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Oct. 16, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:57
1484 A Theory of Marxism
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Hey everybody, hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. October the 11th, 2009.
This is a topic entitled, Why is someone a Marxist?
Why would somebody be a Marxist?
What is the psychology behind somebody being a Marxist?
Well, the short answer is I have no idea.
This is just amateur silly ramblings by A podcaster.
But I'm quite excited by the topic.
I think I have some very useful things to add.
So here, as a possibility, we can explore these potential trends.
And I think that they will bear some fruit.
I really do. So thanks to the listener for mentioning the topic and for others seconding, thirding and quadrupling it in importance.
So let's take a swing.
So the first question I think we should ask, if we want to ask why is somebody Marxist, is why is anybody anything?
I think that's the most fundamental question to ask.
Why is anybody anything? Why does anybody have any particular set of beliefs or any particular ideology That he or she works with.
That is the first and most important question to ask.
And my answer would be that there are generally two groups of people who have particular beliefs or ideologies.
And the first group would be those who have Looked at the evidence, reasoned from first principles, studied opposing thoughts, tried to integrate a wide variety of perspectives, and come up with something useful, and therefore original.
And these would not be people who would end up as Marxists.
You simply could not look at The history of the world, certainly since the mid-19th century, and say, you know what's really great?
Marxism, right? That would just be nonsense.
And the central tenets of Marxist ideology, in particular the Labour theory of value, have been so thoroughly discredited so many times that nobody who approaches the question with any kind of reasonable skepticism would end up Being a Marxist, it's just not where you would go.
So there must be some of the reasons as to why people are drawn towards that particular mode of thought.
And if people end up passionately devoted to, for many people, it's a lifelong devotion to a particular brand of thought or an ideology.
They become professors, they write books, and Marxism has survived for over 150 years.
And if you go back to something called Spenumland, you can look it up, I think it was 18th century, this forced redistribution of wealth, which is not the only component of Marxism, we'll get into other ones.
This stuff has been around forever, and if you go back to the bread and circuses of ancient Rome, 2,000 years this nonsense has been cooking around.
Every single time it's tried, it fails, and it fails most murderously.
So why would people continue to believe in it?
Well, it's not because of reason and evidence.
And so it has to be something else.
It's that process of elimination.
Now, I would say...
And I think if you look into your own heart and the hearts of those around you, that most people end up believing or adhering to a particular ideology because the first time that they meet up with that ideology, it just makes sense to them.
It carries them along.
It has a parallelism or a conformity with something that is already within them that makes them swallow it hook, line and sinker.
And I think that's really, really important to understand.
Ideologies are like the final piece in a puzzle that has already long been in progress and is almost complete.
Ideology is like...
When I was younger, we would do these chalk drawings or these sometimes watercolors, and what we would do...
In an art class, we would get this spray, that we would spray on top of whatever we had done, so that it would be much more difficult to smudge.
And so, this was a piece of art that was already in progress, to say the least.
More than in progress, already underway.
And we were simply spraying a thin film of some sort of oily plastic over top of it.
Ideology is the lamination of existing prejudice.
It fixes it, makes it impervious to change, to weather, to alteration, to reason, to evidence.
It freezes existing prejudices in time.
Somebody starts becoming a Marxist in the crib.
The ideology is only the final lamination over and above the grisly portrait of prior prejudice.
So what is it that goes on in somebody's life that would lend them to be more susceptible to Marxism?
Well, I don't know, of course.
I'm not a psychologist or a scientist in this area.
But these are my thoughts on the subject, or the matter, for better or for worse.
The one thing that's truly astonishing about Marxism, truly astonishing about Marxism, and I include in this most forms of socialism as well, is this jaw-dropping reversal between voluntarism and coercion.
So for the Marxist, the exploiter, It's the guy who offers you a job and pays you a wage that, if you're working there, you're willing to accept for your labor.
No gun, right?
And we're talking about free market principles here, not fascism, not state corporate mercantilist capitalism, whatever you want to call it, but not what we have now.
But we're talking about the free market, right?
So if somebody offers you a job, he's the exploiter, right?
Voluntarism is violence.
He controls you. He exploits you.
Whereas on the other hand, the government is voluntary.
Your participation in the state is purely voluntary.
Social contract, don't you know?
You get to vote, right?
And so, this is the jaw-dropping thing about socialism as a whole.
That that which is voluntary is completely recast as violent.
And that which is compulsory, coercive and violent is elementally recast as voluntary.
If you take a job in the voluntary free market, why then, you are brutally and violently exploited.
