How arguing for a free and peaceful society exposes the sociopaths around you. If you've been an active libertarian, you have already done your own Milgram's experiment. I implore you to process the results.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| I appreciate your patience with some of the background noise and so on. | |
| I just generally do better podcasts when I'm not sitting, staring at something. | |
| I don't know how some people do it. | |
| I just sit there, Rush Limbaugh sits on his butt for like three hours straight. | |
| I just can't do it. | |
| I'm better walking around. | |
| I'm better doing other things. | |
| It just helps my brain kick into the highest gear it's capable of. | |
| So, thank you for your patience. | |
| So, this is the fascists around you, part three. | |
| So, in part one, we looked at the susceptibility of people to be infected or inhabited by a sociopathic personality on the part of an authority figure and conform themselves to murderousness, to human destructiveness, if they felt they could get away with it, which is really about the externalization of conscience. | |
| In the second part, we talked about sociopathy, and I had some emails saying, well, the difference between sociopathy and psychopathy and so on... | |
| Well, I mean, obviously look it up. | |
| I mean, I'm not competent to answer any of this. | |
| Psychopathy and sociopathy are terms that are often used interchangeably. | |
| The only distinction that I can really find is that sociopathy... | |
| Sociopaths appear to have a bit more of a case of honor among thieves. | |
| I'm sort of reminded of when Mussolini really helped out Hitler. | |
| Before the Second World War, Hitler wrote him a note of absolutely fervent thanks and promises of eternal loyalty, which Hitler actually did fulfill, committing troops to North Africa, even at the expense of his Western expansion, and it was one of the things that helped to bring him down. | |
| So, there may be more of an honor code among sociopaths, whereas psychopaths are even more impulsive and so on. | |
| But, to me, it doesn't really matter. | |
| I mean, it doesn't really matter what the fine distinctions are of different kinds of evil. | |
| Now, of course, the question of evil brings up the question of nature versus nurture, and there's no clear answers, apparently, On this, there are genetic markers, but a brain researcher found that he had all the genetic markers of psychopathy, but he had a wonderful childhood and he was not a psychopath, at least not the traditional one. | |
| But he had the genetic markers and he also had the brain scan that indicated almost pure psychopathy in the brain. | |
| The dark centers of impulse control and the dark centers around emotional learning and so on. | |
| So, he had all the markers, but he himself, of course, was not a psychopath in a clinical sense. | |
| He just had all the biology of it, but he'd had a wonderful childhood. | |
| There do seem to be some indications that there is some... | |
| Like, if you have a good childhood and you're a natural-born psychopath, Then you're more likely to be on the slightly shady end of the business world, never end up in prison and so on. | |
| Whereas if you have a violent upbringing and you're a psychopath, then you end up as a criminal and violent and so on. | |
| Now, there are some traits where decisiveness and, in a sense, a lack of empathy can be very helpful. | |
| I mean... | |
| I don't know if I'd ever be comfortable hacking over, even with all the training in the world, hacking open someone's throat in an emergency, but you want a surgeon to be cold, cool, and calculated when a sudden operation is needed and so on. | |
| Even cutting into someone makes most people pretty squeamish, but surgeons, you kind of want them to be unencumbered by an excess of empathy for your appendix or whatever. | |
| Now, as to why there are these people, well, it seems that there's some sort of theories around social reproductive strategy that as long as you don't have too many psychopaths, then the scatter-your-seed reproductive strategy has some value, right? | |
| So instead of having a few kids in a pair-bond relationship and nurturing them very closely... | |
| You have a whole bunch of kids which you then abandon and you just, you know, cross your fingers and see which ones grow up as far as your genetic markers go. | |
| You're keeping your genes reproducing. | |
| DNA photocopying, job one. | |
| So there is certainly some reproductive strategies. | |
| I can certainly also imagine that a tribe... | |
| of empaths, right? | |
| A tribe of people who were empathetic and raised peacefully and so on in the Hobbesian state of nature way back in the distant past or in many places in the world, the not-so-distant past or distant present, that those without any remorseless, conscienceless ability to kill would be at a disadvantage in the endless violent competition for resources that characterized free civilization. | |
| And when I say pre-civilization, I pretty much mean the civilization that we're in right now. | |
| Civilization will be when we've finally gotten rid of the state and of superstition, religiosity. | |
| So we're in pre-civilization, but even more pre-civilization. | |
| So you want a minority of people who are going to be able to kill without conscience in order to protect you from other tribes who have a minority of these people. | |
| But at the same time, you don't want to be entirely composed of these people because you'll never get any farming done, right? | |
| You have no tolerance for the low-stimulus job of actually staying alive. | |
| So... | |
| So I certainly can see that, you know, if there's a genetic basis to it, that it would not be something that would be weeded out. | |
| But you would achieve a balance of a few percentage points of people who have no conscience. | |
| It's a viable reproductive strategy, and it's a useful strategy for defense of the tribe and for attacking others. | |
| You want to go to war with the cold-blooded rather than with Leo Buscaglia. | |
| Now, that having been said, sociopaths and psychopaths in the military don't tend to do very well because they don't follow the chain of command, they're impulsive, they put people in danger. | |
| So, for instance, in... | |
| In the bomb disposal units, the sort of Hurt Locker group, in the bomb disposal units, and they've done some studies of this, in the bomb disposal units, you really need to be careful, and you need to not be fearless. | |
| That's not sensible, it's not rational. | |
| And those people tend to get weeded out pretty quickly, either by the tests that they give people, or by reports from superiors, or by, I guess, the bombs themselves. | |
| They're called cowboys, and they're considered to be a negative, and so on. | |
| So, At least in the modern military, the sort of conscienceless, impulse-driven, remorseless, hair-trigger kind of person doesn't really seem to do that well in that structure. | |
