All Episodes
Previous Next
June 9, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:49
1678 The Death of the West Part 2: The 19th Century (audio to a video)

What brought the guns to bear on millions of lost souls... References http://www.fdrurl.com/deathwest2

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Defend Maloney from Free Domain Radio.
This is part the second of the death of the West, the 19th century to World War I. I'm going to put forward a thesis here that may be surprising.
It's original to my knowledge.
There's some good evidence for it.
I'm not going to claim that it's an open and shut case, but I think that it's a very compelling case, and I hope that it will help you to understand how we can avoid these kinds of collaborates in the future.
Whenever you look at wrenching social change, and World War I can easily be described as one of the most wrenching social changes that ever was and perhaps ever will be.
Looking at the months or years just prior won't do you any good because everything is already in place.
It's like saying, well, there was a forest fire because lightning struck a tree.
No, there was a forest fire because there had been a long period of no rain, because there'd been no clear-cutting, no break-cutting and so on, probably because the government owned the land.
But you don't want to look at just the thing itself.
You want to look at everything that came before it in order to really understand what's happening.
So, August of 1914, the outbreak of hostilities occurred.
There was an incredible surging of enthusiasm for the war.
Young men signed up in droves.
They thought, we don't want to miss out the adventure of our generation, a war that will be over by Christmas, as they believed at the time.
Of course, a catastrophic miscalculation.
But why was everybody so enthusiastic for war?
And why had everyone not been so enthusiastic for war in the West for about a hundred years previously?
I just wanted to mention as well, I will be talking in the next video about Empire, because it's not like these were peaceful governments, but their violence was largely directed overseas.
We'll get into that. I'm not ignoring it or pretending that it was a utopia, but I just wanted to mention I will get to that next video.
If you go back two generations from 1914, you get to the 1860s and the 1870s.
It's my argument, it's my contention, That the reason why people became so enthusiastic for war, so enthusiastically patriotic, so enthusiastic to obey their political masters, was because of the introduction of public education, which throughout the Western world occurred I mean, it occurred in stages, and I don't want to get into all the details.
You can easily look them up.
But it was around the 1870s that for many of the countries, state education was created.
Now, why do I say state education had anything to do with World War I? We all know that human beings are kind of like imprinting ducks.
We tend to...
Give our emotional and intellectual allegiance to whoever raises us.
This is a biological imperative.
You have to be loyal to whoever raised you, because if you oppose them, they will abandon you and you will die.
We imprint upon whoever raises us.
This is well known by religions who will try to get their squiggly tentacles into the brains of children as young as possible.
It is well known by governments who will try to get a hold of children as young as possible and indoctrinate them.
For example, I mean, this is anecdotal, but I took my daughter to the library yesterday and I was playing with her and a three-year-old and a four-year-old a three-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl and I asked them what songs they knew and they started singing one nursery rhyme and then the boy said no no no oh Canada right and they stood up oh Canada and they literally stood up ramrod straight with their fists clenched at their side staring off into space singing oh Canada which is a hymn to the glories of being owned in the Canadian tax livestock farm This occurs very early.
The physical gestures were there, the physical rigidity, the staring off into space.
This is a three-year-old and a four-year-old who had already received this indoctrination from their government education system.
It's not inconsequential.
It is not at all inconsequential.
Whenever you begin to use force to educate children, and everybody understands who's got three brain cells rubbing together, that it requires the initiation of force for public schools because you have to go.
And particularly when it was instituted, it was a highly regressive tax.
It taxed the poor. It eliminated the capacity.
There was no homeschooling allowed.
You could send your kid to a private school, but for reasons we'll get into, those private schools began to diminish and vanish because they can't compete with free.
So, everybody understands that you have to get your hooks into children very early, and then the children will have a very strong allegiance to you.
It's a Stockholm Syndrome. I mean, it can be a beautiful thing when families are great, but it's a Stockholm Syndrome when you are put into government schools.
Because immediately you have to hide the violence of the environment.
You have to pretend that it is consensual when it is, in fact, coercive.
And blurring this distinction for children is a very bad idea.
And so... It's very important to understand that the government became the parents to a large degree because parents were originally responsible for educating their children and parents did a fantastic job.
We'll get into some statistics in a moment.
Parents did a fantastic job of educating their children prior to the rise of government schools.
After the fall of religious schools in the 16th, 17th centuries and prior to the rise of government schools in the 19th century, there was an amazing time!
An amazing time!
