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July 22, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:08
1703 Ordering Hits on Friends

What it means when a friend supports the state.

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Hey everybody, it's Steph. Time to talk about a central paradox of dare philosophizing.
Now, for those who've been following what has been occurring in this conversation over the past few years, You've heard me divide people into those who can be saved and those who can't, right?
Those who can be brought to reason and those who due to overinvestment in the existing paradigm slash matrix slash statist fantasy and those who are too traumatized to do anything other than ex post facto justifications, right?
You can't philosophize with people who have a bad conscience.
This is a very fundamental thing to understand.
If people have a bad conscience, it's because they know that there are UPB violations and moral hypocrites, and they have denied that knowledge in order to continue to receive and achieve the short-term economic gains of participation in a corrupt and violent system.
You can only reason with people who have a reasonably good conscience, or at least are willing to confront the bad things they've done.
One of the things that I'm happiest about If not the happiest about in my life is the fact that I have achieved the grand old age of 43 and two-thirds.
And I have a good conscience.
I have a good conscience.
I am proud and happy of what I have done with my time in this world.
I have not beaten anybody up.
I've not abused anyone.
I've tried to stand up for what is right at all times to varying degrees of success.
And I have a good conscience, which is one of the reasons why my mind is roamable.
Like, it roams. It doesn't run up against electrical fences within my own conscience.
I don't have a don't-go-there place, or most people have a don't-go-there everything, and there's a tiny square that they get to live on.
But one of the reasons why I can be spontaneous and all of that And tangential, you may say.
It's because I don't have areas in my mind where it's like, don't go there.
That's uncomfortable. That's oogie.
That's bad. That's self-attacky place.
Again, not that I... I mean, I want to pretend that I don't self-attack or never cause I do.
But the self-attack is not because I'm ashamed of things that I have done.
The self-attack is just an old habit that has come to me from my history.
It's something that was inflicted on my history.
You know, like an old war wound. It's not the same as having stabbed yourself.
Just having an old wall wound is a reality of having been in a war.
And so I have these wall wounds and these scar tissues, but they're not central to my personality.
They're just things that I deal with as they come up.
And I think that's really important to understand that how many people in the world have a bad conscience?
How many people in the world have a bad conscience?
Or another way of putting it is how many people Are morally proud of themselves?
How many people are morally proud of how they have spent their time, blood, energy, and sweat in this world?
Well, I would suspect that it's actually quite a few.
Sorry, it's quite a few.
They're quite few in number. The number of people who are actually proud of how they have spent their time in this world and feel admiration for their own moral courage And feel satisfaction and self-esteem in what they have done to further the cause of truth, virtue and courage in this world.
Well, I would suspect that it's very few people.
It's very few people. Those people who have been courageous but misguided can be changed.
Like an athlete who has simply trained incorrectly can be taught a better method, but somebody who's cut off their own leg can't, right?
So I think it's important to try and get a sense of where someone's conscience is when talking to them about truth, virtue, courage, honesty, philosophy, and all that kind of stuff.
If that person has a bad conscience...
Then philosophy is sort of useless.
In fact, it's worse than useless.
It will simply provoke attack.
The haters of philosophy are those with a bad conscience, those to whom philosophy provokes horrendous guilt, which translates into attack against others.
So I think it's really important to do that, you know, in every science fiction movie.
You go into the spaceship and there's this laser scanning for external contaminants and then you get scrubbed down or some sort of vapor gets sprayed at you to get rid of all alien contaminants and so on.
Well, I think when you're opening up a conversation with someone about virtue, truth, philosophy...
I think before you do that, and I'm an idiot for not having done this on a whole number of occasions, so this is a sort of hard-won truth.
But scan, right?
Do do a scan. Where do you sense that their conscience is?
I think conscience can sniff conscience, so to speak.
Like dogs in a park, eh?
Conscience can sniff conscience, and I think it's important to do that scan.
Figure out where is someone's conscience, because...
