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March 12, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:57
1610 Arguments with a Statist - Does the Government Reflect the Will of the People?
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Hey everybody, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
So, I'm just playing around with some different arguments to use against the illusion, the statist illusion, right?
This is one that I think is pretty good.
I haven't yet to try it out with somebody.
Well, I don't really talk to very many statists anymore.
But this is one I think is pretty good.
So, the basic argument for democratic statism...
It's that the government reflects the will of the people, or the majority of the will of the people.
And that, to me, is a very interesting proposition, because it's kind of binary.
I mean, there's obviously some gray areas, but it's pretty binary.
So, in order for the government to reflect the will of the people, There are a couple of considerations that need to be taken into account for this position to be true.
First of all, for the will of the people, which really means the will of the individual to be valid, it can't be propagandized, right?
I mean, it can't be propagandized.
It's like saying that if you have a kid and you bring that kid up, you know, put him in a Jesuit monastery and so on, and that's all he's ever exposed to, to take a sort of extreme example.
Some kid is born, he grows up and is in a Jesuit monastery since birth that he has, quote, chosen of his own free choice and free will to become a Jesuit monk.
Well, clearly that would be a pretty silly proposition, right?
I mean, that would be a very hard thing to sustain, to say the very least of it.
In the same way that if you're born in America, you have not exactly chosen to become an American, right?
I mean, you may choose to stay, but you didn't choose to become an American in the same way that if you're born in Russia in 1950, it's not like you chose to become a communist.
I mean, that's all you're exposed to.
That's all you're allowed to see or to be instructed on.
So, the choice of the individual must be unpropagandized, uncoerced, in order for it to be valid.
We all understand that.
I mean, if it's an arranged marriage and you're forced to choose the guy, you can't be said to have chosen him of your own free will.
I mean, you could also say, analogous to the political process, If you are forced to choose between one or two guys, neither of whom is particularly appealing, but you have to marry one of them, that you cannot be said to have chosen the marriage.
I mean, it's a very bad way of looking at the question of choice.
And so the will of the people...
Should not be conditioned by the state, should not be propagandized by the state, in order for that will to be valid.
I mean, I think we all understand that the propaganda undermines, if not destroys, choice.
And the reason for that is that virtually everything that we experience, I mean, outside of our direct perceptual I think?
And so, even when it comes to one historical event out of the millions of historical events in history, we rely on other people's interpretations of that event, right?
And so, the standard thing that you hear is that capitalism caused the exuberance of the 1920s, of free market laissez-faire capitalism caused the stock bubble of the 1920s, and it then crashed, and then the parents...
Sorry, the government...
We'll get to that podcast in a sec.
The government... I had to come in and save the remnants of capitalism from the craziness of the laissez-faire people and the same story is being reproduced now when it comes to the tech bubble or the housing bubble or the other, the raw materials bubbles and all of these things that have occurred over the past 10 or 15 years.
This is a story.
Of course, this is a fairy tale.
It is mythology. It is, as I've talked before, history is just another kind of religion.
And I believe, I'll do a podcast on this another time, I genuinely believe, that language itself, in its current use, is nothing more than a form of religiosity and superstition.
But So in order for somebody to make a choice, they have to have the facts, right?
So if there's a crash, if there's a boom and then a crash, and you believe that the boom is caused by freedom and the crash is saved by government intervention or interference, then you kind of have no choice in determining what course of action should be taken, right? If everything that you've been told is that the crash...
It's caused by freedom and saving people is the province of the state.
Then, of course, if that's all you've ever heard, it would be insane to think otherwise, right?
If all you've heard is that smoking damages the lungs and quitting smoking is the best way to prevent future and reduce prior damage, then, of course, of course, of course, That is your course of action.
If you're a doctor, that is your suggested course of action, right?
And so, if you were a doctor and you said to somebody who's having lung trouble, you need to increase your smoking, that would be insane.
Now, have you gone through all the raw data and done your own experience?
No, of course. You're relying on other people's reporting, right?
And so, our choice is, in a very real sense, Determined by the narrative that we are exposed to.
The choices that we make are determined by the narratives that we're exposed to.
Now, narratives doesn't always mean false narratives.
