Jan. 16, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:28
3560 The Truth About Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" Speech
I had to listen to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech when I was in government schools – repeatedly, every year, it seemed. Unfortunately, I was already reading real philosophy, so I immediately pegged it for the dangerous sophistry that it was, and remains.I know, I know, it is considered one of the crowning achievements of American oratory – but now, so many decades later, aiming at a dream seems to have landed us all in a nightmare, and perhaps we should take a little bit of time to figure out what the hell went so wrong. Here’s the first clue: Dr. King’s speech is called “I have a dream,” not “I have a plan.”The Truth About Martin Luther King, Jr.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgqz3CaAWC0Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Maloney from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Ah, the good old hopey-changey thing.
Never really seems to change too much, does it?
Usually goes just a little something like this.
Describe your dream.
Provide no freaking clue how that dream is to be actually achieved.
Fail spectacularly.
Then blame others.
Rinse and repeat, at least until you run out of other people's money.
Like most of you, I had to listen to Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s I-have-a-dream speech when I was in government schools, repeatedly, incessantly, every single year, it seemed.
Now, fortunately, I was already reading real philosophy, so I immediately pegged it for the dangerous sophistry that it was and that it remains.
I know, I know, I know.
It's considered one of the crowning achievements of American oratory.
But now, so many decades later, aiming at a dream seems to have landed us all in a nightmare.
And perhaps we should take just a little bit of time to figure out what the hell went so spectacularly wrong.
Ooh, ooh, I know, here's the first clue.
Dr.
King's speech is called, I have a dream, not, I have a plan.
Because I don't care about people's dreams.
Come on, be honest.
You don't care about people's dreams either.
I do care about facts and reason and evidence and plans.
Reality, not dreaming.
Dr.
King's speech was not a call to action, but an incitement to fantasy.
So, imagine this.
You're a seasoned, skeptical, hard-nosed investor, and I stand before you asking for your money and proclaim, I have a dream that one day a company will exist that is very profitable and very efficient and serves its customers' needs wonderfully and has no competition and will be judged as a most excellent company and lots of people will want to work there and the people who work there will be tall and handsome and pretty, but there will be no dalliances.
In fact, this company will be so virtuous there will be no need for a human resources department.
This company will be so virtuous and productive that there will be no need for government lobbying of any kind.
This company will be so virtuous that never once will a lawyer's frame darken the golden gates that lead to the climate-controlled paradise of its inner sanctums.
I have a dream.
That the money shall be rolling in, verily like barrels filled with gold, and all shall partake, and all shall rejoice, and all shall be full of merriment, and passion, and joy, and productivity.
I have a dream that all the investors in this company will stand before this company and, starting with a slow clap and rising to a shirt-shredding cheer of exaltation, shall cry with one voice to the very heavens above, rich at last, rich at last, thank God almighty, we are rich at last!
So, how much money are you going to give me?
A million dollars?
Two million dollars?
A hundred million dollars?
More?
Come on, after the first sentence you would have pushed the button under your desk that calls for security.
Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech was not a solution, but a setup.
Let's look at it in more detail.
He complained about slavery, a government program.
He complained about segregation.
A government program.
He complained about Jim Crow.
A government program.
I don't know, maybe it takes just a bit of distance to see it, but in the speech there was a significant amount of complaining about government programs.
In fact, the American government has treated blacks so badly, you'd think there'd be some significant opposition to trusting the government and relying on government programs to solve complex social problems.
Dr.
King said this.
I have a dream that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
Ah, right.
Slavery.
See, there's this notion that continually referencing American slavery is somehow kind or compassionate or empathetic or helpful.
Oh, I'm telling you, my friends, it is one of the greatest disasters in America, both in the past and in the present.
Come here, come here, come closer.
Follow me on this.
Very, very important.
Imagine this.
Imagine if 1 to 2% of blacks were criminals 150 years ago.
None now, just 1.2% 150 years ago.
Now imagine that I said this meant that all blacks were criminals in the present and owed non-blacks reparations for the criminality of a few blacks 150 years ago.
What would you say to me?
You'd say to me that the degree of irrationality in my statement could scarcely be comprehended, let alone measured.
A tiny percentage of black criminals 150 years ago being used to smear all blacks in the present?
Where would you even start?
First of all, taking the negative behavior of a tiny minority in a racial group and extrapolating it to everyone in that racial group, that's the very definition of racism.
Secondly, the sins of the fathers are not visited upon the children.
The evil that men do dies with them.
Thirdly, Moral standards have, of course, shifted enormously over the past 150 years.
Judging the past by the standards of the present is a fairly useless exercise.
It's like having a hobby of damning medieval doctors for not using laser surgery to correct eyesight, those bastards.
Here's the thing.
This is what I'm talking about.
At the height of American slavery, which rested on African slavery, black Africans captured the slaves and sold them to the whites.
At the height of American slavery, about 1-2% of Americans owned slaves.
1-2%.
That's not 122%.
It's 1-2%.
Oh, and by the way, some of those slave owners were blacks.
One study has reported that 28% of free blacks owned slaves, far higher than the percentage of free whites who owned slaves.
Also, two-thirds of whites came over to America in bondage and were referred to on both sides of the ocean as slaves.
Throughout the 1600s, white slaves outnumbered black slaves, and half of the white slaves died before achieving any kind of freedom.
Also, the vast majority of slaves shipped out of Africa were shipped to Brazil.