| But in the past, when war was a little bit less organized, so to speak, I could see there being some value in that. | |
| But one of the most amazing things about personality, genetics, epigenetics and environment and all of that is that our genes listen very closely to our environment starting from birth. | |
| If you have a calm mother with sufficient nutrition, that forms your genes one way. | |
| If you have a stressed mother and there's lots of loud noises and there's insufficient nutrition, then... | |
| The personality adapts to a situation of win-lose, conflict, shortage of resources, and so on. | |
| And so, it adapts itself to be dominant and... | |
| and violence and hair trigger and not particularly thinking of the consequences and to have a high and early sexual drive, right? | |
| So, to start experimenting with sex around puberty and sometimes even before and to be more prone to rape and assault and things like that because you're in a situation where there probably are a lot of other people around like that all competing for scarce resources and so win-win negotiations and peace and cooperation and handshakes to start experimenting with sex around puberty and sometimes even before and to be more prone to rape and assault and And peace and cooperation and handshakes and all that, probably not going to be your best strategy. | |
| So, I can certainly see why those genes would not have been weeded out. | |
| Of course, I, like anybody else who studied this, can't get to you're a psychopath in the same way you have red hair. | |
| It doesn't matter. | |
| You know, your environment doesn't matter. | |
| You end up with red hair because that's the genetics or blue eyes or whatever. | |
| And nobody can make that statement with any confidence. | |
| There, of course, is increases in sociopathy. | |
| There's culturally specific gradations of sociopathy, and there are influences among parents. | |
| Look, it's hard to falsify, and it's hard to prove. | |
| And... | |
| I remain mildly agnostic tending towards environment. | |
| Because whenever anybody talks about genetics without talking about epigenetics, then that is a confirmation bias. | |
| Because if you talk about genetics like, well, this is the way that the sperm and the egg combined, this is the way the DNA fell out, and that's it. | |
| It's set in stone. | |
| The genes are like an asteroid and the personality is like a crater. | |
| Whenever they don't talk about the adaptability of genes, prenatal, postnatal, to environment, to stimulus, and particularly when people talk about twin studies without pointing out that the twins shared a womb and shared the same mother who was probably in a great deal of stress because she was going to give up her kids, | |
| and also if they don't talk about the fact that in most twin studies the twins are together for at least a year before they're separated and that they probably go to similar I mean, if people don't talk about that, then they're really misleading people. | |
| I mean, this is a fundamental falsehood. | |
| On the other hand, you know, there do seem to be, you know, there are three brothers and two of them are fine, and... | |
| One of them is a sociopath or whatever, and the parents say, we did everything the same. | |
| Was there a coach who molested? | |
| Was there a priest? | |
| Was there... | |
| Who knows, right? | |
| Again, you can't really determine these things. | |
| But I am aware that if untraceable people might have abused the child, then maybe it was an early babysitter who just focused on torture on one because he was the youngest. | |
| Who knows, right? | |
| But I'm very aware that that's a slippery slope because then whatever anybody comes up with that appears to be genetic, you could say, well, it's epigenetics. | |
| And if epigenetics doesn't work, you can say, well, there's abuse that wasn't recorded and it becomes something which is unfalsifiable. | |
| And the moment it becomes unfalsifiable, then it's not really very helpful to discuss. | |
| So I'm aware of that and I want to sort of be clear about that. | |
| But I tend more towards environment that does seem to be... | |
| It does seem to be that It's genes plus abuse that is the deciding factor. | |
| That seems to be the consensus of the most recent articles that I've read, the sort of 2012 articles that I've read. | |
| Other researchers believe that it's genes plus environment. | |
| And since we can't control genes, we can only control our environment, then, of course, it's incumbent upon parents to focus on giving the very best possible experience for their children, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Now, so that all having been said, this is sort of a brief, obviously, amateur overview, but let's dig into some of the real meat of the matter. | |
| I'm going to make the case that sociopathy evil is fundamentally underreported. | |
| And this show, Free Domain Radio, has done a lot, I think, to expose that and to bring that into the forefront. | |
| And I'll tell you why, but sort of let me briefly point out the argument that... | |
| One of the key arguments for that... | |
| So one of the key arguments for bringing about a peaceful and free society is called the Against Me argument. | |
| So if somebody supports the state, they support statism, the government, then they are... | |
| Supporting the use of violence against you for disagreeing with them. | |
| So somebody says, well, I think Social Security is great. | |
| Well, then you should pay into Social Security. | |
| You should give them your money and so on. | |
| Or I'm a supporter of the Iraq War. | |
| Well, you should do this. | |
| You should go ahead and do it. | |
| If I am not a fan of Social Security and I'm not a fan of the Iraq War and I wish to act on my conscience, then status, support, encourage, praise, revere armed men in costumes coming to my house Shooting me if I resist and locking me a cage if I don't. | |
| So, if you're a statist, you support the use of violence against me. | |
| Now, that's an argument that is hard for people to process emotionally, because, you know, we all grew up with all this propaganda about how law is virtue and the state is there to help and so on, right? | |
| But the against me argument points out or shows the necessary consequences of Of supporting a centralized coercive hierarchy. | |
| The necessary consequences of supporting the state are that you encourage and praise and think is really wonderful the initiation of violence against people who disagree with you and wish to act on their own conscience. | |
| If you like socialized medicine, then you should pay in the government to do socialized medicine. | |
| I consider it immoral. | |
| And enormously unproductive. | |
| But if I act on my conscience, if you're a statist, then you support me being thrown in jail. | |
| And if I resist being thrown in jail, you support me being shot. | |
| If I attempt to defend myself against armed people forcing me to follow your standard of virtue. | |
