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June 11, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:23
1681 Freedomain Radio on Radio Free Oklahoma!
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Alright folks, it looks like we've got our guest on the line.
We have on the air with us Stephan Molyneux.
He has been fascinated by philosophy, particularly moral theories, since his mid-teen.
He left his career as a software entrepreneur and executive to pursue philosophy full-time through his work at Free Domain Radio.
You can find that website at freedomainradio.com.
Good evening, Stephan. Good evening.
Thank you so much for having me on.
It is weird to be talking to me first-hand when I've heard your voice so many times on your podcasts and videos.
Right, I imagine that by this time it's probably haunting your very dreams.
Well, I must admit the first time I heard one of your videos, I was kind of off-put by the accents, being a southerner, but it grew on me, and especially the content of your work at freedomonradio.com.
I'd like to preface I started off as a minarchist, I guess, getting into the freedom movement.
I was a strict constitutionalist.
But as I began to explore and research and so forth, I began to discover that the Constitution of the U.S. was not such a great document.
It was conceived in secret as a document of compromise.
In fact, the greatest thing about it, which is the Bill of Rights, wasn't even in the Constitution.
It came afterward. Exactly.
It was one of the selling points.
Later, reading Leisender Spooner, I came to realize that as a piece of paper, it had absolutely no bearing on what our rights are or how we should conduct a society.
So, I mean, I started out a strict constitutionalist.
I thought that was it. This is it.
This is the ultimate truth.
I never thought I would find myself, frankly, and I hesitate to say this word, an anarchist, which I basically am.
I just hate to use the word because it's such a loaded, It's a negative term.
In fact, I think its first usage was negative.
It's been demonized.
Over and over, they just drag anarchism through the mud.
It's an easy candidate.
Well, I mean, the only anarchists you've seen in the news are the guys with the black ski masks breaking windows and blowing up cars.
Do you think the word can be saved, Stephan?
I think it can be saved, but it certainly can't be saved by pretending – I can't save it by pretending that I'm not what I am, right?
So I used to – people have said, well, use the term voluntarist or anti-violence or something like that.
But the problem is as soon as I start describing my position, my advocacy of a society without a state, people say, well, isn't that just anarchism?
And I'm either going to fudge that and then start to look all kinds of creepy up front or I just say, well, yeah, that's the word that is used to describe somebody who is consistent with the non-aggression principle.
If you don't believe that human beings have the right to initiate force against each other, whether you like it or not, you are dragged to the edge of a voluntary, stateless society or an anarchic society because government, by its very definition, is a monopoly of individuals.
Who claim the moral and legal right to initiate force against others for the sake of the social good.
No matter whether you believe or not in that social good, it's still not moral for people to use force to solve social problems, and that's where you have to be if you're consistent with the principles.
The argument that you posed to say that, well, if you don't want the criminals, or whatever, that 2% of the violent population, You know, that everyone's so worried about an anarchy.
Why do you give them a monopoly of force where they're not going to get prosecuted for being violent people?
You give them shelter. It is a tragedy, right?
I mean, because people say we need a government because there are evil people in society.
And I'm not naive. I'm not a utopian.
I certainly accept that there are evil people in society.
And it's the very prevalence of evil people that makes a government such a suicidal institution in the long run because evil people are drawn to power.
Evil people are drawn to the government.
There is a minority of evil people, which is why you can't have a government because that's the first place they're going to go.
Yeah, it's only the unsuccessful, the dopey evil people who are in prison, the really smart, successful ones, they're running the country.
They seek office. The petty criminals, yeah, they're the ones that get wrapped up in the bureaucracy and the petty crimes.
Well, what you see is you've got the petty criminal who robs a liquor store, yeah, he's in prison, but you've got the huge criminals and they're killing millions of people with our money.
With the government's rubber stamp on it.
Exactly. There's an old story that's sometimes talked about where somewhere in the ancient world, an emperor catches a pirate and he says, you know, it's really bad to be a pirate.
You shouldn't be a pirate. And he's like, but you're just the pirate who won.
So instead of being called a pirate, you're called the captain of the Navy.
And that, I think, is a fairly accurate representation.
He's one of the great pirates.
Now, most of our audience, I would say the vast majority of our audience, they're going to be minarchists, I would say, constitutionalists.
And I constantly get in friendly debates with my friends, who, frankly, they cannot see that we can do without at least one small government to protect the Bill of Rights.
They think we need a government to protect our rights.
What would be a valid counter to them?
Well, I wish it were true.
I really wish it were true.
A government of whatever size is something that we're all so familiar with.
We grew up with it. Almost every country in the world has a government.
Almost every country throughout history has had a government, though it's not always the case.
So it's just something that we're familiar with.
And one of my counter-arguments is to say, well, you have to think from principles.
You can't just think from what is habitual or familiar.