If someone has a bad conscience and you begin to philosophize with them, all you're going to do is create an enemy.
Most likely. I have...
I mean, I've had a number of parents, right, to take just one group.
A number of parents have written to me and said, you know, I was pretty horrified that I did this nasty thing to my kid.
I screamed at my baby or something like that.
You know, I spanked my kid and I feel really wretched about it and so on.
And that's actually an example of a good conscience, right?
Because they're not enjoying it, right?
They feel bad about it.
That's an example of a good... Feeling bad about something you've done is the example of having a good conscience, not an example of having a bad conscience.
Having a bad conscience is when you...
I screamed at my kid because my kid wasn't listening.
I hit my kid because my kid was disobedient, right?
That's an example of having a really badass conscience and unrecoverable to philosophy, right?
You can't... You can't give medicine to people who are just going to reject the medicine.
I mean, I guess you can, but all you're doing is wasting your pills and actually provoking.
The pills that provoke healing in healthy people provoke pain in wretched people.
And you will pay for that pain in one way or another.
So I think it's important to do the conscience scan before you get down into having conversations with people about virtue.
I think that's really, really important.
So, what do we do if we're interested in reason and evidence and we're dealing with people who have a bad conscience or people who are too scarved or brutalized or brutal to accept reason and evidence?
Well, I think that what we need to do is to be very aware of the degree to which they will attempt to UPB violate in order to protect their own conscience, right?
So, one of the things that you'll be told if you're into ideas, into principles, into truth, reason, evidence, and so on, one of the things that you'll be repeatedly told is that, no, don't be ideological, right? Don't take ideas too seriously.
Don't be an extremist.
Don't be an absolutist.
Don't be an ideologue and so on.
You see this all the time in the media.
It's so boring and so predictable.
I've actually wanted to read out some articles where this is talked about, but it's frankly too boring to do because it's just too grindingly predictable.
People talking about whether the government should be doing more stimulus packaging, whether it should steal, borrow, and spend more money in order to save the economy.
Well... All it has is they say, well, we don't want extreme budget cutting.
We don't want the extremist ideology of free market puritanism to take over wise and measured and considered leadership.
You know, it's all this. It's just adjectives.
It's embarrassing the degree to which this is all out there, but of course it makes perfect sense because that's all that is talked about in public schools, right?
Or any schools, really.
I mean... It's just approval and disapproval.
There's not truth and falsehood.
There's not reasoning from first principles.
There's no philosophy, no logic.
This is what it's approved of, and this is what it's disapproved of.
And so this is what you're told, that don't be an ideologue.
Don't be ideological. Don't be absolutist.
Don't take ideas too seriously.
Don't place ideas above people.
In other words, don't judge me by objective standards.
Can I just say, by the by, I mean, I agree with that to a large degree, but the thing that I've always found so vile and so horrifying about the world is the degree to which people will put ideology above others.
Alright, so if you're using the against me argument on a good friend of yours, let's say, Bob, Bob your friend, And you say, Bob, in your statism, you support the use of violence against me.
I mean, what clusterfrak has occurred to the central cortex of the human soul, wherein somebody says, I'm going to cling to my patriotism?
I'm going to cling to my ideology of statism and continue to advocate violence against you rather than put my affection, my love for you above the bullshit ideology that I was force-fed as a child.
When the reality of violence is pointed out to people, What kind of cosmic ass-clown do you have to be to place your addiction to ideology above your love for your family and friends?
And this is the real test.
And it's a test that is gruesome.
It's gruesome because we're always told that everybody loves us.
Everybody loves us. And then when we point out that they want to use violence against us for disagreeing with them, wouldn't you expect that this...
Oft-fabled and oft-spoken of love would change their minds about that and say, well, gosh, I really don't want to advocate violence against you.
And so I'm going to stop.
I'm not going to say I'm going to agree with you, but I'm at least going to say I don't want to use violence if you disagree with me.
