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May 24, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:04
1918 Birthers, JFK, 9/11 and Family

A revealing way to look at conspiracy theorists through the lens of family history...

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Hey everybody, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
The birther movement, I think, is interesting.
I actually did put it into a first draft of the status family.
But I thought it's worth talking a little bit about it.
Again, I'm going to approach it from the lens of family history, which, you know, is not the only place that you will ever talk about these things, or I will ever talk about these things, but it's a damn good place to start.
Just as we all start in a family of some kind, or with caregivers of some kind, so do all of our thoughts, and that's where we should begin our examination.
Of issues and it's a way of clearing the decks, you know?
I guess it's like the old thing.
When a wife is murdered, the first person they look at It's the husband, and if they clear the husband, then they'll start looking, but they don't start looking at random strangers.
And so, in the formation of people's beliefs, we look at the family, and if the family is exonerated, if there's reason and evidence, fantastic!
We move on to other things.
But that's where we have to start, as responsible empiricists and thinkers, I guess, with some degree of knowledge of the human soul.
The first thing that I get about The birtheress is a real sense of, I guess, desperation.
Desperation would be the key thing.
They feel horror at the Obama presidency.
Now, whether that's due to racism or not, I don't know.
I don't know enough about the birther movement to speak to that.
But I don't think it fundamentally is about racism.
I don't. I think that...
It is about the socialism.
It is about, I mean, this elegantly ridiculous man who's never created a job in his life, being in command of a multi-trillion dollar economy and claiming to have the knowledge and ability to create jobs with a stroke of the pen in Washington, which he was not able to achieve with the sweat of his hands in the real world.
So there is a sense of change.
There is a sense of...
Expansion of the state.
There is a sense, of course, of creeping and sinister hypocrisy in the Obama administration, because Obama seems like a nice guy who is continuing the tortures at Gitmo and ordering the hit on bin Laden and lots of other things that are not such a bunch of nice things to do.
Actually, I just saw there are t-shirts available with the long-form birth certificate on it.
And it says, made in the USA. It's kind of funny.
But there is a sense of desperation.
If we can delegitimize this guy through a technicality, then we are good.
We are home free. Obama does go to church less than other people.
He does have a strong-willed, competent, professional wife.
He's raised outside the narrow bounds of American parochialism.
So he does, to use a clichéd term, he does represent the other to some degree.
And the Bertha movement is the idea that his authority can be delegitimized Through the circumstances of his birth.
Now, even people who are anti-state or anti-large state, Republicans and so on, for them to be birthers is silly, because fundamentally it doesn't matter where he was born.
It's a rule in the Constitution, but then what you're saying is that all the rules in the Constitution are just arbitrary.
Well, if he was born here and then moved to Hawaii, you know, a few days or a few months later, that's completely different.
He is now no longer at all eligible for the presidency.
But then all you're saying is that the proximity of dirt to his mother's vagina is the key thing to his legitimacy as a leader.
I mean, I think everybody can accept that he grew up, at least in Hawaii.
And so, basically, what the birthers are saying is that we want to limit the arbitrary power of the state by reinforcing the fact that state rules are completely arbitrary.
You know, I mean, he was born, I mean, it's an island, you know, hundreds of thousands of miles off the coast of the United States, which happened to be annexed in the 1890s or something.
So, I don't think you could fight arbitrary power by waving around the absolutism of arbitrary rules.
I just think it's not really going to work.
But I think, of course, the 9-11 people needed some place to go.
And there's a lot of people, of course, the JFK people.
The JFK people have gone all kinds of quiet.
I think a multi-volume, I think I read a year or two ago, multi-volume work.
Came out basically discrediting all of the JFK conspiracy theories.
And that, of course, you know, for a rational movement that, you know, let's say the conspiracy theory movement or whatever, for a rational movement, that's a pretty important thing.
You know that people are acting unconsciously.
When they can shift from one conspiracy to another without evaluating the prior conspiracy.
Right, so lots of people were involved in the JFK. I mean, it was a huge deal.
I remember a history teacher, the one that I wrote about in On Truth, the nasty one with the toupee, he...
He got a guy to do the entire Zipruda JFK conspiracy presentation to the class.
I'm not sure that was entirely appropriate, but he did bring the guy in and turned to me triumphantly and said, well, does that hold your interest, Mr.
Molyneux? It kind of did, but kind of who cares?
Anyway, the JFK people have gone silent, and...
In any rational business model or in any rational model of any kind of human activity or achievement, there must be a postmortem of the failure.