So people say, well, we're never going to have a society without a government.
Well, first, there have been in the past in very successful societies as well.
But more importantly, that exact same argument could be used about slavery prior to the 19th century, right?
You could say, well, no society in history has ever existed without slaves, and therefore it's impossible.
Well, no, it is possible if you think that all men are created equal, then of course you have to oppose slavery.
If you think that violence is a bad way to solve social problems, and I think the evidence is fast accumulating both in America and in Europe these days, at least we don't have people pointing to European socialism as the way forward now that it's Birth rate is plummeting and its debt is accelerating.
We have to think in terms of principles and morals and ethics when it comes to making decisions about society.
The fact that we're comfortable with the idea of a government does not mean that the idea of the government is moral or right.
And I think that now we're at the tail end of seeing how impractical the execution of a government is, how we went from the very smallest possible government in history, which was the American government in the late 18th century, That has transformed itself in a little over 200 years from the very smallest government that you could imagine,
the very government that everybody could dream of as the perfect experiment in minarchism, that has now mutated in this horrible Elvis Presley manner into the very largest Most well-armed, most powerful, most destructive government in many ways that has ever existed with 700 military bases which has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths around the world.
So if the very smallest government that was designed by the most brilliant minds of the entire Enlightenment and the Renaissance, if the very smallest government has mutated into the very largest and most powerful government, we have to at least start to question the theory of statism because this Is a laboratory experiment of something which was supposed to heal,
turning into something that has swollen into such a bloated and power-soaked monstrosity that anybody who's not questioning the theory of government right now needs to shake their head and look at the facts again.
And it's your argument that the very small size of the state back in the days after the American Revolution, when we had the perfect minarchy, That basically created, it's not an aberration, it created the monster we have today.
Well, yeah, that's right.
And it's not just the American government.
The Roman government started on the principle of free trade and then turned into an empire which destroyed itself.
The British government started out on the principle of free trade, turned itself into an empire that nearly destroyed itself in the 20th century and is trying to finish the job off now with socialism.
So it's not just the American, I don't want to sort of point out America as a singular example of this, but the very brief argument is that when you have a small government, you have an excess of liberty.
You have property rights, you have free trade, you have private currencies, you have all of the fertilizer, in a sense, to grow enormous wealth.
And we saw that in the 19th century in Western Europe and in America and Canada and Australia and most of the colonies.
What happens then when you have a small government and property rights and free trade is you get a huge growth in wealth.
Because people are more efficient, the price mechanism allocates resources very efficiently, so you get massive increases in wealth.
The moment you get massive increases in wealth, you get massive increases in taxation.
And you can see this, of course, after the 19th century, governments all began to take over public schools.
They began to create their own fiat currency and they would no longer allow you to compete in terms of currency.
You start to see national debts.
You start to see the income tax.
You start to see sales taxes begin to emerge.
As the wealth grows because of a small government, governments themselves hook into that wealth and grow even faster than the wealth does to the point where they overwhelm like a cancer.
They grow and then they overwhelm the body politic.
And that seems to have happened over and over.
I'm sorry? He was saying that they kill off the host.
The cancer eventually kills off the host.
Well, I think we can see that happening now.
What are you guys heading towards? Is it a trillion dollar deficit at the moment?
It's about to surpass the GDP. It's almost there.
Yeah, I mean, here we have a system that was founded on no taxation without representation, and you all are taxing the unborn.
I mean, two generations, three generations down from now, they'll be staring down the muzzle of this debt.
And this is what happens when you have a government sitting on top of the wealth-generating capacities of the free market, is it grows far faster than the free market and kills it off.
Absolutely. Well, and that's one of the videos, I think, that one of the first ones that I ever saw of yours.
We're coming up on break here in just a moment.
But yeah, one of the first videos I saw where it says that we are the death, you know, and that's what really, you know, drew my attention to your work, you know, because, you know, here we are, we're showing that, you were showing that it's future generations that are actually getting, you know, acquiring this death.
And what are we doing to, you know, how are we going to answer them?
What did you do to stop our inflating?
We're going to be back on the other side of this break, folks.
We're speaking tonight with Stephan Molyneux from FreeDomainRadio.com.
Be sure and stay tuned.
We'll be back after this. Welcome back to Radio Free Oklahoma on the Rule of Law Radio Network.
Be sure and check out the website Radio Free Oklahoma.net and RuleofLawRadio.com.
We're speaking this evening with Stephen Molyneux from predomainradio.com.
Be sure and log into his site and check it out.
There's a ton of information on there.
I mean, you could be on there for months and not cover all of it.
Oh yeah. If you want to learn more, definitely go to predomainradio.com.
There's podcasts, videos.
I mean, I listen to that stuff all the time.
Part of what I've gone, you know, my life experience has been that, you know, I go through transitional worldviews, transitional philosophies.
