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Sept. 27, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:20
1468 School Sucks - Freedomain Radio Interview with Brett Veinotte
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Hello. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, I can.
Fantastic. How's it going? Good, Steph.
How are you? Oh, I'm just great. Thank you.
Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time on a Sunday to have a chat.
And I just wanted to compliment you on a most excellent podcast that a listener of mine has turned me on to.
I've just finished the last few episodes and just wanted to say it's...
Really, really well done and well-argued, well-positioned and just wanted to congratulate you on a really, really great podcast and I just wanted to give you the opportunity to give this so that my listeners can get a hold of it, the place where they can go to get the School Sucks podcast.
Well, the actual site for the show is schoolsucks.podomatic.com.
But my website, which also has links to all of these episodes, is edelution.com, and that's edu-lu-tion.com.
Fantastic. Well, I must say, because when I start listening to somebody who has some great ideas and you really have some fantastic insights, there's always this tension because I start listening and I'm like, oh, I hope I can really like this guy.
I hope that he's going to go all the way.
I hope he's going to be principle-based.
And so on and I just wanted to say that it was a great relief to hear you go full tilt boogie on principles and it was a beautiful thing and I just wanted to congratulate you again for that leap.
I mean you're a younger man than I and to be so far ahead is a beautiful thing to see so congratulations for that.
Well I understand.
Thank you very much and I understand what you're saying because I was actually having kind of a disappointing morning listening to A guy that I think you debated with recently, Jan Helfeld?
Ah, yes. Who I had discovered maybe a year ago, and I thought he did some, what appeared to be some pretty root-striking interviews with political figures, but I was just listening to a debate between Helfeld and Larkin Rose, and boy, was I disappointed.
Yeah, I must say that I don't think it was his shining star moment when I was debating with him.
I found it Mind-bendingly reversal, like I suddenly felt like he was the politician and I was Jan Helfeld.
But it does happen that way sometimes for sure.
And that's one of the frustrating things with minarchism, right?
So when I was listening to your podcast and you were really going, as you say, to strike at the root of evil, I was like, don't be a minarchist!
Come on, baby! Don't be a minarchist!
And you sailed right over that hurdle, at least if I understood your podcast directly.
You sailed over that hurdle beautifully.
So thank you.
Thank you for that. Well, I felt that it was important that if I'm going to be doing a show about the problems with the public education system, that right from the get-go, right out of the gate, I'm very clear with people who are listening who might be new to these ideas, that I'm not in any way suggesting some kind of political action as the solution.
And I thought That that was something that I could clear up in like 15 minutes, just sort of as like an aside episode.
It wound up taking me 160 minutes over three episodes, but At least I was thorough.
Well, you know, given my volume of output, I'm never going to criticize somebody else for lengthy podcasts, and I thought they were very good.
And, of course, the challenge is reaching outside the compound of those who really understand the non-aggression principle.
Reaching out that compound is – it's almost like you have to reinvent the language.
It's like you're breaking people out of Orwellian doublespeak.
And it's almost like if the school system wasn't as effective in propagandizing children, you wouldn't actually need three episodes to remind them that statism is force and participation in the political process – It's like joining the mafia to turn it into the United Way.
It really doesn't work. That's not the purpose of the mafia.
So, I mean, it's almost like If you hadn't had to be that long, you wouldn't need to do the podcast to begin with because there wouldn't be that amount of propaganda.
So I thought you did a really concise job.
The style is great.
Your metaphors, I think, are wonderful.
I can only envy the degree to which you avoid verbal tics and tangents like I seem to be consistently plagued with.
It was great and really enjoyable.
I'd like to ask you a couple of questions if I could.
We can take this conversation any way you want to, but I have a couple of questions to ask if that's alright.
Absolutely. So you've mentioned Ayn Rand and Hans Hoppe and so on and the Lou Rockwell site, all of which are fantastic resources for certain kinds of education.
Can you tell me a little bit about your progress or your journey towards a sort of principled or philosophical interpretation of the world?
Because it's a long journey for many people, and you certainly didn't start where you ended, otherwise you may not have gone into the educational field to begin with, so I'd like to know a little bit about that process, if that's alright.
Sure, absolutely. Well, I think, and I never mean to generalize, but I think it's a relatively common path That people come to an understanding about government-run education systems through the discovery of the ideas of liberty.
For me, the path was the reverse.
I became aware of, obviously, the perils associated with this government schooling, and that subsequently led me to the full embrace of the philosophy of liberty, but also eventually the principle of non-aggression.
