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May 20, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:19
4097 More Truth About Critical Cycles in Human History
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So when I was in grade 8, there was this girl in my junior high school.
She was very pretty, but not smart and coarse, harsh in many ways.
And I had decided I was going to go and ask her out to a dance.
And word got around that I was going to ask, I don't remember how, word got around that I was going to ask a girl to a dance.
And I remember being cornered by some of the kids in school, some friends, some just acquaintances, who basically demanded to know at great length who I was going to ask to the dance.
And... Some memories.
It is a long time ago now, but the feelings are still vivid.
The parts of the brain that know no time connect like a wormhole.
And I remember not really wanting to say who I was going to ask, but eventually I did.
And everyone kind of gave this look at each other like, yeah, right, we know you.
While you're asking her out, because she's pretty.
And they said, oh yeah?
And what do you find attractive about this girl?
And I said, her personality.
And then just like coincidentally, like you couldn't write it if you wrote it in a movie or a script.
It would be too obvious.
And she put out some braying laugh and cried out some coarse, expletive-laden phrase right after I said, well, I like her for her personality.
Yeah. I just remembered.
Oh, the timing.
The wretched, wretched timing of it all.
But the instructive timing of it all.
Anyway, the reason I'm bringing this up in sort of cycles of history part two is that when you want a resource in this case the resource I wanted was a date with a pretty girl you can talk yourself into just about anything you can deny reality you can subsume the basic evidence of your senses when you want a particular resource and you want it for the wrong reasons Then what happens is your capacity to lie to yourself to acquire resources unjustly is virtually bottomless.
And from an evolutionary standpoint, that makes sense.
I mean, you need resources if you're going to have kids, if you're a mom who doesn't have a father around, you need resources.
And... Nature doesn't really care how you get those resources.
It only cares that you do get those resources.
And when you want something that is unjust, the dominoes start to fall.
We've all been there.
Be honest. Be honest, my friends.
I speak a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg of all of the things that we've all done at one point or another in our lives to lie ourselves into getting something.
Philosophy, of course, defines what is just and defines what is virtuous and defines honesty.
And the first honesty that is required is honesty with yourself.
And people say, how honest should I be in the world?
That's relatively irrelevant.
The honesty in the world is a shadow cast by your honesty with yourself, or rather a light source cast by your honesty with yourself.
And my problem in that moment, back in Oh my lord, back in the, what was that, late 70s, early 80s?
Anyway, my problem back in the day was that I was not being honest with myself, and I was being obviously dishonest with others.
And I remember the look that people exchanged, like, oh yeah, you're really into her for her personalities.
I mean, personality. I remember just being humiliated.
And it was good that I was humiliated.
Because it taught me a little bit about how to choose better people around me.
And it took a little while for that to play out in my life.
But it's something that once you achieve it, you can't look back.
You can't be dragged back.
I mean, you turn back and look at that.
And your resolve turns to steel, not your wife turns to salt.
So... This is the great challenge of where we stand in the cycle of history.
So, the state has promised unjust rewards to massive portions of the citizenry in the West.
They have promised unsustainable Impossible.
Mathematically ridiculous benefits to people.
Both in the present, but even more importantly in the future, in the coming tsunami of interstellar vacuum debt that's going to suck out the false heart of our pseudo-civilization.
Now the question of how all this came about is complicated, and I'll just touch on a few of the big issues, because that is where we stand right now.
We have the arguments on our side with regards to the accumulated evidence of things like the welfare state and unemployment insurance and old age pensions and socialized healthcare and all of the other benefits that have been promised to the citizens which are unsustainable, completely unsustainable. The evidence is in.
Poverty has not been reduced.
Poverty was being reduced before the welfare state came in.
And then, of course, you started taking from the successful and giving to the unsuccessful.
And what that meant was you were taxing productivity and you were subsidizing unproductivity or anti-productivity in terms of having kids outside of wedlock.
Now, it's a basic economic principle.
Whatever you tax, you reduce.
Whatever you subsidize, you increase.
So when you tax productivity and you subsidize unproductivity, then you end up with less productivity and more unproductivity.
I mean, that's just natural.
It's inevitable. People say, and you can sort of see the graphs online, that poverty was being reduced in the post-Second World War period in the West, particularly America.
Also partly because there was a giant pause in immigration from 1925 to 1965, which allowed the lower classes to start bidding up for higher wages rather than having endless waves of low-skilled immigrants coming in to America in particular and bidding down the poor's wages.
Blacks in particular had a huge takeoff economically in America between 1925 and 1965 because they weren't facing competition from endless waves of low-skilled immigrants bidding down wages.
And so in terms of the question of unjust privileges that were provided to people, it started in the 1960s with the welfare state.
It was there before But it really started.