| Now, the against me argument is very powerful. | |
| It's very powerful. | |
| And it's powerful not because it converts people to voluntarism or anarchism and so on. | |
| I mean, it does that occasionally. | |
| But it's very powerful in exposing people who don't have empathy or who lack empathy, let's say, to some degree or another. | |
| And the reason for that is, of course... | |
| That if somebody is driving an ATV, and they come up and chat with you, and they drive their ATV onto your foot. | |
| Let's say the ground's kind of squishy, so it doesn't smash your foot up, but it's really painful. | |
| They drive the ATV onto your foot, and they don't know it, let's say. | |
| Or you assume they don't know it. | |
| And you say, dear God in heaven, you just drove your ATV on my foot. | |
| Can you move it? | |
| If they say, oh my God, I'm so sorry, and they jump off the ATV, lift it up, you know, so they don't spin it and hurt your toes or whatever, and they walk you to the house, and they drive you to the hospital, and you get an x-ray, and they're just so apologetic. | |
| Well, clearly this was an accident. | |
| This was harm to you. | |
| That was unknown to the perpetrator. | |
| You can't charge that person with assault because clearly it's an accident. | |
| I mean, unless they're unbelievably fantastic actors and are doing something for which they have no motive, then it's an accident. | |
| They didn't know. | |
| Now, the against me argument... | |
| It states or reveals to people the basic fact that they have an ATV on your foot. | |
| It's called the state. | |
| They have an ATV that is crushing your foot and it's called the state. | |
| Now, I'm fully willing To accept that the vast majority of people have no idea, like they just have never made that connection, propaganda and all that, endless amounts of avoidance of this basic and essential topic that the state is violence, that it's just never occurred to them that they support the use of violence against you, the initiation of violence against you. | |
| So, they're driving the ATV called the state, and when they stop it, it's on your foot. | |
| So, the against me argument is saying, you have an ATV on my foot, and it really, really fucking hurts. | |
| Now, somebody who has empathy... | |
| Somebody who has moral sensitivity, somebody who is a reasonably literate and mature and wise, I didn't say educated, it can go quite the opposite direction, but empathetic human being, will be troubled by the fact that he's supporting the use of violence against you. | |
| He will be troubled by that. | |
| Because the logic is so obvious. | |
| Of course you want me thrown in jail for not paying taxes, for not obeying your chosen gang of thugs, for acting on my own conscience, for wishing to live free of violence. | |
| Of course you support the use of violence against me. | |
| If you support taxation, you support the use of violence against me. | |
| If you support what is commonly called regulation, then you support the use of violence against me. | |
| If you support the Federal Reserve, then you support the use of violence against me. | |
| And theft of me. | |
| If you support the national debt, you support the use of violence against my daughter. | |
| I mean, nobody supports the national debt, but if you accept the national debt. | |
| If you support public schools, then you support the use of violence against parents to not pay for that which they may find morally repugnant and reprehensible. | |
| If you support... | |
| Foreign aid, then you support taking money from the poor people of rich nations and giving it to the rich thugs of poor nations and so on. | |
| Now, most people don't make this connection. | |
| The against me argument can, in a very concise and powerful way, make this argument. | |
| You now know that you support the use of violence against me. | |
| Now, somebody who has empathy is troubled by that. | |
| They may be troubled by that on a number of levels, and I really want to spend a few minutes on this because it's really important to understand what I mean when I say that sociopathy is vastly underdiagnosed in society. | |
| Now, the first level of empathy, if I use the against me argument against Bob, the first level of empathy is for Bob to say, I can get that your perspective would be troubling for you. | |
| That if you believe that I support the use of violence against you, I can really understand that that would be troubling for you. | |
| Now, that's not a concession that he does, but that's the basis of empathy, which is to understand where someone is coming from, even if you don't agree with them. | |
| I can understand that if you believe that immigrants take your jobs and run up your tax bill, I can understand and I can accept that you would be troubled by the presence of immigrants in your community. | |
| I can understand if you believe that blacks are crazy violence-prone and breed like rabbits and abandon their children, that you would have a negative view of blacks. | |
| Right, so this is... | |
| I empathize with where your thoughts have led you. | |
| I'm not saying that I agree with your thoughts, but I empathize with where your thoughts have led you. | |
| So, I can understand... | |
| So, if I say we should have a society without a government, in fact, we must for it to be called a society, and people say, well, you know, axe murderers and the roads and education and healthcare and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, none of these things will be provided. | |
| I can understand that if you believe... | |
| That only the government can provide these solutions. | |
| And if you do not understand or accept that the government is the initiation of force and therefore immoral, in other words, if you think it is both moral and the only way to provide these things, then I can understand that if I argue that we shouldn't have a government, it will translate in your head into we should have no roads, the poor should die in the streets, we should let... | |
| Evil people take over society. | |
| The biggest and most violent gang should rule. | |
| If you believe that the government provides peace, security, stability, charity, and if only the government can provide this and there's no moral problem with the government providing this because of the social contract or you vote people in or love it or leave it or whatever, then I can understand that the arguments for anarchism for you will translate into a vastly negative social experience. | |
| Your conception of what society looks like will be terrible. | |
| It's like I said, if we should have houses made out of jets of flame, I can understand that this would not be very appealing to you. | |
| So, as far as empathy goes, I can empathize with people's perceptions even if I violently disagree with their beliefs. | |
| Violately may not be the right word for somebody. | |