Of free, I mean sort of free as in free market, largely a private education where parents would choose, literacy rates were very high, intelligence kept increasing and there was entrepreneurial skills that were taught and we'll get into some of the amazing education that was going on in the 19th century.
This all got hammered and crushed down by the rise of government education.
So, when the government educates the children, the children are loyal to the government.
And it was very clear that war worship was instituted in government schools, and there are sources for this.
You're welcome to look them up. I'm going to put sources to this, which has some specific facts in it below this video here, or if you're listening to the audio, you can check out.
The video page.
Children were taught that war was glorious.
Children were taught that war was noble.
Children were taught that there is nothing finer and nothing more wonderful than for a man to sacrifice his life for his country.
As Nelson was supposed to have said at the Battle of Trafalgar, I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.
This was pounded into children's heads.
This was indoctrinated into children's heads.
Why? Because, for the most part, people in the government wanted to have future soldiers to go and continue to conquer more Third World countries, to expand their empires.
And so, if you want to have soldiers who are willing to go and die of tropical diseases and spears to the chest, you have to tell them that war is glorious, That obedience to the king or to the political leader is the highest form of virtue and then you can breed your lovely little kill robots to go out and slaughter people they've never met before.
So the indoctrination and the war worship that was inflicted on children by government schools was enormous and deep and had incredibly long-lasting consequences.
The first generation was, of course, sort of 1860s, 1870s to 1880s.
One of the things that occurred prior to the First World War and in many ways laid the stage emotionally and psychologically for the horrors of the First World War and the irrationality of the First World War was the rise of modernist art movements.
So within a generation of the institution of public schools, art mutates into Dadaism and cubism and nonsense word poetry and so on.
And you get, as some commentators have pointed out, Picasso-style paintings where bodies already look like they're blown apart while they're exploded, turned inside out, put at impossible angles as if they've fallen from a high building.
This is the inner torture of children who are herded into government schools expressing itself through art, because not just the artist, it's the popularity of the art.
Atonal opera, anti-beautiful dancing, a dancing which was grotesque, which caused riots when it was first premiered.
There was a real mutation into irrationality and distortion in art within a generation of public schools, because children pick up everything unconsciously and they're reflecting back.
The horrors of the society that they live in, where they're herded into state schools and taught that murder is virtue.
This has profound impacts on artistic sensibilities which then flow out but into society.
So the irrational madness of the First World War had, as laid in its foundations, the public school system which indoctrinated children to worship war, to worship the government, and that obedience to the head thugs was the highest possible virtue that could be achieved.
And so when the call went out in 1914, Millions answered the call.
I also wanted to mention one follow-up.
There's a number of follow-up things which I will drop in here and there.
My good friend Charlotte sent me a great message about what helped the West to grow.
And I absolutely want to get more into those things like the discovery of science and Greek literature, particularly philosophy, through explorations in the Muslim world.
And also the relaxation of the ban on lending money for interest, ban on usury through the Catholic Church.
All of these are very, very important.
We will do that in another series called The Rise of the West, because after we talk about the fall, we should talk about the rise, because that's where we have to get to after the fall.
So I just wanted to mention that.
I also wanted to mention that another reason why America, in the spring of 1917, entered into World War I was because the French army was falling apart.
The French army was rife 54 divisions mutinied in 1917, early 1917, as a result of yet another disastrous campaign where hundreds of thousands got slaughtered.
They shot their officers, they set up Soviets or democratic areas, and they said that they would defend France if it were invaded, but they were no longer going to attack the Germans.
Tens of thousands were mutinied, they were arrested, dozens and dozens were shot, and this rebellion was barely put down.
But there was no guarantee at all that the French soldiers would be available for any more of an offensive, and the British soldiers, of course, who weren't quite as badly beaten up, were still available.
But this is another reason why America came in, because if the French army had rebelled, as it did, And had become purely defensive, then there was no possibility of beating Germany and extracting the German gold that was necessary to pay off the war debts that had been lent to the Allies by America.
So this is another reason that America came in.
It was the same reason in terms of picking up the, getting paid back for their war debts, but it was this rebellion within the French army was enormously important in drawing America into the war because the West was absolutely crumbling and the peace treaties would have been To have everyone go back home.
Of course, the politicians didn't want a peace treaty where everyone went back home, because then the millions of deaths that had already occurred would be, quote, for nothing.