See, when you give old age pensions, You are not subsidizing unwed motherhood because when you retire, you're too old to have babies, I guess, unless you use this weird space alien transplant mechanisms they've got on right now.
But basically, if you retire at 65, you're not going to be having any more kids.
So you are subsidizing, but you're not subsidizing an avoidance from the workforce because generally you're not in the workforce and you're not subsidizing unwed motherhood because they're old age pensions.
So old age pensions came in Long before, decades before the welfare state really took off.
But it did not affect marriage as much.
It did not affect unwed motherhood.
It did not affect work incentives because it was for the old.
And of course, when old age pensions came in, people didn't live particularly long.
Not many people made it to 80 or 90.
Now, of course, significant numbers of people make it to 80 or 90.
So it was a relatively Small benefit, but of course massive relative to...
Well, the law gets passed and people who never paid in to old age pensions start receiving full-on old age pensions.
So, you know, they basically paid in nothing and are getting tens and tens of thousands of dollars worth of benefits.
I don't know if that would be close to $100,000 or $200,000 worth of benefits now, but it's substantial.
Certainly far more than the zero that they've paid into.
But that did not fundamentally alter...
The marriage contract, it did not alter stability of relationships.
It did not alter the two-parent family because it was old-age pensions at the time.
And it's the same thing with socialized medicine.
Socialized medicine has a small effect on marital stability because it reduces the mother's need for a stable provider.
And whenever the government shovels money at fertile women, the stock of good men, the value of good men, diminishes enormously.
Look, we all know that women have a, I don't want to say darker side to their sexuality, but women have, let's just say, an unexplored shadowy Fifty Shades of Grey side to their sexuality.
And you can do all the research for this online if you dare.
But... When women are fertile, they prefer rougher, meaner-looking men, and when they're not fertile, they prefer more placid and stable and mature providers.
And whenever you take money from men, and please understand, I mean, the old-age pensions in the welfare state were...
Almost exclusively funded by white men.
We'll get into the demographics and the gender demographics in a few minutes but it was taking money from white men and giving it to women.
Whenever you take money by force through the state whenever you take money from men and give it to women Then the value of being a male provider goes down.
And therefore women can indulge in their darker fantasies for the rougher trade of men, the more unstable trade of men, the less reliable trade of men.
And what that means, of course, is that personality traits being highly genetic, you are bringing into being, you're facilitating, you're creating, you're enhancing.
A genetic replacement.
A genetic replacement of more mature, higher IQ stable providers with usually lower IQ, less mature, emotionally or socially or financially dysfunctional personality structures.
It is a genetic replacement.
And this is something, of course, we would not expect people to understand in the mid-20th century.
It is a very significant fact of life.
And you can do research on the employment-resistant personality if you want more on this.
But whenever you take money from men by force and give it to women in return for their votes, so you buy the votes of women, then what happens is women will tend to have sex with more unstable men, with less reliable men.
And they will shun Stable, benevolent, healthy, mature providers.
In general. And smarter women won't, for the most part, but less intelligent women will.
It's very, very cruel. It's very cruel.
It sets women up for a life of loneliness and feelings of betrayal and having their hearts ground into and shred up like a piece of Edam on a cheese grater.
And they end up miserable, alienated.
Their children are dysfunctional and failures in life and...
They end up dependent on the state.
They can't find the love of a good man.
They get used up and thrown away by men, by politicians, by the media, and eventually often by their own children.
It is a wretched, wretched situation and system to put women into.
But again, it's free stuff, and we talk ourselves into free stuff all the time.
And people sort of underestimate this as well.
There are certain thinkers, and I may in fact be one of them, who look at the First World War in particular as the turning point in the West, that the West died between the years of 1914 and 1918, when 10 million of the best young men around when 10 million of the best young men around got ground up and slaughtered in war.
And then, of course, after the 10 million who died in the war, there were close to 20 million who died in the Spanish flu as the soldiers returned to their home countries, bringing with them this The Spanish flu and, of course, people were weakened because it was war.
There was a lack of food and there was a lack of medicine and there were fewer doctors and so on.
They'd been taken out to the fields and sometimes killed by accident, although they were generally protected, of course.
And the governments had a huge problem because no real birth control back then.
And so the soldiers would come home.
And the soldiers would have sex, of course, with their wives.
Their wives would get pregnant. The soldiers would go back to the front and get their heads blown off.
Or, which was sometimes more challenging, certainly more challenging for governments, if the soldier gets wounded than if a soldier gets killed, in some ways.
Because then you have health costs as well as benefits to pay out.
And so... You have to keep women's enthusiasm for war going because men follow what women want in the West.
Because in the West, traditionally, women have had the choice of who they want to marry.
It's not like Indian-style arranged marriages and so on, right?
It's not youth marriages. And so because women choose men, men have to conform to the wishes of women.
