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Dec. 30, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:13
1544 Civil Disobedience - The Roundtable
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I had done a show about a month back with Cat Canning as kind of the conclusion to the series about apathy and indifference, one of the lessons that I believe is passed along to people in public education.
We talked a lot about Kat's activism and I felt like the response that I got was very mixed on the topic of civil disobedience.
A lot of people who had come over to School Sucks podcast After our initial interview, Steph, were pretty critical of what they saw as encouragement of civil disobedience.
Now, that wasn't the intention of the show.
The intention of the show was to kind of demonstrate what emerges from behind that benevolent facade of the state that we're all taught about in school, when people who have developed disobedient and nonconformist attitudes act on those attitudes when people who have developed disobedient and nonconformist attitudes act on those attitudes in what we
So my opinions on the actual issue of civil disobedience, I really don't feel like they're terribly strong for or against it.
I can understand both sides of the argument, but it seemed to me, and I might be wrong about this, that there's a considerable rift between different groups of people who are trying to advance the causes of freedom over this issue that there's a considerable rift between different groups of people who are trying Trying to advance the causes of freedom over this issue of civil disobedience.
So my hope would be that there would be some kind of a way to close that rift a little bit and find some common ground.
I think that is an excellent idea.
And I agree with you that there is quite a division around the question of civil disobedience.
And I think my views are fairly well known, though.
That doesn't mean, of course, that they're not open to reason and evidence.
And so you're sort of...
On the fence about it, like, I mean, and I obviously have no particular problem with people who do it.
It's not like it's a bad thing to do or an immoral thing to do.
It's got nothing to do with that.
For me, it's more around practicality.
But so you sort of, sort of, do you have an opinion about, I mean, you don't do it, right?
So there must be something that you find a better or more important thing to do than civil disobedience.
Is that fair to say? For me there is, especially at this point in my life.
Wes and Daniel Lockermacher and I talked last, probably a couple weeks ago now, about this issue.
And I said, when I think about a lot of the things that I have going on for me, Brett Vinat, right now at the end of 2009, If I started to do some of the things that I hear about people doing, it would be self-sacrificing.
And I also brought up that it would be somewhat inconsiderate to the person that I'm in a relationship with who's kind of, you know, counting on me to play a certain part in us pushing our lives forward together.
So the idea of doing a lot of the things that I've heard about being done, especially in Keen, Are not things that I can consider personally right now, but I have a problem discouraging anybody else from doing that if that's what they want to do, if that's how they want to kind of exchange their time, money, and physical freedom.
I don't really have a problem with that, but am I actively an active civil disobedient?
No. Not right now, no.
And Lauren, you're, I wouldn't say in favor for everyone, but you find that there are very strong arguments for the effectiveness of civil disobedience.
Is that right? I wouldn't mention so much the effectiveness, but the necessity for it and the desire for certain people to do it, I guess.
All right. And Wes, where do you stand on the issue?
Well, first, let me preface by saying that I have a really bad cold.
So if you're just listening to the audio of this, it's me.
It's just I got a flu virus of some sort.
Sounds very sultry, though.
I like it. Yeah, I think I could slip into my gubernator voice pretty easily like this.
So... I know that he's pretty authoritarian.
He's probably not for civil disobedience, I don't think.
Maybe in his personal life, I don't know.
But where I stand, I mean, I really commend Lauren for the actions that she's done.
I've spoken about them on my podcast, Complete Liberty podcast, a couple times.
And I have not been thrown in jail.
Well, actually, like 20 years ago I was, for a fake ID, of all things.
And I spent the night in jail.
I think that every person who values liberty wrestles with this issue because what we see in our society is mass conformity, essentially.
We did a little activism event here a couple weeks ago, almost two weeks ago, down at the tax collector's office, the county assessor.
And lo and behold, the entire PR team came down, including the head tax collector.
So we actually got to get in a discussion with this guy who basically shakes people down, you know, millions of people in San Diego County, for their property taxes and other taxes, of course.
And it just, in the last 10 years, apparently, this woman that my friend Joe paid $1 bills to, he had like $3,800 of property taxes to pay, supposedly.
I asked her if she's ever seen anything like this, people coming down with cameras and making a big deal about this, like this is a rights violation, this is immoral to do this, to extort money from people and impose services on them.
And she said, I've never seen this.
And she said she worked there for 10 years.
And I asked her, well, has anyone else said you know?
So years and years and thousands and millions of people can be part of a process that is utterly immoral and unjust.
And because of this conformity meme, this obedience to authority, basically evil goes unchallenged.
And that's really my main issue with civil disobedience, that it is the most overt way to actually Show people that what is going on here is immoral and unjust.
And if you actually stand up for what is right, perhaps there's a chance to achieve some real freedom.
All right. And Lauren, maybe you could talk a little bit about your experiences with civil disobedience and its effects.
Sure. There was a pretty controversial case in New London, Connecticut about eminent domain, people's houses getting stolen.
So, I moved there to try and help the people to, you know, make it a little bit harder for them to get evicted if there's one more person's weight, you know, there.
So, one day I just, there was a city council meeting.
They wouldn't let the people in, and I thought that was wrong, so I wouldn't leave the building until everybody came out of the city council office, or they...
The courtroom there. And they arrested me for that, for trespassing, in the city hall during a city council meeting.
So after that, I mean, there was all kinds of, you know, it was like a media event.
There was lots of coverage.
There was locally and regionally even.
And a lot of people...
