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June 5, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:07:57
2401 The Joy of Evil! The True History of Morality - Stefan Molyneux Speaks at Libertopia 2012

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses the true history of morality in his closing speech at Libertopia 2012.

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So I would like to talk with you this afternoon about the true history of ethics.
And don't you like how I put the word true in there?
That's to differentiate it from all my other speeches.
This one is the true one.
And I really want to make a case about how much ethics suck and how maybe they can be fixed.
And I really want you guys to...
I don't want to be like a TV head or talking head.
This is going to be audience participation.
You can just yell out answers.
You can correct me when I go astray.
But I really want this to be a conversation.
Because this theory that I'm working on is a work in progress, which I would really appreciate your feedback on.
So ethics is really essential.
It is really essential.
I notice this all the time as a parent.
All right, parents out here?
Parents, parents?
Okay, good.
And I mean, isn't at least half of what I say during the day is moral nagging, isn't it?
I mean, it's just continual with children.
You know, don't do this, don't do that, but we all have to share, don't hit, don't whatever.
It's just this moral nagging that is really essential and it's hard to imagine being a parent without The benefit of ethics, but the problem, of course, is that ethics is really, really slippery and elusive to define and to prove.
You know, we did a presentation this morning where we had a sort of foundational document saying, well, these things are self-evident.
These things we accept as true.
And that's kind of annoying because you want to have something stronger than that when it comes to ethics.
Now, in the ancient world, you could say ethics sort of started 1300 BC when Moses was supposed to have got the tablets from that dude.
And, you know, they had the standards on there, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and so on.
And in the ancient world, when Socrates and some of the pre-Socratics began to talk about ethics, it was really challenging for them, really challenging.
In the ancient world, virtue or ethics was kind of like an art form.
It was like being a doctor back then.
You just kind of cajoled and tried to encourage people to be good.
And Socrates, as Nietzsche characterized him, first came up with this holy trinity of philosophy and virtue, which is reason equals virtue equals happiness.
If you are rational, then you can be virtuous.
If you are virtuous, you will be happy.
Aristotle said that happiness is the one thing that we do not seek in order to get something else.
Right?
Like, we go to work to get money, we get money so we can buy food, we buy food so we can satisfy hunger, we go to sleep because we're tired, we wake up because the alarm goes off.
But the happiness is one thing.
When we're happy, we're not saying, I'm happy so I can get a tan, I'm happy so that I can do a cartwheel.
You're just, you're enjoying that state of being in the moment.
So he said, happiness is the one thing that we, that is the end in itself, that is not a means to anything else.
So if reason equals virtue equals happiness, that is That has been the basis, of course, of ethical thinking for most of Western history, for sure.
It's not something that's divinely commanded.
It's not something that's a social contract.
It's not written in stone or in a constitution.
And Plato?
Plato.
Ah, my friend Plato.
I don't mean to trivialize.
Hi, baby.
I don't mean to trivialize Plato, but I believe his ethical theory goes something like this.
Do you see the forms yet?
Do you see the forms?
Do you see the perfect virtue yet?
No?
Okay, try this.
And you really repeat until you see the perfect platonic world of virtue and forms which cannot be explained to anyone else who does not also go...
I'm not mischaracterizing Plato too, too much.
Aristotle said that we pursued excellence and virtue to achieve a state of something he called eudaimonia, which is sort of general well-being and happiness and all that.
And he believed that happiness was when we were exercising our facilities and our courage and our talents to their best end, and that's what made us happy.
And Socrates came up with a doctrine that was incredibly surprising, shocking to the ancient world, where he said, to suffer evil is better than to do evil, because to do evil harms the soul, whereas to suffer evil Does not harm the soul.
To a largely martial culture coming out of Sparta and, you know, the Peloponnesian Wars went on forever.
It was astonishing to think that it was better to suffer evil than to do evil, which of course is something that Jesus said, except to moneylenders.
But who can blame him for that?
Haven't we all felt that from time to time?
I wish the SEC just had a whip and a set of stone steps sometimes.
Teach those moneylenders.
Well, not the capitalist ones.
Now, Thomas Aquinas then adapted this.
He sort of blended Christian ethics with Aristotelian ethics, and he came up with something that is a pre-echo of objectivism, because he said, well, the nature of man requires X, and therefore X is good.
So he said, you know, human beings require life and therefore to take life away is an evil.
It's similar to the objectivist argument that, you know, that which is good for man is the good and rational life and rational arguments and rational living is good for man and therefore it's the good and so on.
And that didn't take.
In Thomas Aquinas' time, then you had Kant who came up with this categorical imperative, which is act as if The principle of your action were universal.
In other words, if you're going to go and steal something, then stealing, if it were to be universal, would you want that?
And of course you wouldn't, right?
So they tried that approach.
Founding Fathers came along.
It was like a Jerry Maguire moment.
You had me, and all men are created equal.
If you just stopped there, that would have been great, because then you wouldn't have had a government.
Or slavery.
Throw in woe in front of men and we're almost there.
Children, maybe, and then we're set.
Now, in the 19th century, and the reason I'm going over this history is there's a lot of flailing around in ethics, which is really annoying because it's so important.
And yet it is so elusive and it's so hard to pin down.
John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham in the 19th century came up with utilitarianism.
That which creates the greatest good for the greatest number is the good.
Boy, if that's not a recipe for central planning, I don't know what is.
I mean, who's going to see the greatest good of the greatest number?
You have to have some central agency that's going to organize everything.
Marxist robots, I hear, will get the job done.
Now, in all of this, So, the dissolution of Christian morality as a central force throughout most of the West, with the exception of America in the 19th century, under the relentless acidic attack of Nietzsche and his characterization of Christianity as a slave's morality.
In other words, well, we're already slaves, so let's make slavery a virtue, because...
You know, we can't get free of our masters, so let's say that those who are lowest shall become high and the meek shall inherit the earth, and it's really great to be a slave because I can't change it.
Also known as patriotism.
In the 20th century, you had significant and intense relativism.
