Why are people so hostile to the idea of a free society? Are people really angry about how roads will be hypothetically built centuries from now? Stefan Molyneux discusses the reality of unchosen positive obligations, the self-sacrifice of subsidy and the origin of hostility to voluntary interactions.
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| Yo! | |
| Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| So, I'm doing this show without direct eye contact for reasons that I'm sure will become clear as we go forward. | |
| The last... | |
| Sorry, the Earth Doctor One writes this. | |
| Holy crap. | |
| This guy is an arrogant retard. | |
| I'm going to build my nuclear power plant right beside his house when he gets his anarchy. | |
| His right. | |
| Who gives a fuck? | |
| My dispute resolution organization is much more evil and efficient than his, and my electricity customers will love me and hate the guy whining about his property value. | |
| He's not a team player. | |
| Besides, my dispute resolution organization has science reports on how safe nuclear is. | |
| That DRO agreement, dispute resolution organization, is just a piece of paper anyway. | |
| I got more guns than you. | |
| Dumbass. | |
| Now, why would I respond to such a piece of obviously over-caffeinated and hysterical trollery? | |
| Well, because there's a very important issue that occurs in this situation. | |
| So, let's mull it over. | |
| And I think it will really give you some important insights into Who is for a free society and who is against a free society. | |
| So very briefly, and so this sort of background goes, I guess back in 2005, good Lord, almost 10 years ago, I first put out an argument that, well, you know, it was new to me. | |
| It doesn't, of course, mean that it was new in general, but it was new to me. | |
| And the argument was that you could substitute something called a dispute resolution organization, which is basically an insurance company that you use to protect yourself from other people's noncompliance with contracts, right? | |
| So if you go into some loan arrangement or some mortgage arrangement or something, then you would pay a small, like a half a percentage point or something, so that you and the other person would agree to abide by a third-party arbitrator and so on. | |
| And there's more, you know, way back at the beginning of the podcast stream, you can find out more about this. | |
| And so this guy, you know, is basically saying, well, I'll get a DRO that will let me build a nuclear power plant right next to your property and who cares and this and that and the other, right? | |
| And... | |
| The response that I could have would be to go into the details of how this might be remediated in a free society, and there's lots of different ways it could be, very peacefully. | |
| And for more on that, you can look at Everyday Anarchy. | |
| It's a free book I wrote, available at freedomainradio.com. | |
| And it's also Practical Anarchy, which goes into this stuff in more detail. | |
| I say it's free, which, you know, it is. | |
| If you like it, if you could donate, that'd be great. | |
| It certainly took a long time to write these things. | |
| So if you could help out, that would be most excellent. | |
| So... | |
| What's more important, I think, to talk about, rather than answering ad infinitum these questions, is to look at what is being talked about fundamentally. | |
| So fundamentally, what's being talked about is your free society, Steph, won't work because I am too vicious. | |
| I am too mean. | |
| I am too evil. | |
| I am too nasty. | |
| So you don't get to have a free society because I am too nasty. | |
| Now, that is very interesting on so many levels. | |
| And in a way, he's right insofar as a free society and that level of viciousness are not compatible, right? | |
| I mean, in any sort of fundamental way. | |
| And, you know, I hear this argument a lot. | |
| It says, ah, you see, well, but Steph, poor naive you, human nature is such that a free society is impossible because everybody seeks power. | |
| And I agree. | |
| Every living organism seeks power. | |
| That's called evolution. | |
| And I fully agree, which is exactly why you can't have a state, because people seek power. | |
| And if you have a state, the first place they go is take over the state and use the monopoly of violence to impose their will on everyone else, right? | |
| So... | |
| Saying we have to have a state because people seek power is like saying this guy is really susceptible to alcohol, so he needs to be night watchman in a distillery. | |
| It's like, well, which is it? | |