And we'll figure that out.
But at least that principle should be there if there's this fabled love.
Between family members and friends and communities.
I mean, imagine this.
Let's take a silly example, but one I hope that will really help to clarify.
Let's take an example. So let's say that your friend, you're sitting over with your friend, and he calls a pizza, and he orders a double pepperoni and gives your address.
You're staying at your place. And then he realizes he misdialed And just then the news story comes on that a good way to order a hit on someone is to order a double pepperoni and dial this number that the police have just discovered.
This is how the mafia hitmen work.
So basically, by misdialing the number and ordering a double pepperoni, he has just put a hit out on you.
Because that's what the revelation of statism is.
Hey, you thought you were ordering a pizza?
You're actually putting a hit out on me.
Hey, you thought you were helping the old?
You're actually putting a hit out on me that the police and the IRS are going to collect on.
Hey, you wanted health care for the poor?
You actually think you're ordering that?
It's not a double pepperoni. It's violence against me for disagreeing with you.
So, let's say that you watch this news story and your friend has just ordered a hit on you.
Double pepperoni, this address.
Bam! The guys are on their way.
And you say, you know what, you better call back and cancel.
And he's like, no, I don't think so.
No, no.
And you're like, what?
You just ordered a hit on me.
I know it was accidental.
I know you weren't aware of it, but now you are aware of it.
You've just ordered a fucking hit on me.
Call them back! And he's like, no, no.
No. I didn't order a hit on you.
You just dialed this number. No, the double pepperoni orders a hit on me.
I mean, do you get how insane this really is?
What kind of friend would not call back and say, cancel the double pepperoni.
My bad. I don't want my friend to get shot.
I mean, what kind of bizarre world do we live in?
What kind of ideology-addicted, clusterfrag fantasy planet are we living on?
Where people say, yeah, I did accidentally order a hit on you, but...
That's okay. That's okay.
Let's let it stand. I wasn't aware that I was, now that you've pointed it out.
Let's just let it stand.
I mean, from a philosophical standpoint, that's what the against me argument reveals.
That's what it reveals.
People thought they're ordering a pizza, they're actually ordering a hit on you.
People think they're just supporting the state and health care provision and welfare and social security and national defense, but they're actually ordering a hit on you.
When you point this out, they don't call back to counsel.
That's completely weird.
And what would you think of a friend who wouldn't call back and cancel the hit he just accidentally ordered on you?
Would you think he would just be a weird, creepy sociopath who obviously had no problem with this kind of coercion?
Would you think, hey, he really does like me.
There's just this little hiccup where he orders a hit on me and doesn't cancel it.
Other than that, it's fine.
Other than that, you know, we like the same movies.
We're good.
Unless it's a friend or family member.
When do you think people order a hit on you, you point it out, and they're like, no, I'm not going to call back and cancel it.
Ah! My brain hurts.
My heart hurts. So, let's get to the heart of the question finally.
Look, only 15 minutes.
The heart of the question is, how, oh how, oh how, Do we deal with the problem of those who won't listen to reason?
Well, it's no different in philosophy than it is in any other sphere of human action.
A man who will not listen to reason with regards to his drinking will eventually, if he is to listen at all, will listen only to evidence.
See, the purpose of listening to reason is so that you don't have to listen to evidence, right?
The purpose of saying smoking may give you lung cancer is so that you don't have to realize smoking is dangerous by getting said lung cancer.
See how this works?
The purpose of telling you that if you spend more than you make, that you are going to be in trouble in the long run, is so that you don't end up heavily in debt, declaring bankruptcy, and so on.
The purpose of saying that it's not a wise idea to build a shack on the surface of a lake, is so that you don't pour a bunch of concrete and bricks into water and end up with no place to live.
right again one more We'll move on. The purpose of blueprints for building a bridge is so that you don't build a bridge that's just going to fall down.
So that you plan it out and you figure out your tensile strength and your beams and struts and all that kind of stuff.