And I would say it was a journey that took several years, but to be completely honest, my transition from political libertarianism or from minarchism was something that took place relatively recently.
I had in this past January, just to show how...
Oh, you know what? I owe you about 10,000 apologies.
I just put my daughter down to sleep.
My wife's out, and she normally sleeps for an hour and a half.
I really, really apologize, but she has just woken back up.
I've just heard her on the monitor.
Can we pick this up shortly if you're around today?
And I really, really do apologize.
It's most rude, but this is very unusual for her.
No, I'm available until about 12.30 today, and then I would be available in the evening tonight.
Whatever you think you need to do, I'm certainly – I'm going to be busy from about 12.30 probably until about 3, but I can be accommodating otherwise.
Well, that's really fantastic.
I really do apologize.
This is part of the excitement of working from home with a baby, though this is very rare.
So I can send you an email.
My wife should be back shortly, and then we should be able to pick this back up.
And again, we'll start again from the top if that's all right, but I really do apologize.
Yeah, yeah, that's fine.
Whatever works best for you.
Do we want to just be on the safe side just so I can be sure that I'm available as well?
Do we want to say sometime after 3?
I assume you're in the Toronto area?
I am. Okay, so that's like, we're Eastern time, so sometime after 3 p.m.
would work? Oh, you know what?
I think my wife is actually...
Oh, I'm just looking on the video monitor.
My wife has actually gone to get her.
So she's up. I thought my wife was out, but she's back.
So let's continue.
I'll just snip out this little bit of annoying interruption.
Sure. So sorry, if you would just like to continue with this story of sort of how you came about it.
You said it was a pretty standard journey.
Yeah, and it took some time, but I was pursuing a graduate degree as well as a certificate to be a certified public school teacher, and I started to stumble across some of the work of Jonathan Taylor Gatto,
and that was very eye-opening to me about the true nature of the public education system, and I think that realizing What the goals were behind the system and how the system had been borrowed from the Prussian Empire, which became the German state at the turn of the 20th century, and we all know how that worked out for them.
But what was really behind, as far as the true intentions of the system, was very eye-opening to me about the nature of government.
Like, why is it so essential for a state power to employ a system like this?
And I think that was sort of the initial doorway opening towards libertarianism first and then ultimately towards voluntarism.
Yeah, it's tragic the degree to which people don't understand the history of Prussia and its descent into totalitarianism in that, as you I'm sure are aware, The Prussia under Bismarck was the first society, in modern times at least, to introduce old age pensions, welfare payments and so on, that as we saw in the Roman Empire and just about every other empire since, that which starts with the bribery of citizens ends up with the enslavement of citizens.
It's how the Mafia works, right?
We'll give you stuff and we'll end up owning you.
And that is that the people who get the stuff get some goodies to begin with and the people usually a generation or two later or more who end up being owned aren't quite so happy.
But it is – nothing comes for nothing and the price that people pay for free goodies from the government is truly tragic and it's sad, of course, that we have to keep relearning this lesson.
But it's inevitable that in the state education system, this lesson would never be explicated.
Well, I think if you could – following what you're saying, I think if you could learn all the lessons of a violent gang in one lifetime – like if I was the leader of a violent gang in some sort of state of nature just let's say thousands of years ago – and I'm basically just a predator on...
Societies of people who have figured out how to live cooperatively and produce things agriculturally or, you know, trade or whatever.
And, you know, I spot from sort of the over the hillside this little productive community and I say, you know, I'm gonna go kill all those people and take all their stuff.
So I go and I, with my, you know, herd of, you know, violent people behind me, Destroy this community, take all their stuff, and then unfortunately, they don't make any more stuff for me.
So I learned a valuable lesson here that I don't go and kill them.
I just go in periodically and take their stuff.
Well, after a while, this gets to be a headache.
So you know what? I'm going to move in.
And in order to give myself legitimacy, Maybe I can just make some casual concessions over time.
Because I'm a small group of violent people trying to control a large group of productive people.
So I don't want to make it so obvious.
So what I would do is make concessions.
I'm going to take your stuff, but I'll put up a building here.
I'll throw some pavement down there.
And over time, one of the concessions that I would realize that I would have to make...
Is that I would want to be providing these people some form of education because that could perpetuate my predation generation after generation.
Yeah, and I think that's quite right, and it certainly has been my opinion, though.
I think it's impossible to prove anthropologically that what we call philosophy was not invented, or what we call morality in philosophy was not invented in the Socratic tradition of pursuing truth and consistent principles, but rather it was invented because those who are young The warriors who have the sort of strength and brutality to control citizens face the problem of getting older,
right? If you set up this standard which says whoever is the physically strongest and the most ruthless and violent ends up owning society, then those who are young benefit.
