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Dec. 15, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:11:02
1807 TNS Radio Freedomain Interview 15 December 2010

The history of the 20th century, and the blood in the stream of society.

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Stefan Molyneux, welcome to North East Truth.
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
Excellent. It's absolutely fantastic to be talking to you tonight, Stefan.
Basically, tonight, Stefan's going to be discussing anarcho-capitalism and all things to do with that as a concept and in relation to other issues.
And the notion of self-ownership and sovereignty and all things to do with that as well.
Stefan, I almost don't know where to start.
You've got such a huge repertoire of stuff out there in the ether, if you like.
Self-ownership, should we start with that?
I think that's a great idea.
Excellent. Well, self-ownership as an idea is a really good term we use in Terms like sovereign and free man, and there's a whole range of terms, but essentially they accommodate the same fundamental concept,
yeah? Yeah, I mean, you sort of introduced me with the term anarcho-capitalism, which is, I mean, it sounds like a technical mouthful, and it sounds like something that should be, you know, crawling up the side of your garage that might need a stiff shoe to the head.
So, I mean, I try not to define my belief system by conclusions, right?
So, like a biologist doesn't say, I'm a Darwinist, right?
He says, I'm a biologist, and I accept You know, Darwinian evolution as a valid theory.
I am a philosopher and I accept that if you consistently apply the non-aggression principle, which is that the initiation of force is immoral, if you consistently apply that, you end up with anarchism as the only moral, valid, and practical social form of organization.
Again, I know it's all over my website, but I'm sort of trying not to define myself by conclusions.
But if we say that hitting people and stealing from them and all that is wrong...
Then we have to say that that's wrong for everyone.
I mean, either it's not wrong or it is.
And if it is wrong, then it's wrong for everyone.
And therefore, something like taxation, which is a socially acceptable form of theft where the initiation of force is used to take money from people, then that can't be right.
I mean, it can't be right for some guy in a blue costume to do something and then wrong for some guy not in a blue costume to do something.
So that's really the basic argument.
I wish it were more complicated than that because then I could claim to be some brain-spanning genius.
But it really is, I think, that the only real intelligence in the world is accepting the simplest and most consistent of ideas, and that's one that I just have found irresistible and impossible to find a way around.
Yeah, I mean, it boils it right down, doesn't it, essentially?
That is the fundamental principle on which any right-thinking...
Human society has got to be based on...
We live in what you would describe as a coercive society, yeah?
Oh yeah, without a doubt.
And with all due respect to modernity, which I am a big fan of, because otherwise we would be having this conversation over an extremely long piece of string with two yogurt cups at the end.
So I'm a big fan of modernity and I'm a big fan of the free market.
And we've made great strides as a species in eliminating the validity of violence in many social – like so we don't have organized and violent marriages like that are dictated by parents or by society or by priests.
So we don't – you know, we have voluntarism in our marriage.
We are no longer assigned to our jobs like they were in the Middle Ages, like you just inherited your dad's occupation and so on.
Or like you got in sort of Soviet Russia or other kinds of dictatorships.
We've made incredible strides forward in bringing voluntarism to things.
And now it's considered generally unacceptable to, you know, beat the hell out of your kids and so on, which in the past was considered not only acceptable but morally necessary in order for them to be, you know, good Christians and citizens.
So we've made great strides forward but there are still huge areas in society where this rule of nonviolence doesn't apply.
I mean, just look at something as simple as education.
Education for the young is paid for by threatening people with throwing them in jail if they don't fork over their cash for it.
So kidnapping and imprisonment is how we fund education.
It's how we fund education.
It's how we fund healthcare.
It's how we fund retirement.
And there's this massive blind spot when it comes to violence in terms of that form of social organization.
So we have to keep pushing and expanding the conversation about nonviolence.
It started off as a tiny speck.
And now we're sort of trying to enlarge it and enlarge it because until it becomes a general principle and we don't have these massive exceptions like, well, I'm against violence unless kids need to be educated, then let's pull back the trigger, right?
We just have to keep expanding it until people accept it as a general notion and then I think we'll be living in a far better world.
Essentially we have this peculiar thing where as a base principle we teach our children that violence and bullying is wrong by bullying them and threatening them with violence.
But then as you grow up you discover that there's a dichotomy between these base principles of non-aggressive behaviour and the actual way the world works in reality.
Sorry, I agree with you.
We teach kids like it's simple, right?
Like we don't say to kids, well, bullying is wrong unless you're doing it to a rich kid to help out a poor kid.
You know, like you can't steal someone's lunch money unless you take five quid from them, you know, give two quid to the poor kid and keep three quid for yourself.
You can't.
Right.
So we give them these rules.
Kids like it's just wrong.
It's just plain wrong.
But then when they grow up and they sort of try to apply those same rules that they were taught as kids to society as whole, suddenly we're like, well, it's complicated.
There's a social contract and there's democracy and you can vote or you can leave the country.
And none of these rules we apply to them as kids.
And I think it makes kids kind of cynical in the long run.
Yeah, it's kind of a betrayal of the ethics that we're brought up with, isn't it?
Yeah, let's be consistent, right?
If we're going to say that it's okay for some people to steal on behalf of the poor, which isn't the real motivation, but at least it's the cover that's given for that kind of theft, then let's just make it okay for everyone.
But, of course, we realize that the moment we make it okay for everyone, it simply can't work.
Like if the poor should have the money of the better off, let's eliminate the government as a middleman and just let them go steal whatever they want.
But we realize society can't work if we apply the values that we hold at a government level.
Society can't work if we extend it to everyone, which should make us kind of suspicious of those values, but that's not often what happens.
Yeah, the government is essentially claiming to hold the monopoly on the use of violence, isn't it, in the modern world?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's more than a claim.
I just spent two days doing my taxes, so I'm on fire about this particular topic.
So, yeah, I mean...
You've been thoroughly beaten. Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, it's bent over and grabbed your shoelaces' time in Canada.
Yeah, I can imagine, yeah.
I'm in the fortunate position of having dropped right out of the whole system at the minute, so until the...
I fall down the next bear pit.
I'm sort of relieved of having to perform all those duties.
Excellent. If you can just type your address then into Skype, we'll all just come and live with you because it sounds like the way to go.
You have a nice shack in the woods, is that right?
Or a castle in the clouds?
Well, actually, it's the most itinerant, unromantic lifestyle you could possibly live, being off the grid.
You spend most of your life sofa-surfing amongst your friends and house-sitting, if at all possible, where it facilitates it.
But yeah, there's nothing good about it at the moment.
The social infrastructure is set up to prevent it, you know?
Right. We'll house-sit for internet access, right?
I understand. We'll house it for hedge fund.
Right. When we're talking about the actual notion of the nature of society, one of the things that you helped formulate in my mind was the notion of extending the personal realm, if you like, into the public realm.
So the same ethical, moral...