And, you know, every time I get, you know, really entrenched in one, I say, okay, this is it.
My worldview is congruent, and, you know, I finally got it, and then I'll see something else, you know, a little chip in the paint, and I'll chip away at it, and I see that there's, okay, there's a whole other level, you know, and that's what I like about Freedom In Radio is that, you know, it really introduces you to You know, this philosophy in a way that I think is really easy to assimilate.
I think you have a good point.
One way I came to this was I wanted to make everything I believed and thought was a principle.
I wanted it to be right and correct.
I don't want anything I've done or just...
I'm not going to think about that because I can't figure it out.
I wanted to make it right, and that led me more and more towards voluntarism and towards the fun of his work.
And, I don't know, just...
We have a lot of listeners who are involved in politics and so forth.
I mean, one thing I want to get to, and we'll cover other subjects, of course, is some kind of how do you talk to people who are in our mindset and think they're on our side, but they just can't see the fact that we need at least one One small state.
One small level of kidnapping and murder to keep everything alive.
Well, and I'm going to go ahead and put this out there.
I think that we have a men anarchist with us this evening.
That's right. I do call myself a libertarian in regular conversation.
That's exactly right, I'll admit.
So what can we do to convince our friend Bobby?
Well, look, the first thing that I would say is that I have a great deal of respect for people who are working very hard in the political arena I mean, it is a tough slog to be out there and campaigning and knocking on doors and handing out pamphlets.
It's a lot of work, and I just first want to say that I really respect people who are doing that.
That having been said, I think that one of the things that libertarians criticize about government is they say, look, you have this mandate to end the war on drugs, you have this mandate to end poverty, to end illiteracy, to do all of these fantastic things, and the government never achieves it, and it never questions why.
And the one thing that I would say is I think we need to take that same light that we shine on government, and we need to shine it on ourselves, particularly our own political activism.
Classical liberalism, libertarianism has been cooking around the Western philosophical scene and political scene for over 150 years.
And during that 150 years, when you think of the countless, literally countless hours and probably hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent trying to advance the cause of freedom, the government has continued to grow and grow and grow and grow.
And I think libertarians at least need to say, look, If I criticize the government for not being self-critical about achieving its aims, I also need to apply that same standard to myself.
I have some theories as to why political action won't work.
I don't believe that political action will work.
But I think that in the absence of an alternative, people fight off their own despair about the future by involving themselves in politics.
Let's say I'm lost in the ocean somewhere and I don't know which way to go.
I'm going to start swimming somewhere because I know that if I stay there, I'm just going to drown or get eaten by a shark or something.
I think in the absence of alternatives, people say to themselves, well, what is it that I can achieve to actually bring the cause of freedom forward?
If the only thing they can think of is politics, then that's what they're going to do.
And I think that that's not the way that it's going to work.
I think that the way that we move forward as a society towards freedom is by developing freedom with our own personal lives, by living lives of shining integrity and virtue as best as we can within our own lives.
I think that we need to teach our kids about freedom.
There's no way to use the political process that I can see or that has ever worked.
You can't use the political process to control the political process because the political process is designed to unjustly reallocate money from the productive to the unproductive.
And trying to get that to respond to some virtuous thing is like trying to get the Mafia, it's like trying to turn the Mafia into a charity organization.
It's just not going to work, no matter how much you beg, plead, and protest.
Well, you see people turning to the government for some kind of moral compass, like expecting the government to act in a moral way.
And that's just, the government is force.
It is the use of force.
It's a monopoly of force, frankly.
And expecting the government to act in a moral way, I think, when you look at it, is ludicrous.
Well, and, you know, there's such a move right now about, you know, restoring the Constitution.
You know, and, I mean, I've been right there in the trenches, you know, with that movement.
But, you know, what was it, Ben and Eric, like we were saying, hold the Constitution up to a freight train that's moving at you and see how much it protects you.
You know, I mean, there's a reality to this that, you know, I think it's hard for us to face.
It's just, it's so destructive, so horrible to actually face it.
It's tough to do. Yeah, and the Constitution doesn't defend your rights.
You defend your rights.
That's been the hardest thing for me to accept over the last year is the fact that this country no longer operates under the Constitution.
I just, you know, again, I was taught in government schools.
It was drilled into my mind that, you know, oh, you know, you've got a Constitution that protects your own law.
They don't talk about the backroom deals.
Exactly. But going back to those solutions, which I was talking about, focusing inward more than outward, I think I can relate to that.
Freedom has to start on an individual level.
It's an individual right.
Well, that's part of the weird change policy.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
That's what I've said. This is an internal process.
External change comes from an internal change.
You can't change the world, but you can change yourself.
And politics, frankly, is a dirty business.
I mean, what good has ever come of politics, expecting politics to change things?
I mean, like Stefan said, what example do we have where it has?