I mean, it's not false that smoking damages the lungs.
But it is a narrative insofar as there is no direct perceptual Or rigorous scientific exposure for most, most, most people to this.
And we see this all the time with nutrition, right?
Stuff's in and out of favor all the time.
Your choice about what to eat.
If you're interested in losing weight or building muscle or whatever, your choice of what to eat is determined by narrative.
You can choose whether you're going to diet or not, but if you're going to diet, then of course you can choose among a variety of diets, but these are all just narratives because you haven't gone through the direct experiments yourself to determine which is the best and worst diet.
So, in a very, very real sense, narrative is choice.
Narrative is choice. It's not predetermined in that everybody who's exposed to the same narrative ends up in the same way, because there is some conscious focusing of the mind or blanking out of the mind.
But for sure, if you've never been exposed to Christianity in any way, shape, or form, you grew up in some desert island, if you've never been exposed to Christianity, you do not have the choice to be a Christian.
You do not have the choice to be a Christian.
And if you're only brought up on Christianity and nothing else, then, I mean, you're very, very, very, very, very likely, it's almost an overwhelming likelihood that you will become a Christian.
But if you're only exposed to that, right?
So, narrative is determinism in many, many ways.
Narrative is determinism.
And so the question is to say, well, the government represents the will of the people.
Well, what is the will of the people determined by?
It's determined by the narrative inflicted upon them by the government.
Right? The pro-statist religiosity that is inflicted on them by the government.
And I got to tell you, anti-state information, some of it's propaganda, but most of it I think is really good information.
I mean, just think of Rothbard's analysis of the Great Depression.
It's dull as a donor, but it is information as opposed to a narrative.
But anti-state information is about as easy to come by in the modern culture as anti-Christian information was in the Middle Ages, which is why just about everybody is a statist, because their choices are determined by the narrative that has been inflicted upon them.
The degree to which narrative creates conclusions, and conclusions eradicate choice.
A choice is when you're not sure, right?
When I'm driving home from the gym, I know how to get home.
I don't drive in the opposite direction.
If I'm lost, I might drive around trying to figure it out.
I have a choice, right? I don't really have a choice, if I want to get home, how to get home.
There's two ways I can get home, basically.
And so since that's the reality, once you have a conclusion, there's no choice anymore.
Once you have a conclusion, there's no choice anymore.
If I want my car to go somewhere, I need to put some gas in the car.
That's not a choice. It's a conclusion.
I don't sit there and say, well, maybe if I pour some water in my car, I can go.
Or maybe if I blow some helium into the tank of my car, I have a conclusion.
And it's a correct conclusion. I need to put gas in my car in order to make it go-go.
So once you have a conclusion, You don't have choice anymore, right?
So the conclusion that smoking damages the lungs is a conclusion.
It's not a choice about whether smoking damages the lungs.
it is a conclusion.
So once you have a conclusion, there's no such thing as choice anymore, which is why, of course, we focus here on methodology rather than conclusion.
I think it's really, really important to remember that there is no choice without truth.
That's There's no real choice without truth.
This is why philosophy is so dangerous to hierarchy.
This is why philosophy is the opposite of hierarchy.
Hierarchy, I mean, I think coercive hierarchies, are the opposite of choice.
And therefore, the enemy of coercive hierarchies is philosophy, because philosophy...
Truth brings choice.
If you don't know the truth, you actually don't have a choice, fundamentally.
If you don't know the truth, you don't have a choice.
Sorry, let me be a little bit more specific than that.
If you don't know the truth and you know you don't know the truth, then you have the choice to go and get the truth and figure it out or whatever, right?
But if you don't have the truth but you think you have the truth, then you truly have zero choice.
You have the opposite of choice, which is the illusion of choice.
And knowing that you don't have a choice is one thing, right?
But thinking you have a choice when you don't is the polar opposite, right?
Of choice. So, for instance, I mean, let's take a silly example.
If you are trying to get somewhere, and that somewhere requires that you go north, but your compass is eerily reversed, and you don't know that, and you're in some field but no landmarks, then you will go to where your compass says is north, and you will confidently go to where your compass says is north.
Off you go, right? Say it's a cloudy day or a night, you can't figure out where the sun is or whatever.