Rules that you almost expected to live by on an individual basis should apply in the macro world.
I haven't really explained that very well.
No, no. I think you just did a better job.
I think I took about 800 pages to say the same thing.
So you get the job of editing my next book.
I wrote in this free book of mine.
It's on freedomainradio.com called Everyday Anarchy.
And the basic idea is this.
People say, well, anarchy is just a bad thing.
Anarchy is just chaos.
It's Mel Gibson on fire riding a motorcycle through some guys with mohawks or whatever.
And that's all nonsense because there is a huge amount of our lives where we treasure anarchy.
And anarchy, of course, doesn't mean chaos.
Anarchy simply means without a violent ruler.
I mean, that's all that anarchy means.
It simply means the absence of government.
It's like atheism simply means...
An acceptance of the non-existence of God.
It doesn't mean having babies for breakfast or whatever nonsense people try and make up about it.
So anarchy simply means without a violent ruler, without a central coercive agency called the state.
And we love that so much.
I mean, if someone were to try and pass a law in a Western society that said, you know, the government is now going to tell you who to marry.
I mean, okay, I guess, you know, three...
Fat, ugly guys would cheer, but everybody else would be like, well, that's appalling.
We can't have the government tell us who to marry.
Or if the government were to say, well, you know, we take your kids when they're born and we'll raise them for you, people would be just justly appalled at that notion.
So the idea, the huge areas in our life where if a violent hierarchy was imposed, we'd be shocked and appalled.
So we love... Anarchy.
We love anarchy. We treasure anarchy.
I mean, if the government were to say, here's the only newspapers you can read, people would go up in arms.
They'd be appalled. So I just wanted to point out that in our everyday lives, we love anarchy.
We love if the government said, you can only shop on this aisle in this grocery store, right?
But we like having that choice.
We like not being told what to do.
But then there's this other realm...
Where there's this huge burst of static, and then up is down, black is white, gravity is anti-gravity, and so on, where everything has changed completely.
And it's the complete reversal, right?
So we love all of this voluntarism and freedom and lack of coercion in our lives.
And then we cross over to this realm called society.
And suddenly, morality is completely reversed.
So, where you and I can't steal, the government must steal.
Where you and I can't counterfeit currency, the government must counterfeit currency.
It's immoral for you and I to do it, but it's immoral for the government to not do it.
You and I can't go and get our kids' education at the point of a gun.
But the government has to, or it's really immoral.
And philosophy has always been at war.
And it's a grim, bloody, 2,500-year battle so far.
Philosophy has always been at war with this reverse dimension, this, I don't even know what to call it, this like, you know, fracked-up headspace of complete moral inversal.
And that is something that we're constantly attacking.
I mean, it happened in the realm of religion, where people said, well, this is how we define existence in the personal world, but, you know, now there's this other existence where there are deities and so on.
So philosophy is just continually pushing back this crazy realm that people invent so that they can get away, literally, with theft and murder.
And so we're trying to push back and say, well, no.
There is no other realm.
There are only people. There is no other realm called society.
There is no public space.
There are only people doing stuff.
And if it's wrong for you and I, it has to be wrong for everyone.
Yeah. I mean, it's essentially...
It's almost Orwellian in the reverse speak, isn't it?
Essentially, you've got the... Right, and where people at the personal level would be appalled, right? So if you and I said, okay, let's pass these laws which say the government now assigns who to marry, people would go insane and mental.
They would consider this a gross violation.
Of their rights.
And yet, there's this whole area or space that people step into.
It's like another personality takes over.
You go from the kindly old guy at the corner whittling his stick and handing out lemonade to some grim Boo Radley sociopath who has to force everyone to do everything he wants and call it virtue.
It's really unhealthy.
I mean, it's unhealthy mentally. It's unhealthy psychologically.
And it certainly is irrational morally.
So would you see the sort of modern history of man as being the era of exploitation then?
Is that essentially what we're talking about?
Because you're talking about co-opting people's autonomy to one particular ego.
Well, I think that the history of human beings as a whole has been of exploitation, right?
So I think my most popular video is called The Story of Your Enslavement, which is the basic idea is that The most valuable resource that human beings can control is not land or animals or anything like that or even the means of production.
The most valuable resource that human beings can own is other human beings Mm-hmm.
You know, these rat bastards who go around raping the body politic for the sake of short-term gains in the financial sector based entirely upon fiat currency, government loans, government control of interest rates.
That's nasty, nasty fascistic stuff.
Those people own us and they threaten us with imprisonment and death if we don't hand over our money and our kids and our lives.
And we have to look at ourselves as livestock and the country as a farm and the government as the farmer.
That is the only metaphor that really makes sense.
What I think happened in the 20th century, from sort of the late 19th century to the 20th century, which I think is not discussed as much as it should be, You really can't understand the 20th century unless you understand that there was an entire class called aristocrats and priests who ran out of juice.
Their whole system collapsed in the 19th century.
So in most of Europe, the aristocracy was ditched.
And the church as a sort of place where people could go to lie for a living, that the church collapsed as well as far as its general social power and control.
And so you have this whole class of people who are brought up to be parasites and would find it completely unthinkable to actually interact in a voluntary way in a free society.
So they had to invent new philosophies to fool people We're good to go.
And the state, which formerly had been sort of a night watchman state where it was really just around the protection of property and the provision of common defense.
And there was no income tax, right?
Which is not acceptable to the ruling classes.
They have to have lots of money because they're greedy.
And so they all swarmed over to the state.
And that's why you get these huge governments, huge growth in governments.
It was all coincidental with the collapse of religion and the collapse of the aristocracy.
These people just invented a new philosophy.
Called socialism, fascism, communism, which allowed them to go over and grow the power of the state.
And then they engaged in endless wars, just as they did when they were aristocrats, and just as they did when they were running the priestly class.
It was just endless wars.
And we're still in the middle of that battle.
These parasites are still swarming all over the state and using it to control us.
The sort of parasitic philosophy survives by every time it's threatened, it rebrands itself.
That's the kind of way I tend to look at it.
Yeah, and the good thing is I think this is the last ship.
Like, there's no other place to go, right?
So once we can deal with the state, then we can, I think, really look forward to a very free society.
But unfortunately, you know, the collapse of religion and the collapse of the aristocracy, it was like taking a balloon and pushing in one end.
You know, all that happens is the other end bulges out.
And we're like, hey, we're free. I mean, think of the French Revolution.
They wanted to get rid of the priests.
They wanted to get rid of the exploitive capitalists, which I would agree with.
And they wanted to get rid of the aristocracy.
And they did. And what did they do?
Well, all they did was they pushed all of these jerks over to the government and ended up with a tyrannical reign of terror.
And the same thing happened in Russia.
The same thing happened in Germany.
It is wretched.
If you just chase down an immediate enemy without general principles, all you do is displace him to some other new and usually more dangerous area.