And as they age and they become weaker and rickety, they face the problem of being overthrown by whoever is younger and stronger.
And so what they did was they invented ethics and principles, which originally was simply a form of self-attack and guilt over defying your elders.
And that allowed them to maintain their control even when their physical strength began to wane.
And I think that is – I mean, again, it's impossible to really prove, but to me it would be a logical evolution of the idea.
And so we're actually attempting to – when we talk about ethics and principles, we're attempting to wrestle a set of conceptual tools which really were around guilt and self-attack and self-recrimination.
We're attempting to take these tools which were invented by evil people to control others by having them self-attack rather than having to beat them.
And we're trying to turn them to good.
And that is a very, very difficult thing to do because evil people, I think, understand the power of principles and ethics much better than good people because it was really invented to serve their ends.
Absolutely.
And I got an interesting education yesterday from a student on relativism.
Just the quick backstory is I was teaching a group of five kids a class that I do periodically, sort of an all-in-one, one-day, one-shot at preparation for the SAT, the most common college admissions standardized test in the United States.
And I was talking to them about essay writing.
And I was saying, it's very important to recognize who's reading these essays that you're going to be writing.
These are not, you know, Nobel Prize winning novelists.
These are English teachers trying to make five or six hundred extra bucks in their spare time.
So when you're given a prompt to write an essay, the last thing you want to write about is something like The Catcher in the Rye.
You know, a book that an English teacher has read a hundred times, they've written fifty tests for, and they're frankly sick of hearing about.
So you need to find a way to put yourself into the position of the teacher over these people.
That gives you a good advantage.
You become an instructor instead of somebody begging for a good score on an essay.
So I was prompting the students in this class, who are all juniors and seniors in high school, to tell me some things that they felt like they had a really good grasp of and a really good understanding of.
And one of the students was very excited about an ethics class that he was taking at his public school.
Now, I'm thinking these two ideas, ethics and public school, and I'm picturing a chalkboard that says violence is heroic, theft helps society, but what my thoughts, what I was imagining, didn't even prepare me for what this child said next.
He said, do you know Do you know that what Adolf Hitler did and what Mother Teresa did were equally justified because they both thought that they were doing something good?
Now, I have four hours, mind you, based on a contract that I've made with these kids' parents to provide them as much information as possible to boost their SAT scores.
But I did have to halt the class at that point for about 15 minutes to address this issue because I was so alarmed by this statement that this kid had made.
I really was, I couldn't even believe what I was hearing.
That's a public school ethics education, I guess.
Right. And this is, of course, the great challenge that if we say to children, ethics is incredibly complicated, which, you know, when we're young, when we're very little children, both, I mean, our parents to some degree and our teachers in particular, will tell us that ethics is very simple, right? Don't push, don't steal, don't hit, don't grab, don't take, don't, you know, don't yell, don't call names.
I mean, it's all very simple and very absolutist.
And then when you take those Ethics that are inscribed on the foreheads of children in very clear and simple text and you apply that to moral rules as they get older, suddenly everything is reversed, right?
It's like the rules are absolute when they're directed at the slaves and when the slaves then take the same rules and apply them to the masters, the masters get all kind of foggy and relativistic and so on.
But if ethics are really that complicated that it takes – there are people who have – And if ethics is really that complicated, then nobody's bound by it, right?
It's like if you have to actually have a PhD in physics in order to throw a baseball, then nobody can really be responsible for throwing a baseball.
And if you have to have a PhD in philosophy to get any kind of clear grasp on ethics, which even seems to elude those people, then clearly we can't be bound by that, which almost nobody can understand.
And that's why I've sort of I've tried as best I can to try and explicate simple and clear moral statements that are universalized because if it's that complicated, nobody's bound by it.
And if it's not that complicated, then of course the rulers are bound by it, which brings down their ownership paradigm.
Indeed. And as far as this example yesterday was concerned… The real danger was not that this student was learning that what Hitler did was good, because I don't think that that was the message.
I think the message was that ethics are relative.
Different rules apply to different people.
So the question that I asked is, I said, can you imagine if we set up different standards for different groups of people, the power disparity, like if one group And I didn't mean to get this much into it, but I said, if one group has the right,
let's say, to initiate, to be the first doer of force against another group, can you imagine the power disparity that would grow out of that kind of relativism?
Because he was just trying to, like, public school is all about, you know, sorting things into groups.
You're an absolutist or you're a relativist.