And that's called really, really going in the wrong direction, because you are confidently, with full, quote, knowledge, going in the wrong direction.
Now, imagine that you know that your compass is pointing, quote, north, but you also know that it's wrong.
Well, of course, if you know that it's the opposite of truth, then you just go the opposite direction to go north, which is actually the case with most modern philosophy.
We're going to go the opposite direction.
So where relativism has the funky relativism and postmodernism and all that, we go to certainty, to UPB. Where Ayn Rand's objectivism has over-certainty and over-control, we go to the ecosystem and to introspection.
You go to the opposite direction of error and you're pretty close, I would say, if not bang on the truth.
At least that's been my approach.
So, if you know that it's the opposite, you go the opposite direction, you're okay.
Now, if you just know that it's broken, your compass, but you don't know which is the right way, then you will try and figure it out, right?
Or you'll go a little ways, you'll ask someone, you'll test, you'll wait for tomorrow when the sun's out and then, you know, rises in the east, sets in the west, you can figure out where north is.
You will do all of those things, right?
You will be patient, you will wait, you will ask, you will figure it out because you know, right?
Now, propaganda is the opposite of truth.
Error is the opposite of truth.
And we get error by teaching conclusions.
Because if you teach someone a conclusion, it's automatically wrong.
Even if the conclusion happens to be right, it's not reproducible.
It's like if I teach you that 9 times 9 is 81, and that's it, and I don't teach you any principle of mathematics, does 9 times 9 equal 81?
Is it true? Well, you have no standard of truth and falsehood, because all you've been taught is a conclusion.
So, in teaching, I'm sort of thinking about this stuff because in teaching Isabella, I got these flashcards and, you know, fun stuff.
I think she enjoys it, fun stuff like that.
So, she, you know, I point at the flashcard, shows a box, and she says box.
And all she's doing is matching sounds to symbols.
She's not really learning anything because she needs to get sounds to symbols to even begin to learn something, right?
She needs to get the basis of language down.
But I'm not teaching her How do I identify a new thing, right?
I'm not teaching her how to identify a new thing.
Well, sorry, she should say that to a little bit of a degree.
She can figure out a bird is either a drawing or a cartoon or a picture or a real bird or the movie of a bird.
She gets all of those as birds, so she's conceptualizing like crazy.
But there's no a priori knowledge.
There's no innate birdness To a bird, right?
Obviously, different language would be a different thing.
Sign language is a different thing again.
So I'm teaching her conclusions.
I'm not teaching her any principles of language.
I'm simply teaching her that words are attached to things.
In an arbitrary, though predictable, And consistent fashion.
So, that is the nature of language that she's at.
Now, of course, when she gets older, and I'm already starting to teach her letters, right?
She doesn't really get them yet. She's too young.
But if she gets older, and we teach her letters, and we teach her sounds, then we are going to be able to teach her to piece together words, which would be great.
And I think this is good.
And that is going to be teaching her principles, that she can then move onwards, right?
But if I point at a picture of a bird, and I say bird, Is it right or wrong?
Well, it's just a thing.
It's just a parallel.
And that's it. It's not a principle.
It's not right or wrong. It just is, right?
Now, you could say, well, if she points to a cat and says bird, then that's incorrect.
But it's not incorrect based on any principle.
It's just incorrect based on a one-to-one mapping, right?
So, you have to have principles in order to have correctness or incorrectness.
If you only have conclusions, you have no principles.
And without principles, you have no freedom.
That's why I don't like religion.
Religion teaches a conclusion. There is a God, the Ten Commandments, blah, blah, blah.
Original sin. These are all conclusions, no evidence, right?
And, of course, hierarchies must teach conclusions.
Because when you teach methodology, then there is no hierarchy anymore, right?
Or you need to create this artificial hierarchy like only people with a PhD on physics can have any opinion on physics, right?
Create this ridiculous hierarchy like Einstein wasn't working in a patent office when he revolutionized modern physics in 1906, right?
But that's really, really important, I think.
That if you don't have principles, you don't have freedom.
If you only have conclusions...
And you don't have methodology.
You have no freedom.
You have no freedom. Is a man free to go north if his compass is reversed and he doesn't know it?
