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Jan. 4, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

20:27

1822 Bill Gates, Sam Harris and the Superstition of State Education

An atheist who is a statist is just another theist - the madness of reason versus the state. Article Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/gatesharris

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	So, Bill Gates is taking his lily-white entrepreneurial hands and jamming them, or attempting to jam them, into the serrated, blood-drenched, bladed fan of status power in an attempt to reform American education.
	Oh! Tragic, horrifying, and painful it is to watch an entrepreneur attempt to work within the system of the state.
	And let's call him an entrepreneur, although he had the monopoly of state power protecting his intellectual property.
	And let's pretend that he's an entrepreneur and try to understand his thinking when it comes to dealing with the U.S. educational system.
	Of course, the U.S. educational system is founded on a monopoly of force.
	Citizens are forced at gunpoint to pay for government education or indoctrination of their children, whether they have kids or not, whether they are private schooling or homeschooling or unschooling, they still are forced to pay for the consumption of Of this oily, greasy, status propaganda for other people's kids for, I guess, 12 years or 13 years, depending on the locale.
	And it's really bizarre how people can just fragment the way that they think when dealing with different entities.
	I mean, imagine if Bill Gates, I don't know, in 1982, were to give a presentation to the Microsoft board saying...
	I found a much better business model, my friends, than what we've been using up to now.
	Up to now, we've been trying to sort of, you know, please consumers with DOS and so on and make quality software, but enough of that.
	What we need to do, see, first thing we need to do is we need to hire A little army.
	A little army. We'll call them tax collectors or whatever.
	And they're going to go around the neighborhoods.
	They're going to find every business.
	And they're going to go in with guns.
	And they're going to say, all right, listen, you guys got to pay us $5,000 a year for DAS. You know, whether you're using DRDAS or something else or have no computers at all, it doesn't matter.
	You're still going to pay us the $5,000 a year.
	And if you don't, we're going to come back with even more guns.
	We're going to kidnap you and we're going to throw you in a DOS dungeon underneath the Microsoft campus where we will keep you there for 3 to 5 to 7 to 10 years.
	So you will be paying us the $5,000.
	That's going to give us a continual stream of income that will be the envy of pretty much anyone.
	Now the next thing we need to do is we need to make sure that it's pretty much impossible to fire our employees.
	No matter what kind of bad job they do, They just simply can't be fired.
	So we've got a guaranteed source of income.
	We are no longer customer-focused because we get the income through violence.
	Our employees can never be fired, and that's the proposal that I'm going to make to improve the quality of our business.
	Can you imagine the looks around the tables of the boardroom at Microsoft in its second or third year?
	If Bill Gates had come in with that kind of proposal, we're going to use force to extract money.
	We're going to make sure our employees can never, ever be fired.
	Because people make this mistake, right, of thinking that the educational system run by the state is focused on the children.
	It's not. I mean, there's accommodation for the children, right?
	There is some interest in the children, but that's like saying a turkey farmer is really only interested in the turkeys because he gives them a place to sleep and some straw and some food and is interested in their health.
	No. They are a means to the end, right?
	The end of the turkey farm is not the happiness of the turkeys, but the profit of the farmer, just as the end of public education, miseducation, is not the knowledge of the children, the education of the children, but the profits of the incompetents who are involved in this kind of bullying and violent situation, this scenario. So, to go in there and to say we should shake it up with free market principles is to fundamentally misunderstand what the purpose of the system is.
	The purpose of the system is to hold the parents hostage through force to take their money.
	To hold the children hostage through force To indoctrinate them in obedience to the ruling classes.
	And this is not paranoid. It's not a fantasy.
	This is exactly how and why and for what purposes government education was originally instituted.
	It was to produce compliant citizens and it was to produce compliant workers for the early industrialists.
	It came out of the Prussian model.
	You can listen to School Sucks for more on this.
	It is a very carefully engineered system of social control, domination and subjugation.
	And Bill Gates didn't go through it, and now, of course, he's going to try and reform it, as if it has something to do with the interests of the kids.
	I mean, I understand. I really, really do understand why people believe this, because it's really painful to accept that a system cannot be reformed.
	We all have this dream that, you know, if we read The Ring of Power, we will do a lot better job.