| If he's really susceptible to alcohol, putting him in a place of infinite temptation is not that great, right? | |
| So... | |
| When people are talking about a free society and get really angry, the important question to ask is why? | |
| Why? | |
| Why would this guy get angry about a form of social self-organization that is not going to be around for at least a couple of hundred years? | |
| I mean, I'm not going to live to see it. | |
| You're not going to live to see it. | |
| It's not going to be a relevant factor in any of our lives during the course of our lives. | |
| It's a multi-generational process. | |
| The earliest, I imagine, is 150 to 200 years. | |
| So, it's... | |
| It's a little faster. | |
| Obviously, I'm aiming to shave a century or two off that with this show, which is about probably the best good that I can do, giving humanity a century or two of more peace and peaceful parenting and non-aggression. | |
| I think that's a pretty good legacy. | |
| That's my goal. | |
| And with your support and help, I think we can do it. | |
| So why would this guy get so angry about this? | |
| Like, I see this with people too. | |
| Like, they get universally preferable behavior, which is my approach to secular ethics, right? | |
| Ethics that doesn't need to be enforced by a state and does not need the supernatural blessings of a deity. | |
| That's my... | |
| And people, boy, it's funny to watch, you know? | |
| People get really angry about UPB. Like, it's like a recipe for kiddie torture or something like that. | |
| It's a moral theory, right? | |
| And it's not like a widely accepted moral theory. | |
| It's making some inroads, but it's not like a widely accepted. | |
| It's not changing any laws or, you know, dictating any social policies or anything like that. | |
| So why would people get so angry about it? | |
| Now, When I get angry at something, it's a good opportunity for self-knowledge, right? | |
| I think we can sort of all understand that, right? | |
| I mean, why... | |
| Especially when it's something that can have no impact on my life in any immediate way. | |
| Why, you know, why would I get so angry? | |
| You know, if my taxes are jacked up 50%, well, yeah, then okay, I can get angry at that, and that makes sense, right? | |
| But... | |
| How roads are going to be built in the year 2450? | |
| It's really hard to figure out why anyone would get angry about it if you just sort of look at it at the surface. | |
| But these kinds of people, this earth doctor fellow, I'm going to assume fellow, he doesn't sort of ask himself why. | |
| He's like, why would this bother me so much? | |
| Because if you ask yourself why stuff that has no relevance to you bothers you so much, you can gather and garner a fairly significant amount of self-knowledge. | |
| I mean, what a great opportunity to figure out what's going on in your brain. | |
| That, like, I remember many, many years ago having an argument with my mother about socialized medicine. | |
| Now, in my view, my mother's, like, quite a hypochondriac, believes she's got a lot of ailments. | |
| She doesn't. | |
| She can never find anything and all that. | |
| And... | |
| She got, you know, really angry about this sort of socialized... | |
| I'm against socialized medicine, coercion in medicine. | |
| She got really angry about it. | |
| And it wasn't like our debate. | |
| We weren't doing it... | |
| I wasn't prime minister. | |
| The prime minister couldn't change that very easily. | |
| Right? | |
| So it wasn't like this debate was going to have any material effect. | |
| But when you sort of go... | |
| I sort of understood it after the fact. | |
| Like, why would you get so angry? | |
| Well, it's because in a free market system, hypochondriacs have to pay their own way. | |
| Right? | |
| And... | |
| And that would block the manifestation of hypochondria, which would cause the person to have to deal with the underlying issues, which she didn't want to deal with. | |
| So you kind of get it after the fact, if you sort of look at it. | |
| So the question for me is, like, why is this guy screaming about building a nuclear power plant next to my house? | |
| Right? | |
| I mean, I don't think... | |
| I'm guessing from the level of rage, he doesn't exactly have the capital to build nuclear power plants as it stands. | |
| There's no such thing as a DRO in any practical or fundamental sense as yet, and there will not be for any time frame over the next couple of decades. | |
| And this is like a completely... | |
| So why would he get so angry? | |
| And I get it. | |
| Like, I understand it. | |