Well, generally speaking, the sort of body politic model that they employ is just a duplicate of the one that they're replacing with different figureheads.
Yeah, that's right. So the religion of God transmutes itself to the religion of the state, where you have, you know, I mean, with God, you've got all these crucifixes.
And with the religion of the state, you have giant heads carved into Mount Rushmore.
And you have the veneration of people like Winston Churchill.
And all you end up with is with new secular saints, new secular mythologies.
People have a very hard time living in reality.
Reality is not a comfortable place for most people.
And it's not because reality is inherently threatening.
I think we all quite like reality.
But unfortunately, we're told so many lies when we're growing up that reality becomes the enemy of our very identity later on in life.
It's a common theme that we keep coming back to on North East Truth.
Essentially, a perpetual state of fear and the resulting neurological dumbing down that results from that flight-of-flight response is a major tool in perception management in the modern dichotomy, I think.
If they can keep you perpetually in a state of rabbit in the headlights, you won't be able to cognizize sufficiently to put it all together.
And inevitably, then you're victimized by a A moray that you don't understand.
I mean, if you don't know the rules of the game, but you're forced to be in it until you can learn the rules, you're in a catch-22, aren't you?
Right. Now, where do you guys see, where's your approach as to where this fear is coming from?
I think mostly it's a highly sophisticated and concerted manipulation of the media.
To put it simplistically, you're so busy running on the rat wheel just to keep all of the white goods that you've got.
That you just simply can't see through this subliminal that's being fired at you constantly on from TV and the media and the actual world we live in, I suppose.
I don't know whether that explains it very well, but I think media control is a constant recurring theme.
Yeah, I think that's very true.
I mean, if you look at the WikiLeaks thing at the moment, I mean, it's genius, right?
I mean, you have to hand it to the masters.
There's a reason why they're the masters, right?
I mean, it's genius because now everyone...
It's talking about these rape allegations rather than the contents of the WikiLeaks cables.
I mean, that is – I mean, and there are very few people, I think, who believe these allegations against this guy.
But the purpose is achieved either way, right?
I mean, because if people believe it's true, then they'll dismiss him as a bad guy or whatever.
But if they believe it's false, they'll still talk about these allegations rather than the contents of the cables that are coming out.
Yeah. Well, it's the usual distraction techniques, and they've changed the emphasis.
First, it went from the content of the leaks themselves to the morality behind the leaker.
And then from that is the individual, the guy himself now has a big question mark over his head.
No matter what happens, that can never go away.
It's the mud that sticks, isn't it?
So his credibility is undermined as a human being.
Yeah, absolutely.
The media has almost reminded me of, you know, if you ever go to the zoo, you know, when the monkeys are angry or upset or frightened, they'll hurl their own feces at things.
Well, that's really all the media does.
To me, there's two components to controlling human beings.
The one is physical abuse and the other is verbal abuse.
The physical abuse is handled by the state in terms of kidnapping and coercion and imprisonment, but the verbal abuse is handled by the media.
a typical sort of male-female thing, right?
So in dysfunctional families, very often, it's not always the case, but, you know, the dad is the guy who hits, and the mom is the person who's the verbal abuser, even if she's just threatening the kids with dad hitting them.
And that, to me, is where the sort of state and the media show up in people's minds when they're adults.
It just shows up in that if they can't get you through force, then they will just get you through verbal abuse.
And all of these allegations seem definitely to fall into that category.
We had an interesting event I don't know whether you've seen this.
You're in Canada.
Yeah? Yeah.
At the student demonstrations yesterday, a guy called Jody McIntyre, who suffers from cerebral palsy, was at one of the demonstrations.
And it was caught on camera as the police attacked him and dragged him from his wheelchair and dragged him across the street and basically abused and knocked him about.
And But interestingly, he was then interviewed on the BBC later that day.
Did a fantastic job, to be honest, Stephanie.
He suffers from cerebral palsy, so obviously his speech is a little bit affected, but he really did himself the greatest of credit on the interview because the BBC's interviewer, the presenter guy, attacked him from start to finish.
They even accused him of threatening the police by rolling his wheelchair in their general direction.
It was absolutely scandalous to listen to.
But it's a classic example of what you're saying about the best...
In a circumstance like that, where there was basically no defense for it, they had no option but to go on the attack.
Yeah, no, for sure.
In the United States, there's lots of cases that are rolling around at the moment.
One recent one that comes to mind is this kid who was filming at a school while a police officer beat up a kid and slammed his head against the side of a bus.
And the kid, of course, was the one who, and the kid who filmed was the one who ended up getting charged, right?
So it's not, as I said in a recent video, it's not the guy who kills the guy who gets charged.
It's the guy who reports the crime who's the murderer.
But see, this is the amazing thing about this modern media technology, of course, right?
Which is that, I mean, the visibility into the true actions of the ruling class are available, right?
Available. I mean, whoever saw police brutality in the 1950s?
Unless you were actually there at the scene.
Yeah, unless you were there. You'd never see that on TV. I mean, there is a kind of...
We've always felt that the government is watching us.
The government, they can go through our bank accounts, they can go through our health records, they can go through whatever they want.
We are an open book to them.
But what's fascinating now, and I think this is one of the things that WikiLeaks is exposing, is that the tables have been turned a little bit.
Not a huge amount, but it's significant that the government now also feels that we're watching them.
That their actions are revealed, like if some officer beats up someone, You can upload it anonymously from some internet cafe and then it's visible, right?
So the actions of the ruling classes are now becoming visible in a way that was never the case before.
I did an interview with a guy a little while back.
He's a filmmaker and he made a film called The War on Kids, which I highly recommend.
And he was able to do, to interview just about everyone except he was absolutely forbidden to bring his cameras into a government school.
They simply flat out refused to, and you never see this, right?
You never see footage from inside a government school.
And when you think about it, I mean, that's really kind of jaw-dropping.
I mean, we're the ones paying for this damn thing.
We're the ones paying for this whole system.
But you can't get a documentary to go into some inner-city school to see what goes on in these classrooms.
They simply don't want anybody to see.
But you can get this footage.
You can upload it. It can be shared worldwide.
So I think for the first time in history...
The government feels that they're a little bit in the spotlight.
They're a little bit having the lens turned on them, and I think that's very unsettling for them because they never want to be seen in their naked nastiness, so to speak.
Well, it is about keeping up the illusion, isn't it?
It's partly what we've been talking about with the demonstrations in the UK at the moment, in that they're We're wondering whether an entire generation at the moment is being taught that no matter how many of them protest, and even if they manage to do it peacefully, the politicians will still flatly ignore them.
I think there's almost the state of trying to send the signal that, despite the fact that peaceful protest is the prescribed way to effect change, they want this generation to realise that it doesn't really.
You know what I mean? And as you say...
Their problem is that they're having difficulty controlling our perceptions if we're freely able to look around and see it other than via the means that they're projecting it at us by.