And if women turn against war, war will not happen.
I mean, I hate to be so blunt, but that's sort of the reality.
And so, given that the ruling classes always want to reserve the capacity to wage war, to have the option to wage war, without being shamed and attacked by women for wanting to wage war.
And this is why the military style haircuts of young female pop stars these days, it's sort of Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry and so on, do not bode well because they're masculinizing their female icons, which is often a preparation for a push to war.
But what happens is you have to keep women relatively enthusiastic for war in order to have the capacity to wage war.
And what that means is that if women's lives are truly wrecked and destroyed by war, in other words, if their husbands are drafted and they're pregnant and they have kids or a kid, their husband goes off to war and is killed, and then there aren't their husband goes off to war and is killed, and then there aren't enough men to And when there aren't enough men to go around, single moms have no chance to get a provider.
And if the consequences of war accrue financially to women, then women will end up with a strong culture and preference against war.
Like, oh, do you remember what happened to Auntie Sally or Grandmother Betty or whatever?
You know, her husband went off to war, he got blown up, she got a little bit of death benefits from him, and then she couldn't get married and she had to work and her kids grew up wild and it was just terrible.
And then what happens is women end up against war.
And sometimes this can go too far.
Like if you look at Germany.
When women are bombed, like when there's a front going on, then women, it's not quite as visceral, it's not quite as bad.
But when women are bombed and die en masse or lose kids en masse or whatever, then they end up growing up.
They'd be very much against war and do anything to avoid it.
But if it's more remote, if their husbands go off and get killed, but then they get a lot of benefits, they get a lot of money, at least enough to survive, then they're not as viscerally against war.
It's not that they don't love their husbands, but I do remember...
Reading, I wrote a very long historical novel called Almost, about a British family and a German family between World War I and World War II. And in my research, I just remember listening to a woman, no, I was reading, reading a woman's report of her early life and her youthful marriage in the First World War.
And she said, you know, 20 years later, you know, I can't even remember his face.
I actually have to look at a photo, which I do once in a while.
I have to look at a photo To remember his face.
All I really think of now is that he was a terribly nice and sweet young man I was married to for a little while who then vanished.
Down the memory hole. So, with the First World War, This is one of the great curses and cycles of civilization that free markets give enormous wealth to governments because they create such staggering wealth in the general community that governments can not only have massive amounts of taxes without fundamentally impacting the capacity of the average citizen to live reasonably well,
but also governments can borrow against the presumed future productivity I mean, if GDP is growing as it used to, you know, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10% a year, which eliminates poverty within a generation for, as I mentioned in the last show, for all but those who choose poverty, then governments have this huge asset, this collateral, which they can borrow against, which is future tax receipts of their citizens.
And when you have a war, though, government outlays, of course, go up enormously, and the war bled off a lot of the gold reserves of Western governments, which is another reason why they turned to fiat currency and to central banking and so on, because they had bled off all of their gold in order to fund and fuel the war.
And, of course, the war would only have lasted a very short time.
The First World War would only have lasted a very short time If governments did not have access to easy credit, those who lend money to wartime governments are the true bloodmongers and vampires preying upon the shredding of youthful male flesh in the West.
It is a horrendous thing to lend, particularly if you're lending to both sides.
I mean, I don't even know what to say.
That it's just squalid, satanic, wretched, monstrous evil.
Because you can't expect the governments to stop.
I mean, the governments are addicts.
The people in power are power addicts, power junkies, as the song goes.
And if you keep lending the money, I mean, that's just wretched.
That's just fueling the disassembly machine of near-infinite human demise.
And so after the war, governments had to provide a lot of money to women in order to maintain their relative enthusiasm for war.
And they were short of labor.
And women were short of husbands and so on.
And so here, because the First World War wiped out so much, so many young males in the West, West Europe and the UK, because of that, governments had to rush in to fill in the gap.
And please understand, this had never before happened in human history.
Certainly not in Western history.
Wars used to be a pretty localized affair.
You know, a couple of thousand knights sparring in some distant field, and you'd just get news as your average sad sack peasant of the outcome of the battle and what the future of your country is going to be.
But all of the wealth that was generated in the 19th century went not only to swelling government tax coffers, government power, and the capacity for governments to take on debt, but...
It also generated the kind of hellscape technology that allowed for this brutal ungodly war that went on for, you know, four plus years and killed over 10 million people, mostly, of course, young men.
Because the technology of war had been advancing relatively slowly.
I mean, the invention of gunpowder, rather, the discovery or the transfer of knowledge of gunpowder from the Chinese to the Europeans changed quite a bit in terms of war.
But again, it was a pretty localized affair and a pretty small affair relative to the population as a whole.
And once the 19th century had produced the kind of technology that allowed for mustard gas and shells and airplanes and bombs and barbed wire and all of the other horrendous human disassembly devices that were deployed in the First World War, It was Winston Churchill who said, I think, of the war.