You know, sent letters, sent, you know, me gifts and things to help me stay in this disputed area, and we had a whole bunch of fun making monuments and stuff, and the papers would always come down and take a look, and, you know, TV stations would come down and do a report, and it seems like nothing was happening there.
There was no pictures coming out.
There was no stories coming out.
There was very few, anyway, until somebody actually got arrested.
And what happened in the long run with that?
Well, in the long run, they offered the property owners more money and they decided to move out voluntarily.
Yeah. Right, right.
And you've been involved in a number of these things, if I remember rightly.
Would you like to talk about a few more?
I mean, I find it very fascinating to hear about.
Ah, war stories.
No. Leave! Also, let's see.
So I don't have a driver's license.
And whenever I get pulled over, it's...
Yeah. Sometimes when I get pulled over, they like to arrest me.
Mm-hmm. If you don't have a license, you don't know how to drive.
Strangely enough, I still know how to drive.
Sorry, you were saying that when you get pulled over?
Sometimes I get arrested for speeding or not having registration or what have you.
Once I was in jail for just not cooperating, I guess, because they wanted to write me a ticket, but I just couldn't go along with them.
Couldn't, you know, kowtow to them and pay the fine and everything to do what they wanted.
So when I was in jail, there was like millions, not millions.
It was a pretty well-known story in the region.
I can't say it was national, but there was lots of response, lots of people...
Hanging out outside the jail with, you know, protest signs.
There was lots of people writing me letters, lots of conversations, lots of arguments about what I was doing, if it was right, if it was wrong.
So it brings light to subjects that usually don't get any light, I think.
And it's a way to, like, you know, bring things up in a powerful way.
And what happened, I guess, when you were in jail for non-cooperation?
What happened in the long run?
Did the charges get dropped? Did you end up going to court?
Let's see. Some of the charges were dropped.
I went to court. They found me guilty and time served.
So that was the end of that procedure.
And how long were you in for?
Did you get a lot of tattoos?
Did you end up running the place?
Have your own game? No.
Let's see. Well, I was in for not having a driver's license in for 30 days.
And I don't know if you can say I was running the place, but I was definitely breaking all the rules and not having anybody...
Any more bad circumstances happen.
I mean, once you're in jail, what worse can happen to you?
I suppose you can get sick, but that didn't happen to me.
You spent a lot of time in solitary, didn't you?
Solitary confinement? Yeah, usually that's where they put me because I won't, you know, go along with all the rules and regulations.
They have thousands of them in jail.
And that's kind of a liberating experience.
That's kind of, you know, a paradox there.
But Once you're in jail and you see that there's 100 million rules they want you to follow and you don't have to follow any of them, that's, you know, wow.
I don't really have to follow any of those rules at all.
Yeah, I guess as long as you're comfortable with your own company, you have those options, right?
And you really notice how many people are there that are oppressed, right?
I mean, how many people are there for ridiculous reasons, not any sort of rights violations?
Well... You know, like 80% of them are there for, you know, drugs and suspended licenses and things like that.
Stefan, do you think that the psychology of, say, the prison guards or the authorized, the police officers, is very similar to real domineering parents?
I've not studied it so it's a tough thing to speculate on but I would imagine that the kind of people who would be drawn to having that kind of power over others were not exactly reasoned with themselves as children and view Compliance and punishment.
I mean, this is the dominant mode of child rearing throughout the world, is do what I say or I will punish you or I will take away something that you want.
This, of course, is simply the exercise of power, not reasoning with children.
And again, I'm a fairly new parent.
My daughter just turned a year old, but I've certainly not found it at all necessary to punish her for anything.
I mean, to me it would be, how on earth could you punish a child who's a year old?
It's up to me to keep her safe and happy and it's not her responsibility.
Her responsibility is to get into everything to explore like crazy and to use as many words for as many objects as she can.
My job is just to facilitate that.
So I think that if you're raised in a sort of environment where you have to obey or you are punished as a child, I think that And particularly, it's more extreme, the kind of punishment and the number of complex rules.
It would seem to me that prison is a recreation of a family environment, or at least if you've had that kind of family environment, prison doesn't seem as completely bizarre to you as it would to someone else.
I mean, the whole point, I think, of the freedom movement is to get people to understand How completely bizarre the world is that they live in, no matter how long it's been around for, right?
I mean, the same thing that happened with women's rights and children's rights and slavery.
Slavery was just natural.
And then now, of course, if we saw a master-slave situation in legal reality, we'd be like, well, that's completely bizarre.
We would consider it a moral crime.
Like if some farmer locked up all of these guys and chained them to work in the fields and didn't pay them more than room and board and didn't teach them how to read, that would be kidnapping and imprisonment.
We would look at that person as just a wild sadist.
But, of course, that was completely normal in the past.
And I think, to Lauren's point, what we're trying to do is to help people to sort of, you know, peel off that third eye and, you know, jump out of the matrix pod and look at just how completely bizarre the world is that they live in.
And, of course, if there is nothing but compliance at an intellectual or a physical level, Then people don't really see the guns.
They just see that it's a relatively, quote, civilized interaction, that you're just paying your bills, that all's happening is you're getting letters and you're paying money just like you would from a gas company or a bank or something.
And there are different ways of bringing out the complete strangeness and weirdness of the system that we live under, which in the future will be viewed as completely bizarre.
And certainly, I agree that when you disobey, then the guns and the power is revealed.
I don't necessarily believe that that leads to enlightenment, but it certainly does reveal, as the old Monty Python line goes, you know, come and see the violence inherent in the system.