Well, he's not free to go north.
He has no practical freedom to go north because he will confidently go south thinking that it's north.
Right? Propaganda is statism.
Statism is propaganda because statism is a violent hierarchy and a violent hierarchy can only be maintained through aggressive conclusions, never through methodology because methodology is the opposite of hierarchy because we can all think and we all have access to reason and evidence, which is why all conclusions must be inflicted.
And methodology, philosophy, reason and evidence, thinking, Right?
If you win, if reason and evidence win, then he is an unjust exploiter and a member of the parasitical class that feeds off the thugs with guns.
Conclusions versus methodology, hierarchy versus philosophy, fascism versus freedom.
It's a win-lose proposition.
It's a win-lose proposition.
Conclusions also destroy intelligence, which is why people seem so dumb when they're into politics.
Conclusions destroy intelligence.
We know this.
If you get the whole word learning method, you don't learn the parts of words.
You just learn every single word.
Well, tens of thousands of words later, you've just got a one-to-one mapping of memory and you can't identify a new word very easily.
So it makes you dumb. It makes you a bad reader.
It makes you a poor reader. It makes reading a struggle.
It gives you a learning disability. Imagine if you didn't learn any principles of mathematics, you just learned the answers to every single equation, right?
Well, you would be a very bad mathematician.
It makes people dumb to learn only conclusions, whereas it makes people super geniuses To learn the few basics of principles and apply them consistently.
That's what the brain is for.
The brain is for principles.
I mean, when you're playing catch, you don't memorize every place where the ball could possibly go and go there.
You have the principle of flight and gravity and wind resistance and spin, and then you go and catch.
So you can catch any ball that is thrown reasonably to you, whereas if you could only map where the ball was going to land based on where it did land, you'd be a very bad catcher.
Conclusions make you retarded.
Philosophy makes you a genius.
So this is sort of part one of, do the citizens control the government?
Well, no. Because the citizens have been sold propagandistic conclusions, and therefore, they really don't have any choice in who to vote for.
They're simply going off prejudice and bigotry and ignorance and delusion.
And so the state trains them to worship the state.
The moral compass is reversed, and they don't know it, so they have no freedom.
To choose freedom. They have no choice.
To choose choice. Which is why philosophy is deemed so dangerous.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
Donation beg. I shall not be shy.
If you could throw a few shekels my way, I would really appreciate it.
Donations are always a little bit light early on in the year, yet the costs of Freedom Aid Radio remain consistent.
So thank you so much for listening.
I will do part two and talk to you soon.
Alright, so let's move on to part two of...
Does democracy represent the will of the people?
That's an excellent, excellent question.
So, let's say you're chatting with a statist, and the statist says, democracy represents the will of the people.
And... I think...
A question then to ask would be, has democracy been successful?
Oh, it's been a while since we've had a tasty little raincast, hasn't it?
But, yeah, so the question is...
Is democracy successful?
In other words, and by successful, what is fundamentally meant is obviously to some degree moral, at least perfection in society as there is in a person's life, but to a large degree moral, but to a more fundamental degree, sustainable.
Sustainability is the key thing when it comes to the success of a society.
In the same way that Success in a career has something to do with sustainability.
I mean, you can lie your way into any position.
You can fake credentials.
You can bribe people to give you references.
You can fake degrees.
You can do all of these sorts of things.
But the real question is, is it sustainable, right?
So you can fake your way into getting a job as a surgeon.
The question is, can you actually cut people open and make them better?
And that's sort of a different situation.
So sustainability is really the key.
When it comes to morality...
And happiness, sustainability is really very important in the same way that sustainability is important for health, right?
So, if you have a toothache and take heroin, it's true you feel a lot better than if you went to the dentist, but it's not really very sustainable.
And if you...
If you discharge your negative emotions on the vulnerable and helpless, you sort of attack and criticize or whatever, make yourself feel better at their expense, you will feel relief from your anxiety and happiness, but at the cost of, yes, more anxiety and unhappiness, right? So it's not a sustainable situation to act out against anyone, really, but particularly the helpless and the dependent.
So that is not so much with the workie either.
I'll give you one last example.
You can lie about your income and you can fake whatever to get into a lifestyle that you can't sustain.
