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Jan. 10, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:52
2073 Mensa Statists and the Aneurysm of Truth!

A Freedomain Radio listener describes his experience talking about rational political philosophy with high IQ Mensa folks.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyne from Free Domain Radio, January the 12th, 2012.
so this is a um a post which is very interesting from a listener so well tonight i went to a politics discussion group hosted by some people in gulf coast mensa mensa is uh for like super intelligent people mensa is supposedly full of people with higher iqs i guess i assume that people with high iqs might care about supporting their arguments with actual logic or reason now usually And I'm not sure that it's not the case with me as well.
It probably is. But usually, high verbal ability and high, quote, reasoning ability is a scar tissue that is developed over the wound of being lied to in very complex ways when you're young.
Intellectualism is a defense against inflicted falsehoods as a child because you have to try and put everything together, but you can't.
So you create this very elaborate, sky-lit fireworks Spiderweb of Christmas lights fog that drapes over all of the contradictory lies you were told and you call that philosophy.
But it's all ex post facto reasoning to justify and get away with and reason to yourself.
Try to put together all of these contradictory lies that you were told when you were a child.
So people with high IQs and significant verbal abilities in my experience generally tend to be the most corrupt people around.
Which again is not necessarily a It's not about everyone, but that's sort of been my experience.
Since the whole discussion was pretty disastrous, there were about...
None of the other people there were anarchists, and apparently none of the others had any intention of discussing any justifications for government.
They basically wanted to discuss how the stolen wealth should be redistributed.
My words, not theirs.
Basically, I kept trying to return the conversation to just a couple of fundamental questions, but they all wanted to assume right past them and argue about how government should work.
Sure, absolutely. So almost every basic question I asked was based on these standards.
Where do rights come from? Is it ever legitimate to justify violating the rights of some for the convenience of others?
I also asked a few other important ones.
Why would or why should anyone voluntarily support government if it was not moral and not in our best interests?
Which everyone seemed to agree it wasn't moral and at the moment was doing enough harm to outweigh the good.
Yet they didn't want to question the legitimacy.
What are the defining characteristics of government?
What sets it apart from an individual or business organization?
Do you think I should be forced to pay for your child's education?
Everyone just assumed it was common knowledge.
But when I asked them what it was they described, what can only be described as a company or a business, I don't understand that.
I did argue that the two defining characteristics of government is its willingness to use force to secure its funding and impose its will.
And impose its will. And the second is people have the misconception that it is legitimate.
Well, that's true, and I think that's a very, very good point.
Of course, it's not just its willingness to use force.
Lots of people are willing to use force to get their way or even to secure their, quote, funding.
Thieves, of course, mafia and so on, they use force to secure their funding and impose its will.
And second, people have the misconception that it is legitimate, and that really is the key difference.
The key difference between the government and a criminal organization is the fact that people don't think that they're the same.
They think that they're complete opposites, right?
And that really is the only fundamental difference.
It is in the misconceptions of the ruled That the ruler exists.
I mean, that's the only space that this violence can be justified.
People are repulsed by violence.
That's why they want it pushed away into laws and courts which they don't generally see and prisons which they don't generally inhabit.
They love the fruits of violence.
They want stuff for free, but they don't want to use violence because violence comes with risks.
But if you can outsource violence to the state, then you get all the goodies without the risks of violence, right?
So if you're a farmer and you want extra money, Then you can either go to your neighbors with a gun, but they might have a gun, and then you're facing significant risks.
Really, it's the risks of violence that is supposed to be the disincentive for using it.
But if you can get The government to propagandize people to threaten people with jail if they don't pay their taxes, and then the government ships you the money, then you get the money without the risks of violence.
And if you ever want to reduce violence in society, well, two things you need to do, of course, raise your children peacefully.
And secondly, if you get rid of the government, then the costs of violence are imposed directly upon the person who wants to use the violence.
And the other thing too, of course, let's say that you don't want the government.
You want to hire someone to go around and steal from your neighbors.
Well, it might be traced back to you.
Also, the guy, you may pay him $10,000 to go and steal $100,000 through your neighbors.
He might just run off with the money.
No system of justice would ever recognize and respect such a contract.
So there's a lot of risk in the use or employment of violence if you actually have to do it.
If other people are doing it for you, Then you get all the benefits.
You get your $100,000 in farm subsidies, but you don't actually have the risks of doing any violence yourself.
And so that's how you grease the slippery slope towards the modern hell of statism.
So he goes on to say, almost none of my questions were answered.