It certainly does provide that.
Yeah, it's a challenge for us to advocate freedom, to figure out how to deal with a group of people who want to inflict pain and suffering and punishment on people who disobey.
Because it seems that they're a small minority of the population, and yet because of mass conformity, they get emboldened, and it's just their way of the highway.
And I think, I don't know how much philosophical or psychological discourse changes their minds.
We had this discussion with this tax collector for, I don't know, 15-20 minutes, and I've got some more videos I'm going to put up today, I think.
I'll probably link to those in my next podcast.
But it's really interesting to see him try to justify what he's doing.
There was a set of questions my friend Michael likes to ask bureaucrats that interface with him, and it goes basically in a three-step process.
Do you consider yourself a moral person?
Do you think that stealing is wrong or immoral?
Well, then how do you come to terms with the fact that what you're doing is stealing?
He disconnects from that process by saying, well, we're not stealing.
It's a social contract, baby.
You choose to live here. This is the price we pay for a civilized society.
You like having roads and schools, don't you?
Right. Yeah, the imposed services.
So I tried to tell him that. You don't have a right to impose things on people.
They should voluntarily choose these things.
This is how the free marketplace works, right?
He tried to get his claws in me by saying, well, do you vote?
Right? So take it up with your representatives.
I mean, he knew that there's a degree of injustice happening because he says you really have a beef with the state legislature because apparently the county takes all this property tax money and then they bundle it up and they send it up to the state and then they divvy it out after they take a big cut, of course. So it's this Rampant passing of the buck, but he considers himself a moral person.
So what sort of arguments can we bring to these people outside of just not conforming to show them that what you're doing is immoral?
Because, I mean, it's almost as if, like psychotherapy, the people who are in most dire need of therapy are the ones who will at least seek it.
They'll be the last ones to ever seek it.
So it's a challenge for us to try to figure out how to If it's even possible to change their minds, or are they just going to be drug-kicking and screaming into a free society by the rest of the people who do have a conscience?
Yeah, I mean, there's a basic economic equation that all status hierarchies use, which is very powerful, and it really, really works for very obvious biological reasons, which is, you know, steal a dollar and give a dime to the people who enforce that.
I mean, that's how the mafia works, that's how the state works, right?
So I steal a dollar from you, and I pay a dime to the enforcer.
But the enforcer can make your life so miserable that you'll just pay the dollar.
And I keep 90 cents and give 10 cents to the enforcer and the vast majority of people are, you know, don't have Lawrence courage and are simply going to say, well, I'm going to pay these people off because I don't want to get my store burnt down, sort of metaphorically or perhaps literally.
So that's a very basic equation.
We're designed to survive and reproduce fundamentally, which is why a lot of people just look at that equation and say, Ah, screw it.
As Brett said, not screw it, but you've got a girlfriend, I have a family, and so I'll just pay these people off and go about my business.
It works really well.
It is a fundamental equation of power that works really, really well.
It certainly is true that if everybody did what Lauren did, the system could not survive.
And I think that's That's the temptation of civil disobedience is that we believe, and rightly so, logically, that even if 10% of people or maybe even 5% of people simply did not comply, then the equation no longer works because you need to have enforcers who Are vastly outnumbered by those they're enforcing upon.
So if you have a hundred slaves and you need a hundred overseers, then slavery does not work economically.
You need to have one overseer per hundred slaves.
So you take the profits from the slaves, you pay the overseer and you keep the excess.
But if your slaves simply don't obey and you have to pay for more and more enforcers, the fundamental equation of statist power economically no longer works.
Sorry, that's a long way of putting it, Lauren, but it's that...
I mean, you understand that you doing it alone isn't going to change that much, but if it spreads to other people who'd be willing to provide this kind of passive or active resistance to authority, that it would not only expose in a wider sense, but would also take an axe blow to the foundation.
Of state power, which is this economic equation of having the enforcers outnumber the sheeple.
Mm-hmm. And the PR scheme, right?
They rely on this propaganda that they're doing good works.
Sorry, I'm not going to talk over yet.
Yeah. We have found that when one person does non-cooperation, then there's a lot more other people that come behind them.
And, you know... Somebody has to be first, and in the future, everyone will do it, right?
I mean, in the future, we're assuming that people will be more or less obedient and more, you know, independently minded.
And, I mean, if you go 200 years in the future that we're thinking about, right, and everybody is completely, you know, good-natured and voluntary in all their actions, that...
Well, if somebody comes up to them and says, okay, give me $3,000 because your house is worth, you know, this much, and they're just going to laugh at them, right?
I mean, that's the future.
That's what we're getting to. That's pretty soon everyone will be doing that.
Yeah, I mean, you can't even be in a business environment and ask a woman to go and get everyone a cup of coffee, right?
That's how far advanced, and I think rightly so, that kind of condescension has been eliminated through the idea of, you know, equality between the sexes and so on.
And that, of course, is much less egregious than $3,000 or I'll lock you in a prison.
So, for sure, the social reinforcement will be very powerful.
I'm sorry, Brett, you were going to say.
Yeah, we need some classroom management, Brett.
I was just going to say that once again because that was so important.
In the future, the anomaly will be the person who thinks they can go around violating the principle of non-aggression because they have a costume on.
That person is out of their mind.
But I think, just in what's being said, my thoughts on the target of civil disobedience seems to be the legitimacy of the state.
To too many people out there, a holstered gun is essentially...
An invisible one.