Are you wealthy?
No, because it is not sustainable.
That is the key thing when it comes to very many evaluations of things.
The sustainability to infinity is the fantasy of religion and the afterlife, and the sustainability of the moment is much more around relativism, right?
So you want that medium amount of...
Sustainability. Oh, sustainability to a human lifespan within reason, not to infinity, right?
So, if you were to live...
Ah, it doesn't matter. I think we understand that.
Sorry. Let's keep plowing on.
Oh, the tangent! The undertow.
She just sucketh me down and not in the way that I like.
So, the morality has a lot to do with sustainability.
And... If democratic societies are not sustainable, it's one way that you know that they're not moral.
And so, when we ask, does a modern Western democracy, does it represent the will of the people?
Even if we ignore all of the propaganda stuff that I was talking about just a moment ago, all the indoctrination and public schooling and so on, even if we ignore all of that, we say...
Do they reflect the will of the people?
Yes. Okay, then the will of the people is greedy and destructive and short-sighted because none of these societies are sustainable.
This is the challenge, and it's a huge psychological burden on human beings these days.
It's not abstract.
When you're living in an unsustainable society, it really messes with the circuitry.
I'm telling you, it messes with the circuitry at a very, very deep level.
It completely messes up people's psyches and the deferral of gratification and cause and effect, hope for the future, desire for children.
When you're living in a society that is not sustainable, then it's like you're sailing on a ship you know is about to sink.
And if you're sailing on a boat that is about to sink...
Your choices are going to be quite different than if you're sailing on a boat that you have every reasonable expectation is going to make its joy in one piece.
All you have to do is picture it, right?
You're on the Titanic. You know the Titanic is going down.
You know your odds of survival are very low.
What are you going to do? You're going to eat, drink, and be merry, right?
Smoke cigars, right?
When you're in an unsustainable situation, it is really going to mess with your circuitry.
And Western democracies are simply not sustainable.
They're not sustainable. They're not even close to sustainable.
It's not even a close call. I mean, they're about as sustainable as somebody who's just put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Oh, his life is sustainable for another millisecond or two, perhaps?
But it's still over, right?
So the societies that we live in are dead, done, gone, buried...
Stick a fork in them, turn them over, they're done.
That is the reality of the situation.
And because of that, if that represents the will of the people, then the will of the people is unsustainable, greedy, exploitive of the unborn and of the future and destructive and so on, right?
And therefore, democracy can't work.
Democracy, I mean, this has been known since ancient times.
It's just nothing you're going to learn in school, right?
Public school or even private school.
Democracies are incredibly unsustainable because people vote to pillage everybody else.
I mean, this has been known since before Seneca.
As soon as everybody realizes that they can vote to take away the income of other people and vote to take away the income of the future, you get massive debts, massive expansions of government spending.
Completely unsustainable levels of public employment.
I mean, this has all been known forever, right?
It's just people don't have an alternative, right?
And when you don't have an alternative, you make do.
You make do with what you can.
And because people don't recognize the alternative of statelessness, they have no choice.
They don't have the choice, right?
Anarchism is not a choice for people at the moment because they don't understand it and they're too full of propaganda, right?
So they don't understand it, right?
I mean, it's like if you're playing a maze game on some Pizza Hut placemat, you're playing a maze game, and you look ahead and it's like, that's a dead end, you turn your pen around, right?
Because it's a dead end. Look ahead, anarchism, well, that's not, forget it, anarchism is crazy, so let's turn around and try something else, right?
Uh-uh-uh-uh, right? That's where people need to go, but they perceive it as a dead end, so they, you know, if you say keep going, it's like, well, it's a dead end, why would I keep going?
It doesn't, right? It's no good.
So, it doesn't work.
The societies that we live in are unsustainable.
And if societies accurately represent the will of the people, and the government has trained the people for close on a decade and a half to participate in the democracy...
I mean, the government is not short of propaganda, right?
There's more propaganda than anybody in the ancient world could have dreamed about.
There's more propaganda than you could imagine in the ancient world, right?
So, the government is not short of propaganda.
And so, the government has trained the people for a decade and a half, and the people's choices are destructive and short-sighted and greedy, and have caused...