| If I strongly disbelieve, if I with certainty disbelieve in their perspective, or if I know that their perspective is wrong, then I can understand why people would be very troubled by arguments that I or other people put forth. | |
| If you believe that without the government corporations will run society because you've watched any of the infinite propagandistic variations on Blade Runner known to mankind, if you believe that in the absence of government the unfettered power of concentrated economic interests will turn us all into medieval serfs, then I can understand that a stateless society to you would be to be forever enslaved in the brainchild of Steve Jobs. | |
| Chinese sweatshop factory of suicide. | |
| Got it. | |
| So what I'm proposing is hugely negative for you because you have erroneous perceptions. | |
| So I can empathize with the results of your erroneous perceptions even though I accept that they're erroneous. | |
| Empathize does not mean sympathize. | |
| Sympathize is, oh my goodness, you got into a car accident. | |
| I sympathize with that. | |
| I mean, if I had been in the same situation, that would be terrifying, that would be scary, that would be, you know, somebody hits your car out of nowhere. | |
| How awful. | |
| That's sympathy. | |
| Empathy is... | |
| Oh, you're trying to cheat me. | |
| I empathize with that. | |
| I get that you're trying to cheat me. | |
| I don't sympathize with it. | |
| I'm not going to, right? | |
| You're trying to troll me. | |
| I empathize with that. | |
| Your desire to do damage, your desire to cause problems, your desire to vent your own self-hating frustrations by disrupting the peaceful lives and minds of virtuous people. | |
| I understand that. | |
| I empathize with that. | |
| I am not going to condone it. | |
| I am not going to sympathize with it. | |
| Empathy is simply correctly experiencing another person's emotions. | |
| And sympathy is correctly experiencing other people's emotions and saying, if I were in your position, I would feel the same way, and that's fair and just and right. | |
| So, empathy is simply when... | |
| Like, empathy is like understanding someone else's language. | |
| I empathize with people who speak English because I can understand English. | |
| That doesn't mean I agree with everything that everyone who speaks English says. | |
| It just means that I can understand what they're saying. | |
| And so empathy is to understand and to correctly experience somebody else's emotions and in particular their emotional intent. | |
| So, if you have a stalker, you are afraid of that stalker, that is empathetic because the stalker is out to scare you and possibly do you harm and is deranged and so on. | |
| I correctly am identifying the negative, the danger, the harm that can come from somebody else's emotional state. | |
| That's empathizing with someone. | |
| It's not the same as sympathizing. | |
| I just want to point that out. | |
| So, the first level is for someone to say, wow, that is a startling argument. | |
| This would be self-empathy. | |
| That is a startling argument. | |
| It's not insane, right? | |
| It's not, you are ruled by the lizard king. | |
| You can do anything. | |
| It's not that. | |
| It's not an insane argument, the against me argument. | |
| It's a startling argument. | |
| It's a surprising argument. | |
| And self-empathy would be to be both startled by the argument and, in a sense, shocked that you've never heard it before, even though it's credible. | |
| And then that is, of course, to realize the degree to which you have been propagandized. | |
| So that's really important to understand. | |
| It is a tear in the fabric of the matrix. | |
| Because since it's true, and it's obviously true, and it's never been spoken of, then you get a clear sense of the degree to which you've been propagandized when you first encountered the against me argument. | |
| And this could be any number of arguments, right? | |
| But against me is really important. | |
| It's really powerful for this. | |
| So the second empathy, I mean, which is a kind of self-empathy, is that is a really startling and unnerving argument that I, who think of myself as a peaceful person, might openly support the use of violence against you, the initiation of force against you for following your own conscience. | |
| That is an unnerving and alarming argument on many, many levels. | |
| That would be another form of empathy. | |
| Empathy, of course, is also in how we present the against me argument and so on. | |
| So, that is another level of empathy. | |
| Now, the third level of empathy would be to say, this must be a very difficult argument for you to have accepted. | |
| So, if I say this to Bob, then Bob can certainly say, that is a startling argument. | |
| I've never heard that before. | |
| I'm just trying to put myself in your shoes. | |
| If you genuinely believe this, and there's reasons to believe that it's true, because I can't think of an argument against it right away, this must be a very unsettling and challenging place for you to live in knowing or believing with some significant justification that people around you who claim to be peaceful are actually supporting violence against you. | |
| That would be another kind of empathetic argument. | |
| Now, another layer, we can skip a couple of layers here, I want to labor this as usual, but I think the synchronon of empathy, the meridian, the pinnacle of empathy, would be to sit and process the against me argument for a minute or two, or to raise some questions or objections and to listen to the responses. | |
| And then it would be to say, wow, I just feel like you've gently massaged open a third eye on my forehead that can see a million miles into the past, into the future, into the hearts and minds of those around me, into the society that I live in, and into myself, because I cannot reject the basic argument that you have made. | |
| Maybe I will tomorrow. | |
| Maybe I'll find some ingenious disprove of it in a week. | |
| But right now, I'm sitting here stunned with the reality that I support violence. | |
| I'm sitting here stunned that I, who praise myself as a peaceful, liberal, moderate... | |
| And who's anti-war and who's anti-violence and who campaigns against child abuse, that I actually support the violence, support the initiation of violence against other people, against you, my fellow human being sitting across the table from me. | |
| That is an unbelievably shocking argument. | |
| I absolutely cannot refute it, to my knowledge, at the moment, and I can't think of how I might refute it because it's so obvious I am supporting the initiation of force against you. | |
| When I support taxation and regulation and debt and fiat currency and government as a whole. | |
| I can't fathom how a society might work without it, but there is a huge moral problem that is at the core of my thinking that I've never heard of before and that tells me a lot about the entire intellectual environment that I'm in. | |
| It's a terrifying argument and I really want to tell you something. | |