But If you are born into a status society, and you are forced to pay taxes and to obey the laws of the state, the whims of the state, the blind, dumb, irrational, brutal, violent whims of the state, why then, this is all purely voluntary.
And that is the most jaw-dropping thing.
It'd be like if I had a theory of sexuality that said, the man who asks you on a date is a rapist, and the man who actually rapes you is a romantic.
I mean, and if I put that forward, everybody would be appalled, of course, shocked and appalled, and would consider it to be a vile and disgusting theory But you transplant things from the realm of sexuality to the realm of economics, and suddenly you get chairs in Marxist philosophy, and everybody pretends to look the other way.
It is truly jaw-dropping.
Now, it's not jaw-dropping if the thesis that I'm going to propose here has validity.
If it does have validity, then this is no longer jaw-dropping but is elementally inevitable.
So, Let's get yourself comfortable and let's start going down this path.
Now, the fundamental thing, I think, to understand is that in Marxism there are basically three layers of power.
There is the powerless, the working class, the lumpenproletariat, the swarthy, sweaty, often homoerotically muscled and glistening with sweat, worker.
There is the worker, and he is powerless.
And then there is the capitalist, who exploits the laborer by buying his labor for $10 and selling it for $15.
And then, towering above the capitalist is the politician, is the Lenin, the Stalin, the Trotsky, the Brezhnev, Khrushchev, all of these lunatics.
And towering above the capitalist, like the moon towers above the tallest tree in a forest, is the state.
And the state Is the power that controls, restrains, and in a pure communist system completely does away with, the capitalist class, right?
So there's three layers of power.
There is the worker who is helpless, and there is the capitalist who has power, And the worker must surrender himself to the power of the state in order to escape the power of the capitalist.
The worker must squat before the mighty cathedral, the bloody cathedral of the state, in order to escape the voluntary economic influence and power of the capitalist.
Now, to be fair, A capitalist does have more power than most workers, right?
If I'm a capitalist and I employ 200 people in my factory and one of them quits, then I'm down 0.25%.
I'm going to find someone new and blah blah blah, right?
And if all of them quit, I'm kind of hosed.
But if one quits, then it's 1 out of 200.
But if I quit and close down the factory, then 200 people have no job.
So there is an imbalance of power, for sure, in the same way that there's an imbalance of power between Bill Gates and myself if we walk into a Ferrari dealership.
He's there to buy them, and I'm there to polish them and sniff the leather.
So, there is an imbalance of power.
Purchasing power, economic power, and so on.
And the power is balanced through competition.
But the one thing that you will never hear from a Marxist is the competition between The capitalists for workers.
So you've got Factory A and you've got Factory B. And Factory A's owner wants to pay his workers as little as possible, and so does Factory B's owner, but the workers want to get paid more, so they're going to shift back and forth in a rapid economic calculation pendulum between these two factories until they end up with a price that the customer will bear.
Because Marxists aren't real big on customers.
Who is it who ultimately sets the wages of the worker?
It is the customer.
It is the customer who fundamentally sets the wages of the worker, not the capitalist.
Anyway, we don't have to get it.
I'm sure you understand that. If you don't, read some Hazlitt or some Friedman or whoever is a good basic economist.
Now, why is this so interesting?
Why is this so interesting?
Well, Why would Marxists completely miss the competition between factory owners for laborers, which will bid up the price?
And why would Marxists generally forget that it is the customer who finally sets prices?
If the customer is willing to pay a million dollars for a candy bar, then the capitalist will pay his workers a hell of a lot more.
For obvious reasons.
Whereas if people are only willing to pay 50 cents for a candy bar, the wages of the workers will drop.
So, I mean, obviously, if people are paying a million dollars for a candy bar, everyone's going to go and want to make candy bars, drive the price down, blah, blah, blah.
We understand that, right? But there is a strangely stale, empty, and dead relationship that is always depicted in Marxism, where there is a factory owner and a bunch of workers and nobody else throughout the entire economic landscape.
No other complexities.
No one else trying to bid up the price of the workers.
No customers who might be convinced to pay more for goods for the benefit of the workers.
No complexity.
It's a relationship that is frozen in time.
There's also, within the Marxist class analysis, not much room for the uppy-downy of classes, right?
There used to be a statement about families in America in the 19th century.
Rags to riches to rags in three generations, right?
And the first generation starts off...
In rags, you get some entrepreneurial guard who builds up the family fortunes, they go to riches, and then his children turn out to be Eaton-style swarthy layabouts, who then drive the family fortune back into the dust again, and so on and so on, right?