	We'd really like to believe that somehow the fact that a system is based on violence is not reason enough to throw it all away.
	But we can somehow get in there and tweak and change and make this work.
	You know, if you're...
	Married to a hopeless drug addict, at some point you recognize that you can't change him and you just have to get out of the relationship.
	But as long as you believe that somehow you can manage his addiction, you can make him a better person, you can make him someone who's not insane to live with, you can help and cure him, then you're an enabler and you're allowing this bad behavior to continue, this rottenness to continue.
	And it is really tough, you know, when an institution like the state holds the children hostage at the point of a gun and holds the money of the parents hostage at the point of a gun.
	It's really hard to look at that and say, we have to scrap it all.
	We have to stop using violence to fund these sorts of systems.
	We have to stop pretending that pointing guns at people will ever produce anything other than horrors in the short run.
	I mean, this is a system where a teacher who was convicted of sexually assaulting a student 13 years ago is sitting in a room doing nothing and still collecting $100,000 a year and looking forward to a full pension.
	This is the system that even a man convicted of attacking a student sexually can't be fired.
	Of course, Bill Gates says, well, maybe it's the managers who aren't doing that good a job.
	Okay, Bill, no problem.
	Why don't you just institute that kind of documentation and difficulty in firing people into Microsoft, that in order to fire someone, the manager has to spend two or three years fighting legal battles with a union in order to get someone fired.
	Oh, and by the way, his pay is not at all dependent upon whether he fires people or not, or the quality of whatever he's producing.
	People say, well now what we're going to do is we're going to measure the outcome.
	We're going to measure how well the students learn.
	But listen, just about anything that you learn after you're 8, just about anything you learn of value can't be measured on a test because it's around reasoning, it's around writing, it's around critical thinking.
	These are not things that you can run through a computer in a multiple choice scenario and get any useful information.
	All that will happen is that teachers will teach the test or they will fudge the numbers or they will cheat the test or they will...
	You know, teach close enough to the test.
	Students won't end up learning more.
	All that will happen is that it will be rigged.
	You can't create voluntarism in a state of violence.
	You can't start off a relationship by rape and expect it to turn to love.
	You can't kidnap and imprison someone and expect them to become your friend.
	Once the system starts with and is based on violence, no virtue can come out of it.
	You have to get rid of the violence.
	You cannot Control the effects of violence and turn them into virtue.
	If violence is at the beginning, nothing but shit, blood, awful, vomit, and revolting stuff will follow thereafter.
	You know, if somebody vomits into your sandwich, it doesn't matter how much fucking seasoning you put on it, it's still a vomit sandwich.
	Anyway, now the other thing I wanted to talk about was Sam Harris wrote something on December 29th called A New Year's Resolution for the Rich, which I will unabashedly read from.
	I'll put the link below. So he's talking about how the U.S. is suffering the worst recession in living memory.
	He says, I find that I have very few financial concerns.
	Most of my friends are in the same position.
	Most of us attended private schools and good universities.
	And we were able to provide the same opportunities to our own kids.
	And he's talking about the problems with the tax cut.
	Now... Atheists who are statists, to me, are a challenge, to say the least.
	I can't imagine that any reasonably educated person has never been exposed to ideas of libertarianism or classical liberalism or minarchism or anarchism or any of these sort of spontaneous kinds of social organization that occur without the guns in everybody's faces.
	So I'm going to assume that Sam Harris has some exposure to these ideas, and if he doesn't, then he's been avoiding them, in which case he's responsible for avoiding them.
	And so, to me, an atheist like Sam Harris, who It goes full-tilt boogie at the religious, at theists, and says, you have to abandon your illusions because there's no reality, the consequences are terrible, you have to be rational, you have to look at the evidence.
	Well, Sam, oh Sammy boy...
	The reality is that you really have to submit yourself to whatever standard you're inflicting upon your worst enemy.
	That is a basic tenet of philosophy.
	The standard that you inflict upon your worst enemy is the one standard, at least, that you have to fulfill yourself.
	So if you condemn...
	Theists for inheriting a 5,000-year-old belief and for that belief having credibility with them because of its ancient origins and because of its enmeshment and infusion into contemporary culture, then, by God, you have to look at the same beliefs that you've inherited in terms of social organization, the state, the use of institutional violence to solve complex social problems.
