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Jan. 29, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:46
1569 How to Control Intellectuals - Freedomain Radio

The very intelligent are very dangerous; this is how they are neutered.

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Alright, so, to continue.
We have the propaganda, which is effective because what it does is it creates electric fences in the minds of the livestock, rather than in their physical surroundings.
Because, I mean, cows are pretty dumb, right?
All things considered. Well, actually, a few things considered, i.e., everything's smarter than a cow.
But cows are pretty dumb.
So, first of all, they don't mind being domesticated.
That's more productive if they're domesticated than if they're not domesticated.
So, cows do very well in that kind of environment, but because they wander off, you need to keep them enclosed.
And they can't milk themselves, right?
But human beings, as far as livestock go, are fantastic.
As long as they are not fully aware that they're livestock, then they're very productive, right?
They will fence themselves.
They will have this sort of horizontal statism, which is where they attack each other for even implying that they're not free, that they're in fact livestock.
So they'll do all of that, and most importantly, they will deliver their own milk, right?
So they'll go off and milk themselves and deliver milk.
And fundamentally, what human beings pay tax for voluntarily is to avoid the reality that they're paying taxes involuntarily, right?
You substitute, quote, When you are in fact in a non-voluntary situation, in order to avoid the knowledge that you're in a non-voluntary situation, because that's very risky, right?
Throughout history, that would be very risky and very dangerous to understand.
And, of course, you are mocked and laughed at.
The rulers don't want you to get that you're livestock, right?
So they make it funny, right?
While continually training you to be better and better livestock.
Now, Another aspect of this is in the enslavement.
Because the real challenge to the ruling class are the very smart people.
The very smart people are a challenge to the ruling class because they're smart enough to figure this out.
So the really smart people may recognize that they are Enslaved, that everybody's enslaved.
They may pop out of the matrix.
So, what do you do with the really smart people?
Well, what you do is you require an enormous investment of time and effort in order to gain credentials, right?
So, I mean, it's completely insane when you think about it, right?
There were 12-year-old astronomers in some of the Middle Ages courts In other words, people who've mastered not just mathematics, but astronomy of the day, who were 12 and 13 and 14 years old.
But what you need to do is you need to have your smartest people invest huge amounts of time and money, and of course those are both the same thing, huge amounts of time and money in order to gain credentials, in order to gain access to jobs.
Some professorships and certain kinds of...
Reporting and the trades and the doctors and lawyers and all that, but primarily the intellectuals.
So, you need to require from them an enormous amount of time and investment in order.
To have them be afraid of having that time and effort be wasted.
It's a very, very fundamental thing.
So, if you require someone to go through 12 years of education, 4 years of undergraduate, 1 to 2 years of a master's, and 5 to 7 years of a PhD in order to become an expert in a field...
Oh, my God. It's so mad.
It's so completely mad.
What is that? 12, we've got 16, 17, 18, and then 7.
25 years of education in order to become a doctorate, to have a doctorate in something, right?
I mean, that's just completely mad.
Four years longer than the average lifespan of the Roman Empire takes to become an expert.
Yeah! Romantic art or something like that.
I mean, so...
So what happens is when you get your intellectuals to invest that much time and energy into pursuing a career, they're going to be incredibly conservative.
And it's one thing you've really got to understand.
Intellectuals are incredibly conservative because they never point out violence and their alternatives are always...
Really pathetically bad and obvious, and in a sad, sad, protected market kind of way, market-driven.
So the socialists will preach to the socialists, and the libertarians will preach to the republicans, but it's all a very closed system.
And take me as a case in point.
So, imagine if in order to get a podcast, I had to go through 20 years of training and give up, I don't know, a million dollars of lost income and so on.
And if I displeased anybody, then my podcast would be taken away and my right to podcast would be taken away.
Or let's say I had to pay a million dollars a year for a license to podcast.
Well, because the barrier to entry would be so high, the only people on the other side of that barrier to entry who make it through that barrier to entry would be those who would be incredibly conservative, who would not ever take the risk of creating an audience, as I have done, but rather would have no choice fundamentally Unless they were like completely mental economic actors, which we can see does not happen, they would not be able to create a market.
They would have to appeal to a market that was already there because the risks of trying to create a market, of losing their license, of losing that quarter century of investment or, you know, sort of higher education that… Seven to nine years of investment and lost income and so on, they simply can't take risks.