| But it's important for, I think, to explain sort of why this guy's so angry, so that you, as you hopefully are fighting the good fight to bring about a free society, you understand that this is generally what people are arguing for. | |
| So, I've talked in this show about there's no such thing as unchosen positive obligations. | |
| According to universally preferable behavior, which I'll just refer to as UPB, according to UPB, there are unchosen negative obligations. | |
| In other words, thou shalt not, right? | |
| No stealing, no rapey, murder, assault, etc. | |
| So you don't choose those, but they're still binding. | |
| And I go into all of this in the book, so I'm not going to rehash the arguments here. | |
| But there are no unchosen positive obligations. | |
| In other words, I can't deliver you a meal which you didn't order and then demand that you pay for it. | |
| And this is why taxation is so wrong, is that you don't sign a contract and therefore you can't be billed. | |
| I can't. | |
| And even if I split, like, if I go and sell your car, even if I give you all the money, it's still an invalid contract because I have the right to sell your car, right? | |
| So if I split the money with you and say, well, I paid you, it doesn't matter, right? | |
| It doesn't matter. | |
| There are no unchosen positive obligations. | |
| I can't enter you into a contract you don't agree to. | |
| You can't be bound by a contract you don't sign. | |
| You know, all these sorts of things. | |
| And the reasons for that, again, are all in the book. | |
| No unchosen positive obligations. | |
| That is really the foundation of a free society. | |
| That is the foundation of a free society. | |
| Because really, when you think about it, your violations, the violations that occur to you are all the results of unchosen positive obligations. | |
| You have to pay your taxes. | |
| You have to send your kids to public school. | |
| You have to participate in various government schemes around unemployment and welfare and healthcare and old-age pensions and all this, that, and the other, right? | |
| And because of all that, The state exists, right? | |
| Why does war exist? | |
| Because there's an unchosen positive obligation, which is twofold, to pay for the war through taxation or debt or inflation or whatever, and also to provide heavily subsidized labor in the form of either draft or reduced income through military pay, right? | |
| So unchosen positive obligations are foundation of war. | |
| And you sort of go through the whole list. | |
| Unchosen positive obligations is the fundamental and great moral blight on society through which all the other evils are bred. | |
| And why would this guy get so angry about a society of unchosen positive obligations? | |
| Well, I think the clue is in this level of incoherent rage and intimidation, right? | |
| So, Unchosen positive obligations is also central to family, right? | |
| So my daughter did not choose me as a father. | |
| She did not choose to be born. | |
| Now, I chose my wife, and she chose me. | |
| So we have positive obligations towards each other, such as... | |
| Fidelity and monogamy and also financial support and counter-support and all that. | |
| And those are sort of the explicit, right? | |
| It's all in our vows. | |
| And the implicit ones are, you know, act in such a way that the person's not going to hate you, right? | |
| I mean, don't be someone other than who you were in the courtship phase and attempt to improve virtue and all that kind of stuff, right? | |
| I mean, there's no job security that compares with just being valuable to your employer. | |
| If you make five times your salary for your employer, assuming the business remains functional in any way or liquid in any way, you've got a job. | |
| And if I continue to provide massive value to my wife, then I'm not going to be facing a divorce any time, which I'm not, right? | |
| So... | |
| My wife and I have chosen positive obligations. | |
| My daughter has no positive obligations towards me because she did not choose me as a father. | |
| She can't leave, didn't choose to be born, and so the onus is upon me to provide value and to expect that she owes me something. | |
| Well, I fed you, you know? | |
| I mean, to take an extreme example, which is not directly analogous, but hopefully illuminates the principle, if I grab a guy and lock him in my basement. | |
| Right? | |
| And then keep him there for a month, and then free him, and then say, well, you owe me $300 because I fed you. | |
| It's like, well, I still didn't choose to be there, so you can't charge me for feeding me, right? | |