It's weird.
You have relativism and you have political correctness.
Which is a really bizarre mess.
The relativism of the first part of the 20th century was really ended by the Second World War when the horrors of, you know, anything goes and there's no such thing as true morality were displaced by the Nuremberg Trials, right?
Where back then, you know, when America was prosecuting the Germans under the Nuremberg Trials, what did they do?
They said, the rank-and-file soldiers are not to blame.
For the decisions of those in charge, let's fast forward to Abu Ghraib.
Now that we're no longer prosecuting but we're on the receiving end, let's flip that around a little, shall we?
And let's make it that only the rank and file soldiers are responsible for the chain of command.
This is how much things can be manipulated and how perpetually ethics are manipulated.
So, I assumed that most of you were children once.
When you were a child, why be good?
Why be good and why not be bad?
What were the arguments?
Why be good?
So you don't get yelled at.
Okay.
That's good.
So was there any other reason that you were given for being good?
Not get hurt?
Okay.
There's a pattern already.
Don't get yelled at.
Don't get hurt.
You will get approval, okay.
And approval shields you from getting yelled at or getting hurt or drunk, eh?
What else?
I mean, these are all avoidances of negatives, but what were the positives?
Why were you told to be good?
Yes, ma'am.
Santa comes.
That's right.
And if you arrange that anagram, you've got a horned devil coming down the chimney.
I'm sorry?
God is watching you, which again is the avoidance of some sort of punishment.
Yes, there is that bribery, definitely, that fictional characters will give you rewards, also known as patriotism.
Anyway, what else?
What other reasons were you given for being good?
Karma!
Don't park your karma in my soul.
Okay, so what goes around comes around, right?
So if you're mean to other kids, they'll be mean back to you and so on.
The avoidance of a negative, right?
Okay?
Did you people have any positive things when you were given your moral instruction other than the fictional characters, which don't last for much people long beyond, well, for voters forever, but for most of us, it's less.
Because what?
It feels good to be good?
Did you get that?
Like, if you do something good for someone, you'll get the happy joy-joy endorphins and do the hokey-pokey.
Okay, so it will feel good to do good.
Now, the problem is, of course, you only need to tell that to people who don't want to do it, right?
Because if you were never tempted to do bad, right, so somebody wants to do bad, and then you say, no, no, no, you'll feel good if you don't.
But that's something.
Okay, so you'll feel good.
Anything else?
I'm sorry?
You got money.
You were paid for being good.
Okay, so this is a market economy where the virtue of your soul was on the block and you were bid up.
Okay, good.
Did you get different amounts of money depending on the amount of virtue?
Did you have a pay scale?
Was it unionized?
Oh, so your father was a gambler.
If you won the bets and you were good, so you were gambling too, really.
You're gambling on where the virtue would pay off if you're...
Okay, so that's how the pattern of gambling repeats itself.
All right.
Now, we've talked about the positives.
What about the negatives, the downside?
Why?
What were you told would happen if you weren't good?
You will go to hell?
All right.
And hell will be at about 9 o'clock when I haven't finished speaking, so we'll have a foreshadow there.
What else will happen if you're not good, if you don't listen?
You're spanked, all right?
Anything else?
I'll be disappointed in you.
You'll be disappointed?
Oh, yes.
I'm not angry.
I'm just disappointed.
Oh, you can't breathe.
The straitjacket.
All right, what else?
Grounded.
Right.
Right.
Particularly helpful if you're an electrical family.
Should we just take a moment to enjoy that one or should we just keep moving like we didn't hit anything on the road?
Keep driving!
Keep driving!
No, boo, just in a little bit.
A little bit.
Yes, sir.
Now, you actually, you are Santa, aren't you?
Would you like somebody to do that?
Would you like somebody to do that to you?
Yeah, how would you feel if so-and-so did the same thing to you?
And was that effective for you?
I guess so.
Well, that's...
Okay, it's only been, what, 20 years, so...
All right, so we got hell, spanking, disapproval, I'm more disappointed in you, and the appeal to universality, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and the golden rule, and so on.
So isn't that interesting?
I mean, there's a great quote from Nietzsche where he said, things that have been around for a long time become so saturated with reason that their irrational origins seem improbable.
It's a great quote.
As a philosopher, I'm always suspicious of anything that's more than 12 minutes old.
Except my daughter.
So, there's a carrot and there's a stick in ethics.
Would you agree?
Right?
So, I mean, in religion, the carrot is heaven.
And in religion, the stick is hell.
But that's afterlife, right?
So in religion, though, there's a carrot called you're happy with yourself, as the lady mentioned.
And what's the stick in religion?
Guilt!
Well, that came from a heartfelt place.
I'm so sorry.
And guilt.
Now, guilt is a weird thing, though, because to be guilty, you have to first have a...
Conscience!
Right?
Now, who are the most dangerous people in the world?
Psychopaths.
People who have no...
That's right.
And see, this is the weird thing about ethics.
Ethics is like a diet book for thin people.
Because most people who are interested in ethics Sorry, most people who are interested in ethics already want to be good and they're not out there driving combine harvesters over puppies or anything like that.
They're not doing lots of bad things.
Whereas the really bad, nasty, evil people, they're not out there thumbing through books on ethics.
No photos of Hitler and Aristotle together.
Oh, the book.
So this is the great challenge, that ethics, you know, we're always talking about, oh, you're just preaching to the choir.
These people already believe what it is that you have to say.
But it's really true with ethics.
The most dangerous people are the people who have no interest in ethics, and the standard ethical carrots and sticks, they don't reach them.
Like a lot of really evil people, kind of masochistic as well.
Ooh, are you saying I'm going to get punished?
I like that.
Right?
This is the problem with do unto others, right?
I mean, if you want...
Well, my daughter's here.
But let's just say if you want activities that involve the initials of my name, Stefan Molyneux...
I'm glad my middle name isn't Norbert.
Then it would be S&M. Anyway.
Then that's not going to be, you know, the do unto others thing doesn't really work that well.
