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Oct. 26, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:08
3874 The Collapse of Germany: Angela Merkel's Failure
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I can't, I can't, I can't do it.
I can't, I can't do it anymore.
I cannot look at the news coming out of Germany these days.
For those of you who don't know, I'm half German.
I guess it comes with the jaw and the blue eyes, but I'm half German.
And I spoke German when I was younger, spent some time there as a little kid.
And it's...
It's like watching the surgery channel where they don't apply anesthetic like the medieval surgery channel, you know, propped open clockwork, orange style with the eyes.
Like the number of terrorism related cases investigated by German authorities has gone up four times just over the past year.
Prosecutors have opened more than 900 cases so far this year, compared to just 240 throughout all of 2016.
This is just October. 80 cases related to terrorism reached the courts in 2013.
So, four years.
It's gone from 80 in total to 900 by October.
And What does it even mean to be a German anymore?
So in 2016, the number of people with a migrant background who lived in Germany, so this is first or second generation immigrants, rose to a record 18.6 million people.
This is up 8.5% from 2015, from the year before.
So this is the fifth year in a row the number of residents with migrant backgrounds set a new high, and this is according to official data, of course, In percentage terms, the increase, 8.5, was the highest since records began in 2005.
What that means is that, I guess, halfway between a fifth and a quarter, so 22.5% of people living in Germany, are now first or second generation immigrants.
Between a fifth and a quarter of people living in Germany are first or second generation immigrants.
And the question, of course, comes down to assimilation.
There are some immigrant waves or immigrant groups that want to assimilate, in a sense, because the values of the country they're moving to are more in line with their own personal values.
So think of the 19th century.
Massive waves of immigrants heading off from Europe to the New World, to Canada and to America and other places, Australia, New Zealand and so on, South Africa.
Well, why did people in Europe, why did whites in Europe want to move to America?
Because they desperately yearned to breathe free air.
They yearned for freedom.
They yearned for opportunity. They yearned, in particular in England and other places too, but most in England, I think, they yearned to be free of the stifling conformity And caste system, this sedimentary layer of caste system that goes on, where you're identified by your accent, your environment, your dress, your look, everything.
They wanted to...
They wanted to live in a free market. They wanted to live where there was free speech.
They wanted to live where it was a meritocracy rather than aristocracy.
Aristocracy historically has been those who were the best at murdering for the king.
If you were good at killing for the sake of the king, and the king was usually someone who had killed the most and the best, it was really more like a mafia.
Except the mafia never claimed the divine right of kings.
So in the past, the aristocracy was a murderocracy, whereas people wanted a meritocracy.
They wanted to rise or fall by the strength of their own merits.
And significant portions of those who came to America found they didn't like it and moved back.
Because what was in America, what was in other countries, was freedom.
It's freedom. And when you get, of course, the welfare state, what happens is you're taking all your valuables and you're putting them on your front lawn and then you're going on vacation.
When there is great treasure, borders become very difficult to maintain.
Very difficult to maintain.
And the people who are going to Europe are not going to Europe because they value European ideals.
They don't They don't value the tolerance, the diversity, the separation of church and state.
They don't value the diminishing, crumbling edifices of a formally free speech society.
They don't value the free market.
They don't value meritocracy.
They don't value freedom of association in general.
And you can look at the surveys.
To confirm this, they're going to Europe, partly, of course, for the continuation of an age-old expansionistic ideal, and also because there's free stuff.
It's free stuff.
If you can get ten times the money by not working in Germany than you can by working in the Middle East, They're not coming for the values.
So as far as integration goes, if I or you or anyone moves to a free society, That is because we value freedom.
Imagine some, I don't know, some island erupted and someone claimed it and turned it into a genuinely free society.
A genuinely free society.
The kind of free society that we can't even imagine viscerally or empirically anymore.
A really free society.
Little to no state.
Little to no taxation.
Free market negotiation, dispute resolution through arbitration.
All of the kind of stuff. And if people moved there, it would be because you wanted to live that kind of freedom.
So, when there isn't free stuff, wherever you move, you move there because you're automatically integrated.
Like water flowing downhill.
If you yearn for freedom, you will move to the most free country and you don't need integration because you already share the values.
That's what draws you there.
Now, the reason why it's agonizing, I mean, there's going to be no assimilation of many of these immigrant groups in Germany.
There may be some blunting of extremism among many, but the second generation or third generation often is more fundamentalist than those which came before, statistically.
There's not going to be any fundamental integration into Germany.
And what does this mean? Well, what this means is balkanization.
What this means is, of course, we now have the emergence as there are in other places of these no-go zones.