You know, the mainstream media is in their pocket without a doubt, and it's carefully managed to manage our perceptions.
But if you were free, autonomously looking around the internet, choosing what you want to see and how your opinions are formed, there's an extent of that.
It's worrying to them that they're losing control of the group mind.
Right, right.
Well, I mean, when in the 16th century, when Martin Luther translated the Bible into the vernacular and handed it out to anybody who could read, people got access to the original information rather than that which had been carefully filtered by the Catholic Church.
And that broke apart Christendom and led to, I mean, centuries of religious war, which we're not going to have, but it led to the breakdown of religion in the long run.
And the same thing, of course, is occurring now.
Now, the student rights, I think, are quite fascinating.
I'd like to talk about those for a few minutes, if that's all right with you.
Now, what they're complaining about, as far as I understand it, is that the government, in its austerity measures, right?
Because the austerity always and forever applies only to the people who are not responsible for the cost overruns, right?
So, it is not like some kid who's 17 who wants to go to university.
He's certainly not responsible for the massive deficit that's been piling up since the First World War.
But he's the one who has to pay, right?
Because the people who actually are responsible for it, they can never pay because they're the ones in charge or they're the ones who are currently heavy voters like the old.
But so there's been like a doubling or in some cases a tripling of university fees and that is what is causing people to have these protests.
Is that fairly accurate? Yeah, that pretty much sums it up, yeah.
But it's not actually the interesting thing, I think, to add to that, Stephan, is that the generation, the current students that are demonstrating won't actually be affected by the future plans.
There's an interesting degree of abstraction in that they're protesting on behalf of the people that come after them, which I do think has quite a significant bearing.
That's interesting, yeah.
Yeah, because essentially we're supposed to be the, you know, look after number one generation.
And these kids have clearly shown that even though it doesn't affect them directly, morally and ethically, and for the sake of those to come in front of them, something needs to be done.
And I didn't think I had that in them, to be honest.
I'd almost dismissed the student as a realistic means of change.
You know, I didn't think the student body...
We're all interested anymore.
Oh, yeah. It's very important not to underestimate the young.
I mean, generation by generation, we're just getting smarter.
I mean, that's just a biological fact that seems to be very well borne out by research.
And so they're smarter than me, for sure.
A lot of them and my younger listeners are just jaw-droppingly brilliant.
So when do these provisions kick in that they're protesting?
Essentially, it'll be, I presume, in two or three years' time when the actual things come in.
Because the politicians obviously crafted it, hoping that they would avoid any major kick-off about it, precisely because it didn't affect the current student body.
So I'm assuming it's basically about three years, whatever it takes to get a degree nowadays.
Right, and I mean, it will affect people who want to go on to graduate school or whatever, but unless...
Yeah, so I think it is quite admirable that they're fighting this as a particular kind of principle, and they certainly are being taught...
A sort of very important lesson about the government.
I mean, one of the things that's very true is that young people are very often shielded from the true cost of social programs until you get that jaw-dropping moment where you go and get a job and your first paycheck is like half what you thought it was going to be because of the taxes.
You know, but by then you're in your sort of early to mid-20s and your opinions have largely been formed.
Yeah. We spend a lot of time and effort shielding young people from the true reality of who's paying for things and what is going on in the world until such a time where the reality can't really puncture the defensive delusions and ideologies that have been set up.
But it is quite applicable that they're going for this.
I'm sorry? Do you think they're deliberately kept in ignorance of the reality so that they're ill-equipped to deal with it when it comes?
Because let's face it, I mean, a kid that starts to learn about the realities of the financial world after he's actually entered into it's at the distinct disadvantage, isn't he?
Oh, yeah, for sure. I was in my mid-twenties before I even understood the mortgage, the reality of the mortgage situation, but by that time I already had a mortgage.
Right. Well, I mean, this comes down to the question of what is the degree to which the control in society is sort of deliberately and consciously planned and to what degree is it a kind of instinct for domination?
Right. I don't believe, and I know that there's lots of people who do believe this, and I'm certainly open to more evidence, I don't believe that there's one giant smoky backroom at the UN where this stuff's all plotted on PowerPoints and wall charts.
I do believe that human beings have an incredible set of instincts for domination, whether it's of the natural world or animals or other human beings, which is to say it's the most valuable resource.
I don't think you need to say that A pride of lions has to consciously plot out how they're going to catch the antelope, right?
They just have great instincts for how to do it, right?
I mean, there are these sharks, and sharks are not the brightest of creatures.
They swim in these tight circles, slowly gathering all the fish together, and then they go and feed them.
This is not planned out ahead of time, like, Brucie, you take the left one.
You know, Sammy, you take the right one.
They don't sort of have walkie-talkies or anything.
They just have this great instinct for exploiting the natural resources around them.
And I think that's true of human beings as well.
If you look at, you know, people who are like abusive husbands, they don't have to go to a class called How to Be an Abusive Husband in order to know that they have to break down the will of their wife, that they have to isolate her, that they have to, make her put herself down.
They have to constantly mess with her head.
They have to make her blame herself.
You don't have to go to a class to learn all this stuff.
People just have an instinct for domination and exploitation.
So it's a base program that we all have, if you like.
Yeah, it's a base program.
I mean, because biologically that would just be the selected approach.
Anybody who had a really good instinct for exploiting and dominating other human beings would end up rising up in any kind of violent hierarchy, whether it's Stone Age or 21st century, anybody who's a really good manipulator of other human beings is going to rise up any hierarchy, therefore is going to have more anybody who's a really good manipulator of other human beings is going to rise up any hierarchy, therefore is going to have more resources there, is going to have
So that gene, or there's probably a whole set of genes, that helps us to manipulate and control and bully and exploit other human beings is just genetically selected.
And then there's two sets, right?
So there's the one set that is genetically selected to dominate and control, and there's another set that is selected to obey and hide, to stay still.
Because throughout most of human history, there was a violent hierarchy, the violence of which was almost always kept hidden from those around.
And there was a slave class, and the slave class survived by not rocking the boat, because anybody who tried to overtake the master classes would get killed, right?
So whoever was a natural rebel, you know, Spartacus or whatever, right?
That person would be killed, so that gene would kind of be weeded out.
So I think that we're just in a kind of, it's like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that fit together, dominance and submission.
And there are times when somebody is born submissive in the dominant classes and vice versa, but for the most part it's pretty stable.
There are so many common methods.
Like, there are probably 5,000 prides of lions around the world, and they all hunt kind of the same way.
But they don't all get together, right?
They don't have a big convention of lions and say, okay, this year we're going to switch tactics a little bit.
We're going to go a little bit more through the bushes and a little bit less over the grass or whatever.
They just all do it kind of the same way.
Yeah, they just all do it the same way because there's just the best way to do it and that's how their instincts have developed.
So I think that people mistake the commonality of social control for some sort of plan or some sort of plot, but I don't think that's necessary in order to explain it.