Irreparable damage to the future of society.
Societies cannot continue, even remotely at their current pace, with their current setups, with the level of public spending and the level of indebtedness and so on.
It can't continue.
And so, if democracy represents the will of the people, then democracy doesn't work.
Democracy doesn't work.
Because it's incredibly unsustainable.
And really, you could say that democracy didn't have a whole lot of traction until women got the vote.
Not blaming women, of course, but just pointing out.
Like you say, democracy didn't really have a lot of traction and credibility until women got the vote.
Now, once women got the vote, then you really had pretty universal suffrage.
And, yeah, for a lot of places, that was early 20th century.
I mean, it's less than 100 years that this cluster frack has lasted.
It's less than 100 years.
I mean, it's nothing.
It's nothing. Rome was close on 1,000.
Less than 100 years, with the most incredible wealth.
And possibilities and opportunities, it's less than 100 years until, and it was less than 100 years that it became completely unsustainable.
I mean, as I talked about more recently, we all knew as kids that it was unsustainable 30 years ago.
So we're talking 50 to 60 years that it lasted in a format that could be believably sustainable, right?
But that took two generations to pillage and destroy society.
The greatest and wealthiest and most powerful, most technologically advanced, most astounding, most mind-blowing, most scientific, most rational culture the world has ever seen.
It took less than two generations to completely pillage it beyond recovery.
I mean, locusts tip their little fucking hats at us.
So, if it does reflect the will of the people, the will of the people is like a bunch of piranhas on a, you know, a stumbly cow, fat cow, that fell into the Amazon.
The river, not the website, for my younger listeners.
Oh, it's time to diss the younger listeners.
Oh, that's a wise idea, given how many of them there are.
I'm sorry, my donators, I love you.
Cringe, cringe, beg, beg, lick spittle.
So, if it does reflect the will of the people, then it's completely unsustainable because the people go into a shark-like feeding frenzy.
If that Israel-Hawaiian singer dives into a shark tank, that's sort of what democracy looks like.
And since female suffrage, which in some places were like in the 50s or 60s, crazy how late it was in some places, but it took like 50 years, from the 1920s to the 1970s, for democracy to completely force-feed its own foot and consume itself.
So, that's an amazingly quick end.
And of course, people don't see that because people are kind of narcissistic, right?
So, it's hard for them to see beyond their own lifetimes, which is one of the good things about the study of history and philosophy.
But history and philosophy, to a smaller degree in many ways, is it really makes you humble, right?
So, 50 years, right?
It took for the feeding frenzy, the self-mutilating, bloodthirsty vampire orgy of eating the young and the future for democracy to consume itself.
So, if it represents the will of the people, it is a completely fucked up system.
Now, If it doesn't represent the will of the people, because the only way you can rescue the people from democracy is by saying democracy doesn't represent the will of the people, right?
If you think it does, then it's a cancerous, disastrous system, right?
So you can only rescue the people from what has clearly happened to democracy, right?
By saying that democracy has been hijacked by special interest groups and it doesn't represent the will of the people and politicians lie and they reverse their positions and, you know, they just tell the people what they...
Right? So, you can do that and then you can rescue the people from the results of...
The great wet vacuum fart of democracy.
But then you just say democracy doesn't work, right?
It's supposed to represent the will of the people, right?
But it doesn't work, because the will of the people doesn't represent the will of the people.
So you can save the people, but only by damning democracy.
And you can't save democracy by recognizing what happens actually with the people, right?
So, either way, it just doesn't work.
It just doesn't work.
So, I think those are important things to bring to bear when talking with people about democracy and what it means.
Now, what you will get if you deal with more sophisticated statists, democratists, Demicides.
What you will get is people who say, the people need to improve.
Democracy does represent the will of the people, but you see, the people need to improve.
And this is an original sin argument, right?
This is the reason why this is hard to counter, although it's completely insane.
But I feel that this is hard to counter, right?
And whenever you feel an argument you just know is nutty, but whenever you feel that an argument is hard to counter, look for religious antecedents, right?
Look for the religious principle that is sort of pitifully updated for this new argument.
That's almost always the case.
I mean, it's not... Always religious.
And even more fundamentally, it's familial on both sides that the religious and status divide.