| I really want to tell you something. | |
| Says Bob. | |
| I want to tell you that I'm really, really sorry for having an ATV on your foot that I didn't know about. | |
| I'm really, really sorry that I have unwittingly, unknowingly, but it's such an obvious argument that I can't claim to have no responsibility whatsoever in the matter. | |
| I'm very sorry that I have spent years and years Supporting the use of violence against my fellow citizen, against my brothers and sisters, against my fellow human beings, that I have been a tool of violence, that I have been a supporter of violence. | |
| And that I have not stopped to examine the alternatives. | |
| I have not stopped to question my own moral principles. | |
| I have not allowed the increasing empirical evidence of the problems of statism to put even the slightest dent in my obsidian-like biosphere of propaganda, prejudice, and delusion. | |
| I'm very sorry that I have for many years proclaimed both publicly and privately the efficacy and value of violence. | |
| I feel ashamed. | |
| I feel that I have done an enormous disservice to the future. | |
| I feel that I have done an enormous disservice to every cause that I hold dear by openly waiving A bloody flag in praise of guns, in praise of prisons, in praise of drones and bombs and aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, in praise of the incarceration of the innocent, in praise of the enslavement of the unborn. | |
| I am shocked and I am appalled and I am devastated that I have supported The institutional expansion of violence across what I thought I was creating a green and peaceful world. | |
| I am appalled that I have been marching, goose-stepping in the phalanx Of master-worshipping, whip-bearing slaves when I thought I was the Pied Piper leading us to a peaceful future. | |
| I am appalled not only that I have been used but that I have allowed myself to be used without question and that my first impulse with you, Steph, was to violently reject everything that you were saying because I must examine the possibility That part of me loves to serve this immorality. | |
| That part of me worships this devil. | |
| This silver-horned devil in a deep yellow saffron monk's robe. | |
| This thief who is the pretense of generosity. | |
| This thug who is the pretense of charity. | |
| This murderer who is the pretense of a liberator. | |
| That I love the words and ignore the deeds. | |
| That I fall lockstep with everybody else marching and herding, in particular the young, off the cliff into war and debt and slavery. | |
| All the while proclaiming my love of humanity and my care and concern for the young and for peace and for the future. | |
| And now I fear, I fear what might happen if I stop marching and break ranks and actually begin to even contemplate acting upon the knowledge That you have given me, which I resent and fear and need. | |
| That would be some level of empathy that is still largely in the realm of self-empathy, but it is an acceptance. | |
| And the last level of empathy, sorry, I said this was the highest, the last one is really where you focus on, this will take a while to process yourself, is where you focus on the other person. | |
| What is it like for you to have this knowledge? | |
| What is it like for you to look around the world and see that most people openly, happily, patriotically, cheeringly, marching bandedly, votingly, support the use of violence against you? | |
| Right, so... | |
| The experiments to do with pushing the electrocution button and killing people with heart conditions or putting them into that risk category, these are people who are shocked and horrified when the truth is revealed to them. | |
| That they just allowed somebody in a white coat to tell them to murder someone and that most of them went ahead and did it. | |
| Not happily, but went ahead and did it. | |
| Now, the against me argument... | |
| Is far more fundamental than these experiments, than the Stanford Prison Experiment, than the Milgram experiments. | |
| Because what you're doing is you are revealing to people that they are allowing people in white coats to have them support violence against their fellow citizens, bombs against the foreign, the selling of the unborn, the wholesale slaughter of Quote, enemies. | |
| That this is not, well, you're pushing a button and you put someone at risk. | |
| You put too many vaults in them. | |
| Or, you know, you thought you did. | |
| People are horrified and they're sweating and they're uncomfortable. | |
| But such is the efficacy and power of propaganda that When the against me argument or other arguments for a voluntary society are revealed to people, how many of them even blink? | |
| How many of them are even troubled by this revelation that through their support of the state they are bringing down the hammer fist of their approval on the endless violence and predations and theft and evil of the state? | |
| So the people who are revealed to have participated in a potential murder are shocked, horrified, and appalled. | |
| And a number of them wrote afterwards that they were actually happy to have this knowledge, painful though it was, because it revealed to them the degree to which they had externalized their conscience and could be led into immorality. | |
| The against me argument is... | |
| The Milgram experiment at an interpersonal level written about a thousand-fold more powerfully. | |
| Did you know that by praising the state, by accepting the necessity of the state, that you are supporting the use of violence against me? | |
| I'm good with that, most people say. | |
| Yeah, and how? | |
| No, I'm not. | |
| Don't be ridiculous. | |
| Well, what's your argument against it? | |
| Oh, just this is silly and histrionic. | |
| Forget about it. | |
| I mean, it's too crazy. | |
| Imagine if that had been the responses of people to the Milgram experiment. | |
| You know, you just allowed somebody in a white coat to have you push a button that would almost certainly have killed someone. | |
| That you allowed yourself to be turned into a murderer because somebody in a white coat was murmuring at your elbow. | |
| And people said, yeah, I'm good with that. | |
| How the hell else are people supposed to learn? | |
| And it wasn't murder. | |
| Guy knew what he was doing. | |
| He was there. | |
| That's what a sociopath would say! | |
| That's what a sociopath would say. | |
| As one sociopath memorably said, Yeah, I got into a fight. | |
| The guy pulled a knife on me. | |
| I grabbed it, jammed it into his eyeball. | |
| He just ran around screaming like a baby. | |
| What a jerk. | |
| Serves him right. | |
| Do you understand what I'm saying here? | |
| And why this series is called The Fascists Around You. | |
| Not the fascist over there. | |
| Not the occasional fascist you meet in your life. | |
| Not the 4% of fascists. | |
| But if you did the Milgram experiment and you showed to someone that they were participating in violence that caused people's death... | |