You understand? But it's all strangely frozen.
You know, the capitalists are like little silver guys in your Monopoly set.
They're just cast that way and they remain that way forever.
And they have mysteriously just gotten a hold of all of this power.
And they don't, you know, the workers can't rise and the capitalists can't fall.
It's all frozen in time.
And so, I'm going to say something which may not be shocking to long-term listeners, but may be shocking to you.
Is that the reason, my friends, that this bizarre, monomaniacal, shaven-down, tiny, whittled to nothing, no complexity, no larger society, simple relationships.
This Robinson Crusoe of economics called Marxism.
Why is this believable?
Well, it's believable because...
That is...
a family.
Why would this even be remotely believable?
Because this is the family.
I mean, just look at the parallels.
They're astonishing. You don't have parent A... And parent B on opposite sides of the street competing for the allegiance and affection of the children.
Both families have kids.
So you don't have parent A saying, hey, I'm going to double your allowance if you come and live with me.
You don't have parent B on the other side of the street saying, I'll let you stay up half an hour later if you come and live with me.
And I'll buy you toy cars, and I'll buy you an iPod, and I'll buy you a Wii, and all this, right?
Parents on opposite side of the street do not, obviously, compete for the allegiance of children.
It is a frozen relationship, and by that I simply mean it's not open to competition.
And I'm not even particularly talking about dysfunctional families here, though we will, of course, be talking about those in the future.
But why is it believable that Marxists would accept that there's no competition for workers among capitalists unless they are mistaking the employer-employee relationship for the parent-child relationship?
And I'm not saying consciously I understand.
Why is it believable? So that's one aspect.
There's no competition for children between various families, and so it seems much more believable when a budding soon-to-be Marxist hears that capitalists just dictate to workers, and there's no competition.
They just ignore the fact that there is competition, because there's no competition for children between families.
So that's sort of the first thing.
The second is that there is this peculiar timelessness to the Marxist analysis, as I sort of mentioned.
The capitalists are just the capitalists, and the workers are just the workers.
How do they get there? Nobody knows.
I mean, I know that there's histories of Marxism and so on, Marxist histories, but fundamentally this is just the way it is.
There's not the mobility between classes which destroys the very idea of classes in many ways.
I mean, we can talk about races because people don't go from black to white to black again, but...
You can rise and fall in classes, heavens to Betsy.
I know that from my own family history.
We've been up and down like the Assyrian Empire.
Right? So, for children, in looking at their parents, good, bad, or indifferent, there's the same kind of frozen, timeless quality.
Well... When you're a child, you can't imagine that you really, you can't really get that your parents or children grew up and became parents, and they're just your parents, right?
They just always were, always will be.
They have that power. They have that authority.
Whether they use it for good or for ill, they just have that power, have that authority.
It's frozen in time. It just is what it is.
And so, when the budding soon-to-be Marxist, here's the Marxist explanation, and there's this, he ignores this weird timelessness.
Children Do not, in the framework of childhood, become parents, and then the parents become children, and the roles reverse, right?
The children are just the children, and the parents are just the parents.
And from a child's perspective, this goes on, good or bad or indifferent, this goes on for a hell of a long time.
Frankly, in eternity, to children.
I mean, to children, tomorrow, especially to little children, tomorrow is next month, or next year.
Next week is 10 years from now.
Everything is eternal for children.
And so there's this weird timelessness.
There's this lack of competition for the children-slash-workers, and there's this sedimentary layer of classes, this impermeability.
People don't rise and fall.
In families, right?
You don't, you know, over the course of six months or a year, through dint of hard work, you become a parent in your family, and your parents, because they are lazy and shiftless, fall down to the status of children, right?
But what can happen, of course, in a longer context, economically or shorter perhaps, Is that workers can work hard, a worker can work really hard, save his money, get some investments, start his own business, whereas the capitalist can be a bum and neglect his savings and not come to work, and then the capitalist can end up working for the worker, so to speak, right?
So, there is that flexibility in the real adult world of voluntary economics, but there isn't in a family.
Children are children, parents are parents, and you don't float up and down between these two categories.
Throughout the life of your childhood, so to speak.
So then when the Marxist-to-be hears all of this stuff, and the capitalists are just the capitalists, and the workers are just the workers, he ignores the basic reality that people get rich and poor.
Sorry, that's a very low plane.
He can ignore that because it doesn't fit with his emotional experience.
Right? Now, Let's continue.
