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May 7, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:52
2376 True News: Obama's Commencement Speech Deconstructed

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, deconstructs Obama's recent commencement speech.

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Hi everybody, Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Thanks again everyone for your very kind wishes.
Beautiful people, it means the world to me.
So President Obama gave a commencement address recently and he said this, and it's worth parsing this out I think in a little bit more detail because the man is a stone evil whisper genius of miscommunication and it's worth having a look at unpacking some of the syllables.
So he said, unfortunately to these graduates, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate sinister entity that is at the root of all of our problems.
Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works.
They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner.
You should reject these voices because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted.
Okay, so we'll get to that in a sec.
But we'll get to the second half in a sec.
Okay, so this is called concern trawling, right?
When somebody says, I find myself concerned or I'm troubled by.
So when somebody starts off, unfortunately, this is neuro-linguistic programming.
So somebody's going to start off saying, unfortunately, this.
And what the word unfortunately does is it programs and primes your mind to hear everything that follows as a negative.
So rather than saying, there are voices who make this, he starts off with unfortunately.
Unfortunately, it's also a sort of condescending, sort of pseudo-mature way of saying, well, unfortunately, there are people who believe very evil things or bad things in the world and so on.
So he says, unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government.
Okay, so voices, right?
You've grown up hearing voices.
Voices is sort of a disembodied.
They're not people.
They're not arguments.
They're not perspectives.
They're not fully fleshed out souls crying for some sort of contact or communication.
You've grown up hearing voices.
They're disembodied.
They're inhuman.
You've grown up hearing voices as also conscious images of mental illness and so on.
Again, this is all wonderfully brilliant stuff.
That incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate sinister entity.
Now, incessantly is a word that is used to program you to discredit somebody else's perspective or opinion.
Because the word incessantly means that it is obsessive, that it is driven by some crazy-ass emotional madness.
It is sort of like a...
Incessantly is like...
It's sort of the repetitive compulsion, OCD, repetitive compulsion syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder, you know, having to wash your hands over and over again.
So incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate sinister entity.
Nothing more is also brilliant as well, because...
is that when somebody does put forward an argument that tells you that this perspective says only this, that government is only this, is nothing more than some separate sinister entity that is at the root of all of our problems, well, that's a straw man.
I've never heard anybody on the right or left, I've certainly never said it, that the government is nothing more than some separate sinister entity that is the root of all of our problems.
That clearly is a deranged perspective.
I mean, I don't believe that the government is responsible, say, for hurricanes or brain tumors or things like that.
And so this is a straw man, right, argument that is wonderful, again, in this one.
Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works.
So what happens is using the word works here to indicate government.
In other words, government works.
Government is effective.
Government does what it's supposed to do.
And to gum up the works creates a negative.
It's a sabotage, right?
So something is working and someone is sabotaging it by gumming up the works.
And gum, of course, works.
It's a mouth word.
It works with voices as well.
So it really creates a very dense lexical set that is wonderful programming.
They'll warn that tyranny always lurks just around the corner.
And this is wonderful because it appeals to your childish sense of danger, right?
Someone just around the corner, like a haunted house or a scary movie or something like that.
It's delicious.
He said, you should reject these voices because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule...
Ah, you see, now we get the other adjectives when we start to describe government.
We get works, we get brave, creative, and unique experiment in self-rule.
It's somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted.
And this gets very foggy towards the end here, but...
See, they suggest.
They're suggesting something.
They're not making a case.
They don't provide any evidence.
They're just suggesting something, you know, like it's some sort of sinister, underhanded thing that is occurring.
And there's no actual argument here.
There's no actual...
There's a mischaracterization.
There's a reductive assertion.
There is strawmanning.
There's wonderful use of neuro-linguistic adjectives to prime you to feel more positively about the state and so on.
Now, the fascinating thing is that government is called self-rule, and that is a collectivist concept.
So, for instance, in the old medieval world, the king was considered to be the head, the priest was the heart, the peasants were the hands, the, I don't know, the apothecaries were the spleen.
I lose track of some of the details.
But this idea that we are sort of one collective thing, and to have a government is to rule yourself, It's really quite astounding.
I mean, it's not astounding that it happens.
This is standard propaganda.
But it's astounding that this is put forward and people listen to it with a straight face, right?
So, you know, there's a Facebook meme that says, well, why do you pay taxes?
Because you want to pay for roads and healthcare and interest on the national debt, and you want to fund...
I mean, there's a gun in the room called the state, and you pay taxes because you would be thrown in jail if you didn't.