	If you condemn Theists for their irrational addictions to old ideas and you continue to cling to the fantasy of violent state virtue.
	Well, an atheist who is a statist is just another theist.
	So, he talks about this tax cut and how in the 1950s, the marginal tax rate for the wealthy was over 90%.
	It never dipped below 70% before the 1980s.
	And he's right.
	Of course, the average net worth of the richest 1% has doubled since 1982, and the poorest 40% has fallen by 63%.
	Thirty years ago, top U.S. executives made about 50 times the salary of their average employees.
	In 2007, the average worker would have had to toil for 1,100 years to earn what his CEO brought home between Christmas in Aspen and Christmas in St.
	Bart's. He's a good writer, I will tell him that.
	We now live in a country in which the bottom 40%, 120 million people, owns just 0.3% of the wealth.
	So... Does Sam Harris not know that government power has vastly increased since the 1950s?
	Does he think that it's somehow a shortage of government power?
	I mean, it was the 90% tax rate that got the rich interested in the state to begin with.
	It was the 90% tax rate that the rich got interested in the state.
	That got the rich interested in the state and controlling it.
	And of course, the rich are going to have more influence over the state than you or I. Over one million Americans are now homeless.
	People on Medicare are being denied life-saving organ transplants that were routinely covered before the recession.
	One quarter of America's bridges are structurally deficient.
	And then he says, well, why is it that people don't want to pay taxes?
	It's easy to understand why even the most generous person might be averse to paying taxes.
	A legislative process has been hostage to short-term political interests and other perverse incentives for as long as anyone can remember.
	Consequently, our government wastes an extraordinary amount of money.
	It also seems uncontroversial to say that whatever can be best accomplished in the private sector should be.
	Our tax code must also be reformed, and it might even be true that the income tax should be lowered on everyone, provided we find a better source of revenue to pay our bills.
	But I can't imagine that anyone seriously believes that the current level of wealth inequality in the U.S. is good and worth maintaining, or that our government's first priority should be to spare a privileged person like myself the slightest hardship once this great nation falls into ruin.
	So it's always interesting, you know, people talk about the 1950s.
	Well, in the 1950s, the government was about one-fifth the size that it is now.
	So, if you think that the 90% tax rate on the richest was a good thing because the 1950s, there was good boom times economically, well, how about looking at a government one-fifth the size that it is now?
	Well, you can't look at that size of the equation.
	You see, because if Sam Harris is calling for an increase in government power, the government is happy to oblige.
	If Sam Harris calls for a decrease in government power, BAM! He would go straight up against the one-way downward-bladed waterfall of government accumulation of power.
	It won't work. It is a one-way revolving door.
	Go the other way, you just smack into the glass of your own delusions.
	Creationists in the state of Kentucky have been offered $40 million in tax subsidies to produce a full-scale model of Noah's Ark.
	Fabulous. Most Americans have no choice but to send their children to terrible schools.
	Terrible schools! Where they will learn the lesser part of nothing and emerge already beggared by a national debt now in course to reach $20 trillion.
	And yet Republicans in every state can successfully campaign on a promise to spend less on luxuries like education while delivering tax cuts to people who, if asked to guess their own net worth, could not come within $10 million of the correct figure if their lives depended on it.
	See, government power has increased, education has gotten worse.
	So what is Sam Harris' solution going to be?
	I wonder. Let's turn the page and find out, shall we?
	So he says some readers will point out that I am free to donate to the Treasury even now, but such solitary sacrifice would be utterly ineffectual.
	I am no more eager than anyone else to fill the pork barrels of corrupt politicians.
	Yeah, it's good, you know, he's getting there.
	However, if Gates and Warren Buffett created a mechanism that bypassed the current dysfunction of government, earmarking the money for unambiguously worthy projects...
	I suspect there are millions of people like myself who would not hesitate to invest in the future of America.
	So he goes on to talk about education.
	It's difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children.
	They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries while mitigating their unintended effects.
	Or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion.
	The future of this country will be entirely shaped By boys and girls who are just now learning to think.
	What are we teaching them? Are we equipping them to create a world worth living in?
	It doesn't seem so. Our public school system is an international disgrace.
	Even the most advantaged children in the US do not learn as much as children in other countries.