Some of them, which I repeatedly asked, were sometimes eventually partially addressed.
None of them had any interest in trying to think of an objective morality, a universally preferred behavior, or even discuss any morality in general.
Yeah, absolutely true. Morality is like the third rail of philosophical conversations.
The whole conversation was basically, metaphorically, well, what color should the stolen car be painted while refusing to admit the car was stolen, or that they don't have any control of the people who will paint it?
Yeah, you see this.
You see this all the time.
People want to, I don't know, it's like discussing the politics of Middle Earth.
You've got this imaginary landscape called virtuous theft.
Which you have no control over.
And then you just want to talk about what would be optimum in this imaginary land called virtuous theft, which is imaginary because theft can't be virtuous and cannot produce virtue in the long run.
And also because you have no control over what politicians do.
So, you know, creating your sky castles is, you know, it's intellectual wankery, wank jobbery of the first order.
I mean, it's a fantasy that people cling to.
It's like a bunch of Starving slaves talking about what they would eat at the master's table.
Well, the master's table is going to let you at the table.
you can fantasize all you want, but all it does is mean that you're going to sit there and fantasize rather than actually do anything about being a slave.
So, out of the group of a bunch of other people who supposedly have higher Q, Zero wanted to debate anything logically, and then were even interested in the concept of common definitions of terms.
When I asked a man to define his terms, the term government, he at first said I was trying to squelch the argument.
Yeah, of course, you ask people to define terms.
Philosophy is all about the definitions.
You can solve almost all philosophical problems in about four minutes, if you actually define your terms.
and the amount of obfuscation and confusion around those terms is exactly why evil and anti-philosophy continues.
Establishing a common agreement, even acknowledging axioms or premises or principles of any kind.
He wouldn't like that.
Most of the table picked up and walked away.
One lady stayed and actually listened to me anyway, and even though she repeatedly said she thought I was nuts or naive, she at least seemed to hear me and even think about what I was saying.
She claimed she wasn't, but she was trying to think of ways free markets could handle some government-imposed services or how it wouldn't.
So she was at least considering things.
So this one person was willing to...
The consensus, and I think this is the reason I'm repeating, it's kind of accurate.
Consensus among the others was, the majority have the right to rule.
Everyone agreed that slavery was wrong and that mob rule was wrong.
Majority opinion is the source of rights.
Government is good because government does things that are good, assuming they wouldn't happen otherwise, right?
So, I mean, there's a bunch of reasons that people get very confused or maintain their confusion about government.
What they do is they say, you know, government educates children.
So education of children is good.
Government educates children.
And if government didn't educate children, children would not be educated.
And so since the education of children is good and government is the only agency that can educate children, government is good.
It's false on every level. Yeah, education of children, I think, is good.
I'll accept that. Does the government educate children?
No, the government indoctrinates people.
The government teaches people how not to think.
The government traumatizes, frightens, entraps, and propagandizes children.
And I mean, if you ever doubt that, right?
I mean, if you're a parent, I'm not suggesting you would do this, but just have this as a thought experiment, which is to go and say, Miss Ames, you tell me that, you say that violence is wrong.
It's not the right way to do things.
Violence is not a good way to get things done, Miss Ames.
But I'm confused, because if my parents don't pay your salary...
You support them being thrown in jail, right?
I mean, the police are going to come by and pick them up for non-payment of property taxes and so on.
So how is that not violence?
And how is violence bad for me as a kid, but not bad for you as a teacher who's supposed to be a moral authority?
And see how well that goes.
And that's like a 30-second question, which you simply cannot ask.
You simply can't even bring any of that stuff up.
And see, just see how that works.
If you believe that the government is there to educate children, and moral questions are very important, then the question around violence should be the most important of all.
And you simply can't bring any of that stuff.
And if you bring it up, you just imagine what's going to happen to your kid.
Let's see here. It is your duty to pay taxes because it's the way it's been, and if you don't like it, you can get out.
The ends justify the means.
Yeah, of course, this is the old Socrates argument.
I mean, it's a bad parent argument.
As long as you live under my house, as long as you live under my roof, you will obey my rules, damn it!
Well, I mean, it's ridiculous.
Can I do that? Can I just say to you, hey, listen, now you've got to obey this book of rules I've written, and if you don't, you have to move overseas.
It's ridiculous. So he pointed out the contradictions of all these things.
They didn't even listen. It was inconvenient and the majority decided I was wrong.
Therefore, go away, nut.