I think it was the Second World War.
He said, after many years of war, the only expediencies that the so-called civilized Western powers had not descended to We're cannibalism and torture, and only because those were of doubtful utility.
Astonishing. It's true.
There were all Christian nations that ended up doing all of this stuff.
And so the free market delivers a conveyor belt of money and death-dealing technology to states, which allows for the...
Production of endless wars.
And this is why freedom breeds tyranny.
And this is another reason why if you have a state at the center of your social organization, all of your advances will be eventually used against you.
Just think of technology these days.
I mean, think of all of the advances in communications technologies and the internet, computers, cell phones, and so on.
We're now being used to spy on you and now being used to help economic migrants coordinate their movements from Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa into Europe.
I mean, if you have a state, whatever glories you developed will be turned into horrors and used against you.
This is just a great tragedy where productivity It's the fertile ground that grows the seeds of your own self-destruction or your own destruction at the hands of the state.
This is just one of the cycles of history.
Freedom breeds tyranny.
A free market breeds excess resources and technology which are then taken over by the state and used against the general population.
And this is why I wrote books like Practical Anarchy and Everyday Anarchy for the time at some point in the future when people can re-evaluate how we organize things completely and find better ways of doing things, ways that are actually sustainable.
And the other thing which I've mentioned before on the show is that once you get governments taking over the schools, then children bond with the state.
I mean, we are to some degree...
Like ducks. You know, ducks will imprint on an orange balloon or whatever is around when they're born.
And when governments take over schools, you end up growing a generation of kids who have bonded with the state at a deep emotional level.
And this is why, you know, people think of the welfare state as their mom and the military, sort of military-industrial complex as their father, the court systems as their father.
That which gives you resources, the welfare state is considered to be the maternal and that which uses force, i.e.
the enforcement arms of the government is considered the paternal.
And people really bond with this.
And when you criticize the state, then people at some deep emotional level think that you're criticizing their parents.
I know it sounds a little absurd, but really notice this when you start to talk about stuff.
They're so emotionally invested in the state.
This can't be because of some abstract political philosophy.
This is because of a very deep and visceral bonding that happens.
And it first started to happen in the West with the introduction of government schools.
And you'll notice that...
The country which first brought in the welfare state, which brought in the Prussian model of education, which is designed to produce mindless soldiers and factory workers, Germany ended up with people who were worshipping the state.
It's inevitable.
And The state rushes in to fill in the void of absent parents, but the state often creates absent parents, right, through the perverse disincentives of the welfare state towards sustainable marriages, right?
If you're a woman and you have a kid under the welfare state in many countries in the West, certainly in America, you get more benefits, and sometimes you can only get benefits if you don't have a husband, if you don't have a man who's got a job living in Your house, living in your apartment, living in your Section 8 housing.
So women are paid to not have productive husbands and then people wonder why marriage is breaking down.
It's being broken down because the government is paying for it to be broken down.
We respond to incentives.
Two fundamental premises of economics.
Number one, human beings respond to incentives.
Number two, all human desires are infinite.
All resources are finite. Which is why the free market is the only way to efficiently utilize those resources.
But again, once you have a state, the free market creates the giant steroid injection into the musculature of the state, growing it to towering Schwarzenegger-like proportions, but without the charisma and entertaining movies and disastrous personal life.
But anyway... So, when you have government schools, kids bond with the state.
And then, a generation after you get government schools, at least in a lot of places in the West, you end up with the First World War.
Of course. How are you going to criticize the state when the state raised you?
Right? How are you going to push back against the idea that the government is immoral when your parents put you in government schools?
That is not just criticizing the state in the abstract or your school in the particular, but your parents in the personal.
Once the government's raised the children, and now it's even worse because there's daycare in some places from like two months after the kid is born, they're literally raised by the state.
And this is, of course, this is all platonic ideal that the government should take over.
The family and the two-parent household is antithetical to the growth of totalitarian state power, which it is.
Which it is. Because, you see, if you bond with the state, then all which swells the power of the state is emotionally positive for you.
Right? So, if you bond with the state because you're raised by the state, and this can occur in many forms, right?
I mean, either directly, personally, or in daycare, or in Pre-k, kindergarten, and then primary school, and then junior high school, then high school, and then maybe even all the way through to college in a quarter century of brain-shredding indoctrination, then you're bonded with the state.
And then the success of the state you feel is like your success.
Let me give you sort of an example of how this goes both ways.
One family, traditional, right?
Father works, mom's staying home with the kids, and the kids want to go to Disneyland, but the parents say, we can't afford it.
And then the father says, oh man, I got a big raise.
And then the kids are like, yay, I got a bonus, I got a raise.
Kids, we can go to Disneyland. Yay!