Now, in the secular realm, what do we have?
What is the stick for doing wrong and disobeying the rules in the secular realm?
Prison, that's right.
That's right.
Prison, social disapproval, exclusion, and all those kinds of good things, but fundamentally it's prison.
And what is the carrot for obedience in the secular realm?
No prison!
That's right.
That's right.
Beatings will not continue because morale has improved.
So, yeah, you get freedom.
And, of course, if you break the rules, you prison and permanent records and all that kind of stuff, right?
And so there's this direct analogy that You have a stick and you have a carrot.
And that's the best that over 3,000 years of ethics has been able to come up with.
And I will submit, that sucks.
That's terrible.
Ethics we separate from all the other spheres of human endeavor.
And just to sort of give you a sense of what that means, Ethics is way older than physics, right?
I mean in terms of like physics that's not insane, you know, like discover the mind of God and kind of stuff.
But like real, you know, post-Baconian, 17th century plus, 18th century plus physics.
Or 19th century plus medicine.
Did you know?
It's kind of interesting.
Before, about the late 19th century, if you were sick, You had a much better chance of surviving if you went nowhere near a doctor.
No, because I mean, what the leeches and stuff like that?
I mean, it was insane.
Here, swallow this cherry bomb.
That will get rid of your heartburn.
It certainly will.
And my heart.
And so if you just look at medicine over the last 150 years, physics over the last couple hundred years, chemistry, biology, Since the mid-19th century.
I mean, it's unrecognizable, the advances that these disciplines have had.
It's staggering.
It's enormous.
Now, let's turn that same expectation on ethics.
3,300 years ago, ethicists came up with, thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not murder.
Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you a witness called the 20th century.
Does anybody know the number of people murdered by their own governments in the 20th century?
170 million!
170 million!
Going once!
Going twice!
170 million!
170 million!
Yes, you're right.
170 million is the closest estimate that they can come up with.
I've heard that there are higher estimates, some slightly lower.
They can't really get within about 20 million.
And this doesn't include wars.
This is just famines, death marches, camps.
If you include wars, it probably spirals up to about a half a billion people.
3,300 years after Thou Shalt Not Kill, 3300 years, we have the greatest amount of murders in human history.
I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that is not progress.
What else did they come up with 1300 BC? Thou shalt not steal!
That's right, thou shalt not steal.
What are the unfunded liabilities of these United States at the moment?
54 trillion.
I'm afraid I cannot accept that answer.
We must go north of that.
Yeah, 100 trillion.
Any other one?
Anyone else?
329 trillion.
Oh my god, we've got a bidding war for the future souls of humanity.
Well, the estimates vary.
I've heard 100 trillion to 200 trillion dollars, unfunded liabilities.
That's just theft.
That's just theft.
Thou shalt not steal.
1300 B.C. 2012.
The very largest intergenerational theft that the world has ever seen.
These pickpockets are good.
Normal pickpockets, they just go into your pocket.
These people can go in through a belly button to the unborn.
And take visas that have yet to exist.
Take bank accounts that are still just a gleam in their daddy's eyes and steal from them.
That's impressive.
And that is not success in the realm of ethics.
And this is why I have come not to praise ethics, but to bury them because they, as a discipline, have done as poorly as, you know, with regards to their stated goals as can be conceived of.
And you know that this is true because of the carrot and the stick.
It is the carrot and the stick that reveal the failure of ethics.
I mean, compare ethics to science.
Imagine, okay, just picture this.
So, I don't know, it's 1914, 1913, or whatever it was.
Pick up some magazine, and it's a science magazine, physics magazine, describing the general theory of relativity.
And it says, you must believe in the general theory of relativity, or you will burn in hell forever, ladies and gentlemen.
You must accept that two and two make four, or demons will provide you endless Oprah reruns with Korean subtitles from now till the end of time.
It would be ridiculous.
To believe that you would need a carrot and stick with math or science or engineering or biology or physics because they can prove what they say, so they don't need all of these hysterical, emotional manipulations.
People who provoke terror in you don't have truth on their side, right?
We all know this from the war on terror, right?
They have to scare you because they have no truth or virtue on their side.
So the history of ethics, which is the history of carrots and sticks, is the history of uncertainty.
There is a desperate need for people to be good.
If everyone steals, society can't survive.
If everyone murders, nobody can survive.
There's a desperate need for people to be good, but nobody has any proof.
That's a terrible situation.
And so they have no choice But to threaten you and bribe you because they can't convince you.
Does that make sense so far?
Question?
History as our tutor in all of those categories?
Agreed.
But how's it changing?
It's not.
That's the problem.
And I'm going to tell you why.
Ladies and gentlemen, funny voices aside.
Well, the first thing to recognize, of course, is that ethics does not exist.
Right?
We can agree on that, I hope.
Ethics doesn't exist like a voice exists in sound waves or a rock or a tree or a cloud, even temporarily.
Ethics does not exist.
Now, people make this mistake, which is that something doesn't exist and therefore it is subjective.
And that's not true.
Just because something doesn't exist doesn't mean that it's subjective.
Like, the scientific method doesn't exist.
It's not a thing.
It's not an object.
You can't weigh it.
You can't tape measure it.
The scientific method doesn't exist, but it doesn't mean the scientific method is subjective.
Numbers don't exist.
If you have four rocks in a room, you have four rocks.
It's not the number four floating around somewhere.
They're like a half-invisible screensaver rippling over the rocks or something.
The numbers don't exist, but just because numbers don't exist doesn't mean that math is subjective.
Logic doesn't exist.
It's not subjective.
So ethics...
Because it didn't exist, it has to be a human invention, right?
And just because it's a human invention, and just because it doesn't exist, doesn't mean it's subjective.
Unless anybody wants to...
I don't want to just plow over that one, that's a fairly significant point, so I want to make sure that we're there on the same page.
It's like the scientific method was invented by human beings, doesn't exist, it's not subjective.
In fact, it's essential if you want to make true statements about the world, the universe and its properties.
So the question is, if ethics doesn't exist, if ethics was invented, what is its goal?