| And they said, that's exactly as it should be. | |
| I praise this system. | |
| I want this system. | |
| And anybody who argues against this system is immoral and dangerous and bad. | |
| And it's the only way, it's the only way to get people to learn is through violence. | |
| People don't respond to anything else. | |
| That's what they need and I'm happy to participate. | |
| That would be, in my opinion, sociopathic. | |
| But what does the against me argument reveal about those around you? | |
| They praise the system. | |
| They're not shocked. | |
| They're not appalled. | |
| They're not dismayed. | |
| They don't pause. | |
| So my argument, and again, I'm just using these words in an amateur context, but my argument is that when you use the against me argument Anybody who's not troubled, anybody who defends, anybody who counterattacks, is sociopathic in their relationship to the state. | |
| And how many people, when you use the against me argument, are troubled? | |
| I don't mean that they're sociopaths. | |
| I have no capacity to judge anybody at that technical level. | |
| But it seems to me that a strong argument could be made that relative to the state, anybody who rejects the against me argument and defends the use of violence against you for the peaceful following of your own conscience has a sociopathic relationship to the state. | |
| Has an empathy-less relationship to the state and its effects. | |
| So when I say that sociopathy is vastly underreported in society, this is kind of what I'm talking about. | |
| When you show people that when they support the state, they support the initiation of violence. | |
| They support the murder because all laws are murder-based. | |
| All laws are murder-based. | |
| Every threat the state makes is based on murder. | |
| They have to be willing to kill you in order to get you to obey them. | |
| Otherwise, you would just kind of ignore them. | |
| They have to be willing to escalate the enforcement of every single law and regulation to the point of murder in order for it to have any credibility whatsoever. | |
| If you resist long enough, if you try to defend yourself, you will be killed. | |
| I mean, I'm not saying that cops want to do that. | |
| My God, I mean, it's horrible. | |
| But that is the reality. | |
| So it's directly analogous to the Milgram experiment Except you're pointing out that people have already been pushing that button for many, many, many years. | |
| And it's not just actors who've pretended to be in pain, but millions of people who've died, hundreds of thousands of people who've been incarcerated and raped and beaten and shivved. | |
| So we're not talking about a theoretical. | |
| We're talking about an actual. | |
| We're not talking about an experiment. | |
| We're talking about a reality. | |
| A reality. | |
| This is not a gotcha. | |
| This is a you've done it to status, which I had to confront in myself, being a monarchist. | |
| I had to confront that in myself, that I had supported the use of violence against people who disagreed with me, that I had served evil by justifying it in principle. | |
| So the Milgram experiment is like one grain of sand on the beach of the against me argument. | |
| And how many people are shocked by their support of evil? | |
| How many people even take a pause? | |
| Or how many people praise? | |
| Right? | |
| The state is necessary to educate people. | |
| Violence is necessary to educate people, and it won't happen any other way. | |
| It's exactly the same way as saying, to learn these word associations, these assholes need to be shocked. | |
| They need to have high voltage run through them. | |
| There's no other way to do it! | |
| In order for people to have some comfort in their old age, in order for people to have some money in their old age, we have to steal from people and we have to throw people in jail who don't want to pay and we have to shoot them if they resist us. | |
| There's no other way to do it. | |
| This is the world that we live in. | |
| How many people are troubled by their support, active open support of murder to organize charity, of murder to organize Education. | |
| Of murder. | |
| To organize healthcare. | |
| How many people, when you show that they have blood on their hands, leap back and try and wash it off? | |
| And how many people smile and lick their fingers? | |
| Do you see what I'm saying? | |
| Do you really see what I'm saying? | |
| I'm going to give you another example. | |
| It doesn't have to be about politics. | |
| Let's say that your parents spanked you. | |
| Spanking is an act of unempathy. | |
| Do I even need to go into why? | |
| You're turning somebody else's nervous system against them. | |
| You're turning your child's innocent child's body against them. | |
| You are assaulting them. | |
| You are attacking them. | |
| You are terrifying them. | |
| them, you are harming them. | |
| If your parents mistreated you as a child, and you go to them as an adult, and you say, I have some significant issues with how I was treated as a child. | |
| I Maybe you did a lot of stuff right, but there's some stuff you did seriously wrong and I'm still living with those repercussions. | |
| How many parents respond to this in an open and positive way? | |
| I don't mean without any trouble, without any difficulty. | |
| Of course, nobody likes to hear that kind of stuff. | |
| It's difficult. | |
| Criticism is very difficult. | |
| Criticism from your children is very difficult. | |
| So I'm not saying, oh, wow, how wonderful. | |
| Thank you for your feedback. | |
| I couldn't be happier that you've blah blah blah, right? | |
| I mean, how many parents will respond to this in a positive way over time to look into it? | |
| Now, some will. | |
| I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. | |
| I've certainly heard reports of some parents who have opened their hearts up, who've talked, who've gone into therapy, whose kids have gone into therapy, they've paid for the kids to go into therapy, they've read books, they've tried to undo the damage, they've acknowledged faults, they've talked about their own histories, they've had a quantum leap forward. | |
| In the psychosocial development of the family tree. | |
| Massive leap forward. | |
| Light years forward. | |
| Massive kudos and praise to those people. | |
| And there are some people who accept and recognize the against me argument and are horrified that the angel they see in the mirror is holding up the halo with two big fucking flaming horns and a pitchfork and the head of the young and the body of the future lying bleeding on the bathroom floor. | |
| Some people do. | |
| It's not many. | |
| It's really not many. | |
| Which is kind of important. | |
| I don't know what the success rate is or the illumination rate is of the against me argument. | |
| I know that in my own life it's less than 1%. | |