That is the purpose, of course, of all that...
of reason.
The purpose of reason is to avoid having to learn through consequences, because having to learn through consequences can be somewhat fatal.
Eating the wrong berry...
It can just get you good and done and killed.
So, my approach to this has always been that there is a kindness in voluntarism, and there is a kindness even in ostracism.
If this makes any sense at all.
There is a kindness in ostracism.
And what do I mean by that? Well, there is this thing which, you know, anybody who's addicted to anything, right?
There's this thing called enabling.
Enabling is... Well, enabling is bad, right?
right, enabling is pretending that there's not a problem or even helping people avoid the consequences of their actions, right?
This is called bad, right?
So if you have a husband who's a drunk and you continually call in sick on his behalf, like you call his work and say he's sick when he's in fact just hung over, and you go out and you buy him beer, and you make up all kinds of excuses for him at family gatherings, and you smooth the way for his addiction, well, then you're not actually doing him any In fact, it is considered to be part of the addiction.
The enabling is a particularly destructive part of the equation.
And you're not supposed to do it.
You're not supposed to help people.
With their destructive addictions.
And to help them is an act of short-term gain for long-term pain.
And that is a very bad thing.
It's considered to be a very bad thing.
Because you're just making it worse for them, right?
You're making their addiction worse.
You are helping them to remain addicted.
And what I've always heard with these kinds of addictions is it's tough love, right?
They'll hate you in the short run because you're standing up for their non-addictive personalities, right?
You're standing up for reason and freedom from the addiction.
You're standing up for something that is positive, right?
And the false self, the addicted part of them, will hate you for that.
And will rail at you and call you all kinds of names and get mad at you and so on, right?
You're not being supportive.
You don't care. You don't understand.
It's not that bad. I don't have a problem.
You're the one who has the problem.
Blah, blah, blah. Attack, attack, attack.
Yada, yada, yada. We've all heard this kind of stuff before.
And there are two kinds of ways of teaching through consequences, right?
The first is to punish. Which is, I consider, not good.
I mean, let's just say parent-child, right?
You punish. And the second is to let the consequences naturally and inevitably accrue to whatever is going on.
So, if your child is...
If you want to do something that's mildly dangerous, you can either punish them for wanting to do it and give them an aversion that way, or you can let them take that step and fall and maybe skin their knee and then they'll learn and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it's a delicate balance and so on, but I don't think that punishment is the way to go.
Punishment doesn't teach the child anything other than aversion.
It's about as sophisticated as hitting a puppy.
I didn't teach him anything other than aversion.
So, what happens after that?
Thank you.
Well, if you simply stop enabling people, then the negative consequences of their own actions will accrue to them.
Now, unfortunately, statism, it accrues to us too, but let's just, I mean, I understand that, but there's not much we can do about that, so let's just continue focusing on the personal metaphor, because I think that works well.
So the man who doesn't listen to reason will have to listen to consequences.
The gambling addict who won't listen to, you need to get help, you need to stop gambling, you're destroying this family, is going to have to learn from consequences.
And people do end up learning from consequences.
It's not pretty, it's not fun, but they really do end up listening constantly.
To consequences eventually.
Again, I'm not saying it's fun or it's easy, but most people who don't just outright die from their addiction will end up listening to consequences.
So the gambler will eventually, you know, the drinker or the sex addict will eventually lose his wife and his kids and his house and his job.
And at some point, the negative costs Become great enough that he learns from consequence.
He doesn't learn from preemptive reason.
He learns from ex post facto consequences.
He doesn't learn from speeding is bad.
He learns from walking away from a wreck.
Hopefully, he will walk away from the wreck.
Now, the whole point of not enabling...
Is ostracism to the addiction.
It's ostracizing the addiction.
So if you're with a guy who's a drinker, or let's just say a woman, let's swap gender as a fancy.
So if you're with a woman who's a heavy drinker, gets drunk every day or every other day, You may not choose to leave her, but you will ostracize the addiction.