Well, I have a slightly different take in that.
I think probably, I broadly think that every human on the planet has a scope or a scale, if you like, of behavior from the most Evil to the most divine, if you like.
And obviously people have natural inclinations to posit them further up and down the scale, but generally speaking, I think that we're all capable of the most evil and the most good, and it's ultimately an issue of self-awareness, being aware that we all have that darker side to us, and choosing to do the right thing, if you like.
I think that's very accurate.
And I think people who deny their dark side psychologically end up projecting it onto somebody else and calling them bad and then having every excuse in the world to attack them and all that.
So, yeah, I think that's a very, very good way of putting it.
You know, I think that people that do that, it's a consequence of simply the lack of self-awareness.
Right. Yeah, I mean, certainly, certainly, certainly, this is why I'm constantly pounding on people, you know, verbally and hopefully encouragingly, who want to take the path of mere politics in order to free the world, right?
Because the world is only going to be free When we're free of illusions, right?
Because, I mean, religion is an illusion.
The state is something that doesn't exist.
People get mad at the government.
It's like there's no such thing as the government.
There's buildings and there's people and some of those people have guns and some of those people have moral theories that they inflict on children that are false.
But there's no such thing as the government.
So it's just getting people to free themselves from their illusions and But it's hard for people to free themselves from their illusions.
It's emotionally painful.
It is like taking a giant band-aid or sticky plaster off a very furry part of your brain that's been on for 20 years.
It's very painful. It is like getting a good oiled spanking on a very sunburned buttock.
That's a great metaphor for you to have visuals.
Feel free to put in something slow motion there.
We're going to cut that bit out and use it as the advert for the show, I think.
About the best metaphor I've heard for weeks.
Yeah, so it's very painful for people to go through that.
But if you don't know about why you resist the truth, you have no chance of achieving it.
And to know why you resist the truth requires introspection.
It requires self-knowledge and a real pursuit of a genuine understanding of your own soul and motivations.
And that's a hard thing for people to do.
I think partly because we're just resistant to doing it because it's unsettling.
And also partly, I think, as you said...
That people are just so, you know, they're on a hamster wheel that's constantly speeding up and they don't have a lot of time for that.
Yeah. I mean, it's essentially how we've described the social contract is the seductive choice not to have to think for yourself.
They choose to obey.
Against the agony of having to know yourself well enough to be a conscious, sentient, moral, ethical human being.
Because it does take all of that.
You can't make a decision, I don't think, that will result in good if the being making that decision is full of paradox and self-denial about their own darkness.
You know what I mean?
Self-awareness is a prerequisite of making rational and sentient actions into the world we live in.
Does that make any sense?
No, I completely agree.
I certainly know that for myself, I have to know my own dark side in order to fight some of the evil in the world, right?
So if evil can be thought of as a really good fencer, like a really good swordsman, then you have to study sword fighting in order to fight that battle.
And so you kind of have to get into that kind of bloodlust yourself.
You kind of have to, I think, get down and mix it up a little bit.
And I think a lot of people who are thinkers are kind of refined and ivory tower.
They don't really want to get down in the dirt, right?
There's this old theory that, you know, if you wrestle with a pig in the mud, you both get dirty, but the pig enjoys it.
And so somehow we should rise above it and so on.
I think in the original wording it wasn't mud, but...
But I think that there is something about getting down and getting your hands dirty and doing some of the dirty work around cleaning up the world.
I think it's important. And you can't do that if you keep yourself very refined and rarefied from your own dark side, I think.
Yeah. If there is such a thing as utopia, I'm convinced it begins inside every individual.
It's not an external thing, is it?
No, it's not. I'm a bit cynical about the concept of utopia, actually.
I don't think there is such a thing.
No, I think there's happiness, which is a state that can be achieved, but it's almost impossible to maintain in a perfectly consistent way.
But there is integrity, and there is consistency, and there is moral courage, and all the satisfactions that come from that.
You can't directly control your own happiness any more than you can directly control your own health.
But what you can do is you can cultivate the habits that lead towards better health.
You know, some reasonable exercise and reasonably good eating habits and getting sleep and blah, blah, blah.
And the same thing, you can cultivate moral habits that will contribute significantly towards the achievement and maintenance of happiness.
And I genuinely believe that our highest or you could say most abstract social institutions fundamentally are modeled on our experiences.
Well, I mean primarily within the family.
And that's something that people don't take enough of a look at that how we look at authority comes out of how we're treated as children.
It's very hard to overturn that within your own lifetime without a lot of work, which a lot of people either have the stomach nor the time to pursue.
Yeah.
I mean it's basically when you speak of the nanny state, that literally alludes to what you're talking about there.
It's a model based on our earliest experiences of life that's then manipulated by the powers that be, as I said, throughout the rest of it, a sort of model of human psychology.
And there definitely seems to be some merit to it, I would have thought, because even the Jesuits would say, give me the boy in, what is it?
First seven years. That's right, yeah.
I couldn't remember the age. Yeah, give me a child for the first seven years and he's mine for life, right?
Yeah. Well, that pretty much says it all.
I think that goes to a huge degree with all things, actually, interestingly enough.
I've recently re-read a book called Nature via Nature, which explains the way your environment actually shapes your genetic code from one moment to the next.
It's not a fixed thing, but constantly reactive with environmental inputs that it receives.
By virtue of that, I kind of started to realise that there is no immutable fixed, if you like.
It's a constant. The world we live in, sort of jumping leaps ahead of you, but the world we live in is a manifestation of What we do in it on an individual basis as much as anything else.
It's about changing the...
If you want to change the world, change yourself.
A good friend of mine has his avatar, a little quote underneath it, is that he can't change the world, but he can change himself, and by doing that, affects the world that he lives in.
Yeah, and if you can't achieve it for yourself, you have no right to demand it of others, right?
So the metaphor I've used before is, you know, if you live on an island where everybody's 400 pounds and you're also 400 pounds, There's no point running around telling everyone to lose weight.
I mean, you can do that, but it's ridiculous.
But fundamentally, if you want the world to be free, then you have to be free yourself.
You have to just lose the weight.
And then people might say, hey, that guy can climb stairs, that guy can touch his toes, that guy can toss his children around, which makes them giggle, and that's good.
So maybe I want to lose some weight too.
But you have to lead by example, not by words, because people really only judge actions fundamentally.
They don't judge what you say.
So yeah, I mean, if you want freedom for the world, the first thing you need to be is free yourself.
And that is so hard for people who want to change the world, right?
So people who think and who understand and who work from first principles and deal with objective evidence want to change the minds of others.
We all do. We all want people to be free and to be rational.
But the problem is that people are quite opposed for the most part to being free and rational.
And so we end up looking like the most enslaved people in the world because we're just banging our heads against the walls of other people's indifferences.
So people look at us and say, well, damn, that guy doesn't look very free.
I don't think I want his life.