And when I started talking, he was like, oh, you're just an absolutist.
And I said, you know, I think there's a little bit more than just sorting people into groups.
School's very good at that, but this is a little bit more intricate, while simple, a little bit more intricate than just calling a person one thing or another.
Right, and the fact that children can come out of public school with this amazing, again, Orwellian ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time, the very statement, ethics is relative, well, ethics is that which other people are bound to follow because it is an objective rule.
It's like science, right?
It's like saying science is mysticism, black is white, up is down.
To say ethics is relative is to say that which is universal and absolute is subjective, local, and preference-based.
And, of course, that makes no sense whatsoever.
We can say something like opinions are relative or personal tastes are relative, but those things are not ethics.
Ethics has this peculiar power that other people must be bound by it, and they know that as children because they're bound to show up in school or, as you mentioned in the show, they face truancy laws.
Their parents are obligated under threat of force to pay for their education.
So that's all absolutist, right?
The rules that point down towards the slaves are all violent and absolutist.
And then when the slaves take up this weapon of ethics to defend themselves against this violence, the fog machines start pumping out and the intellectuals start baffle-gabbing everyone and everything becomes relative.
But of course, if everything is relative, then we can't have any rules or laws or government.
Everywhere you point, points to no state, right?
Indeed, and what I'm realizing is built into this training of relativistic morality and obedience of public education is also this defense mechanism, this emotional defense mechanism that people of my parents' generation are extremely good at, which is rationalizations for why it has to be just exactly this way.
And one of the things that I've always encouraged people to do is we see reality.
We see what's going on in the world and with respect to the state.
And I have to think that it requires an incredible amount of thought and creativity and imagination to make these kinds of rationalizations up for this violence and predation.
And what I always encourage people to do is Could you just do an experiment where you try to channel some of the imagination necessary to rationalize the violence of strangers who don't care about you into imagining a world where their agenda doesn't have to be superimposed onto our lives?
It's a worthwhile thought experiment.
No, it is. It is absolutely.
And getting people to think in that kind of way, or we could just say to think at all.
And I like the way that you start your podcast with the, what do you call them, conceptual thought exercises?
Is that right? The critical thinking question?
The critical thinking question. I think that's a wonderful way of getting people to start because, you know, really fundamentally we're not trying to teach people conclusions, right?
You know, people will say to me, oh, you're an anarchist, or oh, you're an atheist, and they want to, as you say, put that label on.
And that's all nonsense.
But that's like calling... Richard Dawkins, an evolutionist.
It's like, no, he's a biologist.
Evolution is just one of the conclusions that rationally follows from the application of the scientific method.
Anarchism or a stateless society is that which simply follows from a consistent application of the non-aggression principle.
So it is – everybody wants to put a label because that way they don't have to review the process of thinking that gets you to those conclusions.
They can put you in a category and say, well, you're an atheist or you're a creationist or something, and they're equally just irrational and bigoted opinions, so I can dismiss them all.
What people always want to avoid and why they label people so consistently is they really, really desperately want to avoid the process of thinking that gets you to a particular conclusion because, A, that means that they have to look at the huge smoking crater in their brain where the ability to process information in that rational and empirical way is.
And secondly, they will irresistibly be drawn down the road of coming up with conclusions that will be startling and alarming to themselves and to those around them.
Absolutely. I think that there's a sort of convenience associated with those labels, too, because I've noticed when I'm expressing my ideas, and I often find that it's very...
I participate in a lot of statist-type discussions in my personal life with family, and this is something that I'm really trying to get away from because it's not incredibly productive.
But I find myself just sort of lobbing my ideas into conversations that are already in progress.
And it's very difficult for them to be integrated in a way that makes sense in the context of that conversation.
But there's also this sorting that the people will do.
You're an anarchist. Your anarchist is probably the best because that's something that people feel really comfortable arguing Right.
So, like, Brett, you can talk for two hours, but at the end of those two hours, I'm going to call you one word, and the discussion's over, and I win.
So, they want, I've noticed, to sort you into a category that they've already determined that they're comfortable and confident in arguing against.
Or really just dismissing, right?
More appropriately, I would say really just dismissing, yes.
What was it that prompted you to start this podcast and got you into that immediate?
Because obviously you have spent a lot of time and very productive time thinking about this stuff.
And I also wanted to compliment you on your argument against participation in the political process in particular.
I love the way that they're just kind of luring you into a kind of quicksand, you know, hey, come join the PTA, come join the school board and so on, because they know the system is so impervious to change that it will bleed off and waste the energies of people who would actually be interested in going for alternatives.