I pointed in a majority of three rapists and a woman.
The men have the right to rape her?
They said no, because the larger majority of society disagrees.
So I said, what if it was an island and it was two men and a woman?
Does that make it right? Right?
Ignore it. You just make this stuff go away.
I asked, what about the large majority of the whole country, 300 million?
Is a minority among 7 billion?
Should we all be communists because the Chinese are the largest majority in the world?
They ignored me. I asked if anyone liked monopolies.
No one agreed, but they all insisted that a monopoly of justice, protections, and roads was the only way it could work.
I see people say, well, we have to have a government to control monopolies in the private sector.
In other words, monopolies are bad, but government is the ultimate monopoly.
Government has a monopoly on everything it touches.
One woman actually said, name one example of someone voluntarily paying for a service or product.
I don't understand why people recognize the free market works for almost everything we need in our lives, and is much better at improving our quality of life.
But when government comes into the picture, suddenly all sorts of special exceptions have to be made for their services.
They don't even recognize these things as being related.
Sure, but this is the result of propaganda.
This is the result of government propaganda.
I told the one lady who would listen that back during the glory days of the mafias, people in neighborhoods protected by the mafia would celebrate them and hold parades for them and sing their praises when they were back in town or when they defied the government.
For real, this is true.
She said, yeah, they just don't know any better while they were living under their control.
I said, yeah, don't you see any parallels here?
No. She seriously didn't seem to see it either, but I thought if I flat out told her she would resist because she didn't want to feel stupid or believe a crazy person.
None of them based a single argument they made on any predefined, pre-agreed, or pre-understood arguments.
And they didn't seem to think it was necessary in order to have a reasonable debate.
But I noted just about every logical fallacy in the book was used.
So, this is the logical fallacies that this guy had when talking to statists.
Ad hominem. I was repeatedly insulted, called crazy, stupid, uneducated, naive, yet almost none of my questions were addressed.
And when they were, it was only by making other logical fallacies.
Right? You understand, ad hominem is an admission of defeat.
Ad hominem is, I lost.
I've lost. I can't overthrow your arguments.
It's the monkey argument.
I'm going to take a deep dump in my hand and throw it at you.
Ad hominism is an admission of defeat.
I get lots of ad hominems thrown at me.
All the people are saying is, I lost.
I lost. I surrender. I can't do it.
I lost. You win.
You win. You win. Poopy head.
I was told by one woman that I just needed to go back to government history class.
I said, would that be the one taught in the government school?
Also had nothing to do with the question I asked about rights.
Appeal to belief. I believe you have a duty to society to pay taxes.
It has nothing to do with anything.
Appeal to common practice. That's just the way it is.
It's naive to question it. Appeal to consequences of a belief and false dilemma.
If we didn't have government, it would be absolute chaos!
Appeal to emotion. If government doesn't pay for schools, all the children will be stupid.
Think of the children! Appeal to fear.
Without government, no one will protect your rights.
That's right. Because there's nothing like having your property rights protected by somebody or some group who can violate your property rights at will.
There's nothing like having your property protected by a group of people who take half of it by force and the other half by debt.
Appeal to pity and special pleading.
Not everyone can afford private schools.
And of course, the... As I made this argument before, the reason we don't need a state, the reason we know for sure we don't need a state is that everyone cares about the poor and the uneducated, right?
So if you said, well, let's privatize government schools, and everyone said, well, that's great, because I really want poor kids to get no education, as if that would happen.
But let's say people believe that. Well, when you say let's privatize schools, the moment everyone says, oh my god, what about poor kids?
It's like, well, that's your answer. You care, so donate.
If you didn't care, the fact is that you do care.
I mean, the government claims that it represents what the majority of people want to do anyway, so we don't need the government.
The majority of people want to help the poor.
Of course, I believe that they do want to help the poor, the sick, the old.
Great. Then they voted in governments who will do that.
I mean, almost everyone says it needs to be done.
Almost everyone is happy to pay taxes.
So great. So great!
Let's just set up a system where less than 90% of the money you give to the poor goes to middle-class, fat-ass people in the government bureaucracies.
Very little money goes to the poor in the government system.
So if you want to help the poor, how about setting up a charity where 90% of the money goes to the poor rather than to fat, pimply, squalid, bespectacled, middle-aged, middle-class, often white people in soft bureaucratic government chairs.
You know? Let's grow charity to the poor, not the assets of bureaucrats.
Appeal to popularity. Yes, majority should rule, just flat out.