| And so, you know, the idea that, well, I fed her, so she owes me something, and it's nonsense, right? | |
| She's a biological prisoner, right? | |
| I mean, she can't leave and didn't choose to be here. | |
| Anyway, these are just basic realities. | |
| I'm sure there's not terribly complicated to figure out. | |
| And so this unchosen positive obligation shows up in family. | |
| Now, we all understand that that which you subsidize, you get more of, and that which you tax, you get less of. | |
| Now, unchosen positive obligations are a form of subsidy. | |
| So, in other words, you may not like the Department of Motor Vehicles, you may not like your public school, but the fact is that you have a legal, unchosen positive obligation to pay for these things, which is a subsidy, right? | |
| So, you provide an involuntary subsidy to these government institutions. | |
| Emotionally, this also occurs in the realm of be with people because X. You owe them something. | |
| They're your family. | |
| They've raised you. | |
| You honor thy mother and thy father and so on. | |
| There is no such thing. | |
| We treat people fairly with justice according to the virtue that they exhibit and the virtue that we're pursuing. | |
| And the compatibility of those two standards of virtue is where we have love and so on. | |
| So, When I talk about a free society, I'm talking about no unchosen positive obligations. | |
| Now, given that that does no harm to anyone financially at the moment, in terms of like it suddenly changes something fundamental about society, the question is why would people get upset about it? | |
| Well, because there's a corollary, which is no unchosen positive obligations in relationships. | |
| In relationships. | |
| Right? | |
| So, let's say you have a cousin who's just a jerk. | |
| Right? | |
| And if you met this person at a party, you'd stay at the other side of the room. | |
| And you'd roll your eyes and you'd... | |
| Right? | |
| But now if you believe, well, I have to spend time with him because he's my cousin, he's family, you do for family, whatever, right? | |
| Well, then you are subsidizing this behavior, right? | |
| Because you have an unchosen positive obligation called he's my cousin. | |
| You didn't choose that, didn't choose the person, right? | |
| And surely the extension of choice is foundational to philosophy because with no choice, there's no virtue, right? | |
| It's not that shocking to seek to extend and expand choice. | |
| And... | |
| So you may lend money to this guy. | |
| You may hang out. | |
| You may go to social gatherings. | |
| You may invite him to your social gatherings and so on. | |
| And you're subsidizing. | |
| It's an unchosen positive obligation, which he's not earned. | |
| And granting the unearned is a form of subsidizing unwanted behavior, right? | |
| So I'll give you sort of an example that hopefully will make things very clear. | |
| So let's say there's a guy in your neighborhood. | |
| You're drowning and he pulls you to safety. | |
| He pulls you to safety. | |
| So you feel like you've got this positive obligation to him. | |
| You would have drowned. | |
| You would have died. | |
| He dove in. | |
| He pulled you to safety and so on. | |
| And then the guy kind of hangs out with you. | |
| He borrows your stuff. | |
| You lend him money and so on. | |
| Even though you don't particularly like the guy, you feel this sense of obligation because he saved your life. | |
| I lend the guy $1,000 because I wouldn't even be alive to have the $1,000 if he hadn't saved me. | |
| So you feel the sense of positive obligation. | |
| Now, let's say that I come along and say, Dude, you've just been tricked. | |
| You've been scammed. | |
| There's two guys. | |
| They're twins. | |
| They look identical. | |
| And it was the other guy who saved your life, not this guy. | |
| This guy, he just cashed in on that. | |
| His brother told him the story. | |
| He thought, well, we look the same, so he came over and he's been taking resources from you for 10 years because you thought he was the guy who saved your life. | |
| He's just the twin brother of the guy who saved your life. | |
| Well, what would you feel? | |
| You'd feel like, man, that's terrible behavior, right? | |
| This guy, you know, he's been milking my Gratitude for 10 years. | |
| He's taken me for thousands and thousands of dollars and hundreds and hundreds of hours that I never would have spent otherwise, right? | |
| And so, I come along and I say, look, you think you have an unchosen positive obligation, but you don't. | |
| Well, you're going to stop granting resources to this guy. | |