But look for, you know, the steaming toe print of God right in the hot lava of a seemingly insurmountable argument.
Because the argument that it's not democracy's fault that things have gotten bad in the abstract, it's the people's fault, you see.
It's the people's fault.
That's why there's a problem.
Because the people are bad.
And so if the people were better, then democracy would work.
So, democracy, then, is this platonic ideal.
And the only thing which prevents it from being as wonderful as it is damn well supposed to be is, you know, the nasty, greedy, evil people, right?
Okay. Well, this is just original sin, right?
Because if God runs the universe, this is the problem, right?
If God is the creator of the universe, God is all-powerful in the universe...
Then why is the universe so shitty, right?
Why is the planet so full of crap?
Right? And murder and rape and war and pestilence, famine, childbeating and so on, right?
Well, because, religious people say, people are bad.
It's not God's fault. It's original sin.
It's our fault that we're bad, right?
It's not God's fault that we're bad.
It's our fault. It's not the government's fault that we're bad.
It's our fault, right?
The government is good.
It just reflects us.
We're bad, and therefore the government's bad, right?
And, of course, the reason why both these insane arguments are believed is that this is the argument in most families where there are problems, right?
What is the problem? You doubt me?
You know, tune in to any Supernanny you like.
Any Supernanny. It's on Friday nights at 9pm.
I haven't watched one in a while, but...
It was always the same thing.
Supernanny, help us. Our kids are bad, right?
Our kids are bad! And you go in and you see these parents.
Oh my god, they're insane!
The parents loathe each other.
They're yelling at each other. One of the fathers, I saw a show, he's hitting his...
Four-year-old daughter, and he's like 240 pounds, right?
I mean, yelling at their kids.
No discipline, no consistency, no happiness, no love, no playing, no curiosity, no empathy, no warmth, no cuddliness, right?
Just parents trying to work on the computer and snapping at their kids, and they want, oh, you see, my kids are disobedient.
My kids are wrong, right? Blame the victim, blame the victim, blame the victim.
That's always the rule of authority, right?
Because authority does things badly for the most part.
And when things go bad, then authority blames victims.
It blames those who are helpless and dependent, right?
And the question is, of course, where do bad things come into the world?
How do bad things come into the world, right?
And there's... There's two philosophies around this.
Well, there's one philosophy and one superstition.
Where do bad things come in the world?
Bad things come in the world, it's either top down or bottom up.
There's only two ways that people really approach this question.
It's top down or it's bottom up.
The bottom up approach, which we're all familiar with, is that bad things come in the world through children.
Children are disobedient.
Children are lazy. Children are selfish.
Children are aggressive. Children don't think about the consequences of their actions.
Children are grabby. Children are mean.
Children are bullies. Children are, you know, if you don't watch them, if you don't give them boundaries, if you don't give them, they'll just do all these bad things.
Right? So, Where do problems come into the world?
Through the children.
Because we're born bad.
You see, we're born bad and we must be whipped and cajoled and bullied and yelled and controlled and sat in rows and we have to raise our hands to go to the bathroom because we're just raging little beasts, you see, that will undo, unravel the fabric of the world with our chaos and our greediness and our selfishness.
So where does bad stuff come into the world?
Well, the theory bottom-up is that children are just born bad.
They're just born bad.
Disrespectful and disobedient.
Children are just born bad.
Or they may be good for a little while, sort of really young and cute and dependent, but they're terrible twos, right?
It's the terrible twos, right?
It's not called the terrible second year of parenting.
It's called the terrible twos.
A kid hits two and they become terrible, disobedient, willful.
It's not the terrible second year for the parents in their parenting, that they're doing anything wrong.
The kids are the problem, right?
And this approach is always taken by societies stuffed to the gills with bullshit.
Right, so when societies are just full of lies, and children are naturally empirical and skeptical and rational, so a society that is full of lies will fundamentally hate kids.
Fundamentally, it will hate the innocence, empiricism, rationality, curiosity, and skepticism of children.
It will, because...
The children don't fit the society.
Of course, if children don't fit the society, you can't question society.
What are you, crazy? You can't question society.
If children don't fit society, well, it's the children who are wrong.
Right? We can see this with the medication debate, right?