And when I started to detect, just in the emails and the comments I was getting about my discussion with Kat, I felt like it was a little bit unfortunate that there was this tension over the issue of civil disobedience in this very, very small group of people.
Well, way more than 99% of people out there have probably never even heard Of the principle of non-aggression.
And even though, strangely enough, they're unknowingly using it to guide their interactions with other people.
But then I realized that that's kind of the issue.
Like, 99% of people don't know about this, so they're more than happy to give 1 or 2% of people, you know, the individuals who aggregate as the state or systems of authority, a pass on following the nonsense.
I think we...
All right.
I think... Do I still have audio?
Yeah, sorry. You just paused for a second there.
There must have been a hiccup when Wes left, but please continue.
So I was just saying that if it is done thoughtfully and it is done carefully, I think that this type of activism can be affected in targeting that widely perceived legitimacy.
Right. Right.
Now, I mean, I agree with you that we should focus on that which is effective.
I think the disagreement comes around that which is effective.
I certainly would never say to anybody, you know, don't do it.
There's certainly the moral right to refuse to comply with a guy with a gun, whether it's in an alley or, you know, beside a police cruiser.
I guess my concern has always been, I mean, I'm a ruthless empiricist.
That's what I always kind of go back to with these kinds of, because we really are talking about an argument from effect.
I don't think that the people who are making the moral arguments, however forcefully, would be condemned by those who are pursuing civil disobedience.
I certainly would never condemn somebody pursuing civil disobedience.
I think the question really is around its effectiveness, and I guess I'm Always happy to look for the evidence, right?
Because when we look for the evidence, we can avoid disagreements of pure theory.
And so I guess I'm always curious about the evidence of efficacy.
And as we all know, there were the Browns, I think it was, what, a year or two ago, who did not pay.
I'm not knowledgeable very much about the story, but...
They did not pay their income taxes and they ended up getting surrounded.
They were portrayed in the mass media, I think, probably except on Fox as crazy lone nutters.
And tax resistance from that standpoint was portrayed as lunatic.
You know, the fringe crazies and so on.
The more publicity that is put on these, the less you're going to get SWAT teams going in.
I think they learned that with the Gonzalez case.
The more publicity that's put onto these kinds of situations, the less they're going to pull out the guns because I think they just surrounded the Browns and kind of waited them out in a way that would not have occurred if the media weren't there.
So, in a sense, the more attention that you draw with civil disobedience, the more, you know, quote, civilized the government is going to act, and the more you're going to be portrayed as a lone crazy.
And I'm, you know, in terms of perception, I'm not sure that that moves things forward.
But, I mean, I'm sure you guys, I'm sure you and Lauren in particular know a lot more about that case and its effects of fallout than I do.
Well, just real quick before, this is where my difficulties start to begin, because To ask the question, is there empirical evidence of civil disobedience advancing the cause of freedom?
If we look historically, my answer to that question would probably be no.
If we go back to what was done in the 1960s, that these people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks have become sort of archetypes of, it's almost synonymous with the term civil disobedience, the effect of what they did Expanded the power of the state.
It drew the state more into that cause.
They said, here's a parade coming that we can't stop.
Let's jump in front of it and pretend we're leading it.
If we're really clever, let's pretend it's for us.
And, you know, then you can look at what Gandhi did, which was nonviolent.
But a lot of people, I mean, I'm sure you guys have all seen the movie, a lot of individuals, a lot of People who I really think would have been better off if they were pursuing the goal of being a free self versus pursuing the goal of an India free from British rule basically just sacrifice themselves to slaughter by the British.
So it's an important question and I would answer it right now at this point in history, no.
The only thing that I would want to be careful about is If people are testing that, if they're trying to basically use the scientific method to see in 2009, under these circumstances, in these conditions, in this place, can civil disobedience effectively advance the cause of freedom?
I just want to make sure, and I know it's not what you're saying, Steph, but I do get the sense that there's people out there who are just completely opposed to that and completely discouraging that.
Sorry, you mean discouraging civil disobedience at all?
Discouraging what's happening, I would say, in Keene, New Hampshire.
There's a lot of different things happening in Keene, New Hampshire, but I worry that people kind of wrap all of them, everything that's going on there, into one group and saying, that's not good, that is not helping, and that cannot help, no matter what.
Because the conditions were so different 40 years ago or 60 years ago where these other examples were taking place.
So all I'm trying to point out is this is why this is a difficult issue for me to get a clear position on.
Well, I think you would agree, Brett, that it's morally clear, right?
You shouldn't obey unjust authority, right?
I agree, yes.
So, again, like Stefan says, it's the empirical, practical side, and I think it's important to delineate what your goals are and what are the principles you're using when you're doing civil disobedience, which will dictate what sort of actions you're going to be doing, because I'm not a fan of just across-the-board whatever in terms of actually achieving what we want to achieve, because people certainly have pet issues, but are those root-striking enough?
And I think to accelerate this process, we really need to strike the root of the fundamental aspects of coercion in our society.
A lot of the resistance that comes against civil disobedience in New Hampshire is by Free State Project members, because they want to play within the system of politics, right?
They want to abide by the law.
And to be perceived as a lawbreaker, Is kind of bad PR if you're going to be in the party, right?
If you're going to play party politics.
So that's really unfortunate because it's setting up a false alternative, in a sense.
So, if they were to disband from playing politics, I think they would see more clearly, okay, so what are the goals?
How do we educate people and the population about the nature of their enslavement?
And what are the smart acts of civil disobedience that are going to achieve the most headway in doing so?