Well, and if you just look at what happened recently with Rand Paul, right, where he had some fairly sensible comments about the limitations of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, And they basically fed him backwards through a blender slowly.
I mean, the media just completely distorted everything that he was saying, charged him with racism, smeared his name.
I mean, they're a bunch of jackals in many ways, and I just don't think that that's the route that we're going to achieve freedom.
The only fundamental freedom, philosophically, I think this is important to emphasize, the only fundamental freedom that we have is freedom from illusion.
The government is an illusion.
The government does not exist.
The government is not a thing, like a tree or a car.
The government is a belief.
The government is an ideology.
The government is a kind of philosophy.
I mean, it's a pretty nasty philosophy, but it is not a thing.
It is a concept.
And if we're going to free ourselves from illusion, we need to free ourselves from the idea of a government, because the government doesn't exist.
It's just a bunch of people in costumes with guns running around telling people what to do.
But we also need to free ourselves from the illusion that we can turn an institution that is based on immorality and force towards virtue.
I made the argument some time back to Ron Paul supporters to say, look, don't start with the federal government.
and infiltrate the mafia and try and turn it into the United Way.
Infiltrate some local government union and try and turn it into a free market advocating organization that withdraws all its privileges.
Those things are much easier to do than turning around the most mightily armed government in the history of mankind.
But of course, people don't want to do that because they know it's going to fail.
And that's how we know it's going to fail in politics as well.
Well, in absence of governments, what would we have? Well, in the absence of government, we would have exactly what we have in our personal lives, but larger, right?
I mean, there's no government agency that says, you have to marry this person.
There's no government agency in the world that we live in right now that says, you have to have this job.
I mean, when I would go for a job interview, if I didn't get the job, I didn't threaten to...
I don't know, drive by the guy's house and strangle his cat.
I mean, it was just voluntary.
We all live a stateless society, a government-less society.
Most of us live that every single day.
If people don't want to listen to my podcast, they don't have to.
If I don't want to go and buy from my local grocer, I don't have to.
If I want to go and buy a suit from so-and-so, I can go and do that.
We do all of this without the government telling us what to do.
People are starting to become very aware, because of the internet, that the police don't work to protect them at all.
I mean, anytime you need them, you call, they show up two hours later.
But now, if you give them an opportunity to generate some revenue, They work for the corporation, and that's the corporation's job is to create money or generate revenue.
They don't serve us.
They don't protect and serve us. Well, yeah, to serve and protect is the motto, but we think it's us.
But it's not really.
It's some other group of people entirely.
But so in the absence of a government, we would have private organizations that would supply security and negotiate contracts and so on.
And they would be voluntary.
And people say, well, they would just turn into another government.
But if you think like an entrepreneur, which I assume you guys being on the radio are pretty much in that category.
I've certainly lived that lifestyle.
If you are providing private security for people or private contract negotiation agencies for people, And if they're concerned about you turning into the government, all you have to do is say, listen, we swear up and down that we're never going to accumulate guns.
You can get third parties to come in.
If anybody ever finds us accumulating guns, we will pay you $10 million.
You just find ways to calm people's fears.
The government doesn't have really any incentive to do that because they get their money in obedience at the point of a gun.
But a private company is going to have to win over customers by dealing with their fears, allaying their concerns, and making sure that it provides the best and most efficient Protection of property.
I mean, just silly things pop into my mind.
In a situation like that, you would actually have them, you know, to where they have to respect the people in that area.
We're already seeing where, you know, our local police forces have become federalized now.
They no longer, you know, support the local community.
You know, they're getting their money from the federal government.
Therefore, that's where their allegiance is.
You know, and I think if you have a private force...
You know, they would be obligated to adhere to the regulations of the people that were paying them.
But we're coming up on break now, and folks, you're listening to Radio Free Oklahoma, and we're speaking this evening with Stephan Molyneux from FreedomainRadio.com.
Welcome back to Radio Free Oklahoma.
We're talking to Stephan Molyneux at FreedomainRadio.com.
If you want to call in, you have a question or comment.
We welcome your input.
The phone number is 512-646-1984.
I repeat, 512-646-1984.
Stefan Maloney is one of the proponents, premier proponents of volunteerism on the web in the world, frankly.
And he proposes a society that has an absence of government, that there will be institutions in that place to provide goods and services.
Stefan, you've talked about DROs, which are dispute resolution organizations.
Can you explain that concept to our audience?
Sure. I think it's a great question.
And I think that we really want to make sure in a society that we recognize that not everyone is going to be good, not everyone is going to be honest, not everyone is going to be virtuous.
And so we do need ways of helping people to resolve disputes.
If we have a dispute in business, if I commit a property crime or something like that, we do need to find ways of resolving disputes.