There must be a postmortem of the failure.
The JFK thing has vanished and there has not been a post-mortem which said, okay, either we were right and we didn't convince anyone as a whole, which is a failure, or we were wrong and told everyone that we were right,
which is a failure. Either way, we've got some stuff that we need to figure out so that we can be more effective either with the information that we have or we can be more effective In ferreting out bad information and making sure that when we can put forward a conspiracy theory that we're actually right.
I mean, that's what...
I mean, if you think of conspiracies or conspiracy theories or conspiracy advocacy as a project...
I view what I do as a project.
I view what Ron Paul does as a project.
I view what the Mises and the Rockwell...
All these people. And the academics, right?
The Rod Longs. And I view what they're doing as a project.
And the project is...
Can we reduce the amount of violence in people's lives?
Can we reduce the amount of abuse in people's lives?
My project? Voluntary relationships?
Well, yeah.
There's evidence that that's really worked.
Because that's the goal, right? The goal isn't about the state.
The goal isn't about any particular entity.
You know, saying that libertarianism is about the state is like saying that being against spousal abuse is being opposed to right-handed guys who hit people.
No. We're against violence as a whole.
And violence shows up in people's personal lives.
And the violence of personal relationships is much more explicit and aggressive than the violence of the statist relationship.
Violence of the statist relationship.
Is appeased through compliance.
The violence of personal relationships, as most of us know, who've had these sorts of fair families or experiences, the violence of personal relationships is not silenced by appeasement.
You pay your taxes, then the government will not throw you in jail.
That's generally right.
And that's the way it works.
But in personal relationships, appeasement does not work as a whole.
So, as far as the reduction of violence in people's lives, the reduction of the initiation of abuse, and of course I count verbal abuse, as do the anti-statists who are political.
In nature, they talk about propaganda, propaganda of the state as destructive and hurtful, and they talk about the propaganda in government education as destructive and hurtful, and so we're all on the same page as far as verbal abuse goes, and propaganda is just a slightly more sophisticated form of verbal abuse.
So if we count the reduction of abuse in people's lives, verbal, physical, sexual, emotional, then, yeah, the family is the place, and not just the family, of course, but all personal relationships are the place to start.
That's... That's where the most violence occurs, and that's where people have the most control, can exercise the most voluntarism.
You can't exercise it with the state, but you can exercise it in your personal relationships.
That's kind of like a QED thing to me.
I don't think there's any way to...
I don't think there's any way to argue against that.
Obviously, people have more authority in their personal relationships, more capacity to exercise voluntarism in their personal relationships than they do in their relationship with the state.
And most people, if they suffer abuse, suffer abuse from their personal relationships, particularly when they're children, more so than their political relationships with the state, which largely leaves them alone if they comply.
So, as far as the project goes of reducing violence, aggression, and abuse in people's lives, I think we're doing well.
I think we're doing what we need to do, we're doing what is logically inescapable, and so that's where this project is, right?
I mean, if I'd throw my support behind Ron Paul, and Ron Paul had done as badly as he did, I'm not saying he could have done any better, I'm just saying that he, you know, then it would have been time for A post-mortem and say, okay, well, what did I expect?
What did I support? What did I put forward?
What did I propose as my project goal?
And what did I actually achieve?
And what is the reason for the disparity?
Once again, I fall back on this approach that I have always talked about, which is, we need more entrepreneurs.
We need more entrepreneurs in the freedom movement because entrepreneurs, if they're good, if they're any good, are merciless when it comes to post-mortems of failure.
This project was 50% over budget.
What went wrong? This piece of code was delivered late and didn't execute correctly.
What went wrong? And you're just merciless and you go back and you try and find the root cause and you figure it out and you give people responsibility for solving and fixing it and so on.
That's what you do as an entrepreneur.
You have to. You have to.
Because the companies that don't go under.
And that was, of course, my approach to both my personal freedom and libertarian freedoms as a whole in analyzing the libertarian movement.
And the fact is that the JFK thing has vanished.
And it's not like conspiracy theories, it's not like they all don't get, none of them get proven.
Some of them do. Of course they do.
I mean, there's very few people who think that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, I mean, anybody who's read anything about it, who's got any kind of real knowledge about it, there's very few people who believe that That was a real incident now.
I mean, the proof is there.
There are very few people who have read recently any revisionist history on the bombing of Hiroshima and the end of World War II between the Americans and the Japanese and say, well, you know, there was nothing fishy about that, nothing strange about that. Or even Pearl Harbor.