| Now, how is this guy, like the guy who's ripping you off, right? | |
| The guy who pretends to be his brother who saved you. | |
| How's he going to feel about someone who comes along and tells you the truth, that he's not the guy who saved you as his twin brother? | |
| He's going to be really angry, right? | |
| Because that directly impacts his resources in the moment, right? | |
| He's not going to be able to scam you and rip you off anymore. | |
| So he's really going to dislike me for telling you the truth about, but you're not obligated to this guy. | |
| In fact, he's been scamming you for 10 years. | |
| You are not obligated to him. | |
| You only think you are. | |
| Well, when I talk about a free society and no unchosen positive obligations, and I'm talking about voluntary relationships, truly voluntary relationships, which is the substitution of virtue for biology, and isn't that really the basis? | |
| You know, we all have tribal in-group preferences, but we're supposed to substitute non-racism for our sort of biological preferences, right? | |
| And, you know, we may hate other people, but we extend to them innocent until proven guilty and all that kind of stuff. | |
| Protection in courts of law. | |
| So, even though we may have an in-group, out-group set of imbalanced preferences. | |
| So the whole idea is to substitute virtue for biology, right? | |
| And so what that means in a familial context or in a friendship context or in a historical context is to say, well, we must make our decisions based upon—our relationship decisions should be based upon virtue rather than unchosen positive obligations. | |
| I wish that was a better phrase for it. | |
| If you think of one, let me know. | |
| U-P-O? Yupo! | |
| I've chosen positive obligations. | |
| So, this guy with his rage and his anger and his hostility and so on, right? | |
| Well, in a free society, who would want to hang out with this guy? | |
| Who would want to spend any time with this guy? | |
| In a healthy society, who would engage with trolls? | |
| Like, I'm not engaging with the troll. | |
| I'm engaging in sort of the underlying motives. | |
| In a free society, wouldn't he kind of be ostracized? | |
| And that would actually be better for him, healthy for him, because people would say, listen, if you keep pulling this ragey crap, I'm not going to, right? | |
| I'm not going to hang with you. | |
| I'm not going to be your friend. | |
| I'm not going to do business with you. | |
| I'm not, like, forget it, right? | |
| Then that would be a signal for him to change, right? | |
| Now, clearly, this guy learned rage as a child from his caregivers, from probably his family of origin. | |
| And I say that because who would want to learn this later, right? | |
| I am a really calm and rational and healthy guy, but I'd really like to be incoherently enraged randomly about things that don't matter on the surface, right? | |
| I mean, nobody would study that. | |
| That has to come, right? | |
| People can learn to study Japanese, but studying Japanese and learning Japanese has a real value to it. | |
| But nobody's going to start with a calm, healthy, and rational basis and then turn into this kind of person, right? | |
| I mean, that's just not how psychology or motivation works, human psychology. | |
| So clearly he learned this level of rage in his family from his parents. | |
| Just use the shorthand parents, could be other people, but for the sake of convenience. | |
| And so this level of rage was learned on the part of his parents. | |
| And of course, his parents would have a huge motivation to substitute biology for virtue in terms of relationships. | |
| And they would have a huge motivation to push the unchosen positive obligations narrative, which is why I say parenting is the foundation of statism. | |
| Now, this guy could be a father, and he could be this raging and aggressive towards his wife and children. | |
| In which case he would be terrified of being judged according to virtue rather than biology, to be judged as a moral human being rather than biological genetic proximity, right? | |
| And so a free society, which is fundamentally predicated on the substitution of virtue for clan, virtue for tribe, virtue for biology, and saying, no, the fact that you are my cousin does not give you the right to get my time, energy, and resources, I'm going to judge you according to virtue. | |
| Well, people are not going to be happy about that if they have... | |
| Allowed the quality of their behavior to slide because they've been getting this artificial subsidy called unchosen positive obligation slash biological. | |