What is its purpose?
Why was it invented?
Was it invented to make people good?
I don't see how, because people aren't good.
Was it invented to end murder?
Statistically, of course not.
It's like saying the war on drugs was invented to end drug consumption.
I mean, it's ridiculous, right?
Was it invented to end theft?
No, it can't be.
Because if you have 3,300 years of a specific goal and you get ever further from that goal, at some point, won't you stop and reassess and re-examine?
But we don't.
We just keep on going.
No matter how many Bodies churn up in the tire tracks behind us.
We say we have ethics so that people won't be killed.
Now, in the 20th century, you'd think, well, maybe we should re-examine what we're doing here because a whole lot of people seem to be getting killed, but we don't.
Was the war on poverty designed to end poverty?
Of course not.
Poverty was being ended until the war on poverty came along.
So what is ethics for, since it cannot logically be for its stated goal of eliminating theft, rape, assault, murder?
To control people.
That's a pretty wide net, my friend.
To do stuff.
Yes, I mean, I think that's true, but can we splice it down a little more?
Oh, yeah.
Talk to me, brother.
To carve out exemptions.
Say it, but slowly.
Like you mean it.
Like I've been bad.
Really bad.
Sorry.
Anytime I try to sound like Barry White, I just put the white in Barry White.
Anyway.
So to create exemptions, okay.
Tell me more.
Thou shalt not kill unless given the order by the state.
All right.
I think that's a good answer.
Does anyone else want to?
I'll tell you why.
Yeah?
Limit competition.
Have you read this essay before?
You have, haven't you?
Oh, you studied.
Good.
All right.
So, let's just go back in time a little bit.
We're going to go so far back in time, I have a mohawk.
We're going to go back in time to the origins of things.
Now, in the origins of things, we are mammals and we want stuff.
And we want stuff with a minimal amount of effort.
And that's a good thing.
I like that.
I think that's fantastic.
It's why we have technology.
And so, of course, the two choices, if you want to eat, is you go get some food, and you earn it, you catch it, you grow it, or something like that, or you steal it, right?
Now, stealing...
Imagine.
Just imagine.
If nobody in the world had ever, ever thought of stealing stuff, ever.
You know, one day you wake up, you bump your head so hard you become like a pseudo-politician and you're like, hey man, maybe I could just take stuff.
Imagine how easy that would be because there was no thieving.
Nobody protected themselves from anything.
There's no passwords, there's no locks, people just leave stuff lying around and if If it's gone, it's like, whoa, I don't know, blew away, space aliens beaming it up for research purposes, I don't know, but nobody's, I don't even have the word for it, right?
So if you're the only thief in the known universe, you have a pretty sweet time of it, right?
It's about as good as it can be, it's about as easy as it can be, right?
So the first guy to figure out stealing, and I'm, you know, I know that happens in the animal kingdom all the time, but let's just, for the thought experiment purposes, the first guy to think of stealing, he's like, man, this is, ooh, lip stuff, right?
Yay!
And then, of course, someone else says, whoa, that's a good deal.
I'm going to do it too.
And you keep getting more and more thieves, right?
Because it's so easy.
And then stealing enters the consciousness of the tribe and people start taking defensive measures against it, right?
Lock stuff up, the passwords, whatever, right?
I know this is all anachronistic, but bear with me.
And at some point, stealing becomes not great anymore.
There's punishments.
People are on their guard against it.
You know, they cut your hand off in the Muslim world or whatever.
So at some point, stealing becomes not so great.
But what if I put this out?
I think it's a pretty good possibility, and I think it's something that has huge bearing on where we are and where we should go as a movement.
What if you could convince other people not to steal while you kept stealing?
Because, right, if everyone steals, nobody produces anything, there's nothing to steal, we all starve to death, right?
So you can't have too much stealing.
And if you have no stealing or very little stealing, there's too much incentive for people to steal more.
But if you can convince other people not to steal while you keep stealing, You've just reduced competition, right?
I'll go one step further.
What if you can convince people not only to not steal, but to send you their stuff, to give you their stuff?
Wouldn't that be sweet?
I mean, you don't even have to break a sweat.
Hey, I know what it's like.
I played Prince of Persia.
I mean, it's a lot of work.
You get cricks in your...
anyway.
What is it?
Gaming claw-itis?
There's some name for it.
I can't remember what it is.
Thumb-mashing hell.
But it's a lot of work to steal.
But if you can convince people that they should never steal, but they should give you stuff, well, that's really great.
Because then you've reduced your competition, you've eliminated your risk for stealing, and you've outsourced the labor of stealing to everyone around you.
Now just think from an amoral resource acquisition standpoint, you really can't do any better.
So I will submit to you that ethics was invented to make being a ruler much more profitable and much safer.
Does that make sense?
I'm not saying do you agree, but to sort of see the logic behind the argument, you can agree at the end.
No, but we'll see.
Because there are two characteristics of every ethical system that I've ever studied.
Number one is an explicit and overt universalization.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not murder.
Thou shalt not commit false witness against thy neighbor's ass or something like that.
It's been a while.
Universalization and an implicit exemption.
This is what you were saying.
Good job.
My mole is working well.
So, thou shalt not steal.
That is the explicit universalization, not on Wednesdays, not if you're redheaded, not if you're over five feet tall, not when the full moon is out, but always, forever, for everyone, no matter what.
Universalization.
Thou shalt not.
But render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
And then there's the implicit exemption that has a whole different language and can never be connected.
Thou shalt not steal.
Taxation.
It's moral.
You see, you create the universalization and you create the exception.
This is constant.
You start looking at ethical systems, you will see this everywhere.
Our friend Socrates, that rat bastard, what did Socrates say?
The majority of men are idiots.
Laws arise from the decisions and the willpower of the majority of men.
You must obey laws because they are virtuous.
What?
Men are idiots.
Laws arise from men.
Laws are virtuous and must be obeyed.
My God!
I mean, to even stitch that together without your head exploding takes some willpower.