Now, another thing that's very interesting about this fundamental confusion between the family and society, between the family and economics, that constitute a foundational aspect of one's susceptibility to socialist silliness, And, I mean, this is not any kind of original thought in my mind.
This is something that has been mentioned by a number of people before me, and surely mentioned by a number of people after me.
And that is that the family is socialistic.
I mean, to each, sorry, from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
Well, I mean, that is the definition of the parent-child relationship, right?
I mean, we don't expect the toddlers to get up and go to work and then strap the parents into a high chair and stuff them with McNuggets, right?
That's just not how it works.
You don't charge your children rent, right?
You give them room and board because you love them.
You want them to be happy and you chose to have them and so on, right?
So, this idea that We should take from those who have power and give to those who are powerless.
We should take from those who have incomes and give to those who have no incomes and so on.
And that it is the responsibility of those who have ability to care for those who have need.
Well, that's family.
I mean, I think it was Milton Friedman who wrote about this, just the idea that...
People get confused, right?
Because a family is communist.
A family is socialistic. And that's how it should be, of course.
Children rent or whatever.
But then to confuse the family with society as a whole is completely ridiculous, right?
And demoral. Fundamentally, it's an intellectual crime, right?
It's like confusing somebody who wants to have sex with you and somebody who doesn't want to have sex with you.
And saying, well, they both have to have sex, or they're both going to have sex with me, right?
That's immoral, right? I mean, that's the foundation fundamentally of rape, right?
So, again, not to equate the two exactly, Marxism is actually far more dangerous than rape, because it leads to rape and murder and genocide and war and all these other terrible things.
So, you don't want to mistake those kind of personal voluntary relationships with...
Well, involuntary general social relationships.
Like, I have a friend who is a good enough friend that he would come and pick me up from the airport if I'm coming in on a flight.
Right? That's nice.
That's a good friendship.
A good aspect of a friendship.
So, we like that. That's nice.
But, if I then pass a law that says everybody has to pick everybody up from the airport, that's fundamentally confusing.
Well, to put it as charitably as possible.
That is fundamentally confusing voluntary personal relationships and forcing them into involuntary general social laws, turning them from friendship to coercion.
Well, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to see through this idiocy, but it does take a fair amount of social programming to miss it at this larger level.
Now, there are more aspects of this, and if you're interested I can go into it in more detail, but I kind of want to keep this chugging along.
Now, one of the things that's quite true is that socialism comes a lot out of religion, in particular, again, just based on my knowledge, which I'm not going to say is extensive, in particular Christianity, And Marxism in particular, of course, is heavily characterized by its Judaic elements, right?
Marx, Jewish, Trotsky, Jewish, Lenin, Jewish.
So, there's a lot of...
I think it was like...
Jews represented less than 2% of the population in Russia, but more than 50% of the founders of the Communist Party, the Bolsheviks who overthrew the Mensheviks, in 1917.
And so, somewhat over-representative, over-represented by a factor of about 25 times the Jewish influence or membership in the Bolshevik group.
And one thing I think that is true, particularly with religious groups and the Christians, there's a good article from Murray Rothbard wrote about the degree to which Christian thinking influenced the founding of the welfare state.
It's really, really interesting, and if you're interested, I'll be happy to post a link.
But Christianity and Judaism lead heavily into socialism.
This idea that Christianity is associated with the free market is pretty new.
Formerly, it was very much associated with this sort of coercive charity of fundamentally mistaking the world for your family.
So, the power that is Exercised by the capitalist over the workers is exploitive and destructive.
And yes, he pays them, grudgingly, a little bit of money, but fundamentally it's exploitive.
And the exploitation has to do with money, money and power.
Now, if we understand this, then it's not that hard to understand that religion, Is an exploitive power wielded by parents over their children.
And it is inflicted primarily for economic reasons, right?
So that you'll pay the church for the rest of your life.
So the economic exploitation of the helpless is religious instruction that is being mistaken or confused for economic predation.
So, the fact that religious parents bully and lie to their children to accept the jagged pill of religiosity for the sake of future prophets for the church as a whole, well, that is pretty exploitive and destructive.
And so, when someone comes along to somebody who's been raised in this kind of environment and says, You know, the capitalists exploit the workers economically, right?
Well, it just, it's believable because the child, I guess the young adult by this time, has experienced just that in the form of his religious indoctrination and lifelong exploitation by the clergy.
Now, you may say, well, yes, but a lot of the Jews were secular Jews who came up with socialism.
Well, yes, of course they were, right?