So the way that I theorize, and nobody knows for sure, but it's my sort of theoretical approach, is I have created entities called dispute resolution organizations, or DROs.
And the purpose of DROs is that if you and I enter into a contract, then we'll put aside a half a percentage point or something of the value of our contract to say, if you and I have a dispute about our contract, we're going to arbitrate according to this third party, this third party who has a good reputation for wise and King Solomon-style decisions and judgments, and we agree to defer to this.
So if you disagree with something I do in the contract, we agree to go to this third party.
And the third parties would all be competing I think at the point people don't see how you could achieve objectivity on the free market.
Well, it seems to me like a private, you know, justice system, people trying to sell their services as an arbitration system, they would strive for reputation for being the most fair.
If you have a reputation for favoring certain industry over another, You're not going to get any customers.
You have two parties that need to agree.
And it's been like that in the past.
I mean, law wasn't always linked to the government.
Exactly. No, that's right.
Like all good things, the government has taken it over and made a mess out of it.
And these CROs would all work together and they would help resolve even international disputes.
And we know that because, of course, internet service providers exchange data all the time, which is how the internet works.
Cell phone providers will carry each other's signals in return for a fee.
So you would end up with a very interconnected and voluntary and market-driven and peaceful way of resolving disputes.
As far as crime goes, well, I think we all recognize that like medicine, crime is far better served by prevention than it is by cure.
Unfortunately, the system that we have right now does not profit from prevention.
It only profits from cure.
So to take some silly examples, wouldn't it be kind of cool to have a voice-activated car or a voice-activated television set So that if somebody stole it, they couldn't use it.
I mean, that would be one way of preventing crime rather than...
But of course, the existing system doesn't do that.
The cops did not invent those tags that you get on clothing.
They didn't invent night vision cameras.
They didn't invent credit cards.
They didn't invent Interac or the bank cards, all of which allow you to not carry cash and therefore be less susceptible to robbery.
These things were all invented and propagated by the private sector, by the free market.
And if we took the lid of government off the creative genius of the species as far as solving problems of crime and dispute resolution, there's literally no telling how far it would go in terms of rendering criminals Rendering the life of crime unprofitable.
And I mean the private life of crime, not the public life of crime, which is a whole different matter.
But there's no telling how far we could go because we can look at the incredible ways that the private sector has served security to the point here in Canada, for a very small fee every month, you get people who will monitor your house and they will send a guy over if there's anything amiss.
And so all of these things could occur, but right now, because people are spending so much money through force on government non-solutions, there's just no room for this kind of stuff to grow.
But it would grow even further than it has, and we would end up with a society where crime would be prevented.
Where disputes would be very simple and cheap to operate in.
And if people didn't obey the contracts that they'd signed with these third parties, the third parties would just mark them down.
Like the same way you get a bad credit report, then your life would become more expensive and more difficult and fewer people would want to deal with you until you had successfully addressed any transgressions that had occurred for you.
And so I think that's really, really important to understand, to participate in an economic change.
System requires that people want to deal with you, and if you continually break your contracts, you're going to find it very hard, if not impossible, to buy a house, to buy groceries, to buy a car, to buy gasoline, because people are just going to say, this guy breaks every contract he walks into, so I don't want to deal with him.
It's really not going to be worth anybody's effort to start breaking their contracts.
And so that's how I theorize, and there's no way to know for sure, but that's how theoretically it could really work in a free society.
Theoretically, yeah. But I mean, I think this whole philosophy, voluntaryism, anarchism, whatever, Basically recognizing the fact that human beings are capable of solving their own problems without a bayonet prodding the back, without the use of force.
We can solve our problems.
I mean, that's probably how human society developed in the first place, was without force.
I mean, frankly, if the state had been present at the inception of the human race, we probably would have never gotten out of the caves.
Sorry, I think that's half the equation.
It's true that we can solve problems without a bayonet.
I think it's equally true and important to say we can't solve problems with the bayonet.
So we can see this right now.
Governments are struggling because the recession has cut their taxable income.
They have massive debts, massive deficits.
They're underfunded on their pension schemes.
I mean, it's crazy, right? Now, what can governments do under the current situation?
Well, not much. They can't raise taxes because the economy is already in the tank.
They can't cut spending because they have these fixed contracts.
And if they cut spending, it doesn't really help.
Let's say they fire 10,000 workers.
Well, those 10,000 workers just go unemployment insurance.
The government hasn't saved a dime.
In fact, it's cost them more money.
Because they also have to give these big severance packages.
So, not only can we solve problems without the bayonet, we literally can't solve problems when we use the bayonet to move people and resources around in society, like so many domesticated animals.
Well, I think that's what kind of gets people depressed, is they see that there's nothing government can do.
I mean, frankly, I mean, are we just waiting for total massive epic failure?
It seems inevitable.
I mean, there's nothing left.
There's not another bubble to inflate.