So, there are, quote, conspiracy theories that do make the transition to historical facts, but The JFK shooting is not one of them.
The moon landing is not one of them.
9-11, as yet, is not one of them.
And the lack of self-criticism, or criticism of the gap between goals and effects, the lack of self-criticism, is one thing that is always disturbing to me about these movements.
My goal is X. I spent 10 years trying to achieve X. I have not achieved X. So what am I doing wrong?
Self-criticism. No. People just rage against the blindness of others.
And this is true of libertarianism as well.
It's true of every movement. People just rage against the blindness of others.
They get frustrated. They get angry.
They lose their temper. They don't really have a strong capacity for rational self-criticism.
Which tells you, of course, a lot about their history as human beings.
It tells you a lot about their childhoods.
It tells you a lot about their relationship with authority.
Self-criticism, you see, is a form of authority.
And a person's relationship to self-criticism is a very good guideline as to his or her relationship with authority.
Because self-criticism is to say, well, there are principles that are bigger than me.
There are principles that I must bow and submit to.
And so...
That is how my relationship with Authority is as well.
The relationship with philosophy.
Relationship with UPB. Relationship with UPB tells you everything about a person's relationship to authority because UPB is an ironclad form of authority.
And if you want to know how somebody's dad treated them, or mom, or teacher, or priest, or whoever was the person who had the most authority over that person as a kid, look at their relationship with UPB. And this, of course, is why philosophy has such a tough time improving and making itself advance in the absence of progress in the realm of parenting and other forms of authority over children.
So, as far as the birth movement goes, I was curious.
There was Someone who came out, I think it was a young man, who came out with a video supposedly debunking the PDF that was released in the White House.
And, I mean, to me, it almost seems like a game.
And there is apparently...
There has been this game before.
You've got to be really worried...
Really careful about conspiracy theory stuff.
Because it is a hook used by the powers that be to detract...
From people's activism, right?
So this was openly joked about among administration officials.
I think it was Noam Chomsky who talked about this.
That they would release little tidbits about the JFK assassination just when things were calming down.
So all these people would go baying off like rabbit hounds towards this...
This other thing, right? So some new tidbit, some new piece of information would come out, and then everybody would seize upon it, and they'd all focus on it, and all that.
And now, of course, with the Internet, it's...
Oh, my God, it's even worse, right?
Because... Because you can really lose your life to this kind of stuff.
And you can really lose your emotional energy, your activist energy into this stuff.
And, I mean, I felt that pull.
I understand. I understand it.
I really do. And so, this guy is saying that, oh, you know, this is a really bad forgery and, you know, here, there are layers in the PDF and blah, blah, blah.
And... That to me is...
I mean, if I were the government and I put on my evil hat, so to speak, I would, of course, release a PDF with layers and with things that were discontinuous and edges that were blurred versus edges that weren't.
I mean, it would be really, really easy to put out a perfect forgery of this kind of stuff.
I mean, the government has trillions of dollars at its disposal.
It would be really easy to put out a perfect forgery of this.
And, especially because, you know, you can't see the original document, so you would just do the forgery in pen, and then you would scan it as a single-layer PDF, and nobody would ever know.
Nobody would ever know. At least there'd be no proof.
So you'd put it out with layers, and there's some here that are jagged, and some here that are blurred, and the text, and so on.
And everyone goes off in that direction.
The government doesn't want the Bertha movement to go away.
The government doesn't want 9-11 to go away.
The government didn't want JFK to go away.
The government doesn't want these things to go away.
Because if these things go away, then people are going to have to find that their emotional energies will be released for other things.
For a more productive analysis of the reality of the system that we live under.
So the birther movement, to me, again, viewing it through the lens of the family, and whenever you see in a movement a lack of self-criticism, you are seeing people who've been severely damaged as children, and who have the relationship to self-criticism, or to criticism as a whole, that they have to authority to As a whole.
That they're going to have to ethics. That they're going to have to philosophy.
This is why people get so enraged at philosophy.
Because philosophy activates their internal abusive father in the form of standards.
In the form of authority.
In the form of absolutes.
That's why people get so mad.
Nothing to do with philosophy. Nothing to do with FDR or UBB or me or any of that sort of stuff.
It's just that if there is an authority that they must submit to, then it reawakens their humiliation and rage.
And philosophy, of course, is a safe target.
9-11 is a safe target.
Birth of Movement is a safe target.
An unsafe target is the actual people in your life, particularly the people.