I know Lauren has this...
I don't know if you've done it all the time, but the typical demeanor that you assume when you get arrested is just clam up, not to say anything, and leave it to the authorities to figure out why you're not obeying, right?
Do you think that that is more effective?
If you want to get out of jail, it's not effective.
They keep you longer.
But if you want to make a point, it is more effective.
It's like everybody goes...
Well, what's happening? What's she doing?
What's she mean? You can learn a lot from people just by keeping silent because your friends defend you and your enemies are accusing you of the weirdest things.
It's a strange strategy, but I think it works pretty well.
Lauren, you say you learn a lot about people by keeping silent and you haven't spoken much, which means you're examining us like guinea pigs.
What have you got? Let's start with your thoughts on Brett and his hat.
Sorry. Yeah, I mean, to Brett's point, I think that the efficacy and history of civil disobedience is certainly open to debate and question.
And I think what we're doing is we're kind of hanging over the chasm of the fundamental question, which is the source of evil, right?
What is the source of evil?
And if the source of evil is people not recognizing it as evil, then civil disobedience, I think, is a good way to show the gun in the room, right?
To show people that you can't see the puppet strings.
You know, you can't see the lasers that control you.
I'm going to spray some water in the air and look, there's lasers and everything.
And so if the root of evil is that people don't see it, that they comply kind of unconsciously knowing that, you know, everybody says, oh, it's part of a social contract and I am happy, but everyone who gets a letter from the IRS has that same clutching feeling of dread in their bowels and so on, right? And they know that it leads down a path towards coercion.
If the Root of Evil is people's inability or unwillingness to see it, then bringing out the SWAT teams and the helicopters and so on certainly does take the velvet glove off the mailed fist of the state for everyone to see.
In my experience, though, people are incredibly resistant to seeing the violence of statism.
To take an obvious example, the fact that the Iraq war was revealed as completely and totally unjust, and Tony Blair recently came out and said, even if we knew there weren't weapons of mass destruction, I would have gone in for that war anyway.
And George Bush saying, well, I went in for the war because it's really important to The end times biblical prophecies for us to have military in the Middle East or whatever it is.
Even a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people that has been revealed as completely unjust and immoral under any form of rational or even international law as it stands.
That's kind of hard to miss.
And the fact that people then go back to the state and say, well, you went and slaughtered 200,000 people unjustly and drove a million more out of the country, so I'd really like you to take over my health care.
People have this unbelievable resistance to seeing the power of the state.
That's certainly been my experience and in the conversations that we've had with people at Free Domain Radio.
I mean, you take people with the best arguments and put them in the strongest bonds, which is the bonds of the family, and even those arguments combined with the strongest bonds seem to be unable to reliably get the basic ethics across to people.
I obviously have some theories about that, but that I think is the fundamental question.
What is the source of evil?
Clearly there is the reality that people won't see it, but the question is why?
And that I think is the essential question.
Why won't people see the evil?
Because if they saw it, then it would end tomorrow.
And so the approach is either we continue to argue philosophically, You know, we show them through civil disobedience, or we give up and hope for the next generation.
You know, like, there's a certain number of tactics.
And I think those are sort of what it is that we're talking about.
But why do you guys think that people are so resistant to seeing this pretty naked and brutal?
I mean, two million people in jail?
I mean, in the U.S., it's obvious just how much coercion there is, but people are unbelievably resistant to seeing it even when it's right in their face.
Yeah, the stock is at large, right?
Go ahead, Brett.
I just wanted to say before, it sounded like a good question for Wes, but what you're saying is so true.
I have a lot of conversations with statists, and I think even when they get it, even when they run out, first they'll do this incantation.
It's not theft. It's not theft.
It's not force. It's not force.
And just until they say it enough times so they can go back to believing it, if that doesn't work, They'll automatically switch to catastrophizing in these very emotion-based, fear-based arguments about, well, Howard, you want clean water, don't you?
You want roads? I need my road plowed.
You know, if this many million people need to die to make sure that water flows here, and, I mean, that's the point.
So even when they do get it, you're right.
There is this incredible resistance to just saying, You're right.
I've never thought about it like this.
It's so obvious. And even if you do get it, like, sorry to interrupt, but even if you do, like, push that balloon in and you get them to understand it for a day, then the moment you take your hand out, the balloon pops out, and the next day they're kind of right back to where they started, which is why I have no hair, but sorry,
go on. Yeah, the metaphor that I use for that is that you can reduce somebody's status belief system In a half an hour, not really by making assertions, but just by asking them questions to a pile of ashes that they will regather and reassemble and, you know, start throwing at other people the next day.
It's amazing. I feel like I've had the same conversation with one person, you know, 40 or 50 times.
It's unbelievable. And obviously now I'm trying not to have it anymore, but...
They keep following you around.
It's like those horror movies, you know, you put the vampire into the ground, you put 40 stakes into his heart, you walk away, and out comes the head.
To be continued.
All these status zombies following Brett around all the time.
The scenario that he had to create to rationalize the violence of strangers that don't care for him at all, the scenario that he had to create was so elaborate and so imaginative.
It was like four people living in the woods needing to share a water system with no contract a hundred years ago.
It took him a half an hour to create the scenario.
And at the end of it, I just stopped him and I said, Look at the imagination that you just devoted to rationalizing violence.
We would love to have somebody like you on our side.
You know, with that kind of imagination, boy, if you could put that to good use, you would be very powerful.