| I would imagine, this is certainly, of course, not scientific, but based upon 30 years of talking about taxes, the initiation of force, and six or seven years of running this conversation, | |
| thousands and thousands of emails, board posts, tens of thousands of YouTube comments, immense amounts of feedback on the arguments that I've put forward, It would seem to me that the success of the against me argument is about 1% or a little less than 1%. | |
| The success rate of the talking to your parents about problematic things that happened as a child is higher than the against me argument. | |
| It's single digits, I think, but it certainly is higher than the against me argument. | |
| But if the success of the against me argument is 1%, then 99% of people are praising and justifying and continuing to praise and justify, even after illumination, the institutional initiation of force against peaceful people. | |
| Like, once somebody can prove to you that slavery is evil, and you say, well, this is how it has to be. | |
| There's no other way to pick crops. | |
| The slaves deserve it. | |
| We won. | |
| They lost. | |
| They can't support themselves. | |
| They can't do anything for themselves. | |
| We need to be in charge. | |
| And anybody who suggests that slavery is immoral is irresponsible and evil. | |
| Would that not be a sociopathic response to the question of slavery? | |
| Because we create choice through moral illumination, right? | |
| If you've never heard the against me argument, you're not responsible for it. | |
| Once you've heard it, you're responsible. | |
| In a very real sense, the spread of philosophy is the creation of the self-knowledge of immorality. | |
| This is why people dislike philosophy so much. | |
| Why did you drop this argument in my lap? | |
| Before I had this argument, I had no doubt about the virtue of my position and no doubt about the centralized necessity of violence in society. | |
| In fact, it wasn't even violence. | |
| It was violence like an appendectomy is violence. | |
| It was for the greater health of society, and what is the alternative? | |
| War of all against all, nature, red, and tooth and claw, blah, blah, blah. | |
| So, philosophy kind of creates evil in people's minds through the spread of virtuous arguments and the resulting moral responsibility that accrues to those on the receiving end of those arguments, right? | |
| So, If sociopathy is to have no conscience and when you point out to people that they support and praise violence against you for disagreeing with them and they continue to support and praise it, is that not the very definition of not having a conscience, of not having empathy? | |
| And this is why I will make the case. | |
| I'm making the case. | |
| I'm not proving the case, you understand. | |
| I'm making the case, and I'm certainly interested in your feedback. | |
| It's a chilling thought. | |
| I'm making the case that statism is sociopathy. | |
| Statism is sociopathy. | |
| And if you want to know the number of sociopaths, In society, look at the number of statists in society. | |
| I do want to be clear to differentiate this rather horrifying proposition. | |
| I do believe that people can be split. | |
| And I believe that statists can be very nice to their children. | |
| I really do. | |
| Now, Tragically, by being statists, they are supporting the selling off of their children to international banksters and so on, and they are supporting war, which may claim the lives of their children and so on, right? | |
| So there are the unintended consequences of their statism is not kind to their children. | |
| National debt, you know, the Social Security Ponzi scheme around the world, the massive unemployment, student debt, all of the statist crap that so harsh is the buzz of the young. | |
| But at an individual level, statists can be very nice to their children. | |
| A lot of statists have committed to not spanking their children, to raising them peacefully, and so on. | |
| So, I don't mean that... | |
| When I say statism is sociopathy, I don't mean that every statist is a pure, unadulterated sociopath. | |
| I have no way of making that claim. | |
| But what I am saying is that... | |
| Staticism is sociopathy with regards to institutionalized violence because it is praised and justified and even when illuminated is defended and its expansion is praised. | |
| It is an area in people's life where there are sociopaths about that subject. | |
| If you read the literature on sociopathy, you will read countless examples where the psychologist or the psychiatrist will attempt to probe the sociopath's empathy for his victims. | |
| And the sociopath will not have any empathy. | |
| For the victims. | |
| Or they will attempt to probe remorse. | |
| Is there any remorse for the actions? | |
| And unless the sociopath is trying to get parole and trying to pretend that he has remorse, there isn't any. | |
| And it would be fascinating, of course, to do an experiment where you would wire people up and to the against me argument and figure out what parts of their brains fired or not. | |
| My guess is it would be Similar to a sociopath with victims. | |
| Because statism has direct and literal consequences. | |
| Direct and literal and violent consequences. | |
| If you're a statist, then you support the war on drugs. | |
| If you support the war on drugs, you're supporting murder. | |
| You're supporting incarceration. | |
| You're supporting the re-traumatization of already traumatized people. | |
| You're supporting theft. | |
| You're supporting predation. | |
| You're supporting gangs. | |
| These are the direct effects of your beliefs. | |
| Right? | |
| So there are very real consequences. | |
| Now, there are more abstract consequences than I stuck a knife in the guy's eye. | |
| So I get that this is sociopathy in the abstract. | |
| At least it remains abstract until it's kind of deeply pointed out, so to speak. | |
| And, of course, the vast majority of people who are statists would never imagine or would never contemplate and would probably be violently ill to even consider using the kind of violence that they condone in the state. | |
| They would never go and rob people. | |
| They would never hold a gun to people. | |
| So, at a personal level... | |
| They're probably quite nice people. | |
| And among their own tribe, they are probably very helpful, very kind that they bake lasagnas for people whose parents are ill and all that. | |
| They're probably... | |
| Very nice people, because that's their tribe, right? | |
| We're kind of not designed to be virtuous in the abstract, because the abstract is like the other tribe, right? | |
| So we're really not designed to be virtuous in that way. | |
| And this is one of the reasons why statism is so dangerous, is that we all have a tendency, I think, to be more or less sociopathic in the abstract. | |
| It takes a lot of philosophy to counter that tendency. | |
| And so statism is a kind of abstract way of dealing with people. | |