I actually have titanium bands all the way in here as a result of several accidents in my postgraduate work.
A lot of repainting.
What about God?
What rules did God put forward that He was not keen on?
Thou shalt not kill?
Here's a hint.
Yeah, floods!
Too young?
Where's the flood?
Did you ever get that?
When I first came to Canada, my pants were too short.
Dude, where's the flood?
I had no idea what they were talking about.
It's snowing.
What are you talking about?
Did it happen to you too?
No, you were the one of kids doing it.
You did that to kids?
We're talking right after this.
In fact, give me five minutes.
I just cry.
When I first came to Canada, all I'd ever seen was skating on TV where everybody was really formal, so I dressed up in a little Fauntleroye suit to go skating in Canada.
Oh, the other thing that happened, too, was I got my skates.
I just got them for the first time, and I put them on, and I went out, and I'm pulling a Bambi all over the ice, right?
I couldn't figure it out.
Wow, this is really tough!
And somebody was like, Silly!
Silver pants!
You forgot to take the skate guards off!
It's trickier with the skate guards on.
You should try it.
Really, nobody will laugh at you.
Let's not go down that road of reminiscing, shall we?
It'll end up with me in a fetal position sobbing.
Yeah, God says, thou shalt not kill, and God drowns everybody in the world, with the exception of Bill Cosby, Noah, some animals, unicorns, yes, no?
Yeah, okay.
So, he has a rule, and he has the exception for himself.
This is constant.
This is absolutely constant.
Plato was much more direct.
Plato said that only the philosophers could see reality.
They can't conceivably communicate it in any way, but you have to obey them for reasons that we can't explain.
I mean, that's very explicit.
I mean, exceptions are always the rule, right?
Atlas Shrugged, great book.
I'm really looking forward to the second part of the movie.
But, you know, her perfect society, no government.
There's no government in Galt's Gulch.
And then she says, well, we have to have a government.
It's like, can you just read your own book?
I'm sure you had 13 years.
Go back a few pages.
See this thing here that's the best thing ever?
Well, when you're a personal dictator in your social community, it's probably kind of hard to get to anarchism.
So you'll see this all the time, that you will have a universal rule that is set up with an exemption that is the opposite, that is never talked about, which only applies to those in power.
This example fits completely and totally and fully into the thesis that I'm putting forward.
And if you find an exception to this, please let me know.
Immanuel Kant.
Act as if your own action became a universal principle.
Well, how does taxation fit into that?
Two guys going, I tax you.
I tax you.
From here to eternity, right?
I'm doing the I tax you aerobics right after, if anybody wants to join in.
Sweating to the oldies.
Very old.
Martin Luther, the original, He tried to square this thing in the Bible, an eye for an eye, vengeance, punishment, Viking, Old Testament stuff, versus turn the other cheek if your enemy asks you to walk a mile, walk two kilometers.
Very, very good foreshadowing.
And if he asks for your shirt, give him your cloak and all that.
He tried to explain this to people, and he said, well, you see, the way that you understand it is...
An eye for an eye is the ruler punishing you.
You, yes, and it's not even just you in particular.
For that soul patch.
Sorry, that's the universal.
We'll get into the ethics of facial hair later.
But when the ruler punishes you, that's an eye for an eye.
He's fulfilling God's commandment.
He punishes you for what you do.
Turn the other cheek is if you're wrongfully punished by your ruler.
And you are the serf and the ruler is punishing you wrongly.
Well, then you must turn the other cheek and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
See?
Serf power.
Immanuel Kant said, you know, the universal categorical imperative, it takes about eight seconds to eliminate the state and taxation and protectionism and all that from his ethical thinking.
But then he says, well, this is all well and good, but of course you have to obey the ruler no matter what.
He gets the exception.
It's always a footnote.
It's always slid in, or it's always there implicitly.
But the rule is universal, and the exemption, which is not spoken about, is for the ruler.
Now, of course, the history of philosophy is the history of not philosophy.
You want to say this objectively, you know?
European history, it's the history of the world.
No, it's not.
It's the history as written by the rulers.
It's the history as written by the victors.
It's the history as written by the most popular people.
Who were those who served the rulers and the victors?
The history of philosophy is the history of those philosophers who were most useful to those in power.
Why else would they be allowed to talk about what they're talking about?
You either had the hard censorship of, if you counsel disobedience to the king, you will be killed, or you have the soft censorship of, well, you're not going to get tenure, or you're not going to get a grant, or whatever it is.
You're going to not get your stuff positively peer-reviewed.
And so it's not an accident that we only hear about philosophers and they're in the Western canon.
The history of philosophy, it's no accident that all the philosophers who created universals with exceptions for those in power.
Thomas Hobbes.
I'm not going to bore you with the history of philosophy, but trust me.
Well, trust me or not, I'm telling you.
After 30 years of study, I'm telling you.
It's a very, I mean, to me, it's a universal theme or pattern.
So, ethics was invented to reduce competition for evil, to make evil more profitable, and to make sure that evil did not suffer the consequences of evil.
This is why I say, ethics suck!
And this is why you have to have the carrot and the stick, because you're being asked to participate in evil.
There's no good argument.
And the worse the argument is, the more hysterical the punishment is for questioning.
For questioning the argument.
The weaker the argument is and the higher the stakes, the more hysterical the punishment even for questioning it.
Right?
How long does it take someone to understand taxation is theft?
How long?
Did anyone take more than about eight seconds?
I'm not saying full-on anarchism, that's 10 to 12 seconds, but 8 seconds it takes.
It's not a hard argument, and yet it has remained impervious to logic for thousands and thousands of years.
That's pretty good evil.
That's great evil.
That's amazing evil.
So how does it remain impervious to the simplest logic that can be imagined?
Thou shalt not steal.
Hey, what's theft?
Well, it's taking other people's property against their will or without their permission.
Well, that's taxation, right?
Yeah, got me.
Oops.
Ron, I think he's onto us.
Quick, put some mariachi music on.
Oh, no, let's start a war.
It's so easy.