The addiction is not treated as part of the relationship.
And what I mean by that is, you don't make excuses, you don't go out and buy beer, you treat her as if she is not a drinker.
The drinking part of her is ostracized from the relationship.
And that's called not enabling.
If you exercise, quote, And that's almost all she is, almost all who she is, then what happens is she'll leave you.
Or you'll leave her, or it'll just get worse and worse and worse, because she can't live without the enabling of her addiction.
And so if you act as if her addiction is not there, in other words, if you exercise voluntary anarchic ostracism with regards to her addiction...
Well, then, you may end up with a person who's so wedded to her addiction that she'll just get rid of you because she doesn't exist in the absence of her addiction.
Her addiction has overshadowed her like a mountain over a little fern.
And if you separate from the addiction, she perceives that as a separation and betrayal of her and attacks and perhaps escalation of the addiction and so on, right?
Same thing with gambling. You ostracize the addiction.
You may not ostracize the person, but you ostracize the addiction.
I don't give you money. I don't make excuses.
I don't bail you out. If you get arrested for non-payment of your gambling debts, I don't come and bail you out.
Just as if you get arrested for drunk driving, I don't come and bail you out.
That is what you do.
You stop enabling.
You ostracize the addictive behavior.
And then what it's doing is it's allowing the consequences of behavior to accrue to the individual.
I mean, we're all about responsibility, right?
And responsibility means being responsible for yourself.
So if you gamble yourself into $10,000 worth of debt or more, then you pay off the debt.
And if other people come and save you, quote, save you by paying off your debt, well, that's not really such a good idea, is it?
Because it just encourages the bad behavior and it's taking ownership for somebody else's dysfunction and so on, right?
So, to not enable has always been something that I've heard of.
And again, if you know more about this, please let me know.
But this is just the amateur wisdom or the wisdom that has been aggregated by this amateur.
You don't enable the behavior.
You let the negative consequences accrue to the person with the dysfunctional behavior.
And it's a kindness, because by shielding people from the consequences of their choices, you only encourage bad choices, and you have become then part of the addiction.
And I don't see how gambling, or sex addiction, or drinking, or drugs, I don't see how that is worse than statism.
With the caveat that if you drink, you're just destroying your own body, whereas statists destroy entire classes and entire countries and entire generations.
Through debts and wars and bad public schools and the inevitable results of the war on drug policies, which is the drive to get children addicted to drugs, you know, all that kind of stuff.
Statism is a global...
Addiction to violence and its destructive effects.
At least the addict, the substance abuser, the individual substance abuser, is only harming himself and, optionally, those around him.
But the statist is supporting an entire regime of global destructive behavior.
There's no alcoholic who caused the deaths of quarter million people in the last century, but the statist's Support these violent systems that cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
And the basic equation that I've always worked with, at least since this show, since shortly before this show began, the basic equation that I've always worked with is quite simple.
The advocation of violence is incompatible with love.
The advocation of violence against an individual is a declaration of war against that individual.
It is not compatible with love.
You cannot say that a man who takes out a hit on his wife loves his wife.
You cannot say that a man who mistakenly orders a hit instead of a pizza when this is revealed refuses to call off the hit that he loves his wife.
No. He is addicted to his ideology rather than empathetic to his actual relationships.
He is incapable of processing the natural and healthy emotions of those around him who are horrified by his advocation and support of violence.
This is to me so axiomatic that it's not even worth debating.
It's not even worth debating.
If somebody says that advocating the initiation of force against people is compatible with love, then...
I mean, that's just such a ridiculous position to take that I just wouldn't even...
I mean, that's just a flat-earther position.
It's just not even worth discussing.
And I give full credit to people not knowing and taking a while to understand.
I mean, I do, right?
This is why I use the metaphor, you mistakenly order a hit on someone by ordering the double pepperoni pizza.
So I understand it's a new idea.