It's the fallacy of sunk costs in an absolutely bloody and genocidal pit, but, of course, people who had lost family members on my side of the family, on my British side of the family, or rather Irish side, Enormous numbers of men died in the First World War two generations back.
more died in the Second World War on both my mother's side and my father's side, the German and the Irish side.
But it's very hard to say to people, well, after millions have died, we're all just going to go back home and nothing happened.
So the politicians would have been voted out of office and possibly lynched if they had suggested that because they'd expended so much propaganda portraying the enemy as evil and immoral to the core.
And there were, of course, all these atrocity stories that came out of Germany's invasion of Belgium, that they were raping nuns and tossing babies around on bayonets.
It's all nonsense, right? But it's no more true than half the stuff that was said about Saddam Hussein.
But this is the propaganda that had been put forward, that Germany was an evil that had to be crushed underfoot like a poisonous viper or spider.
The church had gotten right into this and exhorted people to go and slaughter and strangle and bayonet Germans.
They were a cancer.
They were a virus. And so you can't just say, well, we've reached an agreement.
We're all going to go back to where we were because the propaganda had been so intense.
The British propaganda effort in America was equally intense.
And the prominent American writers who had come out in favor of the war and in favor of American intervention The British government arranged to have soldiers write them letters expressing their appreciation.
And, of course, the British government cut the communication cables from Germany to America across the Atlantic, which gave Britain the sole source of information about the war.
And, of course, they just lied about everything.
But you just have to look at what happened in Iraq and what's happening in Afghanistan to know that war is just a synonym for lie.
Anyway, so let's go back to the 19th century.
I'm going to give you some statistics which may be surprising because, of course, when you're at the tail end or the far end of a government program everybody thinks that the government program was put in to solve a genuine problem.
But public education, like everything else, Did not solve an existing problem.
In fact, it was the success of the free market that caused the government to institute private public schools.
It was not because it was failing.
It was because it was succeeding.
And the moment that it began to go in, education standards begin to decline.
Propaganda replaced genuine education.
A large number of topics were dropped from the curriculum, like economics, like law, like entrepreneurship, like business, like accounting, all the things which would actually help Children, particularly if the poor, actually compete with the middle and upper classes because the middle and upper classes don't want that.
They want a nice thick layer between them and the poor because the poor will work for cheap.
The poor will work for less money.
And so the rich don't want their wages dragged down by the entrepreneurial aspects Or energies of the poor, and so they put in public schools to retard the intelligence and abilities of the poor so that they don't compete with the rich.
It is a truly vile situation, the exact opposite of anything that would be just, noble, and right, and true and good in the world.
And of course, the function of public schools to maintain the class system, to give the rich the ability to send their children to quality private schools, while forcing the poor to send their children to the Metal detecting prison-built concentration camps of anti-schooling run by the state.
This is just a way of keeping wealth concentrated.
And you can see that as public schools have gotten worse, wealth has concentrated itself more and more in the hands of the rich.
This is what governments do.
They impoverish the poor and enrich the rich.
The gap will always get wider when governments are in charge.
So let's look at some of the educational Facts and statistics from a little earlier.
And I apologize for reading from notes here.
I just couldn't remember all of this stuff because my brain is aging.
Okay. A look at some literacy figures in the U.S. before 1870 when substantial state intervention began.
The 1838 report on the training of pauper children in workhouses shows that 87% pauper children, the poorest of the poor children, 87% could read.
Portugal in 1950 had only 55-60% literacy rate, 87% in a free market when they were far poorer than people in Portugal in 1950.
In 1950, Egypt had 20-25% literacy rate, compared to 87% of the poorest of the poor in a private school US system.
The report from the Assistant Handloom Weavers Commission in 1839 revealed that over 92% of handloom weavers could read.
And the average school-leaving age was 11, and most of the adults were at least 15 in 1833.
This was an enormous growth in literacy and truly, truly fantastic.
Let's look at some other facts and statistics about education in the 19th century.
In 1838, in England, 80% of children were receiving at least eight years' worth of education in the private school system, which I think is very, very impressive and positive.
In 1839, in an intensive survey, the government found that no more than 2-3% of the juvenile population are uneducated or left entirely destitute of formal education.
So only 2-3% of children were uneducated at all.
In 1839, the Manchester Society surveyed Hull, which is a town in England, 90% of adults in both towns could read Hull and Pendleton.
And again, the sources are below.
And the ratio of pupils to teachers was actually better in the 1830s than it was in 1967.
It was 26.8 versus 29.7.