| Footnote, biological. | |
| Right? | |
| I mean, we all understand that if we talk about privatizing government schools... | |
| There'll be some people who view that with relief, but there'll be a lot of teachers who are like, ooh, I hate that. | |
| That's horrible. | |
| It makes me really angry because they don't feel that they can compete in a free market environment. | |
| They've allowed the quality of their education to slide. | |
| To the point where nobody would want them around. | |
| So let's say that you have a teacher in a school. | |
| Let's do another example. | |
| Let's say that you, because teachers are so emotional for people, but let's say that in the Soviet Union there was a government-run restaurant and it had a monopoly and so on. | |
| And there was some waiter who was horrible to everyone, bought all their food cold and for like 10 years he was just a terrible waiter. | |
| People, you know, they just put up with it because sometimes they didn't want to cook. | |
| He was a terrible waiter. | |
| And let's say it all gets privatized. | |
| And this waiter is like, oh, I'll change now. | |
| I'll become a good waiter now. | |
| And it would be like, sorry, I have to fire you because everyone hates you so much that even if you promise to be a good waiter now, that's actually going to annoy them even more because you could have done it before, but now you're just deciding to do it now. | |
| So somebody who, like, we're all very, very closely attuned to that which is going to give us value or not, that which is going to give us value or take away value. | |
| And so... | |
| If this waiter, who's like a horrible person, who's been subsidized by unchosen positive obligations, which is a monopoly on being the waiter in that restaurant and that restaurant in that neighborhood, that person's going to read about the free market and is going to react with great hostility. | |
| Because nobody likes the withdrawal of a subsidy. | |
| And not just because of the money, but because they have adapted to that subsidy. | |
| The teachers have let their quality of teaching deteriorate. | |
| And waiters have been bad waiters. | |
| And people have... | |
| You know, the fact that you look at these government workers in the States, I mean, you see these margins, they're huge. | |
| It's like the second half of Wall-E. Right? | |
| The movie where there's these chunky people on the spaceship. | |
| And that's because they've got these subsidies for healthcare, right? | |
| Which means that they haven't had to take as much care of their health because they don't pay for their own healthcare. | |
| They take away that subsidy. | |
| It doesn't make them healthy all of a sudden, right? | |
| They've still got all the health problems, which they have partly because their health care is so subsidized. | |
| And you start talking about a free market. | |
| I mean, they're enraged, not just because they'll lose their subsidy, but because all of the behaviors that they have adopted, which are adapted to that subsidy, are now maladaptive, right? | |
| I mean, they're counter-adaptive, right? | |
| So, you know, you can't get fired. | |
| You become a crappy worker, and suddenly you can get fired. | |
| All of the accumulated crappiness that you have as a worker in the minds of others is coming back to haunt you, and you can't just switch that around, right? | |
| So there's great rage. | |
| The substitution of voluntarism for involuntarism produces great rage because people have adapted to an involuntary environment. | |
| So people who think, oh, well, you've got to spend time with your cousin just because, well, they're subsidizing that cousin. | |
| They're subsidizing his bad behavior. | |
| And when that subsidy is taken away, the cousin is going to react in rage. | |
| Just privatize anything. | |
| The family, the schools, the Department of Motor Vehicle. | |
| Privatize anything and people get enraged. | |
| Privatize relationships, which is the substitution of virtue as a standard rather than biology or proximity or history or whatever. | |
| Well, people get enraged because their crappy behavior has been subsidized by this involuntary positive obligation or series of them. | |
| So this is why the guy is so angry. | |
| Who the hell would want to spend time with this guy in a free society? | |
| And the voluntarism that occurs in the economic realm is nothing compared to the voluntarism that occurs in the personal realm. | |
| And it is in the personal realm that it must occur first. | |
| Thank you everybody so much for listening. | |
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