And, of course, it's a ridiculous thing to say.
I mean, if I don't like what's in a particular store, I don't have to join that store and try and work my way up to be a board member in order to get them to order the pair of pants or the kind of fruit that I want to wear or eat.
I simply go to a store that suits my needs better.
I don't have to plow myself into an entire organizational fetish to get change in the free market.
But, of course, that's what's invited us.
I was a great argument against participation in the political process.
That's something that I'm more recent to.
So I really appreciated that.
But what was it that got you up and running?
Because you put a lot of thought into the stuff you're.
Your arguments are really well articulated and communicated.
So after the certain amount of preparation, you just decided to dive into the Olympics of podcasting.
Was there any particular trigger that happened in the short run to get you moving on that?
Yeah, sure. I would actually credit another show that I had been appearing on as a guest host.
I'm guessing that you and probably several of your listeners are familiar with a show called Complete Liberty Podcast hosted by Wes Bertrand.
I'm not familiar with it, but I'm going to make a note of that because I think you mentioned it in the podcast that there are two or three of you that discuss these topics.
Is that right? Yeah.
And last December, I think it was, I had initially contacted Wes and To say, you know, I live in New Hampshire.
I'm really on board with what you're doing.
I've read your book. I'd like to at least audition, you know, to have a conversation that maybe you and I could get together and discuss education.
And at the time, I was still really sort of breaking out of the minarchism thing.
This was like 10 months ago.
And I wanted to go on Wes Bertrand's show and talk about the efficiency problems with public education.
So within that, we thought that we could do this in like an hour.
We wound up devoting six shows to the topic of public education.
And I really felt that that experience, and his work too, helped me get out from sort of swinging in the branches of that tree of evil Down towards the root of it.
And after those six episodes, like I do say in my podcast, I appear on that show relatively frequently.
We're actually recording one today.
And I get a lot of satisfaction from that.
But I really wanted to do something that was exclusively mine and exclusively really on the topic of education.
And so that was...
I saw how accessible I guess it was, this podcast world, how accessible it was through doing that with him, but really just recently within the last couple months did I take that final step in setting all this stuff up, figuring out the technology, and obviously it's a continual learning process.
I'm still trying to, the sound quality issues are somewhat mystifying.
Yeah, I'll send you a link.
I have a video on all the technology that I use to produce mine, which may be of use to you.
I mean, that's the one thing that I would say is that the content is fantastic, but yes, sound quality might need a little bit of a notch up, but there's easy ways to achieve that, but it took me years to figure it out, sort of the best way to do it, so I'll pass it along to you.
It might be of some utility.
And also, could you provide the link, if you know it, by heart of the Complete Liberty podcast so that people can check that out as well?
Yeah, you can get to the main site just at completeliberty.com.
It's linked all over my pages as well.
And the podcast is available on iTunes.
So it's usually a discussion, two people, three people.
The first 10 episodes of that podcast are Wes's book, Complete Liberty, the Demise of the State and the Rise of Voluntary America, which is a very good book for introducing political people to the ideas of liberty.
And that helped me a great deal as well.
So I think those would probably be the best ways to learn more about that show.
And what are your goals for the – well, I guess, first of all, how often are you doing these shows and what are your goals for the future with regards to the School Sucks podcast?
I'm trying to do a show about every 7 to 10 or 12 days, I think is realistic given my schedule at this point.
What I'm trying to do initially is lay the groundwork about a series of lessons that I believe are embedded into the curriculum of public education.
That obviously not only perpetuate the state and its institutions, but really cripple and destroy the individual.
The long-term goal is a little cloudy at this point.
You know, really, I was honestly just thinking it's time that I go on the record here somehow.
Like I was saying, I participate in a lot of discussions with friends and family.
That I feel go absolutely nowhere.
I've logged hours and hours and hours and hours feeling like I was talking but nobody was listening.
And I really wanted to, maybe just even for my own sanity, to start putting something together that was a concise and planned out presentation of these ideas.
Yeah, and it certainly does help you to get more into the orbit of people who are willing to rip off the scabs of propaganda and start really healing from first principles.
And that can be tough. I mean, the focus on principles or the inability to resist the inevitable conclusions of principles does not seem to be a widely scattered human trait and therefore to sort of expect that it's going to be in your immediate circle would be unusual to say the least.
And certainly most of the people that I've talked to who've attempted to bring philosophy to friends and family I mean, the number of them who've actually succeeded is very, very, very few.
So, I mean, there is this enormous resistance to principles.