And I think that's the mistake that people make.
You just have to live a kind of life that is incandescent and beautiful and glorious and free.
And then people may be interested and then they can ask you and then you can say, well, you know, I did this, that and the other and you're welcome to give it a shot and I'm happy to help out if I can.
And that's, you can't lose then.
Because either people are going to be inspired by you, in which case, great!
You know, you've helped yourself and you've helped the world or they're not.
But at least you're not going to be a slave to their indifference and rejection of reality.
You get a happy life either way.
It's like you get a cake called your happy life and maybe you'll get some icing called inspiring others.
But either way, you get cake and that's not a bad thing to get.
Yeah, absolutely.
I've been through that exact phase.
I'm sort of just coming out the other side of that myself, Stephen, where I've exhausted myself trying to get other people to do this and that and the other.
And now I've just realized that so long as I'm doing it myself, I've got my cake.
You know what I mean? Yeah, I'll take the cake.
I can't go far wrong than just every decision I have to make, I choose to do the right thing rather than the pro-social thing, which is a perversion.
Yeah, I mean, even if you take something like cake and you run around trying to jam it down with people's throats, all they're going to do is bite you.
Maybe you sit there saying, damn, this cake is good.
Yummy, right? And it's real, then they might wander over and want some.
But that's really, that's the best thing that I've sort of figured, the best way I've figured out to do it.
I mean, I suppose we should get on there.
We sort of, I think, I wouldn't say dealt with the anarchy side of it, but can we move on over to the...
Intellectually onto the capitalist side of it, Stefan.
Yes, please. I'm a peculiar...
I really... I come from the position with this that fundamentally I would much rather consciously and voluntarily choose to collaborate with like-minded people to achieve a known end than to compete with them.
Is that not the fundamental principle of capitalism, though, that it's all about the competition?
Well, I would say not.
So... So let's just take a biological analogy before I sort of explain.
So it's true if you look at, you know, let's go back to our friends, the lions, right?
So you look at a lion and an antelope, it's a win-lose thing, right?
I mean, the lion eats the antelope and the antelope dies, so the antelopes keep getting away and then the lion dies.
It's a win-lose thing. So we look at that as sort of aggressive and destructive, but necessary, I guess, for the natural world.
However, if you look at the lion itself, think about all of the muscles and the nerves and the tendons and the bone and the marrow and everything that is working together in that.
And think about, I mean, even the intestinal parasites that are in there helping the lion break down the antelope's food.
It's hugely about cooperation.
And there are a few places where there's a win-lose, right?
So you think of two giant circles, right?
So the giant circles are everything that is cooperating in that animal to keep it alive and to keep it functional.
And all the animals that don't compete for each other, but there's small areas where the animal's interests conflict.
Now, if you look at capitalism, it's very similar, right?
So I say this, I was a capitalist.
I sort of co-founded and I was an executive at a company that did fairly well.
And yes, it's true that there were times When we would be doing a presentation and either we would win or some competing company would win.
So that was a win-lose. But for the most part, it was not the case.
For the most part, it was all cooperation.
Sometimes we would even cooperate with our competitors.
But for the most part, like we cooperated with the people who leased our offices, with the people who sold our computers, with the people who supplied electricity.
There was no competition between us and those people.
That was all cooperation. So I think it's important.
We look at the drama of win-lose in capitalism and we say, aha, it's dog-eat-dog, it's win-lose, and it's all about fierce competition.
But we ignore that that competition is only possible because of a huge amount of cooperation on the part of everyone that makes those win-lose situations even possible.
So I think that you can look at it as sort of win-lose competition.
There's some aspect to that.
And that's not true of capitalism as a whole.
That's true of everything, right? So if you marry some woman, hopefully, right, she's off the market for everyone else.
That's a win-lose situation. If you take a job, somebody else doesn't get that job.
If you eat a muffin, nobody else gets to eat that muffin, right?
So I think it's not specific to capitalism or a free market.
It simply is the nature of life itself that, you know, I get to use my lungs, nobody else does, right?
I mean, that's just the nature of being alive.
I think that it's showed up or it's mirrored in the free market to some degree, but I think it's sort of fundamental to life as a whole, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, I see what you say.
Possibly it's my own, trying to be as self-aware as possible.
The word capitalism itself carries such baggage, especially to people from my background and whatnot.
It's a four-letter word, if you know what I mean.
Tell me what associations it carries from your history, because I probably share those.
I'm just curious what they are for you.
It's just that I see exploitation as being explicit in the notion of capitalism.
It's just that the idea of exploitation is what I have the most difficulty with.
It's not the race as such, but the reality of competition as a life model is that It rapidly becomes apparent that you don't have to win yourself.
You can trip the guy next to you up.
It becomes more important, the competition, than the end goal, I think.
I just ideologically have a great deal of difficulty with it because for me personally, I resist to the death being coerced into involving myself with something or forced, but I always think it's the least wasteful use of energy is to collaborate towards an end goal where there's a meeting of minds voluntarily than to compete to achieve that goal and inevitably waste Sort of energy in the competition,
if you know what I mean. Okay, and I understand this in the abstract.
Can you just give me a bit more of a concrete example?
I just want to make sure how it plays out in this world view.
See, I don't think it does play out in this world, Stephan.
I mean, that's probably where it's firmly posited in the realm of ideology, because I think the entire world moray that we live under, even in our own minds, is based on the fundamental notion of competition.
I think competition, implicit in it, allows for a niche for exploitation or exploiters to benefit, whereas collaboration, inevitably, there's nothing in it for an exploiter because if you can't compel or manipulate the game of competition, there's no niche for you to get into it with a collaborative approach.
Because the exploiters basically are sat there, not in any way collaborating towards the end goal, so they're self-evident and therefore not welcome.
Whereas in a competition, everybody's running and tripping each other up and stuff, and nobody even notices that the exploiters are kind of the bookies of the race who always seem to win.
Well, okay, but I just need to understand these terms a little bit more.
First of all, when I sort of see, I don't know, MP3 players, like I see, I don't see people tripping each other up.
Like, so it's this, I guess, Creative makes some, and Sansa makes some, and Apple makes some, and Microsoft makes some.
They all, to me, are just offering a variety of things.
And if I choose one MP3 player over another, I guess, I mean, one company wins and the other ones lose.
But that's sort of the nature of choice.
But how is it that they're tripping each other up or coercing each other in order to produce these products?
Well, I think it's more a case of...
You've got me now, see, because I'm thinking...
I'm not trying to get you. I'm not trying to sort of get you.
I really do want to understand where you're coming from because it's a very common perception, which is not to say that it's false or wrong or anything.
I really try to understand in a concrete way where somebody's coming from.
I think, well, what is it?
My experience in the business realm and stuff, the general air seems to be that those who progress best are the ones that play the game, if you like, rather than, they're much less focused on production of the end goal rather than how well they play the game.
You mean sort of like playing office politics and stuff, right?