Absolutely. Because the rabbi is more than happy to talk about the culture of Judaism, the long history of Judaism, the chosen peopleness of Judaism, the moral and cultural superiority of Judaism, just hand over the goddamn money.
So... It doesn't particularly matter whether the bigotry is cultural, or geographical, nationalism, or religious, or whatever.
But it is a brutal set of exploitive lies, wielded by those in ultimate power whose position cannot be traded, and for those whom they have control over, there is no competition, right?
It's just a one-sided, top-down, brutally inflicted exploitation.
Well... That's culturally, quote, strong or religiously deep families inflicting this lies and nonsense on their children who are helpless, who can't escape, who can't get to.
There's no competition for them.
So then when people hear, people who've been raised in this kind of way, they hear that there are these capitalists who exploit the workers and there's no competition for the workers and they're just frozen in time and there's no up-and-downy in the classes and It's for economic exploitation and blah blah blah.
Well, it fits.
Right? It fits with their own experience.
Growing up and being lied to and bullied and controlled in a non-competitive situation.
Where there's no up and down movement in class power, parent to child.
And being bullied and controlled for the sake of economic exploitation by the priest or the rabbi or whoever, right?
I saw a movie called Defiance with James Bond, I think it was, Daniel Craig.
And it's about a bunch of Jews who are fleeing...
In Nazism, and, you know, good for that, man.
Go live in the woods, right? And, I mean, again, if you have any kind of knowledge or understanding of this stuff in any kind of depth, it really is just astounding.
It's this scene where everybody shows up, they've gathered their possessions, right?
They've got all their possessions with them.
Everything they could flee with is in bags or trunks or whatever.
They're tottering along in the woods, and they come across the Jewish leadership, right?
And what does the Jewish leadership do?
Jewish leadership gets them all together and says, All right, everybody.
Take all your goods and give them to us.
We will take care of it all.
And we will assign you positions, careers, jobs.
And whoever does not work shall not eat.
Right, so it means the basic communist thing, right?
Take everything that you have, hand it to the leadership.
The leadership tells you what to do with your life and threatens you with starvation if you disobey.
Well, it's not hard to see what kind of families these people come from where that is not seen as gruesomely unjust, right?
We can, I think, all understand that, where that is occurring.
And this is the irony, right?
We wish to escape National Socialism, and so we will take Communist Socialism in the woods.
The idea that they would all come into the woods and the Jewish leadership would say, well, keep what you've got.
It's yours. Trade as you see fit.
Engage with who you see like.
We're not going to tell you people what to do or how to live or how to work because you're adults, and it would be embarrassing for us to treat you like children.
But... That's not how it works in all too many families, particularly religious or strongly, quote, cultural families, right?
Bigoted families. You have to keep people's rational independence down.
You have to keep their critical thinking down.
Otherwise, people just look at this and say, so you're basically charging me to eat bullshit.
Well, that's not a very good deal, so thanks.
Thanks, but no, I think I'll go with philosophy rather than religion or culture.
So that's, I mean, it's a very, very important aspect of things to understand, of this reason why people are so susceptible to these silly ideas.
It's because these ideas are a mere crystallization or lamination or formalization of their direct emotional experiences as children.
Direct emotional experiences as children.
We are prepared for and we are conditioned for these lies, the formalization of these lies through silly structures that are so easy to see through, so embarrassingly and ridiculously easy to see through, that we have to grant that people have been preconditioned to believe this nonsense through childhood experiences.
We have to! We have to!
Because the only alternative It's to think that people are completely retarded.
And, you know, weirdly kind of functionally retarded.
I mean, they're very intelligent Marxists, right?
Well-read, erudite, well-traveled, speak 12 languages, whatever.
Polyglots up the yin-yang.
Right? I mean, we either say that they're kind of autistic, you know, or...
You know, they're the rain-man kind of people.
Which I don't think is fair and valid.
I mean, it's not... Reasonable.
Autism would seem to have pretty specific characteristics that these people would not have, socializing capacities and so on, capacities of certain kind of empathy.
So we have to...
I mean, this is the fundamental challenge of philosophy in any age, but in the modern age, even more particularly when information is so freely available to everyone, is that...
Why do people believe silly things?
Why do people believe completely silly things?
Well, it's either because people are just dumb, and easily led, and stupid, and idiotic, and prejudicial, in which case, well, philosophy is not going to do anyone any good.
It's really not going to help anyone, because people are just too stupid, right?
It's like inventing a language that takes an IQ of 200 to speak.
It's really not worth it, right?