Right? And then the guy gets the raise and he forgets he's being taxed at 40%.
So $5,000 has become $3,000 and he's like, ooh, I know, I don't think we can, kids.
So then the kids are like unhappy at the state for taking the resources away from them that they would, as a family otherwise, used to go to Disneyland, right?
Upset with the state, angry with the state.
State power is antithetical to their personal interests.
So when somebody comes along and says taxation ought to be reduced at some visceral level, they're like, hmm, yeah, because I remember my father had a real tough time getting ahead.
And then he tried to do this business, but he couldn't get a license.
And then he tried to do this business, but something happened.
And then he tried to do this business, but the taxes went up.
And then he tried to do this business, but there was a crash.
And if you had currency and inflation, right...
If your sustenance as a family comes from voluntary interactions in the free market, if your father's an entrepreneur, then you grow up most often.
Unless there's so much money that it's all completely abstract.
You know, all the rich people will say, yeah, you can increase my taxes because, you know, what's the difference between 50 million and 40 million?
Not that much, right? 50,000, 40,000, there's a big difference.
So what happens is if your father is providing for the family, then the whole family is aligned with the take-home pay of the father.
And then expansion of state power diminishes his take-home pay, reduces opportunities for the family.
So you grow up kind of emotionally in that structure with a desire for a small estate, right?
And you also grow up with a frustration regarding bad decisions of those in your neighborhood.
So if your father's working and he's, you know, making a sort of lower middle class salary and then, you know, another three moms, another three women down the street become single moms and go on welfare and then taxes go up and blah, blah, blah, right?
Then you're like, I'm frustrated.
The tax is going up. I'm frustrated and negative towards the women who are becoming single moms or the whatever, right?
And so, if you have a two-parent family where the father works, and this could be the mother works, the father works, but in traditional ways that it works, Because the father's going to make more money overall because he's not interrupting his career by having kids and breastfeeding and being tired and the mood swings.
So that's one family, right?
Traditional two-parent family, fathers in the free market, and therefore expansions in the size and power of the state are directly inimicable against the values that you want, against the resources that are available to you.
Sorry kids, we can't go to Disney World because taxes went up, or I got taxed on this windfall, and so sorry.
Now, let's compare this to kids raised by a single mom.
Or it could be a father who works for the government or any number of these things, but the single mom.
Well, If you are in the family where the father works and you hear that benefits towards single moms are going up, then you're going to be frustrated because you know that's going to mean taxes going up on your dad and also more irresponsible single moms and all that.
But if you are a single mom and you hear benefits going up, well, you're in a very different situation.
You may hear, I'm sorry, we can't get you that cheap tablet because we don't have enough money.
And then you hear that the benefits are being increased and now it's like, hey, you get your tablet.
You get a cell phone, you get a PS4, whatever, right?
So then expansion of state power is to your benefit.
And so you become emotionally invested in that.
I remember that day when the benefits went up and we got to go out to a great meal.
Yay, government power!
And this is the, it's a cultural, economic, increasingly uncivil, civil war that is occurring in the West between the productive and the dependent, right?
Between those who are on the paying side So the welfare state fundamentally was driven By the hole in resources that opened up in the West after the death of 10 million young men in the First World War.
You needed widows benefits.
You needed other kinds of benefits.
You had massive costs of rehabilitation.
And, you know, there were people in the 80s who were still kept alive, whose lungs were fried by mustard gas, still kept alive in hospitals.
Someone's got to pay for that. And the women can't pay for it.
And the men can't pay for it because they're disabled.
So you have a massive increase in government spending, government power.
And then, as I've talked about before, usually within sort of 15 to 20, 25 years after women get the vote, you get a welfare state.
And part of that, you know, people get mad at women and all of that, but part of that is war.
Because, you know, after the First World War, well, you have the massive economic dislocations.
You know, governments punch drunk with fiat currency and central banking just go on a massive...
And some of that was just crazy government addicts to providing magic money to people.
And others were, you know, the brutal Treaty of Versailles imposed upon Germany.
I mean, Germany would have continued paying up until the 1980s war reparations, and they could not rebuild their economy.
Germany had suffered enormously.
I mean, there was starvation and disease that happened because of a blockade in Germany.
It wasn't invaded, but it was still pretty brutal.
And, of course, it had fought a two-front war.
And England, of course, had barely been touched by the war because you couldn't get bombers over as you could in World War II. America, of course, has, other than loss of manpower and resources, has not been touched by either of the First or the Second World War.
But Germany was first, I mean, it was blockaded and half-staffed to death in the First World War and then pretty much carpet-bombed from end to end in the Second World War.
And so Germany, in order to pay its reparations, to some degree, just began printing money.
And then some bright sparks in the West said, oh, well, we don't want that fiat currency because it's becoming increasingly worthless.