Right, so if it wasn't strong in this one, let us turn him to the light.
Right, right.
But go ahead, Wes. Well, my psychotherapy master's degree focused a lot on systems therapy and systems in interaction with family members and so forth.
So the phrase, it takes two to tango, was pretty operant in that understanding, because for every action of evil, there's a person who is on the other end of that.
And when you have a perceived legitimacy in a whole nation state, that evil Evil is basically socially acceptable.
It's sanctioned and assumed as the given.
You really have a dynamic set up where people are not challenging the evil that's right before their eyes.
And why aren't they doing that?
Well, they're really afraid to do that because it gets back to the family, right?
They were browbeaten as little children and their wills, their ability to make their own choices, was not really respected.
So, that's the main psychological component that I see, but also the memes, these ideas people have in their head.
If you accept the premise of collectivism and the end justifies the memes, wow, you can accept a whole bunch of crazy stuff.
And, of course, it'll vacillate all over the issues, you know, if you're siding with the Democrats or the Republicans or any version of statism, basically it's based on the premise of collectivism.
So I think that idea is really one of the most destructive ones in the realm of political philosophy.
But why do people accept the idea that the end justifies the means and that the collective good is better than the individual good?
Individuals need to be sacrificed for groups of individuals, for the collective.
And, of course, it's contradictory, but it's based, and objectivism has basically focused on this altruism.
Self-sacrifice is the operant ethical principle that's in our culture, that you don't have the right to your own life as you see fit, but rather as the collective sees fit.
And I think that it's really a self-esteem-building process.
Anyone who's really worked on their subconscious thoughts and feelings and intersected and raised their awareness, It's going to have a real difficult time with someone telling them that the end justifies the means, that you do this because I say so.
You know, they want rational reasons for things because they know how their mind works.
They know how to understand reality, and it just isn't making any sense.
So I think that it's really an issue of mass deficiency in self-esteem.
And of course, this is really the issue in the schools because kids...
are not respected.
Their own ability to make their own choices in what they want to learn, you know, in their own interests is just stomped on.
So it's no wonder that they grew up to be, you know, obedient, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens.
Lauren, you must have had this with people who said, well, you break the law, you know, don't do the crime if you can't do the time, who just view you as somebody who broke the law and was justly punished You must run into that a lot.
How do you find, is there any way to overcome those arguments with people?
Actually, I haven't gotten that argument.
People don't come to me personally with what controversial are.
They don't get in my face and say, that must be it.
I'm like up to most people's shoulders as my stature.
Dynamite comes in small packages.
That's on your t-shirt, isn't it?
But anyway, go on. Or your briefs.
Just kidding. Just kidding.
Sorry, go on. But, you know, if you talk to people like that, you know, at the time they say that, they're really angry.
But, you know, if you talk to them and say, well, what about this guy?
You know, I met a guy in jail.
He didn't hurt anybody.
He just had a marijuana.
I met a woman in jail and she didn't hurt anybody, but, you know, she didn't pay her, you know, Some sort of vehicle license fee at the right time.
Or, you know, men who didn't pay for their child support payments in time.
But that's not the way to fix things, though, is it?
I mean, jail doesn't fix anything.
It's, you know, it just makes things worse.
Statistically, that certainly is the case.
Sorry, go ahead. Our last roundtable, we discussed operant conditioning, rewards and punishments, and educational issues, too.
But I think Alfie Cohn has really delineated the nature of this meme, if you will, in our culture that rewards and punishments will determine people's behavior, and you can manipulate people through rewards and punishments.
And that's the whole system of laws that are set up.
I mean, this tax collector kept on coming back to me like, it's the law.
It's the law. That's the answer.
It's the law. And it's not to be challenged.
It's not to be questioned. It's the authority, right?
And I just got a real distinct sense that he is so obedient.
And I told him, I wish you didn't have to be part of this process, because obviously you're trying to justify it in some way to make it seem like you're not the biggest part of the problem.
It's the state legislature.
They're really unjust.
So... It's amazing how people have a hard time coming to terms with the nature of their own obedience, even while they're being authoritarian.
As Ryan Rand said, what was it?
A leash is just a rope with a collar at both ends.
Or a noose at both ends, I guess, is what she said.
Right. I think also people...
Face the challenge of testing the amount of love in their actual relationships, right?
So if you have an epiphany philosophically or morally or psychologically or, you know, even scientifically if you're embedded in a religious community, if you have some kind of epiphany and you bring that knowledge to the people around you, it is certainly our hope that we have relationships where love trumps disagreements.
You know, that we have the love in our relationships that if I come to someone who I have a loving relationship with and I disagree and I bring evidence and reason and we talk about things that the love is going to triumph or conquer the immediate discomfort of the disagreement.
In fact, if you have a relationship where you can't disagree, I would not say that that is a very loving relationship because disagreements would be natural to anybody who thinks and we all move at different paces in different areas.
And I think that people kind of get a sense that they're not truly loved.
That they're just convenient to other people's superstitions, so to speak.
There's sort of a mutual silence machine that goes on.
And I think that people are very afraid to set foot on that bridge over the chasm called, I disagree with you about something.
And I have some reason for it.
It's not just, you know, I like ice cream and you like peanut butter or something.
But when we bring that kind of disagreement, particularly in a moral area, and particularly in relationships where there has been moral authority in the past, like parents who say to us, don't lie, or who say to us, don't steal, or who say to us, don't bully, and then we say, well, the system that we're embedded in has all of those features, and since you've Put these forward to me as moral values, and I reflect them back to you as moral values that are universalized.