If people are that dumb.
And so, I don't believe that people are that dumb.
I think people are brilliant.
I think everyone's a genius and everyone's a philosopher.
So then the question is, if everyone's a genius and everyone's a philosopher, why do people believe such silly things?
And why do they so resistantly and almost malevolently sometimes oppose basic truths?
Like, say, taxation is false.
Why? Why do they do that?
Well, it has to be because they have been conditioned, and they're avoiding particular kinds of traumas, and they are pursuing particular kinds of relief from anxiety.
If people aren't dumb, but they believe dumb things, then there must be some x-factor, some missing factor that explains why Intelligent people believe dumb things.
Oprah, not a dumb woman.
We've been all over Obama. Anyway, we could go on and on.
But you understand, right? And my approach has always been that the x-factor as to why, which explains why the dark matter, so to speak, that explains why intelligent people believe truly stupendously dumb things, Is childhood experiences.
Some of the Voxers stuff.
Anyway, so let's continue.
We're on the home stretch, and I really appreciate your patience.
I know it's a long cast, but I really wanted to get these ideas across in one shot, so to speak.
One sitting. Though I'm not, but perhaps you are.
So, let's finish off with a magnificent flourish.
So, an objection would occur, I believe.
And it came to my mind, and I'm sure it's come to yours as well.
An objection would be, Steph, you madly prattling fool.
If people dislike authority because they've been oppressed by their parents, and that's why they dislike capitalists, right?
It's a projection of their parents onto capitalism.
Why, oh why, would they invent a monster authority if they dislike their personal authority?
Why, if it's true that people mistake their family for economic life as a whole, if that's the case, then they project their hatred of their parents onto The capitalist.
Then why would they invent this super state called the communist state, if they really dislike authority so much?
Why wouldn't they just say, well, the solution is a stateless society?
Well, an excellent question.
Let me take a swing at it, at least with the solution that I've come up with, and we'll see how it stands.
Well, first and foremost, I mean, there's a fairly well-known phenomenon in psychology, which is that if you repress and project, you do not escape, right?
So, to take an example, if you were battered as a child and you pretend that you weren't, You do not escape violence, but rather will be driven to recreate it until the truth comes out.
If you unjustly project your original traumas onto those who did not abuse you, you will not escape the cycle of abuse until you put the blame where it belongs and, you know, get the professional help to process the emotions so that you can accurately identify what happened to you and the perpetrators and their moral responsibilities And the resulting moral judgments that will accrue from that, then you don't escape the cycle of violence.
Mickey Rourke was in the news recently.
He spent ten years not acting, rather getting into fights and being a wrestler and beating people up, because he was physically assaulted regularly by his stepfather, and until he got help from therapy, he could not escape the violence, but rather sank deeper and deeper into it, like a Red mastodon and a tar pit.
When he got therapy over a period of years he got better and now he's working again and blah blah blah.
I'm sure we can all think of many examples.
So if you resent the unjust and exploitive authority of your parents And we're just talking about exploitive and authoritarian parents in this way, right?
Aggressive or abusive parents.
I'm not talking about all parents. Be clear at all times.
But if you unconsciously resent the exploitive authority of your parents, the unjust and perhaps brutal authority of your parents, and you project that onto the capitalist, you will not escape Brutal authority.
But, in fact, you will only intensify it.
And that intensification takes the form of the state.
And why do I make that claim?
Well, I mean, I think it's psychologically somewhat true as an amateur.
But, more importantly, it's because of this.
If you are, and we'll sort of go back to the legal definition of this, if you're a slave, Ancient Rome, Egypt, sweating under a desert sky, building pyramids.
If you're a slave, you can't escape.
I mean, that's almost for sure.
And if you can't escape, since you can't escape, and you're so crushed and humiliated and such an underdog in your society, since you can't escape, the reaction formation Or the mental overcompensation for your humiliation is to imagine that although you cannot crush your hated masters,
there is a power out there somewhere in the universe that will lay them low.
The skinny kid in glasses who's just been beaten up And has had his lunch money taken.
Has the most ferocious fantasies of attacking his bully.
Or of his bully being laid down or humiliated or broken in some primeval and nasty way.
The crushed and the broken and the humiliated and degraded and abused have vengeance fantasies that could truly shatter the sky should they ever become real.
Christianity... It is, in its foundation, one such vengeance fantasy.
And this is why it was so popular among the slaves.
Because Christianity says, well, you know, the rich men don't get into heaven, and at the end of days or after death, the rich go to hell, and the poor go to heaven, and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
It's a revenge fantasy religion.