A small difference, but nonetheless, better.
Parents were very effective at sending their children to good schools and taking their children out of bad schools, which I think is very very important.
One of the problems that occurred when government education was first instituted, it only guaranteed education for Four months of the year, whereas private schools were eight months of the year.
And so because parents could send their children to school for free for four months rather than pay and have them go for eight months, the amount of education that the children received actually went down as a result of the institution of public schools.
And let's have a look at some of the innovations.
They're just amazing. Some of the innovations that occurred in the 19th century.
As early as 1811, the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor was formed and created national schools and they followed the idea of a fellow named Bell.
Bell and Lancaster were two British innovators in the realm of education in the 19th century.
Now, Lancaster schools are very interesting.
They created a school and they had a number of teachers, but what the teachers did was the teachers taught the elder children, the elder students, and then the elder students taught the younger children.
And let me tell you how it works.
This will blow your mind.
So if you've ever been to college and lived in a college dorm, there's a thing called script.
It's like monopoly money that's only good within the school.
And the Lancaster schools ran on a system of script.
What that means is that they printed up this money, quote money, which was only valid within the school system.
And children got this money.
They got a fixed amount of it. And then what they would do is they would pay the elder students to teach them.
And so you had to be really good.
You competed as an elder student to teach the younger children.
So the younger children were in fact bidding themselves to get quality education from older people, and they could also bid to get money to get education from the teacher, but who was more expensive?
And they do say, of course, that when you really know something is when you can teach it to someone else and they can understand it.
So the teacher, the elder students received instruction, the teachers, and then would in turn instruct the younger children.
And they had to compete for this script with the younger children.
And the pupils got together and they had committees.
These kids, kids, right?
They would get together and they had committees where they would pool their money, script money to buy textbooks and copy them and try and save money that way.
And it was truly an amazing system.
It is a complete free market, free enterprise system within a school that itself is within a largely free enterprise system.
This was just astounding.
There were problems with the school.
I'm not going to say that's perfect. I mean, it's still a pretty irrational and religious time in many ways.
So it wasn't perfect. But both Lancaster and Bell were the first educators that I know of Who forbade corporal punishment within their schools.
That doesn't mean there wasn't punishment, there was dunce caps and humiliations and so on, but still, it was a huge step forward to have no physical punishment, no corporal punishment within schools.
I mean, there's many states in the US that still allow it 200 years later.
So I just wanted to provide an example of the kind of innovation that was occurring with Scripp and bidding for services and elder people teaching younger kids who they had to compete to teach, who had to make the lessons enjoyable and engaging and so on.
But let me tell you what really blew my mind when I read about this, and I hope it will be equally mind-expanding to you.
How much do you think a year of grammar school education in the Lancaster School in this script-based school cost?
How much do you think it cost? You'd be surprised.
Let's look at a comparison, right?
In Washington DC, relatively recently, the public school district spends about $13,000 per student.
$13,000 per student and 62% of poor fourth graders in the Washington area lack basic skills in math.
So we have a basic math literacy rate of 40% versus a much higher literacy rate though in reading when the schools were entirely private.
This is how much it cost for a child to go to the Lancaster school in the 19th century.
It cost $40. $40!
Oh, that's not even the best part.
The best part is it cost $40 in 1999 dollars.
Not $40 at the time, which would have been a huge amount of money.
It cost $40 to send a kid to these schools where they learned how to negotiate, how to bid, how to buy, how to sell, how to market, how to succeed in business.
There's a reason why England was so entrepreneurial in the 19th century.
It cost $40 in 1999 to send your kid to this kind of school where they received a much more functional education than can be bought with tens of thousands of dollars of government money now.
$40! This is why when schools are private you will absolutely be able to send every poor kid in the planet to school $40 a year.
Unbelievable. So, what happened?
Well, this is from, again, an article I'll post below.
Established educational elites found Lancaster schools so threatening that most English-speaking countries developed mandatory publicly paid education explicitly to keep public education in, quote, responsible hands.
These elites said that Lancaster schools might become dishonest, provide poor education, and were not accountable to established authorities.
In the 18th century, in England, non-conformists, from a religious standpoint, were excluded from most schools, and so they formed what became known as dissenting academies, such as those at Daventry and Warrington.
The education received at these schools was more closely linked to the world of business and included subjects such as science and accountancy.
And I just wanted to mention that in the early 16th century, many boys still went to chantry schools, religious schools.
After the religious changes of the 1540s in England, the chantry schools were closed.