Principles, you know, they're like a nuclear strike on prejudice, and people just don't like to think of themselves as a smoking crater that they have to rebuild from scratch.
And there is this very strong resistance.
I think everybody – I mean I've always argued everybody's a genius and everyone's a philosopher and everybody knows deep down in their heart where a focus on first principles, rationalism and empiricism is going to lead.
And people just kind of shy away from that like you're inviting them to go skydiving with a handkerchief, right?
Here, hold this above you and you'll be fine.
And they're like, well, that just seems kind of nuts to me.
So I think not – I did do a – if it's useful to you at all, I did a speech in New Hampshire I guess in March of this year called the Against Me Argument and you can find it linked on the homepage of freedomainradio.com.
You might want to watch that.
It is a way of I think immediately bringing the coercion of the state into conversations with people by basically saying, so if you support taxation, you support the use of violence against me.
Like, can you look me in the eye and say, I think that you should be thrown in jail for disagreeing with me?
And that's a very powerful way, I think, to bring this to people.
But, of course, it can be quite volatile in terms of the relationship.
I agree, and I think it's one of the most well-organized arguments that I've heard.
I think there's all these different levels.
Like, this morning I spent this time listening to Larkin Rose versus Jan Helfand.
So I think we start with the debate between people who are political, which is, once the knife is in all the way, Which way do we twist?
And then there's the debate between political and minarchism, which is like, how far does the knife have to go in?
And then the debate between minarchism and voluntarism, which is like, are you so sure we need the knife?
And then finally, beyond that, outside of all that, there's an actually meaningful and productive discussion about what do we do once the knife is put away?
And I find Myself obviously talking about putting the knife away, which with people who are all excited about how they're going to twist it, and that's incredibly frustrating.
But I did give that argument of yours a run-through, because I did hear that speech.
I did watch the video, and I was very impressed by it, and I did...
Give it a run-through, probably with not the best first person to try it out on, and he shut down.
It was a complete emotional shutdown, and he just kept repeating to himself, it's not force, it's not force.
And just like if he said it enough times to himself, that incantation would make it true.
There is this terribly tragic, and you can see this in Jan Hellfeld's interviews, there's this terribly tragic The circularity that, you know, it's like getting stuck in this hyperkinetic revolving door, and I'm sure you've experienced this a number of times when you talk with statists or even monarchists, is that they say, you know, you say, well, statism is the initiation of force.
And they say, it's not because...
Because there's a social contract, because you get to vote, because you can join the system and change it, because the old Socratic argument that you can leave the country if you disagree with the laws and you're free to go, as if we are, right?
It's like saying that an animal that gets to choose another cage in the zoo is the same as an animal who's free, right?
And so they will continually say it's not force, right?
Because if you look at the force directly, it's completely unsustainable.
I mean, all the people have to do is look at taxation as violence and the whole system falls down.
But it's like trying to push two very strong magnets together with opposite poles, so it's really hard to make that connection for people.
And so they say, well, it's not force, it's not force, it's not force.
And then you say, well, if it's not force, then let's not enforce it.
Because it's not force, so there's no point, right?
To your charity, there's no point holding a knife to their throat because they're going to give you the money anyway.
In fact, having the knife to their throat is sort of pointless if they're going to give you their money anyway.
It's a ridiculous overhead.
So they say, well, it's not forced.
It's not forced. And you say, well, then let's not enforce it, right?
Let's not have tax laws.
Let's just have everybody who likes the government send money to the government voluntarily.
And they say, well, no, we have to enforce it.
Right? And then you say, but then it's force.
No, no, it's not force. It's just this revolving door where you point out the force and they say it's not force and then you say, well, let's not enforce it then and they say, well, we have to enforce it.
Well, I think they also spend 12 years of their lives learning about the validity of what I've sometimes referred to as the magic dust or the magic soap.
Oh, yeah, the magic soap. I love that.
Of the democratic process.
That... And I said when I was setting up that thought experiment in that episode, I think it was the fifth one, that the sort of absurdities that people have to accept as reality in order to participate in politics are completely unbelievable until they sort of sprinkle this magic dust on top of the violence and say, no, you know, if there's enough people...
Just encouraging people to be violent predators, it's fine.
Don't you understand? No one's ever thought of anything.
This system of how a society should be run that was thought up 2,000 years ago by people who thought there was giant magical men in the sky throwing lightning bolts at them, there's not going to be anything better than this.
So, sure, while we can talk about how every other aspect of our personal life, of our family life, of our professional life, of our technological and scientific life is always improving every day and we're demanding those improvements, as far as state power in our life is concerned, this is really, you know, the cat's meow right here.