As most religions are.
But, because it is an unjust fantasy...
Sorry, it's not an unjust fantasy to fantasize about your abusers being brought down in some manner.
But it is a fantasy, and as a fantasy, it can't set you free.
It may give you short-term relief, but it can't set you free at bottom.
And so, what happens?
Well, this belief that there is this unjust authority over you, that some super monster authority will lay low, is the fantasy that is common.
To all slaves, to all who are trapped in involuntary relationships.
And it is why the cycle of involuntarism continues.
You see, when we are not free to choose our companions in life, or when we do not feel free to make those choices,
resentment is the inevitable after effect involuntarism leads to vengeance to thoughts of vengeance,
to plots of vengeance, to resentment to anger, to rage to fantasies of destruction and to hate the world Where we are not free to choose, we become slaves to hatred.
Where we are not free to choose, we become slaves to hatred.
Where we cannot choose, resentment breeds like maggots in old meat.
Where we are not free to choose, we become slaves to hatred.
Now, the world needs much less hatred and much less Vengeance and much less resentment.
And the only way that I know to reduce the amount of hatred in the world is to turn up the dial of voluntarism.
And so if you have such parents and You do not feel free to see or to not see them, as you see fit, as you best prefer, with moral certainty, with rational clarity, with the empirical evidence of your own history, with the help of a therapist.
If you are not free to choose your companions, Then displacement, distortions, rippled sub-diffusions in rational thought, abandonments of empiricism, retreat into rank delusion is inevitable.
Because everything that you will believe when you do not have choice will be a mask for that lack of choice.
When you reject the choice of who you see as an adult in this life, Then you are rejecting choice, and therefore everything that you believe, every ideology that you claim to revere, every god that you bend on your knees to pray to,
will be a must to justify and imagine that that lack of choice is real, to justify abandoning choice and falling into convention and culture and involuntarism.
When you abandon or retreat from the challenges of choice, of individuation, of authenticity, of being who you are in the face of reason and evidence, with the tools of reason and evidence.
If you reject choice, then everything that you claim to revere and worship fundamentally will be a reflection of that rejection of choice.
Thanks.
When you raise an edifice called no choice, everything that you revere and worship will be born freaky and twisted in the shadow of that statue that blocks the light of reason and of evidence and of choice.
And so, if you are a socialist or a Marxist, you have these stand-ins called capitalists who you say you have these stand-ins called capitalists who you say are not voluntary.
The worker does not have a voluntary relationship with the capitalist.
And that is a reversal of the truth.
Because the worker does have a voluntary relationship with the capitalist.
You say, as a socialist, the worker has a voluntary relationship with the state, which is not true.
The worker does not have a voluntary relationship with the state.
Nobody has a voluntary relationship with the state.
And why have these reversals occurred?
Because If you've been raised in a repressive and false and brutal environment, raised religious, or, you know, in this sort of strongly oppressively cultural sense, you know, Jews, Greeks, whatever, right?
If you've been raised In a prison of lies, inflicted lies, then you can only maintain that.
Sorry, the pauses here.
You can only...
Let me start again. If you've been raised in that kind of way, then as an adult, if you reject the choice to be open and honest with those around you, With your parents, with your family. If you say, well, I have to go over to see my family or my parents, right?
If you lie to yourself about your true feelings, if you are not honest and open, and if you say that my relations with them are involuntary, then obviously you're fundamentally rejecting choice.
If you fundamentally reject choice, You cannot have as your ideal a voluntaristic system.
Of course you can't. This is the relationship between freedom and family.
If you reject voluntarism in your personal relations, you cannot sustain voluntarism As an ideal in your ideology.
It's not possible. I'm not saying nobody has ever come from such a background and spoken highly of freedom, but fundamentally it can't be sustained.
There's always going to be a way in which it shows up.
Now... Children have an involuntary relationship with their parents.
They just do. Don't blame me.
You can if you want, but it's Mother Nature who's to blame that witch.
Children have an involuntary relationship with their parents.
And that's fine. And that is perfectly fine.
There's nothing wrong with that at all.
I mean, when I'm lying on a surgeon's table and I've been knocked out, I have an involuntary relationship with my surgeon, right?
I just hope he's a good one and doesn't take off the wrong spleen.
Wrong kidney? I think there's only one spleen.
But you understand, right?