Will you stick by the moral values that you kind of imposed on me when I was a kid?
We hope that the morals weren't just used for power, to sort of bully us.
We hope that they were used as universal values.
And so when we do universalize those values, we hope that the people who had authority over us, or people who are husbands, wives, friends, and so on in our life, love us More than they love their prejudices.
Love the truth, love reason and evidence more than they love the beliefs that they happen to have inherited and hold.
And I think, I mean, certainly there's a lot, a lot of evidence that people prefer prejudice to friends, to family, to just about anything.
And that's a really chilling thing to see in your relationship, that if you're not convenient to other people's prejudices, you can be sort of flushed like a four-day dead goldfish.
That is a really tough thing for people to see, and I think that's one of the fundamental things that people avoid.
Yeah, how do we enable the manifestation of the true self over the false self?
And it seems like in our culture now, the false self predominates.
People's excuses and rationalizations and defense mechanisms and fears are more important than the truth, are more important than love and understanding and respect.
And I think, regards to civil disobedience, you know, there's a whole spectrum, I think, It's important to delineate what different types of behaviors would qualify, because it doesn't necessarily entail getting thrown in jail.
I guess true civil disobedience would be defined as doing something overtly in defiance of laws and with the intention of getting arrested to prove a point to say that I should have the freedom to do this and therefore this law is unjust and I'll get arrested and thrown in jail and suffer these consequences.
But obviously that's not practical for most people because they need to be able to live, right?
To eat and to have love relationships and all these things.
So on their scale of values, Unless they have a really strong reason to do the civil disobedience, they're not going to do it.
Which gets back to the whole root striking nature of it.
I think that there's... That there's effective means to challenge issues.
For example, the taxation thing.
I think that this is the court where they get their money, right?
That and the printing press.
And to challenge those things in smart ways is important.
And I'm trying to figure this out because for me, I can't really spend time in jail.
I've got type 1 diabetes.
And I check my blood sugar level like five to eight times a day.
I prick my finger. And that's not going to happen in jail.
So I'm going to be really neglected, my health.
I'll have to go into fasting mode, essentially, is how I can stabilize my blood sugar levels.
So that's really not an option for me.
So what are the sort of actions that I can take that don't entail getting thrown in jail, but still can have an effect and show people the gun in the room and the mass conformity as really not how you should be living your life?
And, you know, it kind of goes to the agorism aspects, what Samuel Edward Conklin III talked about, where you operate in a realm that you're not participating in the process, you're not cooperating with certain rules or laws, you're staying off the radar.
But that's kind of the implicit sort of CD. The explicit, overt stuff can be, you know, going down and confronting people that have gotten away with utter madness for years and years without ever being challenged.
There was a book that we talked about at this Atheist Meetup Group here called Don't Believe Everything You Think, The Six Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking.
And I don't know if you guys have heard of these experiments done by Solomon Ash, a social psychologist, where he had a group of people and he held up a sign that had lines on it and the person that was in the experiment was supposed to determine which line corresponded with the first one.
And it was noticeably obvious which one actually was the same length.
But the Stooges, the Confederates that he had in the experiment, all decided to go against the reality of the situation and say, no, no, that longer line is actually the same length as that line.
And a lot of the time, the person would conform to what the group said.
But the chances of not conforming went up dramatically when there was one dissenter in that group of Confederates.
When they aligned with reality, that encouraged that other person to do the same.
And I think that's one of the more effective...
one of the more obvious reasons to do civil disobedience that if one person sees someone standing up for the truth and what is right they can kind of like kickstart that conscience process to become more aware and to become more loving if you will of people that are being wrongly aggressed against yeah for sure for sure Thank you.
Thank you.
Those are most of the thoughts that I had.
The last one that I've mentioned is, I mean, as a philosopher, I'm very keen on the abstract argument, you know, for better or for worse.
And I think that pounding the hammer of the moral argument over and over again, I think is the way to move forward.
My issue with civil disobedience and, you know, getting arrested, it's not an argument, it's an example.
And it's not like examples are bad.
Again, I'm sort of an empiricist.
I don't think that you need to see people getting arrested to understand that the state is coercion.
I think that if you can understand it intellectually, you don't need to see people getting arrested.
If you see people getting arrested And you don't get it from that.
You certainly aren't going to get it from an intellectual argument.
So I guess if it gives you publicity to make the case that you can make the argument about the injustice, which I think, Lauren, is what you've been talking about, asking people to say, well, this guy's in jail for nonviolent reasons, and all I did was not have a state-sanctioned license, which has no effect on my ability to drive.
Then if it gives you a platform to make the case, I think that's good.
I'm always concerned and I had the same issues with the Ron Paul campaign.
I'm always concerned that as a movement we look at the sort of examples of what works, right?
And we say, well, I got arrested and I talked to these 10 people and changed their minds about stuff.
I'm always concerned about the hidden costs, right?
How many people looked at the Browns being encircled with helicopters and guys in the bushes with AK-47s and went, oh my god, that's terrible.
Something's fundamentally wrong with our country and I'm going to get involved and learn the facts.
Versus how many people said, well, if that's what libertarians are, they're a bunch of, you know, You know, crack-smoking idiots who don't know what they're doing.
It's too counter-culture. It's too creepy.
It's too weird. It's too out there.
It's too off the grid and then turned away from it.
My concern is always the opportunity cost.
It's easy to see. It's like the government programs where they spend money creating jobs.