Is anyone railing against Brazilians?
No!
It's not a mineable white guilt resource down there, is it?
Blaming whites now for the legal actions of 1-2% of whites and blacks 150 years ago is the equivalent of saying all blacks should be blamed for the actions of a few black criminals 150 years ago.
I'd say, I don't know, pretty racist, right?
Let me break it down for you even further.
Let's jump in our time machine and set it for the here and now.
Currently in America, 20% of black men with a high school education have criminal records.
Would it be fair to say that all black men with a high school education are criminals?
Of course not!
That would be racist!
See how that works?
Going from 20% to 100% is wrong.
It's immoral.
It's racist.
Is it somehow less racist to go from 1-2% of whites and blacks were bad 150 years ago to 100% of whites are bad now?
Please, I beg you, tell me.
What the hell do I have to do with slavery?
My ancestors were Irish.
Many of them were captured and sold to Middle Eastern slave traders.
They were oppressed by the British staff after the potato famine, you name it.
Other of my ancestors fought to end slavery worldwide, one of the great triumphs and honors of European civilization.
Hey, did the Jews end slavery?
Hell no!
Did the Muslims end slavery?
The Buddhists?
The Zoroastrians?
No!
It was mostly British Protestants who ended the universal curse of human slavery that has been going on for about 150,000 years.
White people ended slavery.
It cost untold blood and treasure to do so.
No other group can take credit for one of the most massive and momentous advances in basic human morality.
Yes, white people ended slavery.
Oh, oh, quick question.
Who now gets the most blame for slavery?
Yes, no good deed goes unpunished.
Am I rich because of slavery?
No!
Everyone, everywhere, all throughout history had slaves.
Slavery actually destroyed economic growth by reducing the need for mechanization.
There was no Industrial Revolution in the ancient world because they used slaves to do the work.
So rich people didn't want to invest in machinery because that would reduce the value of their slaves.
The Industrial Revolution occurred in a post-slavery society.
It couldn't have happened any other way.
Slavery throughout human history kept us all starving.
Ending slavery, well, that's why you have the option of eating too much.
American blacks have the highest standard of living of any black population on the entire planet.
The per capita income of American blacks is currently 20 to 50 times higher than the African blacks in the countries that originally sold slaves to the Europeans.
See, here's the problem.
Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
had a dream.
And that dream involved using the government to steal staggering amounts of money from non-blacks and give that money to blacks.
Huh, wait a minute.
Using the power of the state to transfer unearned wealth.
Dammit, why does that seem so familiar?
1966.
Speaking to his staff, Dr.
King declared, We are now making demands that will cost the nation something.
You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars.
We are treading in difficult waters because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.
There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.
Huh.
There it is again.
Taking people's productivity by force.
Using the power of the state to strip people of the products of their labor.
Why does that seem so familiar?
Dr.
King He was a socialist, an anti-capitalist, perhaps even a useful tool of the murderous Marxists.
He was a serial adulterer, a plagiarist, all that.
I've got a whole presentation on Dr.
King you can have a look at below.
And he was, most dangerously, a dreamer who dreamt of using violence to achieve his ends.
Dreams plus guns.
What could go wrong?
Arguably, the most famous line in his most famous speech is, I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
But here's the thing, Dr.
King, maybe, just maybe, People are judging the contents of character, of community, of the fruits of massive welfare dependency and single motherhood and a drug and thug culture, the insane levels of criminality within the black community.
See, I've generally found that if you act better, people judge you more favorably.
I mean, I'd really like to be judged by the content of my character rather than the color of my skin.
I had nothing to do with slavery.
I have fought against enslavement all my life.
My most famous video is called, The Story of Your Enslavement.
How about judging me by my actions rather than by my race?
I recently had a conversation with Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, and Reverend Peterson said that people don't judge race, they judge behavior.
Now he wants the black community as a whole to do well.
So do I. So does every decent person on the planet.
Wouldn't that be wonderful, amazing, fantastic?
Dr.
King talked about using government to forcibly transfer billions of dollars to the black community.
In reality, since his speech, the government has forcibly transferred not billions, but hundreds of billions of dollars to the black community, and things are, in many ways, much worse than before his famous speech.
In particular, the black family has virtually disintegrated.
Marital stability back in the day was stronger among blacks than whites as recently as the 1920s.
Black progression into the middle class was stronger after the Second World War than it is now.
I am literally haunted in my mind by Dr.
Thomas Sowell's last column.
He recently retired at the age of 86.
And he wrote this.
With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettos like a visit to the Harlem High School some years ago.
When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park.
Looks of horror came over the students' faces at the thought of a kid going into the hellhole that park had become in their time.
When I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer nights before most people could afford air conditioning, young people have looked at me like I was a man from Mars.
But blacks and whites alike have been sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century.
They did not have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.
Here's a quote.
Even in the antebellum era, when slaves often weren't permitted to wed, most black children lived with a biological mother and father.
During Reconstruction and up to the 1940s, 75-85% of black children lived in two-parent families.
Today, more than 70% of black children are born to single women.
Would the argument be made that there was less racism in the 1930s and the 1940s than there is now?
No.
We know what happened.
We know that Martin Luther King's dream was achieved.
As the economist Dr.
Walter E. Williams has said, quote, the welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do, and that is to destroy the black family.
Yeah.
Dr. K.
King had a dream that untold wealth could be taken by the government and given to the black community.