So what we'll do is we'll just come and take a million shoes from the German factories and we'll dump them in the British market.
Which made consumers happy in the short run, but destroyed the capacity for British shoemakers to sell their own shoes.
It's kind of what happens in the third world when you dump free food and you dump lots of resources, monetarily and otherwise, in the third world.
Dump a lot of free food in the third world and people are happy, like, yay, free food.
But the problem is that people stop becoming farmers because they can't sell their food.
You can't compete with free food. And you just become...
They become addicted to the free food.
And because there's free food, they can have, you know, six, seven, eight kids.
And next thing you know, there's a migrant crisis.
Anyway, so... So this...
Basis of the welfare state was really sewn into by a number of decisions.
And, you know, the comfort that you can take, I take some comfort in it, like demographic replacement and massive immigration problems.
Those decisions were made in 1965, like a year before I was born, and these debates were going on in England in the 60s and in America in the 60s, but the debates were shut down in the 60s very quickly.
You can just look up Enoch Powell, Rivers of Blood, which is a phrase he never actually used, but you can look up that and see what happened to his career to see just how open the debate was more than 50 years ago.
And All of these decisions, like government schools, you know, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, I mean, 150 plus years ago, some of this stuff.
I mean, these events were all set in motion many generations before you were born.
And that means, of course, that the snowball of statism rolling down the icy hill of bribery, incompetence, and And falsehood and attack, well, it's gotten pretty big.
Doesn't mean it can't be stopped, because we have the giant block of the internet now, but it just means there's a lot of momentum in the state.
And there's a lot of falsehood.
You know, if people can get you to accept unjust stuff...
If you can be bribed into obsequence and obedience to the existing power structures, you will inevitably start lying to yourself.
And the lie, in the long run, is actually much more dangerous than the free stuff.
Much more dangerous than the free stuff.
You know, I sometimes wonder if people get addicted more to lies than even to substances.
Because when I've talked to people who are addicted to various substances, Which I haven't done in many years.
But when I was younger, I would sometimes have these conversations.
And like somebody who was a social alcoholic, in my view, like they couldn't get together without beers.
You know, hey, let's get together tonight.
It's like, who's bringing the beer? It's like, why do we need beer?
What? We can't get together without the brain-deadening social lubrication of infinite vats of soul-effacing alcohol.
And generally, that's because...
People are boring and need to giggle, right?
So if your friends are boring, then you need alcohol to take them, to make them entertaining.
And then you hope that, you know, I remember one guy on my volleyball team many years ago.
One guy, his big story, you know, was he fell asleep at a party with a beer in his hand and somebody tried to take the beer away from him and he woke up to grab it.
And to me, that's like, well, that seems like a horribly dangerous addiction, you know?
I don't, you know, you could play an air horn next to the guy, he wouldn't wake up, but you try and take his beer, right?
And this was just, and this was considered cool.
And to me, the addiction is not the alcohol, it's the story about the alcohol, it's the story about the marijuana, it's the story about the gambling or whatever.
Like if your alcohol is like, you know, hey man, it's just fun, it's just cool, why would you be a square and not want to drink?
I mean, it's ridiculous, it's fun and blah, blah, blah, right?
Then it's a story about the alcohol that's more addictive.
The lies you tell yourself about the alcohol and why you need it that is more dangerous than the alcohol itself.
Because I think that the addiction is facilitated by the story around the addiction rather than what it is itself.
And, you know, when addicts hit rock bottom, the rock bottom is what?
The rock bottom is the end of the story.
It's the end of the cool factor.
If you've lost everything because of this addiction, it's kind of tough to say it's cool and it's fun and anyone who tries to talk you out of it is just a square who doesn't like enlightenment or something like that.
And so piercing the false narrative about the true addiction is the key and that, fortunately, is one of the central roles of philosophy.
And so where we stand is In the cycle of history right now is we have, for the first time in human history, really the first time in human history, we have a giant tool by which we can eviscerate the lies that people are telling themselves about their addictions.
And once we...
Can undo the lies, then we can change the unjust power.
The unjust power is cloaked in and sustained by the falsehoods we tell ourselves about it.
Like people who are trying to pull back government control over healthcare.
I mean, there's no rational analysis.
What's being said is, of course, you're taking healthcare from the sick and they're going to die.
Right. And that is creating a narrative about government control of healthcare.
It's nothing to do with reality.
People are dying because of Obamacare.
People are dying because of socialized healthcare.
You know, I was once referred to a specialist.
The waiting time up here in Canada?
Ten months.
Ten months.
Astonishing. I had to go on a big quest to go and find another doctor.
And it turned out to be nothing.
But it was like, okay, I'm supposed to sit here and wait for 10 months?
I could be dead. Like, you've got to be kidding me.