If people wanted to pay taxes, we wouldn't need the overhead of the IRS and laws and courts and prisons and guns and people kicking down your doors and garnishing your wages and so on.
So the idea that You are born into an environment.
You're sold into a social contract before you're even born.
And then you are laden down with debt, which politicians are using to bribe off special interests in the here and now at the expense of your future.
And then you are shoved into a government school where you're propagandized endlessly about the wonderful virtues of government.
And then you are taxed at gunpoint for the rest of your life and so on.
That this is somehow self-rule is a complete insult.
You know, it literally is, you know, to a smaller degree, but in the same essence, it is a plantation owner and his slaves, you know, him sitting down and saying, well, we're all in this together.
You know, we're all on the same side.
We're all farmers.
No, one of you has a whip and one of you has not a whip and is beaten and so on.
So he said, we have never been a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems.
We shouldn't want to.
Well, I don't know anyone in the world who has ever said that the government should solve all of our problems.
Again, this is just a made-up straw man.
It is literally like somebody thinking that they're in a boxing ring when they're just punching themselves with lots of little butterfly wings and fairy dust on their hands to make sure they don't get any injuries.
But we don't think government is the source of all our problems either.
Again, false dichotomy.
Should the government solve all of our problems?
Well, no.
Of course, that's completely impossible.
I stub my toe.
Who do I sue, right?
But is the government the cause of all of our problems?
Well, no.
But the reality is that you don't have to be opposed to something while at the same time claiming it is the source of all of your problems.
So, for instance, are all of the problems in the world caused by rape?
There are problems in the world that exist that are not caused by rape.
Does that mean that we should not oppose rape because it is not the cause of all of our problems?
Well, of course not.
We should oppose rape because it's initiation of the use of force.
It is a violation of self-ownership.
It is immoral to the core.
And so if somebody were to say, well, you know, we shouldn't be against rape because rape isn't the cause of all of our problems, we would understand that that person would be morally insane.
Or a politician, but I repeat myself.
So this is, again, this is just the normal kind of crap that government schools have done a great job.
And these graduates, of course, are probably listening to this saying, oh, it sounds like a middle ground.
Yeah, I don't want to blame the government for everything.
I guess it's like self-rule because we get to vote and so on, right?
I said, because we understand that this democracy is ours.
And as citizens, we understand that it's not about what America can do for us.
It's about what can be done by us together.
Okay, so I guess we all get to tax each other.
I guess we all get to print money.
I guess we all get to indoctrinate children.
I guess we all get to force people through thousands of regulations.
I think, what, $70 billion worth of regulations were added just last year by Obama's administration.
I guess we all get to have armies.
I guess we all get to have national debts.
I guess we all get to sell off the unborn.
I guess we all get to be governments, because it's self-rule, right?
And we're all in this together.
There's not this artificial dividing line.
Between the victims of violence and the perpetrators of violence called the state, called law, called prisons, called courts.
So I guess we're all in this together, so we all have the same rights.
And so this is typical, right?
That the slave masters will tell you that we're all in this together, and then you say, great, so I get a whip?
And they're like, no, you don't get a goddamn whip.
Now get the hell back in line, because we're all in this together, and we're all equal, and we're all involved in this wonderfully noble creative experiment called self-rule.
It's like, well, then why are you the only person with the whip?
Why are you the only person who can...
Take 5% of the world's population and have 25% of the world's prisoners.
Why are you the only people who can throw people in jail?
Why are you the only people who can print money, make debts, start wars, order people around, throw people in jail, if it's all just some noble creative experiment in self-rule?
Well, this is all nonsense, right?
Through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government.
Now, self-government, it's like self-rule.
Self-government is one of these completely oxymoronic terms.
It is the literal moral equivalent of self-theft, or self-rape, or self-assault.
You see, government is a minority of people with the legal and moral right and obligation to initiate the use of force against everyone else in a given geographical area.
That's what government is.
And Obama has admitted this.
Government is force.
It's well understood in political circles.
Government is the sole agency with the ability to initiate force in a given geographical area.
Microsoft can't sit there and say, well, I'm going to ban Linux from coming in.
They can't.
They don't have an army.
They don't have weapons.
They can lobby the government.
You get the free evil of having the government be the big bully gun in the room that you can point at everyone you dislike.
But the reality is that no corporation, no individual has the moral right to initiate the use of force.
Government is the sole agency.
That has the right to initiate.
In fact, the obligation, its sole purpose, its sole definition, it's not like it has the right to, but it doesn't have to exercise it.
