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Oct. 6, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:24
1477 True News 55 -- Obama, Vanity, Grandiosity

Did Obama close Gitmo yet? Get the troops out of Iraq? Sighhhhh

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. This is just a miscellany of observations on the current political scene, and I hope that you will find them useful and enjoyable.
There's quite a funny Saturday Night Live skit floating around.
You can find it on the web, or at least the intro.
Which goes through the list of Obama's campaign promises and his degree of success in achieving them.
And I think it was about a year, year and a half ago that I said nothing was going to change except the color on the future stamps as far as transitioning from Bush Jr.
to Obama.
And, of course, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that the predictions can entirely come true.
So they sort of mentioned nine things, which I think are interesting to review.
Obama, on his first day of office, said he was going to close Gitmo.
Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay, the concentration camp remains open.
He was going to get troops out of Iraq.
I believe there's still a few there.
He was going to improve things in Afghanistan.
Things were worse in Afghanistan.
He was going to achieve health care reform.
Not so. Take action on global warming.
Not so. Immigration reform, gays in the military, limits on executive power and prosecution for violations of the Geneva Convention with regards to the torture memoirs that went trickling down like a severed head bouncing down a set of stairs from Cheney all the way down to the sociopaths at Abu Ghraib.
This is interesting to note that the biggest transition of race and culture and generations and outlook and education and birthplace has resulted in virtually no change.
But one thing that is interesting, and I think it's absolutely essential that you understand this as somebody who is a cattle prod participant in our democracy, which is to understand what the pendulum is of the swing of power between Republicans and Democrats.
For instance, if I were a sleazoid reptilian bank executive who knew that all of my banking loans underwritten by the government were going to fall like a house of cards before a heavy sneeze, the first thing that I would do is try to get a Democrat into the office.
I would give the majority of my campaign contributions to Barack Obama rather than to McCain or whoever.
And the reason for that is that if you are in big business and you want a big handout from the government, the last person you want in the office is a Republican.
Why? Because if the Republican president gives you a big handout, then the Democrats, the lefties, the liberals, go completely ape wild and start talking about, you know, fascistic and, you know, hand in glove.
I don't want a Republican in when I want a big handout.
I want a Democrat in, because that effectively silences the Democrats' opposition.
In the same way, if I really want to expand government, or I'm going to benefit or profit from an expansion of government, I want to make sure That a Republican is in power.
Why? So that when government grows, as the federal government grew by two-thirds under Reagan, who was committed to decreasing it, and of course you saw the explosion of the deficit under George Bush, the guy who said government is a problem, not a solution, and was ostensibly a free market conservative, you want to make sure that the opposite The opposite ideology is in power.
So that if you want to expand government, if you have a Democrat in, then all of the Tea Party guys are going to go completely ape-wild and attack the Democrats, and you're going to get bad press and cause lots of problems.
So when you want to expand the government, you want to make sure that a Republican is in.
So that the idiots who simply cheer on their own team, regardless of the actual moral content of what is being done, are silenced.
So the critics of corporations and the banksters, the banking, the fascistic banking industry, are silenced because the Democrat is in power and they're not going to criticize him in that way, in the same way that the free market ideologues, who would have howled like howler monkeys being fed ass backwards into a blender, if a Democrat had tried to increase the size and power of the government in the same way.
that a Republican did are silenced because they're cheering for their own team regardless of whether they're scoring in somebody else's goal or in fact their own using their own taxpayers head as a ball so I think that's really really important to understand that's why there's this alternation of things in power and that's why you see that government grab power does not grow any slower and sometimes even faster when a Republican administration is in power it's just a sign to get the idiot cheering heads So,
the people who are for Obama, but against the handouts of the banking industry, will cheer Obama, most of them, rather than rail against his surrender to this fascistic group of people who must just laugh at us.
I mean, night and day. It must just be completely ridiculous for them to see us cheering.
You know, we're like a bunch of mice tied to a stake, cheering the oncoming of the wildebeest stampede of our own future.
So I just sort of wanted to mention that.
The other thing that's amazing too, and I mentioned this in a Sunday show recently, you look at just these nine things, right?
Closing Gitmo, getting out of Iraq, improving Afghanistan, healthcare reform, global warming, immigration reform, don't ask, don't tell gays in the military, limits on executive power and torture prosecutions.
One thing that is very true about politics and the reason why a political life or a status life is really the polar opposite of a philosophical life is that a philosophical life is really around humility.
To be humble is the essence of philosophy, just as it is the essence of science or engineering or mathematics.
It's a surrender to the higher power, so to speak, of reason and evidence.
Religion and politics are the opposite of humility.
Thinking you have a direct pipeline to universal omniscience is not exactly humble.
For somebody to come in and to be such a fundamentally stupendous, mind-blowing know-it-all as to go through these lists and say, I'm an expert in each of these things and I know what should be done.
I mean, Barack Obama, health care reform, please.
I mean, the guy's never been a doctor.
He's never been a nurse. He's never run a hospital.
He's never run any kind of health care program.
And yet he's supposed to be the guy who is going to give us the answer as to how the most complex and intermingled, some free market, mostly fascistic health care system should be reformed at the point of a gun through laws and legislation to provide better health care to patients.
That is just mind-blowing.
There was some report in the media that Barack Obama was going to go and ask some tough questions of his generals in Afghanistan.
That is just a remarkable amount of hubris.
I mean, it's really staggering when you grow up in a philosophical or scientific tradition where humility is the key.
And I'll get to those questions about my own humility in a sec.
I know that there are some skeptical faces out there, perfectly valid, but let me just continue and then you can blast me in a new crater where my forehead is.