	Yes, the inefficiencies of our current system could be remedied and must be, and these savings can then be put to good use.
	But there's no question that a true breakthrough in education will require an immense investment of further resources.
	See? An immense investment of further resources, more government taxation, more debt, more power, more control, more violence.
	Well, the government, like the mafia, is always happy to up its armory.
	And this is the amazing thing.
	People can't think outside this.
	And yet the same guy, Sam Harris, will say to people who pray to God for a cure that you're irrational, that you don't look at the scientific evidence, that you don't look at the facts, that it doesn't work.
	At least the people who pray for a cure aren't harming anybody, but people who call for an increase in state power are doing enormous damage to the people who it's going to be stolen from, probably those children in the future, and to the people it's going to be spent on, who are going to be even more damaged by it.
	So here's his big suggestion.
	Sam Harris, after talking about the corruptions and inefficiencies and pork-barrelness of politicians, he says, here's an expensive place to start changing America for the better.
	Make college free for anyone who can't afford it.
	College free. Now, is Sam Harris retarded?
	No. Is he a moron? Absolutely not.
	Does he know that you can't make something free?
	Of course he does. There's no magic wand in the world that can make something free.
	There's no such thing as free.
	There's no such thing as a free lunch.
	Everybody understands this, but he uses this word, free.
	And what it means is that he's going to force others to pay, and he knows what the government does to pay for things.
	It borrows money. Which means, he says, we should subsidize, we should violently subsidize education for people in the present, By piling massive debt and interest payments upon people who haven't even been born yet.
	I mean, this is the reality of what he's talking about, but you can't talk about it like that.
	And it is tragic. You know, people who believe that they have reason and evidence in a particular sphere, they move to another sphere.
	And it just completely collapses and goes into this complete la-la-la fantasy land.
	And Sam, oh Sam, oh Sam, it's really, really not that hard.
	You are a college guy, college educated, you have a PhD, I'm sure you teach somewhere.
	Pretty simple, pretty easy.
	If you want to make college free for people, stop charging for your lectures.
	Easy peasy, nice and easy.
	Done baby, done.
	Stop charging for your books.
	I've done it. Hundreds of thousands of philosophy books downloaded.
	They're all free. Yeah, I ask for donations.
	You can do the same thing. If you want to make college free for people, then stop charging for your services.
	Don't hold a gun to everybody else.
	I mean, that's pathetic.
	That's immature. That's stone evil.
	And you don't want to be that way.
	What you want to do is lead by example.
	If you feel that education is the most important thing, then start creating online courses, start giving your books away for free, the audiobooks, the PDFs, even the physical print copies because you're so well off and you want to give up money for your society through taxes.
	Forget that. You've already talked about how corrupt society is.
	All you need to do is give up the intellectual property on your books.
	Release them all for free.
	Go and teach for free.
	Teach online. Teach face-to-face.
	Go and pay for it if you have to.
	Hey, I have gone to college campuses to teach where I have paid for my own taxi.
	I have paid for my own airfare.
	I've paid for my own accommodations and my own meals.
	And have not received a penny in return.
	That's called philanthropy.
	That's called helping people.
	I release all of my stuff for free.
	I release it all on the internet.
	I release the PDFs. I release the audiobooks.
	Everyone can have them for nothing.
	That's called being interested in education and putting your goddamn money where your socialist mouth is.
	That's the invitation and the challenge that I would put forward.
	And I particularly put it forward to free market professors, right?
	People who believe that you need to make sacrifices to achieve the free market ideals.
	Quit your tenured paying positions.
	Go and teach on the internet for free.
	You can do it. I live pretty well by doing all of this stuff for free.
	I have, okay, my car is 12 years old, but I live in a pretty nice house.
	Yes, it's snowing outside and I won't see the sun for another three months, but that doesn't have to be the case for you.
	You don't have to live in a garbage can or your car if you start giving stuff away for free.
	Philanthropy goes two ways.
	If you're generous, the world will be generous back.
	So forget about Forcing other people in the future who aren't even born yet to subsidize your dream of a better educated America.
	Release all of your work for free.
	Get out of your tenured position.
	Go teach for free. Teach on the internet for free.
	Ask for donations. That, my friend, is how you change the world.
	That is how you live by example.

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