They can't take risks, which means they can't reason from first principles, which means they have to reflect back some existing prejudice.
Some existing prejudice must be, must be, must be reflected back in order for them to gain a market share, in order for them to have a market share.
Which is why you see, of course, a lack of innovation, in my opinion, in the libertarian community, in the socialist community, in the republican community.
There's a lack of reinvention.
A lack of continual improvement.
And, of course, I come from the software marketing entrepreneurial sphere where continual improvement, blowing up everything that you made last year in order to start again from scratch, that is the name of the game, right?
Evolving from 16-bit to 32-bit, from Access to SQL Server to Oracle.
From an access frontend to a BB frontend to an ASP frontend to whatever, right?
It's a continual process of reinvention.
When I create a new version of the website or have help creating a new version of the website, I blow up everything that was there before except perhaps some general structure and we start all over again.
So that creative destruction, which people praise so much in the free market, just does not show up in credential-driven Reporting or communications.
And that's why people say, well, I don't respect anybody who doesn't have a PhD.
I'm not going to listen to anyone who doesn't have a PhD in philosophy about philosophy.
Well, all you're guaranteeing is that you're not going to hear anything original.
You're not going to hear anything really challenging.
And that's for sure.
Because original and really challenging is the risk of trying to create a new market.
And people who have no plan B, they're just not going to do it.
They're just not going to do it.
Like if you spent 10 years trying to get a PhD and then you want to go and try and get tenure, you're just not going to be able to piss anybody off.
You're going to have to take a recognized position and you're going to have to have all of the usual fawning civility, over-civility that should not be occurring in the realm of ethics and essential ideas.
You're going to have to have all of that in order to achieve your goal of making a living because otherwise, what are you going to do, right?
As Matt Groening says, like, meet the bitterest person in the world, the person who studied for years and years and didn't end up getting a degree, or got the degree but didn't end up getting a job in academia.
What are you going to do? Right?
Well, I don't know. What are you going to do?
Cab driver? Waiter? I mean, whatever it's going to be, it's going to be a complete catastrophe.
And it's going to ruin your life, right?
Because you're going to be like 30 or 35 or whatever, just starting out in some job field with very little chance of progress.
And, I mean, if you're a woman, what are you going to do in terms of having kids and a family?
And if you're a guy, you're not that much better off.
Right? So, So, if you're the state, the way to protect yourself from the very intelligent is to have goodies and have a protected system that they all want to try and break into, like the media.
And, of course, the media is protected, right?
The media is protected fundamentally because taxes are so high that people can't afford proper reporting anymore, right?
I mean, there used to be more reporting, but people can't afford proper reporting anymore.
And therefore, what they have to do is they basically have to retype government propaganda, right?
That's what happens. The government calls a press conference and people say yay or nay to it.
You get some cheap-ass pundits in.
Darling, you okay?
You get some cheap pundits in, and you talk about the government's points, and all of that is really cheap compared to actually hiring reporters, doing stories, doing research, interviews, and so on.
So you have to have access to the government in order to be able to run an even remotely profitable media enterprise these days, and the only way you get access to the government is you tow the party line of one kind or another.
You simply don't question any fundamentals about the government.
Otherwise, you find that you will simply have no access to those Boo-boo, shwee, thumbs! And of course, if you're a professor or you want to become a professor, you really have to toe the party line.
I mean, you just have to. You're just not going to go out and try and create something new because your entire livelihood, your life, your future, your capacity for family and children and everything that you may want in your life hangs upon you fitting into some existing slot, right? Expecting innovation from academics and the media It's like expecting the police to show up with a fantastic new anti-theft device, right?
It's like, imagine, I mean, I was thinking about this the other day.
I was at a store, and of course, Isabella likes to grab things in the store, and I let her grab things and carry them around, but she can't walk out because they've all got those sensors, right?
They go beep, beep, beep if you try and walk out with something, of course.
And it just sort of struck me, I mean, this is the whole problem with statism and all of these protected groups that I'm talking about.
Imagine if these things had not been invented, these censors, and the police showed up and said, hey, you know, we've been trying to figure out how, you know, been racking our brains about how to reduce your theft because, you know, we're the police and we really want to protect your property.
And so the police R&D department has come up with this fantastic anti-theft devices, these things which attach to clothing, which when you break them, they stain the clothing.
And, you know, these Magnetic strips and UPC codes and all that kind of stuff so that people can't switch price tags on you.