| It's really easy to bypass the aggression and to swallow the propaganda and so on because we don't see it. | |
| And so it's out of our field of vision and it's really tough to be virtuous in the abstract and to apply the principles of the everyday to the social and to the general. | |
| And this is why people can fully support statism and fully support murder and be appalled that anybody would even question their support of murder. | |
| They do all of that, and yet if they saw a murder, they would be appalled and horrified and they would call the cops and they would testify and all that kind of stuff, right? | |
| And this is what I mean when I say that in the abstract, we have a very strong tendency as a species towards And look, if you don't agree with me, and please don't agree with me for anything that I say, I think I've put together a pretty strong case. | |
| But if you don't agree with me, that's fantastic. | |
| I mean, I would like to be wrong about this. | |
| I mean, if there's almost anything that I'd like to be wrong about, it would be this. | |
| There's many other things I'd love to be wrong about, and I come to with great reluctance. | |
| But I must hold fast to the mast of empiricism. | |
| Of empiricism. | |
| Maybe I suck at making the case for philosophy and virtue. | |
| I'm perfectly willing to accept that, and I would love it if I did suck. | |
| It would be great. | |
| In other words, if you could do the against me argument in a way that really worked and illuminated people and got them to back off from their support of the abstract murder machine called the state, I think that would be fantastic. | |
| I would love to suck at this. | |
| Oh, wouldn't that be great? | |
| Oh, delightful, delicious, and perfect. | |
| I am in hot pursuit of the self-sucking. | |
| Much like a limber teenage gymnast. | |
| Male. | |
| But if you doubt this, there's easy proof, as I've said for many, many years. | |
| There's very easy proof. | |
| A very easy test. | |
| I don't necessarily proof, but there's a very easy test. | |
| And the very easy test is this. | |
| Simply go and make the against me argument to people in your life, to good people in your life, to people you are doubtful about in your life, whatever it is. | |
| If you doubt this, if you doubt the case that statism is sociopathy, fantastic. | |
| Go make the case and let me know how it goes. | |
| Go make the case that will only take you about two minutes. | |
| Go make the case that people around you, people who love you, or who say that they love you, that they actually support the use of violence against you for following your conscience, for being peaceful. | |
| That they embrace and accept and praise the use of violence against peaceful people, including you, especially you. | |
| Make that case. | |
| It's a very easy case to make, logically. | |
| And they don't have to agree with every particular, but they do at least have to understand that this is where you're coming from and it's not a terrible case. | |
| You're not saying we're ruled by lizard kings. | |
| It's not a terrible case. | |
| And see if they respond in an empathetic and hopefully sympathetic way. | |
| Almost everything that I put forward, I try to provide evidence-based verification that is independent of me. | |
| That's very important to me. | |
| I don't want anybody to accept what I'm saying because I'm saying it. | |
| I don't. | |
| And you shouldn't either, of course, of course. | |
| I don't even need to say it. | |
| It's an insult to you that it even needs to be said, and I apologize for that, and that's not necessary. | |
| But if I'm making this case, then you can verify and validate this case. | |
| And I want you to, right? | |
| Now, if you feel a great deal of fear... | |
| In bringing this up with other people around you, that's an important thing to know. | |
| It's a very important thing to know. | |
| That tells you a lot about where you are and your fear that it might be true. | |
| It may be, in fact, not just your fear, but your knowledge that it is true. | |
| But make the case. | |
| Prove me wrong. | |
| And if you've got a great way to make the case, school me. | |
| You know, call me up on a Sunday show. | |
| Call me up. | |
| I'll do a listener combo. | |
| I'll broadcast it as far as I can. | |
| If statism is not sociopathy, then there's a way to get people to empathize with the victims of statism, including the person across the table making the case with the against me argument. | |
| Then there's a way to get people to empathize that I don't know about, that I haven't figured out. | |
| If statism is sociopathy, then you cannot get people to empathize. | |
| If you ask them for empathy, you will only harden their commitment to aggression. | |
| And it exposes a very, very ugly side of human nature, which makes the Milgram experiments and the other experiments utterly pale in comparison. | |
| Utterly pale in comparison. | |
| So, if you can make the case in a successful, consistently successful way, I beg you, please do and let me know. | |
| But I really don't think that you will be able to And I say this not to condition your test. | |
| I say this not to make you fail. | |
| I say this because it's not going to work, my belief. | |
| It's not going to work. | |
| The against me argument reveals that statism is sociopathy 99 times out of 100. | |
| Even in the sometimes where people do accept it, the sociopathy reforms later on. | |
| They simply will reform and they'll be back to being status within a day or two. | |
| The reason I say that it's not going to work is not because I don't want it to work, but because I don't want you to blame yourself when it doesn't work. | |
| Because other people will try and get you to take the rap for their coldness, for their harshness, for their acceptance of and praise of institutionalized violence, for their murder fetish called patriotism. | |
| They will try to get you to take the rap for that. | |
| Oh, you know, you're wrong, you're crazy, you brought it up too harshly, what am I supposed to do, blah, blah, blah. | |
| But in the same way that we don't want women married to sociopaths, or men married to sociopaths, to take the rap for their sociopath's bad behavior, I don't want you to, if state is amid sociopathy, I don't want you to take the rap for other people's failure to overcome this, because sociopathy by its very nature cannot be overcome. | |
| For a variety of reasons, which if you want, you can do the research and figure all that kind of juicy stuff out. | |
| But if you doubt what I'm saying, please, please try. | |
| And try your very best. | |
| Give it a good shot. | |
| Let me know what the results are. | |
| I don't think I'm wrong. | |
| I'm quite certain that I'm right. | |
| I'm quite certain that the theory is right. | |
| I'm always happy, very happy in this particular instance, to be proven wrong. | |
| Thank you so much for your time and attention, and thank you so much for fellow traveling these deep, dark, turbulent waters with me. |