Now, what happens to you when you go to people and say taxation is theft, war is murder?
I am one of those filthy libertarians.
Oh, sorry, that's what you mean.
That's what happens to you?
Sorry, I thought you were just having a general comment that I was a filthy libertarian.
That's true.
You know, it's hard work being up here.
Sorry?
The roads.
The roads.
That's right.
You have to become a Rhodes Scholar.
Rhodes Scholar.
Anyone testing?
Hello?
Hello?
That's right.
I'd like to apologize.
Well, I apologize for all my jokes in advance.
Yeah, well, people, what do they do?
I mean, can you feel the sphincters?
What?
Did you get the flash of panic that people have?
Do you see that?
Do you know why that's there?
I'm sorry?
Cognitive dissonance.
Yeah, that's true, but why?
Why is it so universal?
Public school.
Trust me, this happened before public school.
I mean, public school is not helping.
Sorry, was somebody saying something over there?
Everybody's looking over.
Okay, no.
You're threatening to spill out their bag of crazy.
That's true.
That's true.
Look, people don't mind becoming saner if it's to their advantage, right?
I mean, cell phones are new and, you know, people adapt to new things.
I mean, why is this idea so particularly volatile?
Okay, the implications of what and how?
The implications of the different relationships they have with the people who are trying to I'm not a slave if I go, la, la, la, la, la, right?
If you point it out, right?
And I could do that for a while, and most people do it for their whole lives.
Well, that's true.
But here's a way to sort of conceptualize, and I think it works, as to why people freak out so much when you point out war is murder, taxation is theft.
There's no social contract.
Social contracts can't be universalized.
And it's because everybody understands the scam of ethics.
When is it most dangerous?
Like, let's say that I'm coming up and I stick a gun in your ribs and say, give me your wallet.
What's the thing that's going to escalate the risk most immediately?
I mean, if you give me your wallet, assuming I'm not just someone who was to shoot you, then it's de-escalated, right?
But what raises the possibility of injury immediately?
Try to get the gun, right?
Somebody sticks a gun in your ribs, if you try to get the gun, that's dangerous, right?
That's when you're likely to get shot.
Unless you're one of my martial arts listeners, in which case, apparently, you can just bend it with your brain.
I'm gonna get more emails now.
Sorry, inside joke.
So, to try to take away the gun from the predator is the most dangerous thing you can do.
Now, if ethics is a weapon to reduce your desire or ability to compete with the real thieves and murderers of the world, And if the effectiveness of the weapon is based upon the explicit universalization and implicit exception, what is the most dangerous thing you can do with that mental paradigm?
Accept the universalization and reject the exemption.
So, when people say, thou shalt not steal is universal, if you say, okay, great, so obviously taxation is theft, then we should stop doing that, right?
That is incredibly dangerous.
That is incredibly dangerous.
People would get killed for that.
What's that old saying?
I think it was from the Wars of the Roses.
Treason doth never prosper.
What's the reason?
Why?
If it prosper, none dare call it treason.
If you become the new king, you ain't treason anymore, right?
And so, you know, under Chairman Mao in the 60s, late 60s in China, under Chairman Mao, the Cultural Revolution, right, let a thousand flowers bloom, right?
He relaxed all of his controls over the artists and the intellectuals, the philosophers, and so on, right?
And I was like, woohoo!
Yay!
We can speak openly and freely.
How wonderful!
And what happened?
There you are!
Right?
It's the tall poppy that gets cut.
It's the hammer that sticks up that gets nailed down.
Agents of the state would regularly circulate.
This is not conspiracy.
This is a fact, right?
Agents of the state would regularly circulate among the citizenry, speaking treason against the state.
Right?
And what would they do to anyone who even remotely agreed with them?
Take them in, and usually they would be killed.
Yes, sir?
Yeah, if you see something, say something.
Absolutely, the pattern continues.
Well, now they have robots to do it, right?
Computers, but...
You see, so, if you just look at basic Darwinian survival stuff, If you reject the universality of the ethical commandment and you steal, you get punished, right, by the ecclesiastical or secular authorities.
If you believe in hell, you go to hell.
If you're guilty, you get terrible guilt.
And if the secular authorities catch you, your hand cut off, you go to jail, you get banished, whatever, right?
So if you reject universality, you're exposing yourself to grave danger, assuming you're not a ruler, a ruler on a different planet.
If you accept universality and reject the exemption, then you speak treason of those in power, right?
Taxation is theft.
It's treason to those in power, which also gets you to a very nasty end.
So the mental trick for those of us poor, dumb, benighted, ruled mammals The mental trick to navigate this maze is to accept universality, to live by universality, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, no assault, no rape, no murder, and to never, ever speak of the exception.
Never.
Because if you speak of the exception, if you point out the exception for those in power, you don't survive.
If you reject the universality and you reject the exception, both of those parts get you killed.
So I believe that we evolved with these emotional mechanisms, which is, I can look straight at the mind-bending Mobius strip of irrational ethics, And have no problem with it whatsoever because if it even crossed your face a little bit that you had a problem with it, the spies would find you.
There's an awful story of many awful stories in the Gulag Apikalago by Solzhenitsyn.
I don't know if you've ever heard it.
It's a terrifying story where there was some A bureaucrat who came to give a speech to a bunch of people, and of course, you know, they kept applauding him, right?
And at the end of his speech, everyone got up, and they started applauding him.
And the applause, it just went...
This is a hint for later, but the applause just went on and on, didn't stop, and didn't stop.
Nobody sat down, couldn't stop.
Their hands were raw, they had headaches, their hands started bleeding, they kept clapping, kept clapping, couldn't stop.
Why not?
The first one who stopped was not going to go to a good place, right?
I mean, that's insane.
This is how insane it is.
Because what we want to do is to survive, right?
Truth is, I mean, it's like maybe a little bit of a little tiny icing flower on the icing of the cake.
We are designed to survive, not to be brave, not to fight the power, not to have integrity.
We are designed to survive.
And that's simple.
We know that.