I understand it's a difficult idea.
I understand that it takes time to process and to understand.
I get that. I really am sympathetic to that.
Again, I'm not going to pretend to rush other people when it took me a long time to really, really get it.
It took me a long time. Nah, I don't rush people.
I understand. But nonetheless, at some point, at some point, it becomes something that you just have to deal.
Shit or get off the pot, as far as the use of violence goes.
But at some point, enough excuses and obfuscations have been made, and enough time has passed, and enough basic and obvious facts have been patiently explained, that people simply, they have to either reject violence or accept the consequences of continuing to advocate violence against others.
The consequences, right?
I don't enable statism by pretending it doesn't have consequences.
By pretending it doesn't have consequences.
This is what consequences are.
I know you know this, right?
But it's hard to get it in terms of statism.
But this is what consequences are.
Reason... Again, I'm going to use my big supertanker, right?
Big freaking oil supertanker.
Reason is the captain.
Philosophy is the steering wheel, right?
Steering wheel. I don't know. Whatever the hell you steer a supertank with.
Probably a bunch of push buttons or a Wii control.
I don't know. But reason and ego is the captain.
Philosophy is the steering mechanism.
And so, if you need to turn around because you're heading, I don't know, perhaps the flat earth is the right, you're heading towards the end of the world.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
We won't sail over. So reason says, oh shit, we're coming to the end of the world, let's turn around.
Let's not fly over the end of the world.
Seems like a good plan to me.
And so you turn. And lickety-split, it takes a while, and blah blah blah, but you turn.
It may take a mile, but you turn.
Now, consequences is a little different.
If you don't have consequences, if people around you don't give you any consequences, then you're just going to stay all over the end of the world and that's your consequence and it sucks to be you.
You're falling through infinity forever.
On the other hand, if you have people around you who really care about you, then you end up in a different situation.
Other people who refuse to participate in your dysfunction, in your addictions, other people, their voluntarism, their ostracism of your addiction...
It becomes something very powerful.
It becomes a very long chained anchor that is thrown overboard.
And that is a very powerful thing.
So you're not turning.
What happens is... The anchor begins to drag along the ground, and there's an arrest to the forward momentum.
It's a supertanker.
And when voluntarism, when non-participation, when the ostracism of dysfunction throws the anchor into the depths, and it begins to snarl and snag on the sand and the weeds and the wrecks down in the briny deep...
Well, the captain is like, what the fuck is going on down there?
Right? Because he's got a drag on one side, and the ship is creaking and groaning, and the controls aren't responding.
Because that is what non-participation does, is it throws the whole entire system out of whack.
Out of whack.
And people hate it.
They hate it because the system...
Dysfunction requires and rests upon and resides upon enabling, participation, the pretending.
Evil only survives on the pretense that it's not evil.
The state only survives on the pretense that it's moral.
Dysfunction only survives on the pretense that it's either not dysfunctional or outright virtuous.
And that's a big problem.
Thank you.
So when you don't participate, when you take yourself out of relationships where there's a continual advocation of violence against you, what you're doing, it's not why you're doing it, but it's the result of what you're doing, is that you're attempting to teach by consequences.
And there's an anchor to That's thrown into the depths of the supertanker that drags and snags and catches.
It begins to turn it around.
And of course, if you're a captain, you think you're sailing in the right direction and there's an anchor that's dragging you and creaking your hull and turning you around and snagging and catching and slowing and stopping and reversing.
Then, of course, what you're frantically going to try and do is cut the chain.
Hack the chain. Cut the ropes that's binding you to the anchor.
Because it's dragging you and stopping you, reversing your position when you're going in the right direction.
So what you want to do is to cut the anchor loose in the depths.
And that's people trying to tell you that they understand that the chain between you, your anchor and the boat, that's your integrity.
And people are going to say, well, they can't fundamentally cut your integrity.
People can't cut your integrity.