In Germany, where the immigrant populations have created their own, their own self-contained, emotive political correctness around their society so that they can practice their own, the tribal ways that they came from in the new society.
And this is another thing the welfare state does.
The welfare state prevents the need to integrate.
If you move to a country, you don't speak the language, and there's no welfare state, you either learn the language in general, or you're going to fail.
And, you know, in the 19th century, you didn't need all these state-sponsored English as a second language programs because in order to succeed absent the welfare state, what you did was you either stayed entirely within your own little cultural bubble, like a Chinatown kind of thing, and you haltingly learned the language, but you didn't absolutely, but your children would learn the language because they didn't want to just stay in Chinatown or Little Italy or wherever.
And I've seen this. I've seen this.
And so, without the welfare state, you have to learn the language.
When you move to Japan, you've got to learn Japanese, or at least your kids have to learn Japanese if they want to succeed.
And it's so funny. It's so funny how we have this duopoly, this schism in our brains.
When you think of the word Japanese, you think of an ethnicity.
And that's really interesting.
When you think of Japanese, you think of an ethnicity.
The Japanese race, so to speak, or the Japanese ethnicity.
And when you think of Germany, though, it can be anything you want.
There's no ethnicity, there's no history, there's no biology, there's no genetics.
Anything you want. Anything you want.
I mean, some space alien with 14 tentacles for a beard could come down, apply for welfare.
Oh look, he or it or she or whatever mitosis is going on within which they replicate.
Oh look, squid face is a German.
And that's fine in a way, except we don't apply that universally.
Think of Chinese. Think of China.
Do you think of just a geography?
If I move to China tomorrow, am I Chinese?
It's interesting to mull over.
And there's not going to be any foundational integration.
There will be some, of course, but there won't be any integration.
In particular, it's my prediction.
It's not what I want, but it's my prediction.
As a result there's going to be balkanization and balkanization leads to armed conflict in general.
And this is, to me at least, as inevitable as watching a carpet, a very bloody carpet roll down, like unroll down a set of stairs.
You don't expect it to suddenly stop and roll itself back up halfway down, absent external intervention, bump, bump, bump, down the steps it goes, unrolling all the bones on all the corpses and all of the historical conflicts that nobody seems to know about anymore.
And it's agony.
And I can't...
I can't watch it anymore.
I can't. This fantasy that we all have that, you know, if our life becomes easier, our life and our societies will inevitably become better.
It's something I want to be true.
I really want it to be true.
But it's really hard to find the evidence for that.
If you look at one of the great flourishing times in the West, particularly North America, but other places too, if you look at the West and one of the great flourishing times was sort of the 1950s.
You know, birth rates were high. One man could support a family of, you know, four kids a wife, five kids a wife on just regular old nine-to-five salary.
Communities flourished. Children played together.
Well, the generation that built that society, and this was true if you look at the growing freedoms compared to life under National Socialism in Germany, you look at the growing freedoms in Germany.
Germany. Enormous freedoms in Germany.
After the Second World War, if you look at the liberties afforded in Japan after the Second World War, I mean, astonishing.
Absolute night and day.
Look at the difference between young Japanese men now who can't seem to get it up outside of the aforementioned tentacle-based squid anime or something.
And if you look at the Japanese in the 1940s, Airplanes into the side of American ships, it is a significant difference.
So the people who built the society in the 1950s, they had been raised in the 1930s.
So they had seen their parents lose their savings, often, in the hyperinflation that occurred in Germany in particular, of course, in the 1920s.
They had seen the stock market bubble.
They had seen the stock market crash.
They had grown up in the 13-plus-year depression that characterized the 1930s culminating in the Second World War.
So they had basically been raised in depression, fear, and war.
And they built... An amazing society in many ways.
Economic growth was astonishing.
And more all-inclusive.
Blacks were moving into the middle class in increasing numbers.
And poverty was declining one percentage point every single year in the post-war period.
Poverty was declining.
It was real poverty, not relative poverty.
And then the children who grew up in the 19, the sort of post-war period, they were born in the baby boom starting at the end of the Second World War, and they grew up, their formative years are late 40s and the 1950s up until the early 1960s, and they grew up in relative peace,
prosperity, and comfort. Absent, of course, the terror of nuclear war, but This somewhat pampered generation, at least compared to the generation that came before, grew up in peace and plenty and security and community.
Well, they produced the acidic unraveling of Western rationalism in society that was characterized In the 1960s and 1970s, they grew up to do, I know you know this is a generalization, lots of exceptions, but they grew up to view or pursue sex, drugs, rock and roll, rampant promiscuity, hedonism, narcissism, the wife-swapping key parties of the 1970s, the general nihilism.