Everybody goes, ooh, 100 jobs were created or 1,000.
They don't say 1,000 or 10,000 were destroyed by having money stolen from the present or from the future.
So I'm always concerned about the hidden costs of people who turn away from enlightened philosophies because they perceive actions that are so far outside their context or their frame of reference that it just looks crazy and then they paint that with a very wide brush of the movement as a whole.
Whereas it gets much tougher to do that with impassioned arguments from first principles.
It's tough to look crazy when you're arguing from first principles, but I think it's easier to look crazy if you're getting arrested and people have no context in which to place that and just kind of react against it.
Yeah, there needs to be the educational component.
Brett and I have talked about this, that if you just do an event, an activism event, and there's no communication to the people that you're trying to communicate to about the principles involved, it can look as just outside the box and something that is just not civil, Obviously, they're trying to convince them that it's a civil act of disobedience, that there's no violence involved on the part of the protesters.
But there really needs to be an educational context in which to come to terms with this.
And I think that's where media, you know, YouTube and just getting things out there to people so they can see and learn from these things.
And again, I don't think it entails, I guess it wouldn't qualify civil disobedience if you're not getting thrown in jail, but non-cooperation, non-participation, and just challenging the people that presume to be authorities in your life, complete strangers.
Get them on camera and ask them questions about, you know, the nature of this immoral, lopsided way of interacting with people.
Why do they get a pass?
Why is it that government is somehow considered moral even though they're doing things, the same things that they arrest individuals for?
You know? Then it gets back to the collectivism, the common good meme, right?
Well, those are my major thoughts.
Do you guys want to close off, again, just to spare YouTube from going down from the length of our videos?
Is there anything that you guys wanted to add as final thoughts about it?
I really have appreciated the discussion, and I think it's touched on some very, very essential issues.
But what are you guys' final thoughts on it?
Well, the only thing that I would add real quick is that, you know, I think obviously you could talk about what happens in a family or what happens in a community as far as beliefs or conventions being imposed on the individual and saying, if you I think obviously you could talk about what happens in a family or what happens in So you need to take these beliefs as your own.
You need us.
So there's that sort of isolation that occurs in those places.
But then in school, I mean, for 12 years, basically failure in life is hung over our heads if we don't accept the beliefs and rules and conventions of the school.
And I really, really believe, I've said it, you know, 150 times on my show, but that this destroys the individual.
This destroys self-esteem and The illusion that can be built on top of a destroyed individual who can't think and doesn't want to think and doesn't think they're self-sufficient, the illusion that's built on top of that also by school is the state.
So I think that I'm really willing to keep an open mind about any way that people are trying to challenge the legitimacy of those people.
And that's it.
Yeah. Lauren?
Well, I'd just like to say that in the future that everybody will stand up against what they think is wrong.
Excellent. Wes, did you want to add anything?
Or was that your closing statement before?
Here, here. Well, I was thinking about Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau.
They got put in prison for not paying the war tax to go kill Mexicans.
And Dave Ridley actually did a puppet show in front of the state capitol to illustrate that point.
And was it Emerson that came to see him?
And he asked him, Thoreau, what are you doing in there?
And Thoreau looks back at him and says, on the contrary, what are you doing out there?
My God. So his point was that in an unjust...
In a society that's governed, when people are thrown in jail unjustly, then...
Then, you know, you should actually stand up for what's right and do whatever it takes to show that this is unjust and it's an intolerable situation.
But it gets back to the practicality, right?
So to what extent can we modify our lives to set it up so that we can challenge authority?
And I think that libertarians are basically on the cutting edge of this whole process, trying to wake...
themselves up and everyone else up to the idea that it's okay to actually assert your individuality to make your own choices as long as you're respectful of other people and their property and oh dear he got cut off I think that was his closing bit.
But I think it's an interesting point that he raises about Thoreau.
That is a very famous interaction most educated people know about it.
This, of course, was quite some time ago in a war that now everybody accepts as unjust.
Yet still, even with that very famous act of civil disobedience, the wars still continue.
And that, of course, is my concern that I'm...
I think if you're going to get involved in any kind of movement, it's very, very important to study its history and figure out what has worked and what has not worked.
And I think as far as libertarianism goes, all too tragically, far more has not worked than has worked.
And for me, it's a lot more about pruning and trying things, trying the road less traveled.
As far as they're bringing freedom to the world goes, I might be wrong or I might be right about that, but I would hate to repeat other people's mistakes or look at things that haven't worked and say, well, civil disobedience throughout history doesn't seem to have been very effective.
Maybe there's something else.
And I'm always around trying new things because I really want to make sure that I try stuff that has not been tried yet.
And I think that's why I'm sort of focusing on some of this brain stuff that I've been working on lately because I think that's Really important information about why people are so resistant to reason and evidence.
But I certainly, you know, if people are out there and have good bits of evidence and arguments for the effectiveness of civil disobedience, please do send them to me and I will do a True News to report on those because that's something that I would be very,
very interested to hear about the degree to which it's been proven to have If not causation, at least correlation with increases in freedom and I would be very happy to see that evidence and I would be happy to publicize that evidence because that's something that I respect above all else.
So thanks very much, Brad, for setting this up.
And thank you, Lauren, for the amazing courage that you display in these things.
I would take my hat off to you if I had one on.
But it really is a remarkable thing and an amazing amount of commitment to what you believe in.
And I hugely respect that.
And I guess we will talk to you guys soon.
And thanks for taking the time out and have yourself a very, very happy set of holidays.
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