If you're angry at your dad or angry at your mom, you sit down and you say, hey, I'm angry with you guys.
I'm upset. I'm not pleased.
And here's why. And I want to talk about it.
Do that with a therapist, hopefully.
That's a scary thing to do.
Bitching about 9-11 is safe.
dealing with your quote issues about authority by delegitimizing obama based on arbitrary rules is a safe way of dealing with your issues with your dad right and the obama thing is really simple It's really simple, fundamentally.
The Obama thing is, you're not my real dad.
You're not my real dad.
The country is the family, the government is the parent.
The head of the parent is the father.
The head of the government is the father.
Paternity is an issue in a significant number of families.
A significant number of families.
You know, they do the blood tests, or for whatever reason, they find out that the dad is not the dad, and so on.
This is a big problem in a lot of families.
And there are a lot of kids who, if they have problems with their dads, think about another dad.
Think about a fantasy dad. Think about an alternate dad.
The magic dad, right?
This is why the evil parents in fairy tales are always step-parents, step-moms, step-dads.
It's like, wow, my real dad is gone.
And this substitute dad is not good.
That's very common.
It's the Star Wars thing, right? My parents are mean, but I have this fantasy dad who was a star pilot.
So, paternity is an issue in a lot of families.
And the other thing that's the case as well is that for parents who are divorced, there is, of course, the significant issue of substitute dads, right? Stepparents. And that's a big issue as well, right?
So, We've all heard, it's a cliche, but I mean it's a powerful and true cliche that the kid snarling at some guy that his mom is dating.
You're not my dad, I don't have to listen to you.
And, I mean, at least according to the research that I've heard, if you're not a primary caregiver, a parent, to a child before the age of four or five, you can't discipline that child afterwards.
You can't, because they have that ace in the hole.
You're not my dad. And therefore, I don't have to obey you.
And... With the birther movement, it seems pretty clear, psychologically at least, that what they're saying is, you're not from this family.
And I have the blood test, sorry, birth certificate to prove it.
I don't have to obey you because you're not from this family.
And it would be interesting to know the number of birthers who were children of divorce, who had issues with step-parents and so on.
I would imagine it would be higher than normal, or higher than you would expect, or higher than average.
And of course, I mean, I'm not saying that this is...
and this has no bearing on the truth content or truth value of JSK's murder of 9-11 of faked moon landings of the birther movement but what it does is sort of the point that I'm trying to get across is that if a movement lacks self-criticism if it lacks empathy for the skeptical
if it lacks empathy for the skeptical then it is driven by balm in the brain early childhood scar tissue It just is. Lack of self-criticism is a fear and hatred of authority, even the authority of self-criticism.
And because of that, it means that there is no point examining the truth value of the statements.
This is really, really important.
A madman with scribbled notebooks of gibberish may have invented a secret language and solved the problems of the universe.
But when you go to clear out his room at the asylum after he's dead, how many people are going to spend months or years attempting to decipher his scribblings?
Well, nobody really.
In fact, it would be kind of crazy to try.
Is it possible that he was a mad genius who solved all the problems of the universe and invented his own language that would only take six months to crack?
It's possible, sure.
It's within the realm of possibility.
Is it a productive way to spend your life?
No. No, it's not.
Self-criticism...
is the essence of philosophy and of the scientific method and of the free market.
Self-criticism is necessary because so much of what we say or believe or have impulses to accept is incorrect.
Right?
The world looks round from space, it feels flat from the surface, right?
And so without self-criticism, there may be accidental truth value in the content of what somebody is saying, but it's meaningless, because any truth value but it's meaningless, because any truth value is accidental.
There's a show on the sheep my daughter likes where the farmer trips, hits a ball accidentally with his golf club, and the ball goes as a hole-in-one.
Is he a great golfer?
No. Would you sink a million dollars into subsidizing him for a PGA Tour?
No. He got a hole-in-one, accidentally.
There's no skill. There's no reproducibility.
So, there may be truth in these movements.
There may be truth in these movements.
But it's as accidental as a random hole in one.
And so we don't get behind We get behind movements. That have self-criticism, that have objective standards, that have empathy for the skeptical.
That have empathy for the skeptical.
As I do when I have guests on the show.
Have empathy for the skeptical. Take it slow.
Took me 20 years. I'm not going to rush someone to a stateless society in a half-hour conversation.
Anyway, I hope this helps.
Thank you so much, of course, everybody, all the time, always, as my daughter would say.
Listeners, want a big hug. Big Mike, yeah.
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