And self-absorption of the 1960s, 1970s, producing the massive materialism of the 1980s, the youth nihilism of the 90s.
And so it's kind of weird.
Governments will sort of always come along and tell us, we will shield you from negative consequence.
Oh, did you not have any health insurance?
Here's some free health care. Oh, did you lose your job?
Here's some employment insurance.
Oh, did you...
Did you have a child with the wrong man, m'lady?
Well, don't worry.
Here's your free housing, your free healthcare, your free food, your free education.
Governments always come along, and we want this, of course, because to stand on the precipice of personal disaster is terrifying, and we want the government to come along and say, we'll save you from the inevitable consequences of either misfortune or bad decisions, and most misfortune Arises from bad decisions.
Even if you get sick and it wasn't your fault, and if you didn't have health insurance, the bad decision to not get health insurance in a free market is a problem.
And, of course, those negative consequences are exactly why people make better decisions.
You know, when we remove negative consequences from people, what happens is we lose The pluses and the minuses by which we pragmatically navigate our way through this world.
We drive blindfold at ever-increasing speeds.
So we want to be liberated and freed from these negative consequences, and that makes us soft.
And the more we are protected, the more we forget that the world outside, our protections outside, are a bio-bubble, a socialist bubble-wrapping, is a dangerous and predatory world filled with wolves who wish to taste the flesh of our treasure and to dominate us the more we protect ourselves the more we live in this fantasy bubble that the world is just a wonderful nice place full of people just like us who want everything that we want we lose any sense of danger we become domesticated we become house cats Housecats.
And then we must, of course, stay within the house.
But the world is a predatory, conflict-ridden, dangerous place full of tribal warfare and a desperate thirst to dominate, which we know, based on our own history with imperialism and so on, a desperate thirst to dominate others.
Genetically, of course, we wish to grow, we wish to spread, we wish to dominate, we wish to conquer.
We wish to impregnate.
That is the drive.
I mean, you can say, well, it'd be nice if that wasn't the way, but that is evolution.
I mean, unless you're going to go some other route to a knowledge of how we got here, that is the reality.
That is the fact of human society.
And the more we are kept within a disconnected, hazy, foggy, amniotic sack of semi-socialism, the softer we get.
The fatter we get.
The more intellectually lazy we get.
The more selfish we get. The more we can indulge ridiculous belief systems.
The more we can indulge Solipsisms and the more we can indulge tautologies and the more we can indulge radical skepticism.
Radical skepticism is like a tumor that grows in the dark and nestled, squalid security of state protection.
You can be radically relativistic if the government's paying your salary and protecting your job through government tenure.
You can be radically subjectivist if you're not a farmer, if you're not a warrior.
I don't know if that sort exists.
I don't know if the crows that are eating my seeds are actually existing or not.
I don't know if there's going to be a spring, summer, or fall.
You can be radically relativistic and subjectivistic if you are kept away from reality.
If you're kept away from voluntarism, if you're kept away from the consequences of your actions, you can indulge in that and you get soft.
Your mental muscles get soft and you spread that softness and that laziness.
That there are people out there in the world, cold-eyed, hard-eyed, square-jawed, strong-willed people, who are absolutists.
Doesn't mean they're rational, but they're absolutists.
And what do you think happens when a culture steeped in absolutism and a thirst for dominance and with very little, if any, self-doubt in the internal pantheon?
Of personalities we call a self.
What happens, do you think, when those absolutists come crashing into the soft, gooey, sticky, unconditioned, lazy, self-absorbed mess of radical relativism?
What do you think happens? How on earth do you expect absolutism to integrate to relativism?
How on earth do you expect certainty to somehow submerge itself into doubt, promiscuity, uncertainty, and selfishness?
It's not even theoretically possible.
But the more we thirst for security, the more we build walls against reality, the lower the walls get against others in the world.
The more we devolve from former wolves to current sheep, the more we build walls against the consequences of our actions, the lower and more dissolved become the walls between us and the wolves.
The more sheep we become, the more wolves we summon.
Of course, if you lay your treasure out on the front lawn of your house and you put a sign up saying on vacation for two weeks, You draw people who want to take it.
You keep your stuff locked somewhere in a bank vault or something.
Well, you don't draw the thieves.
You lay everything out on your front lawn.
You draw those who wish to take it.
The more you shield yourself from reality, the more you invite predation.
And these are the consequences.
This is the horrible cycle of a statist society, of a society with government at the center, with a monopoly on violence at the center of the social decision matrix.
This is the cycle, as you know, as the cycle goes.
Hard times build strong men.
Strong men build good times.
Good times breed weak men.
Weak men bring hard times.
So goes Germany.
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