And so it's not a rational conversation about means and ends and virtue and integrity.
And I mean, it's just scare stories, right?
If I can... You know, shoot this flare of scare stories up and show you these imaginary monsters.
I can get you to run in the opposite direction.
Nothing to do with any rational analysis.
And so what we have now and what I've been working on With sole focus for the most part.
With sole focus for the most part.
What does that mean? That's kind of contradictory.
With significant focus, and I circle this all the time, is penetrating people's false stories about things.
The lies that we tell ourselves.
Because we've been bribed into compliance, and we've been bribed into obedience, and we've been bribed into obsequence, then...
Because we feel that the state is the mother who gives us life by providing us the resources we need to survive, then anybody who says state power should be reduced is perceived to be taking food from the mouths of your children and denying you health care and denying you a place to live and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, these are all stories, and they're utterly false.
And they're utterly false in ways that, I mean, scarcely even need to be repeated.
Poverty is far worse now than it was before the welfare state.
Far worse now. Now, in terms of proportion of the population, you can see, well, the line has gone up a little bit, but it's not particularly bad.
You can say, well, it's not much worse than it was in 1965.
But that's not true at all.
That is not true at all.
And there are a couple of reasons for that.
Number one, in 1965, there was not the same absolutely crushing national debt and unfunded liabilities throughout the West.
So, if you have the same proportion of poor people that you did in 1965, but you also have a massive debt, then you're poorer, much worse off.
You understand? I mean, if I have the same income that I did 10 years ago, but I'm now a million dollars in debt, I'm obviously poorer than I was if I was $10,000 in debt 10 years ago.
Now I'm a million dollars In debt, but my income has stayed at $50,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, or maybe it's gone up a little bit.
Was I richer or poorer 10 years ago?
Well, of course, I was much richer 10 years ago.
My income hasn't changed that much, but I didn't have nearly as much debt.
And so the way that you figure out What's called net worth is you take up assets income and you compare it against liabilities and debt, right?
And so if you say this, if somebody just buys, you know, $5 million house and they're paying like 80% of their income on a mortgage, Do you say, wow, they just went from not having $5 million to having $5 million?
It's like, nope, because they now have a liability, which is all of the interest that they're paying and, of course, the principal on the mortgage.
So the poor are much worse off now because as a country, as a civilization, we're far poorer than we were in the past because we have the same number of poor and we have...
Almost infinitely greater debt.
I mean, unfunded liabilities in America run north of $150 trillion a year or 10 times GDP. I mean, come on.
Come on. I mean, that is truly insane.
That literally, literally is like somebody having $100,000 a year income and being in debt over a million dollars.
I mean, you've got to be kidding.
And they're running a deficit that is, you know, $30,000, $40,000 a year.
So if they want to start paying their million-dollar debt off their, say, $60,000 a year, well, what's the $60,000 a year after taxes and after expenses?
Eight bucks. Eight bucks versus a million.
Oh, yeah, we'll be able to close that gap right away.
Now, of course, Trump's idea or argument is to grow your way out of it, and we'll see.
We'll see. Seems to be some indication that might happen, but it's a long, long climb, my friends.
The second reason why we're much worse off as a society regarding the poor is, of course, the definition of poverty has completely changed.
And if you look at the statistics for the poor, I've gone through this in other presentations.
I mean, it's ridiculous. Like, virtually nobody in the 1970s had air conditioning, and now the majority of the poor have air conditioning.
The majority of the poor have color flat-screen TVs and cell phones and internet and, you know, all of these kinds of things.
And the average poor person in America has a larger living space than a middle-class person than Europe, right?
And, of course, poverty is, to these days at least, significantly voluntary.
I mean, the average poor household, Two adults living in the average poor household work combined an average of 15 hours a week.
40% of what the poor spend their money on is luxuries that are, of course, not necessary by definition.
And they say, oh, it's about recessions and so on.
Nope, these numbers don't change whether there's a recession or a boom going on.
So some people choose less money and more leisure time, which is perfectly fine.
Perfectly fine. And one of the great challenges, of course, is that fun can't be economically redistributed by states, but money can, right?
So if you don't...
You got two brothers, right?
Bob and Doug. And Bob goes to night school and works hard and ends up saving a whole bunch of money and making a whole bunch of money.
Whereas his brother, Doug, goes out and parties and picks grapes in Queensland and backpacks around and sleeps around and, you know, has a blast and works occasionally as a bike courier and office temp and painter.
Improv. Guy in the busker in the subway.
So what happens is the guy who works hard, he ends up with a whole bunch of money the government can tax and redistribute to the fun wastrel guy, right?
So, while Bob was doing all this hard work and staying up late and so on, and Doug was out there having all this fun, well, you can't take the fun that Doug had and redistribute it back to Bob, right?
Because it's lost in time, it's history, it can't be transferred.