Yeah, I mean, all that kind of thing.
But just in general, there seems to be far too much energy devoted to their domination of the race and far less attention to the actual end goal.
I mean, I've worked in the National Health Service where office politics is the industry that they're in.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you calling the National Health Service the product of the free market?
What I was actually seeing is the National Health Service is the perfect demonstration of what we think it's for and how it actually operates as an entity.
They're just two completely different things.
Yeah, look, and I think that, sorry, I think if you look at the government, like the French court of Louis XVI or something like that, then everybody who's really close to the king is kind of gross, right?
They're just kind of corrupt.
They're toadies.
They're lickspittles.
They're, you know, just nasty little sycophants.
Yeah, sycophants, that kind of stuff, right?
Whereas some guy who's, you know, working 500 miles from the king in a field is not political in that way.
He's just trying to, you know, get his crops out of the ground in one way or another.
Yeah.
So I think this is not an excuse for capitalism as a whole, but I think that it's worthwhile to draw a line between proximity to the state is not proximity to the free market, is not proximity to voluntarism.
Right.
So if you're looking at companies, yeah, I mean, companies like that are involved in the really close.
And I've worked with these companies in my career.
The companies that are really up close to the military industrial complex in the U.S., absolutely.
They are weird and gross.
And there was a company in Canada that still is, of course.
It was called Bell.
Now, Bell was originally came out of the military and it was just going through the process of losing its government monopoly on the phone service.
And the culture in Bell, when I worked with them many years ago, was really weird.
Because it was, A, it was ex-military, and B, they had a government monopoly, and C, it was just breaking up.
So people were just panicking, and they had to reinvent the whole culture, and the Bell has emerged as a much nicer company because it's lost its government monopoly.
Because when you have a government monopoly, then your ability to play politics and manipulate and provide votes and threaten politicians to maintain, that promotes an entirely different kind of person.
Inside the hierarchy, then if you're a relatively small software company really operating in the free market, a different kind of person tends to float up.
So I agree with you that there's a lot of nasty, ugly politics and a lot of people get promoted for reasons that are pretty nasty.
But I would also hesitate to say that that's the nature of the free market.
I would say that that may be the nature of proximity to the government plus...
The status of corporation is a truly ugly invention of the government, right?
It was invented by the government in order to shield corporate executives from legal liability for their actions, and in return for that exclusion of liability, the government demanded the right to We're good to go.
I agree with you that the very idea of giving corporations human rights almost It's just a bizarre notion as well,
because at the end of the day, it just allows them to create their own charter, essentially.
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like giving me the ability to apply for a passport for my daughter's teddy bear.
I mean, it's completely ridiculous.
or actually more like your imaginary friend can get a, can enter into a legal contract.
I mean, it's bizarre.
But this is the kind of weirdness that you get when you get governments and massive, gross, corrupt financial organizations together is that they protect each other's interests at the expense of the general population.
And I agree with you, that is completely exploitive and destructive.
And at its root, it is coercive because it is finally, it's the fist of the state that keeps all of this stuff going.
But that to me is separate from voluntarism.
And I agree with you that capitalism has taken...
It has been taken to mean that, like, the kind of nastiness that goes on in state-sucking, corporate, fictional, nasty, fischistic-style enterprises.
But that's not how it worked when, like, prior to corporations, that's not how it worked when the world was a little bit more free than it is now.
And there's no reason to believe that it would continue this way if the fists of the government were taken out of the face of the free market.
Actually, I agree with you on that, Stefan, because thinking about it, it's precisely because the National Health Service is state-funded that the people in it are under no immediate pressure to perform, and that creates the...
A fertile breeding ground for silly office politics and whatnot.
They forgot that they're supposed to be dealing with the healthcare of patients coming through the place.
You know, it's ancillary to their actual daily grind.
It's all about corporate climbing.
Yeah, listen, and I'll just give you one final metaphor.
Obviously, I completely agree with you because you seem to be agreeing with me, so that sounds like a good thing to do.
Otherwise, I'm going to look kind of silly.
But the way I think of it is sort of like this.
Imagine there's a small stream that's coming down the mountainside, right?
And Sort of at the top of this small stream, somebody takes a big, giant vat of blood and pours it into the stream.
Well, that's just one thing that happens at the very top of the stream, but the blood colors everything down the stream, right?
So the fish die, I don't know, maybe the lampreys or the leeches do well or whatever feeds on blood, the vampire bats, I don't know.
But it changes the whole ecosystem of everything that is downstream when the source...
What happens is people look downstream and say, well, streams are bad because they have all of this bad ecosystem.
They smell like blood. They're getting my feet all wet and feet all dirty and red or whatever.
They stain everything.
But what they don't look is they don't look at the big vat of blood that was poured into the stream at the top.
They look at everything downstream and say, well, this is the nature of being a stream rather than this is the nature of being a stream that has blood poured in at the top.
And so when the source of a company's income is the coercive power of the state, and that applies to Wall Street, I mean, Wall Street right now got bailed out and is now receiving millions and millions and millions of dollars in bonuses paid out to itself.
is now receiving millions and millions and millions of dollars in bonuses paid out to itself.
They're not lending money to small businesses.
They're not lending money to small businesses.
Why?
Why?
Because they can borrow money from the Fed at 0% interest and buy government bonds at 3% or 4% interest.
So they get that money simply by churning, laundering money through the government apparatus.
So they have nothing to do with the free market.
All they are is just leeches hanging off the state, being paid by the state to keep the financial system propped up for another few years while everybody pillages the treasury.
But I think it's really important to look at if there's violence in the source or in a significant section of the source of a corporation's income, that is like putting that blood at the top of the stream.
It changes everything downstream.
You need to look at the source of the problem, which is the violence that the state has as a monopoly of both currency and regulation.
And that changes everything in a corporate culture and not to mistake the effects of that bucket of blood in the stream for the bucket of blood going in the stream.
If you take that bucket of blood from continually being poured into the stream, the stream clears up.
There's nothing in the nature of human economic interactions that require that kind of corruption.
It just comes because there's this, you know, monstrous blood sucking tentacled evil God called the state at the center of everything.
Yeah.
I like it.
The thing is, with your description of anarcho-capitalism, Stefan, I felt myself agreeing with every stage of it to the point where I have to admit that Capitalism without violence or coercion is a workable mechanism for humankind, I think, without a shadow of a doubt.
Well, I appreciate that. I mean, that's a huge compliment because it is a tough thing for people to conceptualize.
I really appreciate that.
I mean, that sort of makes all the blood, sweat and tears of putting it together worthwhile.
So thank you so much for that very, very extreme compliment.
For what it's worth, Stephen, for me to admit that capitalism might be just about not implicitly corrupt from top to bottom and just needs to be got a shot of is a huge step for me even cognitively to take.
So I thank you for opening my mind in it.
To the possibility, even.
We're about bang on an hour now, Stefan.