And the big picture view of this, of course, is that with the religious wars occurring or the religious conflicts occurring, all the religions were trying to get hold of schools.
And that's one of the reasons why they just stopped having church schools, religious schools, because it was just easier to hand it over to the private sector.
So... We had this amazing century with all of its problems and all of its challenges.
We had this amazing century of private education where children received an education that gave them incredible social mobility for a few dozen dollars a year in modern currency.
It's unprecedented. Have you ever heard about it?
No, of course you haven't heard about it, because government education was supposedly instituted to solve the problem of a lack of education when all it has done has ensured that education is dead in the modern world, particularly for the poor.
People say, well, Shakespeare, he went to a government school, but Shakespeare went to a government school for 12 weeks a year.
So, I think it's really, really important to get this terrible arc of history where the poor, and more importantly, their parents, their parents chose the schools, their parents selected the schools, the parents educated and invested in the education of the young.
Very high literacy rates.
The American Revolution was founded on Thomas Paine's works.
And they sold one and a half million copies in a relatively tiny population.
In the early 19th century in America, a standard book of grammar sold over five million copies in five years because that's how literate the population was.
Alex de Toxville in Democracy in America continually talks about how Americans love to read.
There were thousands of newspapers, hundreds of magazines and subscriptions.
Dickens was enormously popular when he came over to visit in America and gave his incredibly animated readings.
The population was incredibly literate.
and very very well educated when it was a free society or more free or free at least in the realm of education So again, I'm trying to keep these relatively short.
The thesis that I'm putting forward is that government schools were instituted because there was a threat of the disintegration of a statist hierarchical society.
Because with the massive immigrants, immigrations that came in from Germany and from Ireland, the Catholic immigrations that came in, the government was worried and people, racists and bigots and narrow-minded tribalists were worried that There was no common identity anymore.
God spare and help us from common identities.
And so there was a fear that society was becoming too individualistic, that the poor were getting too uppity, that there was too much education, there was too much competition.
People didn't like it. The conservatives, their asses clenched up tighter than a diamond boar and they said, well, we can't have this anymore.
The teachers wanted to go to a public school system for job security.
And of course, the bad teachers wanted to go because they couldn't get fired very quickly.
All of this conspired to take parents out of the equation.
I mean, I understand.
It's the state that raises children these days in the West.
It's the state that raises children, not parents.
Parents both go to work for the most part and see their kids for an hour or two a day.
Which is, they're not interacting in a fun way.
They're just feeding and bathing and putting them to bed.
It was the takeover of children by the state which laid the foundation for the war lusts Of World War I. Because you have to hide the violence of the state when the violence of the state is being used to educate the young.
Because you can't say to the young, oh yeah, you should absolutely hit someone to get what you want because that's how my salary is paid as a teacher.
You have to hide all of that.
And to overcompensate the hiding of that, you have to praise to the skies the glories of the state.
Within a generation or two of government education coming down on the West, you have the progressive socialist movement.
The... The Fabian socialists, George Bernard Shaw was a prominent member, all working to expand the power of the state.
In Germany, you get under Bismarck the first welfare state and old age pensions.
Once you break that barrier where the state can now educate the children, the state can do everything and anything because people raised by the state have a much tougher time questioning and opposing the state.
Because we bond with whoever raises us.
We imprint like ducks on an orange balloon and trail it around.
The last thing that I will mention as well...
Is that the mechanization that was so slaughterhouse-y in World War I, the aircraft, the tanks, the shells, the explosives, of course, the barbed wire, and all of the machine guns, this all came out of...
Engineering developed by the private sector.
Explosives came out of mining.
They had to blow the holes in the ground because it was easier than digging and chipping away at it.
So all of the mechanized murder of the First World War came out of The relative economic freedoms of the 19th century and the incredible advances in engineering that occurred and in technology that occurred throughout the 19th century.
This is why it is so absolutely suicidal to have a government and a free market.
Because the free market produces all of the wealth.
The free market produces all of the technology and the weaponry.
Sorry, the technology which can be adapted to weaponry by the government.
Which is why whenever you have a free market, you always end up with a much larger government and a much better armed government at the end of it.
Which is why you can't have freedom in a government.
Freedom with a government is a short flash in the pan followed by a death grip tyranny.
So I hope that this makes some sense.
We will talk about empire and we will talk about the immediate origins of the First World War in the next episode.
Thank you so much for watching.
▲
Export Selection