.
And because there's no good answer to this, you simply can't talk about it.
And people are hugely paid and hugely rewarded For either expressly corrupting the language and the thoughts and the reasons of others or are hugely paid and only paid as long as they avoid talking about these basic facts.
That to me is the essence of class conflict.
And that's why I believe philosophy is the only solution to end these artificial divisions.
Thank you so much for listening and watching and donating and participating.
▲
Export Selection