Because anybody who didn't survive, those genes didn't get passed along.
So the genes that give us Agreement with the universal and rejection of the exemption are the only genes that would keep us alive.
So when we go to people and we say taxation is theft, man, we're fighting millions of years, hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary fine-tuning which says, Oh, crap.
I'm in trouble now.
Because either this person's an agent of the state, and if I agree with them, I'm toast.
Or they're not.
In which case, they're insane.
And if I join them, the next guy's going to be an agent of the state, and we'll both get killed.
Now, the point that you made, which, since it's a point that I agree with, was an excellent point, was that No, maybe I'll come back to that.
Maybe.
Was that people don't like to know that they're slaves, right?
And so it is very humiliating to recognize that you've been lied to by everybody who's inflicted ethics on you, that ethics are used to control you, ethics are used to make you good, and by good it means obedient and non-competitive with the evil powers that be.
That's very humiliating.
It's very humiliating.
It's hard to look at your serfdom in the face.
I was talking earlier about these Honduras free cities.
I mean, wouldn't you love to go to a place where you could be a damn adult?
Just for once in your life, just be an adult.
To not be perceived as some dangerous, retarded, idiot child blindfolded with a baseball bat in a china shop.
That you have to be controlled and regulated and taxed.
And you have to be taxed because you just don't care about the poor or the uneducated or the sick or the old.
And you have to be regulated and controlled because if it wasn't for the FDA you'd take like cow dung and stuff it in your ears to cure your headaches or something.
Like you'd just be completely idiotic.
If you weren't hyper-controlled and regulated like some toilet-trained-at-gunpoint German orphanage, I don't know.
I would just love to try that, and recognizing that that is not the case, that I'm 46 years old, and I have been treated like a weird, wayward, dangerous child my whole life, and I will continue to be treated like a weird, wayward, dangerous child until I take that six-foot dirt nap at the end of it all.
I would just love to go to one place and go, Adulthood.
Wouldn't that be great?
And it's pretty horrible to look at the reality of where we are and how much we're controlled.
I mean, it's even more painful when you become a parent.
And you see, you know, they have these ads, you know, I don't even know what they're for, like people walking around, they got the letters over their heads and they're walking around and I can...
The debt that my daughter is born into...
Is chains.
You know, I see her sometimes walking around, skipping around.
I see these big pirate chains just going bouncing after her like these slow snakes of doom.
And the schools that are presented to her as virtuous and good are just brain deadening, drug enforcing, indoctrination, lack of concentration camps.
It's agony.
And it's agonizing to look at these little fences.
And you know how agonizing it is for people because it's like looking at cows.
It's not like it is looking at cows.
And, you know, there's these electric fences.
And the first couple of times, you know, you go into the electric fences, you're like, it hurts.
It hurts.
And then what happens is the cows start not going to the electric fence because it's painful.
And so we end up in this weird world where we can map what people actually believe only by the topics that they refuse to acknowledge.
We can map out what people genuinely understand about the nature of the world that they're subjected to only by what they refuse to discuss, refuse to look at and recoil from.
And it is very painful, and I think that's the challenge that we face, is emotional, very deep, base-of-the-brain, amygdala, fight-or-flight stimulus programming around ethics.
Somebody asked me today, What do you do when you get, you know, people want to make a statistical argument?
I'm like, ooh, facts, ooh!
Well, I mean, it's impossible, generally.
I mean, because you can find, you know, statistics are like politicians trailing polls.
They just follow opinions like dogs on the trail of illusion.
And so I try not to get involved in statistical arguments.
I'll use them sometimes to back up what I'm saying, but I try not to get involved in them.
Because you can't win arguments by saying, well, you know, as a whole, we'll be better off in a free society.
Well, sure we will as a whole, but there is no as a whole.
And that's like saying a drug addict will be better if he quits drugs.
Well, he knows that.
Even the drug addict knows the drugs are terrible for him and they're destroying his life and his wife left him.
He lost his job, his house, and waking up face down in a Vegas ditch with hookers' panties and maybe even a hooker beside him.
I don't know.
But he still can't quit, even though he knows it's really bad.
Of course, people think the government It's really good and taxation is good and laws are good and so on.
And so we're trying to convince people to quit something that they think is good.
And of course, if we did get what we wanted and we didn't have all these laws and these controls and debt and slavery, it would be really bad for a whole lot of people.
Did anyone watch any of the video footage of the Chicago teachers' strike recently?
Yeah?
These are not small people.
I mean, take away the healthcare of people who are 300 pounds, they're not happy.
Right?
Take away the retirements of people who've spent 30 years pushing pointless paper in some dystopian, you know, horrible Dostoevskian hell of bureaucracy and then take away their pension.
It's like, I only put up with that crap because of the pension.
And now you take that away, my whole life is a ruin and a waste.
I mean, it's incredibly painful to end social institutions, however evil they are.
I mean, the people who transported slaves were out of a job when slavery ended.
A lot of auctioneers had to switch to other livestock.
And so we can't win without the moral argument, I don't think.
People do not lead a revolution for incremental improvements in the growth of the GDP. They just don't.
People will change, will risk change because of ethics, because of virtue.
People will sign up to go to war because they think it's the right thing to do.
I mean, that's insane when you think about it.
I mean, because ethics, because we're so programmed by universality.
Again, if you're a parent, you've seen this repeatedly.
My daughter is continuously straining for universality, universality, universality all the time.
That's a chair.
That's a chair.
That's a chair?
No, that's a stool.
Oh, why?
Three legs, right?
Always trying to get the...
You can't have language without universality.
Can't have negotiation without universality.
We are universal machines.
That is the genius of our species, is that we have this capacity to universalize, which is the noose around our neck.
It is the canon propulsion of the free market and the canon propulsion of technology is our capacity to universalize.
It's the canon propulsion of science and of economics.
But in the realm of ethics, it is what is used to enslave us.
Because of the exceptions that are granted to those in power that we can never speak of.
And so this is, I think, why it is so unbelievably challenging.
Oh my God, isn't it horrible?