We've got it. We don't need to ask questions anymore.
That's silly.
We are at the paramount.
Yeah, no, it is strange.
And I've sort of pointed this out a couple of times as well.
Every society thinks that they're at the peak and nothing can conceivably get any better.
And when you start questioning the basic foundations of that society, it's completely incomprehensible to people that you could say get rid of aristocracy or get rid of slavery or get rid of the subjugation of women or get rid of laws which allow parents to aggress against children or whatever.
That you could change any of these fundamental things around society.
Everybody who's before that change...
Thinks it's, you know, disaster, completely impossible, the worst thing in the world will happen.
And everyone after that change says, I can't believe there was ever a debate about this.
I mean, it's a really funny thing you see over and over again in history.
When it came to abolitionism with slavery, you face exactly the same arguments for the continuance of slavery that you hear for the continuance of statism, right?
Well, the slaves, they can't get jobs.
They'll just starve. They'll die.
They'll have no health care. They don't want to be free.
It's not, you know, they're part of an educational system to humanize them and blah, blah, blah.
You hear all the same nonsense with abolitionism and the pro-slavery arguments, and people simply, they say, well, we've never had a society that's not founded on slavery.
Never. So how, you know, of course, then you hear that we've never had a society that's not founded on the existence of a government.
And so everyone beforehand, it's like this massive failure of imagination and trust in the capacities of human beings and of reason.
And then after you make that change in society, a generation later, everyone's like, I can't believe that people actually debated this.
It's so obvious. Yeah, that's really well put.
I absolutely agree with you.
And really, that is probably one of the most powerful arguments that was able to perpetuate slavery when people started talking about abolition was, Well, show me a society that didn't have slavery then.
You know, if you've got such good ideas, let's see a historical example.
And you are absolutely right.
The arguments that were used to perpetuate the institution of slavery are identical to the arguments that are used to perpetuate the existence of the state.
There'll be chaos. People won't know what to do.
They'll kill each other. It's always been there.
Yes, absolutely. Society will collapse.
How will anything get done?
The price of food will skyrocket if you have to pay people and people will starve to death.
I mean, it's inevitable.
When you question people's fundamental ethical assumptions, they simply assume that apocalypse results from that questioning.
And it's this fear tactic that's, of course, implanted.
in educational systems is implanted by the rulers so that the idea of living without rulers is equated with this sort of Mad Max beyond the Thunderdome, shaven heads and motorcycles and flamethrowers, you know, and then society descends into madness and chaos or as Helfeld put it, you know, there'll be tanks in the street like and then society descends into madness and chaos or as Helfeld put it, you know, But there is this – it's not an argument.
It's the argument from catastrophe, and it's used to undermine and attack every single step forward or step up the sort of bloody ladder of human ethical progress, which is that, well, okay, yeah, every single freedom that we've extended, every single piece of equality that we've extended before has been immeasurably beneficial to almost everyone in society, but this next one is going to be a step off a cliff into the jagged, fiery pit of horrible clichéd anarchy.
And that's just not an argument.
It's just an argument from paranoia that this magical curse is going to descend upon humanity if we take one more step up that ladder towards the light of freedom.
And it's sad, but that's what we spend our life is wrestling with these fundamentally invented devils of paranoia and not rational arguments.
It's amazing. And I hope that you'll take a stab at that.
I haven't done much in that realm.
But how it is that we end up with this just unbelievable fear of freedom.
I hope that you'll take a swing at that.
I'm sure you'd have some fantastic things to say about it in a future podcast on education.
I absolutely will, and I think that a lot of the lessons that are embedded into the public school curriculum are designed to bring about that fear of freedom.
There's... You really do learn in school how to be such an insignificant part of an irrational group that needs to be managed and controlled.
That is really...
It's not an explicit lesson of school, but it's an implicit lesson throughout the entire 12 years that we spend in government-run education.
It's more like training more than education.
Calling public school education, I think, is the first big mistake.
Yeah, I know. It's like calling an al-Qaeda terrorist camp an exercise regime.
I remember this very much from my education, and I was in public school and private school in England and Canada, and Scotland as well, briefly.
And it really is. It's very sad.
But the fundamental approach that's taken to children is that children don't like learning, don't like obeying the teacher, don't want to be there.
And the whole system is set up with the barbed wire and coercion and force of various kinds.
And it is amazing to me, again, as a new parent to look at.
I mean, I can't stop my daughter from exploring the world.
I can't stop her from picking up everything.
Turning it over, trying to examine it, trying to understand it.