Its sole purpose is to initiate the use of force against legally disarmed citizens, at least disarmed relative to the state.
So self-government is like saying that I have the right to attack myself.
I have the right to rape myself.
And self-government is just one of these absolutely mad phrases.
Self-government is, you know, I have control over my own body.
I am responsible for the effects of my actions.
But government is a legal monopoly of people with the right to initiate force.
It's the opposite of self, right?
Self is, I own myself, responsible for the effects of my actions.
Government is, people have the legal right to initiate, obligation to initiate the use of force against me.
The completely opposite concepts.
So, the other thing I want to mention as well, In this, just briefly, is it's really hard to understand the state without understanding the relentless decade-plus propaganda machine that we're run through, you know, like sausages, well, like meat through the sausage grinder and pink floats the wall.
Like, we all understand, if I were to say to you that Coca-Cola, the Coca-Cola company, should run You know, they should be responsible for 100% of all of the budgets and all of the salaries and all of the expenses, and you have to pay it, right?
You're forced to give money to the Coca-Cola company, and the Coca-Cola company runs the schools.
Now, do we really imagine in our wildest dreams that if the Coca-Cola company ran the schools, that students would get objective information about soft drinks?
I mean, can you imagine, right?
It would be incomprehensible.
Either the subject would be avoided or you'd be shown a bunch of commercials.
I remember I actually worked as a daycare aide.
I was not a teacher-teacher, like official teacher, but I worked as a daycare aide taking care of a bunch of kids, 30 kids or so, ages 5 to 10.
I was 11 for a couple of years when I was a teenager.
And one of the school trips was to a Coca-Cola bottling factory and they played the commercials.
The kids were all singing along with the commercials.
And this guy had this like walrus mustache that he was rubbing in glee because the kids all knew the commercials.
But we understand that if Coke ran the schools, we would not get information about tooth decay.
We would not get information about obesity.
Of course not.
That would be like...
That would be like being in an advertising company and getting the Coca-Cola account and then creating an ad campaign which talked about the destruction of enamel, cleaning pennies, obesity, sugar, diabetes, tooth decay, all of that kind of stuff, and saying, well, what I want is for Coca-Cola to pay for a 30-second spot talking about all the dangers of soft drinks.
Alkalinity and even the diet drinks have been known to cause obesity and health problems associated with pop and so on.
I say this as a recent bitter deconversion from pop.
I used to like it quite a bit.
But anyway, so we all understand that we would not get information that would be objective from the Coca-Cola company about soft drinks if the Coke ran the schools.
And children would be propagandized.
I mean, they wouldn't hear the negative information, they'd only hear the positive information.
Most of the positive information would be propagandistic, like made up, like to teach the world to sing and lose one tooth at a time.
And yet, when we come into a political environment, I
mean, again, if...
Slave owners ran the schools, slaves would not learn about the evils of slavery.
We understand that in a very fundamental way.
Conflict of interest is, as I've argued before, is what democracy runs on.
If you don't have conflict of interest, you can't have democracy.
People on welfare vote for welfare.
Well, what a shock, right?
I mean, academics vote for...
Increased academic freedom and at the expense of everyone else.
I mean, lo and behold, a lot of the military industrial companies vote for military spending.
It's all conflict of interest, nothing objective about any bit.
It's all just a bunch of rhetoric designed to cloak the naked shafting of your wallet and your children's futures.
And so this is really important.
The only reason that this stuff all works is because it's layering in or taking advantage of an existing set of neurolinguistic programming that has occurred.
Topics avoided, topics emphasized, topics de-emphasized, language that is created with positive adjectives and other language that is created with negative adjectives.
No arguments, no substantive arguments.
Reasoning from first principles, no moral examination of the initiation of force.
I mean, did you ever know that the government is the only agency with the obligation to initiate force in a geographical area?
Of course not.
Any more than you're going to find a Coke commercial telling you about the negative effects of Coke.
So I just really wanted to point that out, that anybody who thinks that we live in some sort of democracy where people are choosing things simply doesn't understand the degree to which children have been programmed by the indoctrinating apparatus of the state.
And as Harry Brown used to say, if there's one thing you could change, it would be getting children to some sort of independent understanding or at least critical analysis of their existing society.
You know, we're born, shoved through the membrane of the matrix, and there we stay forever, which is another reason why if you can homeschool or unschool, at least get your kids out of public school, you will be doing a massive favor to the future, because getting them away from all of these endless commercials that result not just in the decay of their teeth,
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