I mean, what was it?
They've already sold off all of the land, and they've mortgaged us as collateral, as our very being.
That's what they're selling now.
That was one of, I think, seven most powerful videos, is the money that's being sold.
It's you. It's our labor, our future labor to pay off the debt.
Yeah, the government that the government is supposed to respect you as a citizen is selling you off to the Japanese and the Chinese.
I mean, they're selling your kids off.
I mean, they have about as much allegiance to you as a farmer does to his cows.
Not even. So I think that's important.
I don't think there's going to be any catastrophic meltdown.
I mean, this isn't the end of the Roman Empire because we have this amazing communications technology that allows us to have these kinds of conversations that were unprecedented.
Unprecedented for people to be able to talk like this throughout history.
It was impossible for that to occur.
The houses are all still going to be standing.
There'll still be roads. There'll still be cars.
There'll still be shopping stores and so on.
There will be a transition out of the existing system over time, but it's not going to be Mad Max hunting rats in the sewers or anything like that.
It's going to be a more gentle transition because we have much better communications than were ever possible at any time throughout history.
The truth about the situation can spread more rapidly, and people are incredibly ingenious when it comes to changes in society that are well communicated, clearly explained, well understood.
They will be able to find substitutions and alternate ways of getting things done very quickly.
And then we'll look back and say, what were we so scared of?
We should have done this, you know, should have done this.
It's like when you finally quit smoking or whatever.
It's like, oh, why didn't I do this a long time ago, right?
Well, that's... It would be chaotic unless you had an alternate currency.
The people need a way to engage in commerce.
And now whether that currency is gold or silver or nails or eggshells or whatever it is, if we lose our currency...
The tally stick. The tally stick.
That's right. I learned about that earlier.
But if you don't have a currency that people can go to, there is going to be immediate chaos.
I'm sorry. People look to the government for that help.
They've been nursed by the state their entire life.
So, Stefan, do you think that, I mean, so many people have been programmed since birth to equate the state with morality and the government with everything that they can do or are allowed to do.
If there is some kind of failure, do you think there's going to be, you know, people are just so unaware of the alternatives, you don't think there'll be chaos that way?
Or do you think that survival, I mean, survival will prod?
Or transition to a libertopian society.
Or are they just going to reset the state and reset the fiat money system with a new currency that doesn't have all the...
Martial law? It seems like the only thing that they know to do is use force.
Right. They come in with their costumes and guns like they always do.
Look, that's very true, for sure.
And there's no way, I think, of telling which way it's going to go.
I do think that conversations like this are very, very important in helping people.
If you think that society is failing because we don't have enough government, then things will go very badly, indeed.
If people finally understand that we're failing because we're using force to solve problems, which is everybody learned at the kindergarten, you know, the kiddie floor and the mats and among the juice boxes and half-eaten glue sticks, We were all told, don't use force, don't hit, don't push, don't steal, don't trip, don't punch. We were all told that, and that's actually a good ethic to live by, is don't use force to take other kids' toys, don't use force to get what you want.
Once people connect that basic kindergarten morality with the massive edifice of the modern state, then it'll be like, oh, right!
Because if everybody had been allowed to steal in my kindergarten class, it would have gone completely chaotic and crazy.
And that's exactly what's happening with society at the moment.
This is a civil war with the government as the arbitrator.
The government herds money back and forth between its special interest groups from the body politic.
And so it is a civil war, but it's just restrained because people are obedient to the gang with the most guns.
There's no way to tell exactly what...
I'm sorry about that.
Hopefully we as a remnant can educate our fellow citizens when things do start to crumble.
When the government comes in and offers those big, strong-man solutions, we can reach out and say, no, that's not what we want to do.
We use individuals to come up with solutions on our own without converting back to the same column in the first place.
I think for the first time in many generations that people are open to this idea now.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Welcome back to Radio Free Oklahoma on the Rule of Law Radio Network.
That's RadioFreeOklahoma.net and RuleOfWallRadio.com.
We're speaking tonight with Stephen Molyneux.
You can check out his website at FreeDomainRadio.com.
Do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about your site and what you offer?
Sure. Sure.
It's a podcast primarily.
That's sort of my major engine of blathering.
And I do have a video channel as well.
And I have a whole bunch of free books for people who are interested in exploring or sharing the ideas of a sort of peaceful and voluntary society.
And it is really my major mission in my life.
That's really what I'm focused on.
Ever since I started doing this, I went full-time about three years ago.
And before that, I was doing it for a couple of years part-time.
It's just to really try and help people to understand that we need to evaluate how society should run, not according to historical inertia, you know, the stuff that was done before, the stuff that was done before, but to really look at it from principles upwards, from like, what is good, what is virtuous, what is true, what is right, what is noble, and then we can build a society from that.