I'm tempted to ask you to stay on further, but I know you can spare us an hour tonight.
If you have one more question, I can certainly do a little bit more.
I just want to make sure that I'm available for when my daughter springs up from her bed and demands her lunch.
Absolutely. Well, I would be the last person to try to get in the way of that.
I'm not actually sure.
One last question to ask Stephen.
Page through the...
Yeah. I've got pages and pages of notes in front of me.
Wait for one moment because there's...
Hey, take your time. That's the beauty of things not being live is you can edit this and make me sound like a chipmunk.
Excellent. Well, we will because I'll have to sort all this waffling out of it as well, mate.
Make note of that, Stevie.
I mean... There's so many profound things in your work that I want to share with our listeners, but there's one specific one about when you're in a debate with anybody about the nature of the world and whatnot.
The one question that really stuck in my mind was when you asked, do you support the use of violence against me because I disagree with you?
And that question encapsulates one of the fundamentals of this whole issue.
Do you want to just expand on that for us, if you can, as a final part of this, Stefan, because that would be brilliant if you could.
I think it boils it down to simply one sentence.
Well, I appreciate that, and it's not often I get to ask to expand on anything, so I'm just going to pick myself off the floor with shock.
I did a speech in New Hampshire last year, which people can find on YouTube, or under my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio.com.
For more on this. But basically, I mean, philosophers and the virtuous, we fight evil.
I mean, that's our job. I mean, it makes us sound like superheroes.
And in fact, we are, but we fight evil.
Now, the great problem with evil is that you can't fight it.
And the reason you can't fight it is because the moment people see it as evil, it's done.
It's lost its power. The moment that something is defined as evil, it can no longer be accepted by any sane, moral human being.
And so... The challenge that we face is to expose evil.
We don't fight it. All we have to do is switch the light on.
Now, the light switch can be pretty damn hard to find sometimes, but all we are doing is turning on the lights.
Because the moment that people see evil for what it is, then it loses all of its power and people oppose it.
If you think of the definition of slavery, slavery was considered a virtual re-education and Christianization of a subordinate race called blacks or whatever.
And so it was considered to be a virtuous thing.
The moment that people accepted that it was immoral, it ended pretty much throughout the world within a decade or two.
And so the challenge with people who are opposing this thing called statism is to turn the light on so that people can see the immorality.
And that's a really hard thing to do because the immorality is pretty abstract.
Because everyone obeys and pays their taxes for the most part, It's hard for people to say, well, it's coercion, because everyone goes along with it.
So, in a sense, people say, well, I've never had the government put its gun in my face, so what are you talking about?
And that's a perfectly rational, though I would say somewhat limited, way to respond to the issue.
So, I have been deploying something for the last couple of years.
I call it the against me argument.
And the basic thing is, okay, so somebody says, well, I think that we need the government so that we can educate poor children.
And it's like, okay... So normally people go into this argument about how education can be provided without the government and then you hear all these objections and then you hear about the 18th century and blah, blah, blah.
But none of that really matters fundamentally.
The only thing that fundamentally matters is, look, you want the government to fund education for kids.
Yes. I say, well, I think that is very destructive.
I think that is immoral and destructive.
Am I allowed to disagree with you?
Now, of course, somebody is going to say, well, yes, you're allowed to disagree with me.
So then you can say, well, okay.
Does it mean anything if I'm allowed to disagree with you, but I'm forced to obey you anyway?
Right? So does it mean anything if a woman is allowed to divorce her husband, but is thrown in jail if she divorces her husband?
Obviously, people are going to say, well, no.
If you're allowed to disagree with someone, you have to be able to act on that disagreement without being thrown in jail.
So then you say, okay, so you support me being able to disagree with you without being thrown in jail.
Well, yes, then you're an anarchist.
Because that's all it is.
All anarchism is, is the freedom to disagree without being thrown in jail.
That's all it is. And so, yeah, that's all it is.
So if you believe that some guy in Washington is this stone genius about educating kids, you mail him a check.
That's great. I'm allowed to disagree with you and not mail him a check, but rather do what I do on the web in terms of podcasting, where I give away all these podcasts and books for free, because that's my way to spreading education in the world, rather than funding some guy I don't even know for some program I can't understand, with all the political push and pull and power that goes on with that.
I'm just not interested in that solution.
I don't want the government to solve those problems, because I actually want the problems to be solved, which the Never works in the long run.
So that's all it is.
So if you are supporting a government program, then you are saying to me that if I disagree with you, I should be thrown in jail.
And if I resist being thrown in jail, people can push guns into my face and blow me away if I resist.
So it is taking this abstraction called government programs, government policies, government procedures, regulations, and blah blah, ministries, and this, all of that is nonsense.
All of that is a big velvety shroud over the dead body of voluntarism.
So all you say to people is forget about the content.
Just say, hey, am I allowed to disagree with you?
If I'm not allowed to disagree with you, in other words, if I have to be thrown in jail for disagreeing with you, then I'm damn well not going to have a conversation with you at the moment pretending that we're having some kind of civilized discourse.
Because if you're waving a gun around saying to people, obey or die, I'm not going to support the illusion that you are a rational human being interested in a civilized debate.
Now, if somebody says that you are allowed to disagree with me, right?
So I'm for the Iraq war.
Great. Send them a check.
I am I'm utterly opposed to the Iraq war, and I should be free to act on my conscience and not send them a check, which means no taxation to support the Iraq war.
I am for the war on drugs.
Great! You send them a check, you volunteer your time, you volunteer your basements so they can throw the beaten up people in there for having the wrong bits of vegetation in their pocket.
Great! I do not support, I violently oppose, vehemently oppose the war on drugs, therefore I should be free to act on my conscience and not support it with enforced money and enslavement.
So it's really all it's coming down to is the freedom to disagree.
And we all know that if people were free to disagree, the government would end tomorrow.
I mean, there's nobody I know alive who would say, well, I really want to help the poor.
And so what I'm going to do when I die is I'm going to will all of my money to the government to use for the welfare state.
I mean, they leave their money to the United Way.
They leave their money to, I don't know, the Salvation Army, someplace where there's some private mechanism at work, some efficiency mechanism at work.
But there's nobody I know who says they really want to help the poor and therefore mails $1,000 to the government rather than to a private charity.
That's how you know what people really believe.
Yeah. Stefan Molyneux, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you tonight.
Absolutely gobsmacked.
I had so many questions I was going to ask you, but just...
I've become transfixed as I'm listening, so I hope you'll apologize.
You mean you're just shocked that I could do all of that in one breath?
I'm sort of like one of those trumpet players who could just keep playing the same note.
I think I breathe in through my ears and then add through my mouth.
Circular breathing technique.
Something like that. I've been working on it for a while and it is kind of eerie.
And what I aim to do is to kill objections by just using up most of the oxygen in the planet.
And I think so far it's been working alright, so...
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