I can't stop her from trying to associate cause and effect.
And she has this wildly passionate love affair with the world and with exploration and with reason and with empiricism.
Not abstract reasoning, but basic biological reasoning that your average pet would have.
It's exhausting sometimes.
You can't stop her from wanting to explore the world and learn more about it.
She won't sit on my lap. She just wants to go down and explore.
And as you say in your podcast, that is the natural state of a human being, is curiosity, this passionate affair with the world to want to understand it, to want to know about it.
And then when you get to school...
It all changes. Like, you have to be assigned homework, because otherwise you won't explore the ideas being presented.
You have to be punished if you don't do your homework, because children are lazy and bad and evil, which is, of course, the Prussian model, which comes out of religiosity, right?
That children are sort of bad and skeptical, right?
Because children are not, I mean, in my opinion, not naturally religious, so religious societies have to pretend that they're bad and need to be indoctrinated, because, you know, children don't believe in things that aren't there, right?
Daughter, a present with nothing in it, she's going to be upset.
I'm not going to say, no, it's a little deity who's in there and who's going to be there.
There's nothing there, right? And so this whole idea that children are bad and lazy and don't want to work and aren't curious and aren't rational and need to be controlled and forced and punished and rewarded and permanent records and incentives and get yourself into a good college and the punishment that can occur if you don't get the good marks and so on, it's all fundamentally predicated on this fantasy that children are not curious and rational and want to explore the world and learn.
And, boy, can you imagine what a joy it would be to be in school if you were treated with the reality that you were curious and rational and wanted to know more about the world and that the school would have to put brakes on you, not force you at sort of cattle prod point to march into the field of, quote, learning. Yeah, indeed.
And what an unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy that that philosophy is, too.
Because while I could not agree with you more about all the things that you're saying about children before they enter school, the condition when they leave 12 years later, they've really gone through just a processing plant.
The raw material, a curious and inventive and creative child goes in and an obedient Taxpayer slash soldier slash, you know, somebody fit to be an industrial employee, which was part of the goal, comes out at the other end.
It's really unfortunate, and I've kind of identified that.
In my opinion, the state education systems, now that people are, at least in most respects, wising up to religion, This state school system is sort of what I see as the next thing that has to dissolve for us to really move forward.
Now, I don't want to take up your whole day, so I'd like to stop here, if that's okay, though I would certainly like to talk more, and again, I don't want to pillage your future podcast material, but I'd like to talk more at some other point, if that would be agreeable to you, about the steps that you see as necessary to To begin this process of dismantling these indoctrination pens, so to speak, or these lack of concentration camps, as I sometimes call them.
But so if we could reschedule at some point again, you know, if you're going to do podcasts on this, we can either do it after or in conjunction with, but I would certainly be interested because you certainly know a lot more about the educational system than I do.
So I would certainly be interested in your thoughts about sort of next steps and what to do if that would be of interest to you.
Absolutely. We will certainly remain in touch, and I'll be happy to, you know, any time in the future to have that conversation.
I would definitely look forward to that.
Thanks, and thanks again so much for your time.
If you just wanted to, for the people who forgot to get it at the beginning, if you just wanted to mention your website addresses again to make sure, you know, for what it's worth, I would certainly highly recommend your podcast to people.
So if you could just give out that contact info once more, I think that would be helpful.
Sure. The main site for the show, in addition, I would just suggest, obviously, you can download it on iTunes, but the main site to see the show notes and to see the links that I use and how some of the arguments in the shows are created.
And, Steph, you'll definitely see, I think, your name and a couple of your articles in there scattered throughout the episodes.
But that's schoolsucks.podomatic.com.
The main website that I use for that show is edulution.com, E-D-U hyphen L-U hyphen T-I-O-N, and all the links to the education series that I did on Complete Liberty, which, you know, if people are into School Sucks podcast, I would definitely recommend checking that out, because I think you can almost see those...
Those conversations bringing me that final step away from statism.
There are episodes 46 through 51 of that show, and it's all linked on my website, so I would recommend that as well.
And that's at completeliberty.com, right?
Yeah, if people are still on the fence.
They have kids in the public education system.
They recognize the validity of a lot of these claims that are being made, but they just don't want to jump over to the other side.
I would recommend I would recommend those shows for that.
Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Brett.
Have yourself a fantastic Sunday, and we'll stay in touch.
All right. Thank you, Steph. Take care.
Bye.
Okay.
Steph, are you there?
Yeah, I'm just closing down.
Okay. Sure. Thanks, man.
I appreciate that. We'll talk to you soon.
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