I always say to people who are interested in, oh, we need a government, it's like, people, they have to realize that a government The ancient Egyptians, 5,000 years ago, had a government.
We don't use anything from ancient Egypt anymore.
Like, we don't use their medicine, we don't use their physics, we don't use their mathematics.
Are we still going to use their form of social organization 5,000 years later?
It really is okay for us to look at some possible alternatives the way things have just been done in the past.
Otherwise, you know, go and look up some Egyptian remedies for, I don't know, a stomach ache, which I think involves swallowing live snakes and say, yay, that's going to be a great way for me to solve this problem because it makes about as much sense.
To create a state. We say, oh, we need a state to protect our property.
But the state takes 50% of your property and doesn't even guarantee you any protection.
I mean, if I proposed that as a system out of the blue, people would say it's insane.
And we need to look at the social institutions we have from the clear eyes of philosophy and objectivity, not just staring at it, rolling towards us through history like Indiana Jones at that big ball at the beginning of the first one.
You know, we just need to sort of start with a clean slate and designing society According to rational principles rather than just stuff that has flowed down through history.
Exactly. And you mentioned before, you know, there had been human societies that have survived successfully without state enforcement out there on, you know, what the government is.
Are there any examples that you can name off?
Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, Iceland went for a couple of hundred years without any government whatsoever.
In ancient Ireland, it was almost a thousand years without a government.
And people say, well, a thousand years, but then they fell to another government.
It's like, but that's not going to happen because with nuclear weapons these days, any state in society would just have one or two nuclear weapons.
No nuclear power has ever been invaded because the deterrent is just so great.
So that's not really an issue anymore.
And people say, well, a thousand years is not forever, but it's a lot better than America is doing at the moment.
So I think there are certainly, even within America, in Pennsylvania, for a generation or two, there was a part of Pennsylvania with no government whatsoever.
And they didn't want a government, and they resisted a government coming in because everything was working just beautifully.
It's just... We just led that way, but there's actually no empirical evidence for the long-term value of a government and tons of empirical evidence that it is a slow and then not so slow kind of poison.
As I recall, prior to the American Revolution, on some of the outskirts of the colonies, there was no functioning government because they kind of stopped paying the British and the British stopped going in there, but they didn't want to resurrect a competing government to antagonize the British.
So they just conducted their affairs in a voluntarist manner.
In fact, I think it was Pennsylvania that actually they convened a kind of a Congress for the outlying districts that stopped meeting after the first year because it was totally unnecessary.
They were able to conduct their affairs mutually well without the so-called government.
It is possible. It's not a pipe dream.
We're not utopian.
I hate that label. We're just being utopian.
We're not being utopian by recognizing That there are evil people out there, and that we should not give them a monopoly of power.
I think it's recognizing the capacity for both good and evil, and accommodating both and trying to incentivize good behavior instead of trying to force morality down people's throats through force, which, as any student of psychology or philosophy knows, that you cannot force morality.
You rob it up of the value. It's no longer morality.
It has to come from within.
I can't disagree with anything you're saying, so please keep going.
Take it away, brother!
Testify! Go ahead.
It's not like laws put morals in the person.
The morals are in the person.
Laws don't create that.
Well, here in Oklahoma, I have a hard time talking with folks that are particularly religious, and I say that religion doesn't have the monopoly on morality.
And that was even a big step for me, you know, to understand what are my values.
I mean, the way I was, you know, raised in government schools, you know, what is honor?
What are my values?
What are my principles? You know, you're not taught how to live.
You're taught how to obey, how to regurgitate information on command and not think.
You're not taught philosophy, and I think that's what's great about Stephan Moleni is that it's It's all rooted in philosophy, which is one of my, you know, I'm not a hardcore student by any means, but I like to read philosophy.
I like its principles. I like to become more efficient in its study, and it's based upon doing the right thing.
I mean, it's basically just, like I said before, recognizing the past people of human good and evil and taking that into account rather than avoiding the subject and hoping, putting faith, that this monolith that we erect will behave in a moral and correct manner despite All evidence to the contrary.
Right, and the two ways that people have Approach the problem of making people good or trying to get people to be good throughout history.
There's two ways that people have done it.
The first is they threaten you, and the second is they punish you.
And that's the sum total of our attempt to create a virtuous world.
I mean, think back to public school, right?
You better do your homework or there are going to be severe consequences, young man or young lady.
And then if you don't do your homework, you get punished.
You get detention or you get...
I mean, when I was a kid, you'd get caned or whatever, right?
So... This is how people do it, is they threaten you, and the government does it too.
You better pay your taxes or bad things are going to happen, and then if you don't, after a while, lo and behold, bad things happen.
The same thing happens in religion.
They say, if you're bad, then you're going to go to hell, or you're going to threaten you, and then God sends you to hell after you're dead, and that's your punishment.