And so we want to give this to you for free because you're a taxpayer.
We want to protect your property. Of course, the police would never do anything like that, not in a million years.
The police are there to file your paperwork, to abuse minorities, and to tell you that nothing can be done.
And... You would no more expect genuine innovation from academia or the media or the other sort of intellectual classes than you would expect the police to show up with some fantastic new anti-theft device.
You know, hey, we've got these GPS systems which are going to give you for free or heavily subsidized for your car because we as the police are very concerned about car theft and so we've got these GPS devices which means that we can go and track them down within minutes of it being stolen, blah, blah, blah, right?
Well, That never in a million years is going to happen any more than you're going to get genuine innovation from academia, right?
And what I mean by, and particularly libertarian academia, all I mean by innovation in this context is to say, hey, we failed, so let's take another approach, which leads you to childhood trauma, family abuse, you know, the stuff that we talk about here, or the stuff that I talk about here, anyway, and other people listen and occasionally participate in it.
But That's how you control the intellectual classes, is you make sure that they have such an enormous investment in gaining a particular position that they're just going to end up having to be horrifically conservative.
Remember, when I started this podcast, I had a job.
I mean, I had nothing at stake.
I was already driving to work and back, and I was tired of audiobooks and even tired of my music.
And so for me, it was more fun to record podcasts.
It was a no-lose situation.
It was much more fun to record podcasts.
And I didn't really ever think that it was...
I had no idea that it was going to turn into something that would be like a job.
And so there was no barrier to entry.
There was no prior investment.
There was nothing to lose because I was doing it all for free.
And those are the conditions that are required to speak the truth.
And in my opinion, for most people anyway, right?
I mean, I certainly did get all the way through the master speaking some pretty heavy truths, but I did not really want to continue, and I don't think anybody was very enthusiastic about me continuing either.
But that's how you control the intelligent classes.
Now, how do you control the old?
Because the old, right, is something I saw in an interview with...
I think it was on Ellen with Clint Eastwood.
No, it was after his film about the boxer, Million Dollar Baby.
He said, I'm 73, what can they do to me?
Like, I'm 73 years old, what can they do to me, right?
So the problem with the old is the old have little to lose, right?
And so they have fewer consequences to speaking the truth, right?
So if you're some 80-year-old professor and you've retired, you can speak the truth, right?
And what can they do to you?
They take away your doctorate. Who cares?
They can't take away your teaching job because you've already saved your money, and so they can't take away your money.
So, the problem is the old, right?
How are you going to deal with the old and the fact that the old have much less to lose from speaking the truth?
Well, of course, you make the old dependent upon the state.
And that way the old cannot.
The old and wiser cows can't instruct the younger cows because it would be instant hypocrisy and so you make the old dependent upon the state and you do that through pensions and medical care, right?
Money and healthcare are the two things that the old need because they don't work as much and they get sick.
Hopefully, I will at some point say we get sick if I'm lucky.
You make the old dependent upon you.
I'm not saying this is sort of any 12-point plan or anything.
Human beings have a brilliant set of instincts for control and the ownership of people.
You want to provide healthcare that is going to protect People's capacity to work, right?
In the same way that you don't give much of a crap if your cow is just, you know, is a little lame.
But you do give a crap if your cow can't produce milk, right?
So, you will get good healthcare if something's keeping you from working.
But as long as you can work, people are like, well, yeah, it doesn't matter, right?
As long as you're still productive, as long as you're still producing.
Now, if you become non-productive but dependent on the state, That's very important as well.
Because I just sort of mentioned the old, but the other question is, well, how do you deal with the problem of the poor?
Because the poor also have less to lose from speaking the truth, right?
Because they have so much less to take away, to have taken away.
And that's, of course, where welfare comes in, and to some degree, unemployment insurance.
But that's how you take care of the poor, is you make them dependent upon the state.
So, you've really got everything blocked, right?
At least people did until this sort of new technology came along and were starting to make some gains, myself and others, some gains down this road.
But that's how you make sure that, you know, the matrix remains undisturbed by the smart, by the old, by the poor, by the young.
And, of course, it's proven to be a very powerful and effective system.
Thank you so much for listening.
As always, it's January 2010.
If you have a few extra shekels, January is a lean month for Free Domain Radio, post-Christmas and all.
If you could dig a little deeper and send some money in, that would be hugely, hugely appreciated.
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