It's like, did you read this myth of Sisyphus that Camus talks about?
You know, that there was this Greek god.
I'm probably going to get this wrong because it's been a while, but Prometheus gave fire to mankind.
Oh no, he was the guy who had his liver pecked out every day.
Sorry, that's reading the mainstream media.
But the myth of Sisyphus is that Sisyphus was condemned to roll a rock up a hill, and just as he got to the top, he would lose grip and it would roll back down, and that was the rest of his life, he was rolling this rock up a hill.
It sometimes feels like that when we're talking about a free world and a virtuous society and the paradise that we know, we know is just around The corner of two months of people thinking solidly and doing some research about these facts.
We are two months away at any given time from a true paradise, a utopia the likes of which we can't even conceive of and we've seen some beautiful utopia in our lives.
We are that close at any given moment and it seems so impossible and I've sort of spent my life trying to figure out why is it so impossible?
It's because the statistical argument won't work, because people don't sacrifice for numbers.
It's because the ethical argument is the only thing that will work, but we are programmed to short circuit any extension of universality to include the rulers.
Because if you extend universality to include the rulers, bam, it all falls down.
There is no hierarchy.
There is no government.
There is no church.
There is no subjugation.
There is no oligarchy.
If you extend universality to the rulers, there are no rulers.
Because being a ruler is being exempt from universality and being able, in fact, being required to do the opposite of what is universally banned for everyone else.
Being a ruler is, you must tax, it is virtuous for you to tax, and it is evil for everyone to steal.
If we can extend universality of ethics, the ethics we, and this is not complicated.
Libertarian ethics is great.
Marxist ethics, that's complicated stuff.
You know, you've got to get a whole bunch of weird, creepy theory, you've got to understand the labor theory of value, which is nonsense, so you've got to believe that the state is your family and, you know, that the class overrides human consideration.
That's complicated stuff.
You know, you don't teach Marxism to kids, right?
Because it wouldn't work.
I mean, Halloween candy would just be distributed and it would just be a mess.
So all the stuff we talk about, it's all kindergarten ethics.
It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculously simple.
I used to work in a daycare for years when I was a teenager.
We had like 30 kids aged 5 to 12, myself and one other teacher.
And our whole day was, as I said at the beginning of this talk, our whole day was...
No, no, don't push him over.
No, no, no.
He was playing with that.
He's invested his property rights into that Play-Doh.
Don't take it from him.
Don't hit.
Don't steal.
Don't lie.
I saw you do it.
Come on!
Do I look stupid?
Okay, don't answer that.
Because the kids were kind of mouthy, they would answer that.
Yeah.
Well, I've got to agree with you there.
The stuff we talk about is so ridiculously simple that it's embarrassing that it's so hard to get other people to it.
People will literally lecture their kids, don't hit, don't steal, right?
And then we say, you know, I think we should not use violence and not steal to get things done.
You're kidding, that would be anarchy.
Wait, you were just telling your kid exactly the same thing.
Are you teaching them to be an anarchist?
No, I'm teaching them to respect rules.
The rules called don't hit, don't steal, which we're trying to convince you.
Anyway, you can go mad, right?
But what I've sort of come to, and I'll just sort of end up with this, and if you have any questions, I'm certainly happy to answer them.
And thank you for your attention, by the way.
I really, really appreciate it.
I hope this has been worthwhile for you.
But if it's true that we are...
Not just psychologically, but literally shouldering people up to a cliff edge when we talk about extending universality to include the rulers.
If we are opening a trap door to poison spikes when we talk about extending universality to include the rulers, if we are essentially, by doing that, trying to wrestle the gun away from the mugger, Then the fact that people freak out, avoid, resist, minimize, attack, slander is understandable.
I'm not saying it's great.
I'm not justifying it.
I'm just trying to explain it as a phenomenon.
That we are literally pushing people to a very, very scary, dangerous and historically suicidal place.
When we ask them to extend the universality of property rights and the non-aggression principle to include the rulers.
Because the whole point of ethics is to benefit the rulers and we're trying to grab the gun of ethics from the rulers and say no.
And the reason why it's so dangerous is because the rulers tell us it's universal.
And we say, okay, it's universal, so that includes you.
And then we vanish from society.
We become an un-person.
We go to the Apicalago.
Historically never to be seen or heard of again.
And that is where we sit as a movement.
I have solutions.
I don't have time, but I have solutions.
This is actually part one.
This is the only speech I've ever done twice, so I apologize if you've seen it before.
This is the only time I probably ever will do a speech twice.
I just think it's important enough for that, but there is a solution.
And the solution is that we have rational ethics.
The solution is what Socrates said before he started lying for the state, although we don't actually know what he did.
We just know what Plato had to write about what he did in order not to follow the same path.
We do have a way of universally proving ethics, validating ethics.
I've got a free book at freedomainradio.com called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
I hope you will check it out.
If you have questions, comments, criticisms, I do a Sunday show every 10 a.m.
Eastern every Sunday.
And I had to move it earlier because people on the West Coast were calling and you're all really smart.
So I had to move it to the point where you'd be groggy at 7 o'clock on a Sunday morning.
So that's why I moved that.
But it used to be at 2 p.m.
But it is around self-knowledge.
The first commandment of Socrates was, know thyself.
If you know yourself, then you can intercept.
It's been measured scientifically.
You have about a quarter of a second between a stimulus that fires your fight-and-flight mechanism and the capacity to damp it down and question it from your neofrontal cortex.
You have about a quarter of a second.
You can't just start it in the moment.
You have to have practice in self-examination and understanding why you feel the way that you feel and not letting your fears and your feelings rule you.
But it takes a lot of self-knowledge and dedication to self-knowledge, to therapy.
I'm a massive fan of therapy.
I think therapy is an essential libertarian and philosophical goal because it gets you to intercept your fight-or-flight mechanism.
That's what we need from the world.
Because if you can intercept the fight-or-flight mechanism, you can recognize that listening to treason now will not get you killed.
But not listening to it will.
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