They can only convince you that your integrity is single-headed, pig-minded, absolutist, fanatical, blah blah blah blah blah.
They can only get you to cut the chain of your integrity.
They can't cut it themselves.
And so when you say to people, well, you're supporting the use of violence against me, you thought you were ordering a pepperoni pizza, you just ordered a hit on me, would you like to call them to call it off?
And they say no. They need you to shrug and say, oh, well, I'm sure it's just a joke.
It's nothing. It doesn't mean anything.
It's no big deal. Everyone does it.
They need you to enable their destructive behavior.
Oh, you don't have a drinking problem.
You don't have a gambling problem. Everybody likes to have a little fun.
It's okay to relax one while.
So everybody's having fun.
Don't be such a drag. Don't be such a tight ass.
I'm not going to be so difficult.
Blah, blah, blah. Then they can continue.
But it's not kind to understand.
It's not kind. It's not kind.
It's cruel. It's cowardly and it's cruel.
So you've got a supertanker.
The anchor is caught on something terribly strong in the depths and it's beginning to turn around.
That's called non-participation.
And everybody wants that anchor to go away so that the ship can continue to sail off the cliff of the edge of the world.
And they'll hack and they'll bite and they'll chew and they'll It's a magic spell that can break.
The magic spell is called break your integrity.
Break your principles. And people will say, well, the advocation of violence.
I advocate the state.
I don't advocate the violence against you.
Well, it's the same thing.
It's a synonym. It's like saying I'm going north, but I'm not going north.
Well, which is it?
Although they say, don't be so absolutist, work within the system, it's not really violence, you can leave if you don't like it, you can vote, you can write.
Don't be such a fanatic, don't be such a crazy person, don't be...
Don't be, don't be, don't be.
Break this chain. Let me continue sailing.
But it is not kind, it is not kind to let a ship sail off the edge of the world.
It is not kind. It is not kind to refrain from pointing out the gun in the room with everyone in your life.
It's not kind. Because what's going to happen when the system collapses?
When the system collapses.
The only chance we have for the system not to collapse is for people to see the gun in the room and reject violence.
And that way, you see, even if the system does collapse, as long as they can see the gun in the room, then they know why.
You know, when the system collapses, you know, it's like a guy brought in, the last metaphor, it's like a guy brought in to a morgue, right?
It's a cop shows. CSI. Guy comes into a morgue, body comes into a morgue, and it's like, well, shit, I don't know.
I don't know what the hell he died of.
We've looked him over top to bottom, can't see a damn thing.
Heart is good, lungs are good, spleen is good, circulation was good, no arterial blockage, no subdural hematomas.
Oh yeah, I watch house.
No lupus. It takes a libertarian to see that there's a great axe sticking out of his chest.
It takes a libertarian, it takes an anarchist to see that there's a great axe sticking out of the guy's chest while all the statist people who can't see the axe because they've got their hand on it and they're implicated in the death, they can't see it emotionally.
You stand around scratching saying, I don't know why such a young and healthy man should suddenly have his heart cut in half mysteriously and randomly.
You see, once you can see the gun in the room, once you can see the axe in the chest, then you can say, okay, well, this is what he died of.
So you know what we shouldn't have is more axes in the chest.
You know what we shouldn't have is more guns in the room.
The body is terminal.
The social body, the body politic is terminal right now.
The only thing that we can do is help people to see the gun in the room so they can understand that it is violence, not voluntarism, that has caused the demise of all that they know and love and care about.
Because, of course, if they think that freedom has done it, Then the solution will be less freedom, which will be a bad place to be.
So this is my basic argument, that the voluntarism in relationships, the acting on principles, the incompatibility between love and the advocation of violence against an individual.
Can't work with love for that individual.
That if you can't reach people by reason, and you can't stand waiting for life to teach them the lesson of consequences, then the consequence that you can inflict on them that has the greatest chance of working is voluntarism, is disassociation.
Will that fix everyone?
Will that fix everything? Of course not.
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