Now, I think that if we accept that we have an involuntary relationship with our parents when we're children, by just accepting that basic reality, by just accepting that basic reality, then I think we can accept that if they behave badly towards us,
if they have behaved badly towards us, and consistently, and repeatedly, and egregiously, and oftentimes criminally, If they have behaved badly towards us, and we have an involuntary relationship to us, that's really bad, right?
We're helpless, we're dependent, we don't have alternatives, we don't have options, we can't leave, we don't have competition for our services, we don't have any money, we don't have any skills, we don't have any legal rights.
So, the more power you have over someone, the worse it is if you treat them badly.
Marxists fully accept this, which is why they get mad at the capitalist who has the most power for treating the workers badly.
So if you have more power over someone, the worse you treat them, the worse it is for you, morally.
I mean, if I don't take half my dinner and give it to some guy in India who's hungry, nobody says I'm evil.
But if I've got a guy locked in my basement and I don't give him half my dinner and he starves to death, then obviously I'm a bad guy, right?
So the more power I have over someone, the more it is incumbent upon me to act with high moral standards, or at least decent moral standards.
Now, if your parents treated you badly, and you continue to see them as an adult, it is fundamentally because you reject the involuntarism of your childhood.
Because you reject the involuntarism of your childhood, you are necessarily led to reject the involuntarism of your adulthood with regards to your parents.
Let me say that again, because it's mildly tricky.
If your parents treated you badly, lied to you, bullied you, told you lies about cultural superiority, gods or nationalism, whatever, and repeatedly and egregiously, and you speak whatever, and repeatedly and egregiously, and you speak honestly to them about your thoughts and feelings, rejected again, or attacked, whatever, you understand the general pattern.
If your parents treated you badly, When you were in a state of involuntary servitude to them, as all children are.
If you reject that it was involuntary, which you have to do in order to continue to see abusive parents as an adult, if you reject the involuntary nature of your childhood experiences in order to, quote, forgive your parents for acting badly, It's real hard to forgive people who act badly when they have enormous power over you.
So if you reject the involuntary nature of your childhood experiences in order to rescue the supposed virtue of your caregivers, then you will inevitably be led to reject the voluntary nature of adult relations. then you will inevitably be led to reject the voluntary
If you reject the voluntary nature of adult relations by saying, well, I have to see these people, I have to see these people, I have to see these people, then you can't sustain an ideology of voluntarism, because you've rejected voluntarism as an adult.
Ah, but what happens to all the stored up resentment, the anger, the rage perhaps?
Well, It gets transmuted, or projected, or there's a reaction formation, which creates, out of your resentment and anger, a kind of super-authority who will take down the parental projection called the capitalist.
It's a god who punishes your slave owner in the foundations of Christianity, It is a God who persecutes the Egyptians with plagues, because they have enslaved your Jewishness.
It is a state, a government, that crushes the capitalists who have so defiled you.
You will create in your mind, in your unconscious, a super-authority that is the overcompensation for your repressed anger towards those who have treated you unjustly.
It is the vengeance fantasy.
For the stand-ins to those who really harmed you, which are not some capitals for the factory.
But if it was those who harmed you, if you were harmed, it is your caregivers in your home when you were a child.
And this is why, for me, it's so important to keep talking about voluntarism and honesty.
Because voluntarism and honesty, if expressed, if acted upon, It ceases or reduces people's need to have these stand-ins for their parents, right? Whether it's capitalists or whoever, right?
In the Marxists, it's capitalists.
In socialists, it's capitalists. Corporations are the left-wing thing, right?
Because then they can talk to their parents directly and be honest and open and expressed and hopefully work things out.
Or if not, if they can't be worked out, then, with the aid of a therapist, take whatever break is needed.
But they will find themselves less angry at abstract things like capitalists and corporations and polluters and this and that, because they will have actually identified the real source of their emotions.
And as a result they will have fewer, or less intense, or hopefully no, Super-authority vengeance fantasies as unconscious recreations of their own anger towards their parents, vengeance against their parents, in the form of corporations or capitalists or whatever.
And they will also have fewer salvation fantasies, which, you know, Obama, we've seen other kinds of salvation fantasies that float around Jesus, people who are going to come and save us, right?
And we can talk about that another time if you're interested, but I think that's the fundamental thing that I wanted to talk about.
I hope that this makes some sense.
It certainly does to me. I'm more than happy to hear the degree to which it doesn't for you, and we can talk about it further, or we can toss out the entire concept if we feel it has no validity whatsoever, but I think it's genuinely worth exploring.
Thank you so much for listening, for giving me the opportunity to think these things and to speak them out.
I look forward to your continued participation in this most amazing conversation.
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