And so threatening and punishing people is...
It's the sole way that we seem to have found to try and make people good.
But as you say, when you're threatening and punishing people, you're not creating virtue.
You're just creating fear and obedience.
It's not the same as virtue.
And the contradictory nature of it, you know, don't hit your sister smack.
Or, you know, murder's wrong, but now go over here and kill these brown people in this other country.
Yeah, if you wear this green costume, murder's good over here.
No, and I think every kid has that same...
I remember thinking that same thing when I was a kid and learning about the wars.
It's like, well, so this guy kills some German tourist in London.
He goes to jail, or I guess way back in the day he would get...
He would get hanged or something.
But you put him in a green costume in France, suddenly he gets a medal and a pension.
Like, I mean, that stuff, it doesn't make any sense.
And we need to start really examining these things and not just waving them away by saying, well, he's in the army as if that answers anything.
It doesn't. He's still the same guy.
He's just got a different outfit on.
I don't get to fly when I put a Superman costume on for Halloween or my special date nights with my wife.
I don't get to fly when I put on particular costumes.
And I don't get to change my moral nature just because I put on a blue or a green costume.
Nothing changes about me as a human being other than my fabric.
And we need to start applying more strict and general moral rules to people and not creating these special categories called cops or soldiers or governments or prison guards.
They're still just people subject to the same universal moral rules as everybody else.
Everything that we create based on costumes is the most ridiculous kind of ethical illusion.
And we need to start outgrowing these dress-up games of ethics that we currently are addicted to as societies.
Exactly. People put on a uniform or a costume, however you call it, and they are robbed of any kind of moral judgment on what they do.
Literally. I mean, they can commit murder, they can steal, they can rob, they can lie, and I'm just doing what I'm told.
We've got a recent incident here in the United States where they kicked in the door of this house, threw in an incendiary, caught the full seven-year-old girl on fire and then shot her through the neck.
And there wasn't even a criminal in the house.
There wasn't even a house that They were hitting several at once.
Now, nothing's happening to those guys.
They were following policy and it was an accident.
Oops, we're sorry. The guy, the cop that got his neighbor's cat and shot it, and he got fired.
He's in trouble.
That just shows what they value a human life.
There's no value to it to them.
You know, we're dehumanized to the point that they don't...
I mean, we're lower than a pet cat.
Well, the state corrupts everything it touches.
It's not human.
It dehumanizes everything.
And we are human. That is our right.
That is our birthright. I mean, at the very least, we have the right to be human.
And I think that's something that sets an evil of this monopoly of force, this government, this state, is that it dehumanizes us, robs us of our capacity To do the right thing.
I mean, it's just so corrupting.
It engenders so much corruption.
Such an albatross around our necks.
And I really hope that we are in a transition period.
I hope my children can live in a society where they can be human without having to live in fear.
There's an old, I can't remember which religion it is, but it's an old cosmological view that says the earth is a sorcerer that's sitting on the back of an elephant, which is sitting on the back of something else, which is standing on a turtle.
And someone said, well, what's underneath the turtle?
And the priest said, no, no, no, it's turtles all the way down.
And it's the same thing.
We have this problem in society where we say, well, there are bad people, so we need to create the police or we need to create the government or the jails or the army or whatever.
And it's like, okay, so there are bad people in society.
Won't they also be in the police and in the government and so on?
So if we need this control to watch these bad people, who is going to watch those?
Who is watching the bad people?
Who is going to watch the watchers?
It's a problem that has never been solved in any political system.
If you think that you're just scared of your fellow citizens to the point where you need to appoint a bunch of people with guns, well, who's going to stop them?
I have no experience with that.
I was videotaping an excessive abuse of force.
And they turned on me and I got beaten up, kidnapped, because I was trying to videotape their abuse.
I was watching The Watchers.
And, you know, luckily in Oklahoma, we're a single-consent state.
You know, some other states are getting them for wiretapping laws, you know, because they have the audacity to videotape the police officers.
Right, right. So because there is no answer, there is no rational answer, any more than there is what's underneath the turtle, there's no rational answer to the question, who will watch the watchers?
So we can't have any watchers.
We can only have voluntary, hopefully peaceful and, you know, reasonable non-compliance punishments if you don't, but it all has to be voluntary.
It all has to be without a central, coercive monopoly of power that dwarfs any other human institution with its military prowess.
We can't find a way to watch the watchers.
It is an infinite regression problem.
And so because there's no way to watch the watchers, we simply have to accept that there will be some risks, there will be some problems in a state of society, it's not perfect, it's not utopia, but it will be sustainable, it will be an ever increasingly peaceful society, and most importantly, it's achievable.
Exactly. I think that's a wonderful way to wrap up this interview.
Thank you very much, Stefan Melony at FreeDomainRadio.com.
We appreciate you taking the time to visit with us.
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