They wouldn't give up this argument, but they refused to admit that anyone's rights were being violated.
But see, if the majority should rule, then the majority should vote on whether or not they want a government or not, right?
Through optional, through voluntary taxation.
Anyway, but of course you can't have that.
Appeal to tradition. Government has been around a lot longer than you have.
Yes, and so was slavery before it ended.
Begging the question. We need government because government does things that are necessary.
That is not a joke. You would understand why government is important if you paid any attention in school.
That would be government school, I assume.
Right, so this is begging the question is assuming that the answer is, like assuming the answer, assuming the answer.
So we need government because government does things that are necessary.
In other words, we need government because we need government.
The circular doesn't get any better.
Burden of proof. I was actually accused of shifting the burden of proof for the need to government onto them at one point for some of my arguments.
Is it wrong to ask for the necessity of government to be proven?
Are there people who live without it?
Isn't it an appropriate natural order?
If it was natural for people to organize into dictatory hierarchical structures, you'd think people would be better at it.
Like maybe they would have come up with a system that worked better after all these thousands of years.
So they are confused cause and effect.
We only have this society because of government.
Without government, there would be no order and no society.
I argued that we can only get a government this large by having a productive society able to support it.
Like cancer doesn't grow on a dead animal.
Or... As fast on one that is not large enough to sustain it.
Yeah, I mean, they confuse governments for society all the time.
They also confuse government for rules, for order.
Government is pure chaos.
I mean, rules are changing all the time.
Nobody can keep up with them.
Debt and they go to war without – I mean, they do lots of things that people don't even know about and aren't aware of because the media, which relies on the government for, quote, misinformation – well, for misinformation – The media doesn't report a bunch of stuff.
So, I mean, the amount of foreign policy horrors that have gone on from the Western countries over the past hundred years are ill-reported, ill-understood, not taught in government schools.
And so, when retaliatory attacks happen from the Middle East, people are like, huh?
They must hate us for our freedoms.
So yeah, so people, they think that government has something to do with order, but it doesn't.
I mean, government is chaos.
And the only reason that government chaos is sustainable is because of debt.
So once governments can go into debt, then irresponsibility looks less bad, right?
So if you're a gambler and...
A counterfeiter, then your gambling looks not as chaotic as if you weren't a counterfeiter because you can just print money to feed your gambling habit.
So people say, well, that's sustainable.
That guy's doing fine. You know, he doesn't work.
He plays video poker all day and he's doing fine.
No problems, right? But that's because he's got a printing press of money in the basement too, right?
So the fact that the government can go into debt is what makes it look less chaotic.
But imagine how chaotic society would be if the government had to balance its books tomorrow.
Had to balance its books tomorrow.
Imagine what unbelievable, wrenching, god-awful changes would happen in society.
That's the chaos that is being staved off.
So I get a toothache. I go to the dentist.
They drill and whatever. I get some root canal.
Then it's like, wow, that was painful.
That was ugly. That was nasty. You get a toothache and you take morphine and you're like, wow, going to the dentist is stupid.
It's ridiculous. I'm fine, right?
But who's going to be better off in the long run?
What happens when the morphine of debt wears off?
Well, the chaos will be revealed.
Hasty generalization. You're an idiot.
Well, it's hasty ad hominem.
Middle ground. Well, you should at least pay taxes for schools.
Because if you don't pay taxes for schools, you're an elitist who wants the poor to get no education.
I bet that people who believe that the poor are getting educated were not, quote, educated in schools in inner cities or in ghettos.
Misleading vividness and red herring.
My great-grand-uncle didn't see the need for a septic system.
He had gone in an outhouse all his life, and so had his father, and so he never got one.
He and his family just used that disgusting, festering outhouse generation after generation, and they just kept using that reeking cesspit even when it was lowering the property value of his neighbors.
Do you want to live in a world of open sewers?
Personal attack poisoning the well.
You're just too young to know any better.
Special pleading. Yes, but they are elected!
They're elected! You see, because we choose our political leaders, and therefore we choose to submit to them.
Now, if you were to set up the same system in marriage, right?
So if you were to set up a system where...
You would say to women, well, you can choose from one of two or three men to marry.
You can't choose not to get married, and you can choose from one or two or three of men to get married.
Then that's called voluntary marriage.
No, that would just be institutionalized rape with a revolving door.
Straw men. This was really surprisingly unused from what I can recall.
I have tons of people who used this in the past really blatantly.
I'm surprised a group of people so apparently disinterested in logic or philosophy wouldn't stoop to it.