Well, a big crater. If you went into some party and some guy was holding forth about how everything in the world should be fixed and he knew how to use weapons and guns and laws and prisons to get everyone to do all the right stuff in every single conceivable field of human knowledge, you would think that that person would just be an unbelievably bullshit-infested blowhard.
It would be like somebody coming up to you at a party and saying, you know, I have a gold medal in every single Olympic sport.
I can do everything.
The very best in the world.
What do you think of that?
I mean, you would have a tough time keeping a straight face.
Somebody would be just so enormously vain and lie.
And so the idea that this guy who was a community organizer and dabbles a little bit in academia and wrote a book or two is going to go over to Afghanistan.
He's not trained in military history.
He's never been in the military.
He doesn't understand Afghanistan.
He doesn't speak the language. He's never studied the history of Afghanistan, to my knowledge, certainly not formally.
And so the idea that he's just going to go over and say to these generals, well, you should do X or you should do Y or I want results or I want improvements.
All politicians are the pointy-haired boss in the Dilbert universe.
They are just embarrassing.
You know, can we run this database by email?
You know, it's that kind of stuff where you're just like your eyes roll around like casino lemons.
It really is just astounding to think that somebody would come in.
And say, I know how to solve all of these problems by hurting people around at the point of a gun.
Amazing, amazing. When you understand just how vain and insane, narcissistic, megalomaniacal that is, it really is something that will just blow your eyebrows right back over your forehead.
When you really get just how insane you'd have to be to say, I know how to hurt humanity around to achieve these goals.
But that is the essence of the political system.
Now, people may say to me, Steph, first of all, get some sun, man.
Secondly, anyway. But they may say to me, well, Steph, you've done videos on the healthcare system, and so how is it that you say you're an expert on healthcare and, you know, all the other things that you talk about?
Ah, my friends, but that is not the case at all.
I am not an expert on healthcare.
I'm an expert, I think, to some degree, if anything, on certain aspects of philosophy.
I'm no psychologist, I'm no economist, I'm not a doctor, I'm not any of these things.
I'm a guy who likes to reason from first principles, has some decent education, but to be judged only by the quality of my arguments and the evidence that I provide.
But the arguments that I make are for the fact that nobody can solve these problems.
No individual with a bunch of guns can go in and solve problems like health care, like charity, like the education of children, like the rescue of the old, like the foreign policy, like the national defense.
Everyone has the wisdom to use violence to hurt hundreds of millions of people around to achieve the right thing.
That is the essence of a humble, philosophical, and I would say realistic approach to life.
So when I do videos about the healthcare, I'm saying I don't have the answer because I am not a doctor, and even if I were a doctor, I wouldn't have the answer for everyone's healthcare because that would be insane of me to think.
What I do know is that nobody has the answer, right?
It's the all-Socratic thing. The only thing I know is that I know nothing.
That is the essence of humility in philosophy, and that is the essence of why voluntarism is so important relative to top-down, coercive, violent statism ordering everyone around.
Because I don't know the answer as to how you should live.
I do believe, and I think I've made strong arguments, that you should not use violence to achieve your goals.
That violence is a bad way to solve problems, that you should not aggress against those in your life, and you should not lie and cheat and steal.
But for a few of you, I'm sure, are doing that anyway.
This is not piped directly into the brain of prisoners.
So, my answer is, I don't know how you should live your life at all.
I don't know whether you should be a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, I mean, a philosopher, whatever it is you want to be.
I do know that I don't know.
And therefore, I don't like giving a group of people the exclusive power to order hundreds of millions of people around at gunpoint and say, don't smoke this and send your kids to school here and here's how your healthcare is going to be provided.
I don't have the answer to these things, and that's why I'm consistently focusing on taking the violence and the megalomania out of the equation of people who think that they can herd everyone around at the point of a gun, socially engineer them to achieve the best thing.
I mean, Barack Obama doesn't know you, he doesn't know me, he doesn't know your healthcare requirements, he doesn't know how you want your children to be educated, but he's just going to make a law, I mean, to simplify it a bit, he's going to make a law force you to do things.
And based on what?
Based on his omniscience?
How is it that we can conceivably believe that such human gods exist who can order people around at gunpoint?
Hundreds of millions of people around at gunpoint to achieve a positive end.
It's complete madness.
And in the future, I believe, the competent psychologists will look back in the same way that we look back at slave owners or people who would beat and whip slaves as very likely sadists.
We will look back at people who claim the ability to have the expertise to use violence in all of these immensely complicated and challenging areas of human interaction.
Those who say, I can herd humanity around like a bunch of stuck pigs to achieve the goals that none of them are able to achieve on their own because I have the knowledge and I have the force and I have the power and I will make it happen.
They will look back upon these people as Insane, as fundamentally insane, in the same way that people were trained through the cult of personality to worship people like Mao and Stalin and Lenin and so on.
And now we look at these people, I mean, and we just say that they were deranged, evil, ill, and so on.
In the future, People will look back upon our time.
I think it's really important to look at that far mirror of the future and say, how is our perspective going to be viewed by people who are more enlightened and with a clearer sense of rational morality?
They will look back and they will be incredibly struck and fundamentally they will find it incomprehensible in the same way that we find Mussolini's success incomprehensible or Hitler's.
Okay, not to equate them all, but you understand, right?
They will look back and they will find the degree to which we were willing to swallow these deranged pills of narcissistic ideology and imagine that these man-gods could order humanity around at the point of a pitchfork and achieve wonderful and good things.
They will be astounded at the audacity and the megalomania of the people who lie to us, and they will be, I think, even more astounded by the degree to which We swallow this madness, and imagine that there are people who can poke and prod with guns and bombs, humanity as a whole, to achieve virtue.
Our present will seem incomprehensible, alien, and fundamentally immoral to the future.
So I say, let's step into the future, so that we can begin to spread that reality around us today.
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