If children are the square pegs in the round hole, you don't adjust society.
You have to break the children, pound the children until they go through the round hole, right?
That's just inevitable, right?
And of course, as a society goes through its phase of decadence, which we are absolutely going through right now, then the lives become all the greater.
And as the corruption of society spreads and the predation upon the young...
It gets greater. I mean, everybody who's got any ounce of sense is incredibly guilty or feels a sense of shame about how society is treating the young.
I mean, we've sold them off to the Chinese, for Christ's sakes, of course.
We've sold them into slavery to bankers for the sake of political expedience, convenience, and not having fights around the goddamn dinner table.
We are fundamentally, rabidly, and bloodily ashamed of how we have left the world to our kids with a massive, overwhelming state power apparatus, a decaying environment, massive debts.
We've fucked up the entire world.
And everybody feels guilt about that, and they don't deal with it.
And so they say, well, the kids are bad.
They tell themselves more lies, and the more lies you tell yourself, the more threatening children are to you.
Children are incredibly threatening to falsehoods.
Children are born not even imagining that some carpenter who got...
Nailed gun to a tree 2,000 years ago, saves, that he's responsible for said death, right?
I mean, he doesn't have any clue about these things.
And then looks upon these stories like, what?
And the fundamental, what?
Is really, really unsettling to the claustrophobic, cracked up, broken souls of the illusion addicted.
So children, children must be crushed, must be broken, must pay for the lies of society.
And that's the bottom-up approach of where things go wrong in society.
We see some kids acting up in a mall and we say, bad kids, poor parents.
That's the bottom-up view of how bad things end up in society.
Look at these teenagers, these teenagers with them bandanas and their low-hanging pants and their hats on backwards and disrespectful and blah, blah, blah.
Now, a philosopher, and anybody who knows anything about psychology and self-knowledge, a philosopher will say, Why do bad things come into the world?
Well, top down. Those who have the power, those who are in charge, are responsible for the bad things.
Right? If you have surly, disrespectful teenagers, look to the parents.
Look to the teachers. Look to the schools.
Look to the priests. They're the ones who are in charge.
They're the ones who have the power. They're not victims, right?
I mean, children are victims.
And so, when someone says to you, well, the people need to be better for democracy to work, they're just blaming the victims, right?
Now, I said this was an easy argument to counter, right?
And it's like, well, if you design a system that doesn't take into account the fact of how people are, it's a bad system.
It's a bad system, right?
If I design a restaurant that sells gravel...
Right? A big gravel buffet, right?
All different shapes and sizes.
Some with tar, some not.
Well, someone says, well, people don't eat gravel.
Well, people need to learn how for my restaurant to work.
It's like, oh, you idiot. Find out what people eat first, what they like to eat, before you open a restaurant.
So, if a system is designed to take the will of the people and make it real, and the will of the people is bad, because people are bad, then that's a bad system, right?
Right?
That's not a good system at all.
And, of course, for the will of the people to be bad, the leaders have to be good, but the people have to be bad, right?
But if the leaders are good and the people are bad, then how could the bad people vote for good leaders, right?
Not possible.
And if the leaders are good and the people are bad, then your average voter should do a lot more evil than your average politician, right?
Who supports the war on drugs, who supports the forcible transfer of money through taxation and so on, right?
So the average citizen would have to be much worse than the average leader.
But of course, we realize, just looking at things even remotely, empirically, it's the leaders who declare wars.
It's the leaders who propagandize about violence.
It's the leaders who take bribes, right?
I mean, so... I mean, this is just empirical.
Look at the criminal record of people in Congress, for Christ's sake.
So, you just go back to the facts, go back to empiricism.
It's a badly designed system if it doesn't take into account fundamentals of human nature.
Blaming the victims is ridiculous when the victims act almost universally more morally than the victimizers and those in power.
And blaming the average citizen who's just going to work and trying to feed his family and this and that for all the predations of those in power is ridiculous.
Because those in power also know about government a lot more so than those, right?
Politicians know a hell of a lot more about how government works and what it's all about than your average voter and citizen, so they're much more responsible.
Crazy argument. Anyway, I hope that this makes some sense, but thank you so much for listening as always.
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