Two wrongs make a right. Look, there are people out there who are more than willing to steal or kill, so we need government, which is funded by theft and killing, right?
Anyway, so these are all of the crazy, bad, ridiculous, stupid, embarrassing...
Non-arguments that you get back when you start reasoning from any kind of first principles and you start to ask people to define their terms.
It happens in theology, it happens in statism, it happens in parenting a lot when you talk about the need for parents to not use violence against their children.
I've got a video series, fdurl.com forward slash bib, the bomb in the brain, which goes through the science of this, and there's interviews with subject matter experts.
It goes through the science of this.
People are lied to, and We're told all this contradictory nonsense and then they're punished for thinking for themselves.
This is very humiliating.
This is shaming.
This is emotionally painful.
This is traumatic because it is too obvious a revelation of the true nature of the predatory, festering and enclosed farm society we live in.
And so you're told, don't follow the crowd, right?
Yeah, I heard this. Why did you do that?
Well, so-and-so did it, and the whole group is doing it.
Well, if the whole group jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do that too?
You have to think for yourself. You've got to have your own moral standards.
You don't follow the group. Then when you grow up, well, you have to obey the law because it's democracy.
Everyone voted for it, or a majority voted for it.
So you see, that's insane, right?
So you punish children for moral transgressions, which then are the exact same justifications as to why they should obey the majority as adults.
Don't use violence to get what you want.
I'm going to go to my union and demand a raise.
And if we don't get a raise, then we're going to go on strike.
And if anyone tries to break the strike, we're going to get the police to throw them in jail because we have a monopoly service.
You set up these moral rules for children and then when those children attempt to apply those moral rules for their elders, everything gets flipped around and you get punished and ostracized, rejected, abandoned and attacked if you attempt to get any kind of consistency.
What happens of course is that people then get traumatized by being lied to, by being controlled.
People get that morality has been used to control them as children and as soon as they actually try to treat morality as morality and make it universal to their society as a whole, They're attacked as immoral and uncaring and brutish and wrong and slandered, right?
All that sort of stuff. I mean, this is the reality.
You're given all these moral rules as a child.
You attempt to impose these moral rules upon your adults.
And suddenly you're evil for not obeying the moral rules as a child.
And then you're evil for attempting to subject your adults to the moral rules they subjected you to when you grow up.
I mean, it's crazy. It's mind-fractory of the first order.
It's like the ECT for your moral centers.
Electric convulsive therapies, shock treatment for your moral centers just fries them up.
It fries them. People's brains are fried, smoking.
Their eyeballs are rotating.
They have been crippled mentally.
And that's a very horrible thing.
And if you get that, if you accept that, and if you say, well, I was lied to and then I was punished for attempting to tell the truth, all while being told the truth is a virtue, right?
Well, you told as a kid, tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.
And then you tell the truth about your doubts or concerns or questions about society as whole, and then you're punished, right?
And so you're just set up in this no-win situation.
And these two moralities, right?
I mean, this is the basic.
This is the basis of human ruling.
This is the basic of human farming, which is you have moral rules imposed upon the slaves, which is that obedience is good.
And then if the slaves ever attempt to impose these universal moral rules on their rulers, then they're punished.
Because the purpose of morality historically has been to enslave and to set up the slaves to attack each other for moral violations which can never be applied to the rulers.
And that's humiliating. And people don't want to know that they're slaves.
They don't want to know that they've been propagandized.
They don't want to know that their parents and their teachers and their priests still lied to them and the media continues to lie to them.
With few exceptions. I want to know that.
They don't want to know that. It's painful.
It's horrible that they've been controlled and programmed to be productive tax cattle.
It's hideous. So what they do is they make up all of these justifications afterwards as to why things are just different.
And they then repeat that attack on anyone who attempts to bring any kind of consistency to a moral argument or intellectual argument.
Genuine moral consistency based upon very obvious and basic principles.
Violence and initiation of force is wrong.
Property rights are valid. And so people then become the teachers who attack the student for asking the naive, honest, honorable questions.
And they just replicate that because they don't want to see the society that they live in and they don't want to see how much they were lied to and they don't want to see Not only how much they've submitted, but how much they've joined the ranks of the liars and the hypocrites in society.
For people to look at themselves in the mirror and see the grotesque, many tentacles, jab at the hut, gruesome, oozing, pustule-filled soul that they've become is too horrifying for people.
And so they must take all of the horrors in their own soul and project them upon the naive and honest questioner.
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