But all of the results of hard work, resources, well, they can be scooped up and redistributed.
It's one of the fundamental unfairnesses of this entire system.
So if people choose fun and leisure over making money, I've got no problem with that.
I can't possibly say to other people in any philosophical objective sense, you must be responsible.
You must work hard.
You must do night school.
You must upgrade your skills.
I don't know. What if the brother has only five years to live?
I'm going to do a PhD.
No, of course, he's going to go and have fun, right?
I don't know. I don't know what the balance is between work and fun for people.
I mean, maybe what you can do is try and have your work be fun, and then you're all set.
So, when the government starts lavishing all this money on people, you end up Not helping poverty.
Poverty gets worse. Communities and families have fallen apart, which was not the case in 1965.
The black family in particular was very strong.
And sometimes in American history, stronger even than the white family.
I mean, slaves weren't allowed to marry, but the majority of, significant majority of slave kids grew up in two-parent households.
As the saying goes, I mean, the welfare state has done what slavery couldn't do, what segregation couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, which is to destroy the black family.
So that's all gone.
The fourth reason why the poor are much worse off now after the welfare state is that employment-resistant personality traits, which are significantly genetic, have now been spread throughout the general population of the poor.
And that's very important as well.
Now you have people whose impulse control is so little, whose capacity to defer gratification is so little, whose IQ has been bred lower and lower over the time period, right?
Lower IQ people benefit more from the welfare state than higher IQ people, because if you're a high IQ person, you can end up making $100,000 a year.
But if you're a low IQ person, you're probably only going to make $20,000 or $30,000 a year.
Now, welfare benefits, single mom with two kids, you get $60,000, $65,000 American worth of welfare benefits in America.
And so working in the free market, if you're not that smart, is never going to pay you anywhere close to as much as you're going to get off welfare.
And this doesn't even count things like government subsidized schools and all that kind of stuff.
And so you have taxed High IQ people, which means high IQ people have fewer kids, and you have subsidized low IQ people, which means you have more low IQ people around.
And more dysfunctional personality structures, again, which is somewhat genetic, that have been around.
And the other reason why, fourth or fifth, I think we're in the fifth reason now why the poor are much worse off now than before the welfare state, Is that the entire work habits have been scrubbed from countless families.
I mean, there are many, many millions of welfare families now.
They haven't seen anybody have a job in like two or three generations.
And so, you know, how to get a job, how to keep a job, how to negotiate workplace conflicts, how to deal with difficult customers, how to interview, how to write a resume, all of that's gone.
Gone. And...
You know, it only takes one generation of people not speaking a language for that language to functionally vanish.
All of those skills, gone.
And they've been displaced by, because you've got the welfare state simultaneous with the war on drugs, which means that people are punished for honesty and rewarded financially, at least, for criminality, because war on drugs hugely raises the price of drugs and hugely raises the capacity to make money through being violent.
And through being violent and having money, you end up impregnating more welfare moms, right, what they call the Section 8 departments or the girlfriend forms.
So the violent genes are passed on and extrapolated, and you end up in this feral situation.
You're going, 100 people shot every weekend in Chicago, it would seem like.
So the poor are far worse off now than before the welfare state.
And now, of course, we're kind of back in a situation as a society where any attempt to curtail or restrain or diminish the welfare state will be met.
If it's significant, we'll be met with ferocious violence, rioting, looting, and so on.
And because there will be some racial element in that, particularly in America, nobody wants that.
Those optics, right?
Nobody wants those optics. So there's no way to diminish the demand for the welfare state.
The only thing that we can do, or diminish the demand for state power, the only thing we can do, which is why I do these conversations, the only thing that we can do is we can undo the lies that support the welfare state.
If the welfare state were to end tomorrow, people would figure it out.
They would band together. They would, you know, so some women would all, they'd all start to get together.
You'd have a community again because people would need each other again.
When you have the welfare state, you don't need your community.
You don't need the support of your community.
You don't need a church. You don't need values.
You just get free money for having sex, for becoming pregnant, for having babies.
You get paid for having babies.
Babies are a liability in society, and they should be a liability, because when you have a liability, you need a stable provider, which means you're going to choose a good man, and his stable genetics is going to be passed on to your kids.
There was no such thing as the friend zone before the welfare state.
I mean, think about that. Think about that.
There was no such thing as the friend zone before the welfare state.
Because if you were stable enough and a nice enough guy to be put into the friend zone, you'd be great marriage material.
So the woman would marry you.
Nice guys finished last genetically never occurred before the welfare state.
Fundamentally. Well, I mean, I guess between Genghis Khan and the welfare state, bad boys didn't get much traction.
So... When the government displaces the virtue of masculinity by dumping resources on women, women choose worse and worse men, genetically passing along those characteristics to their children, and communities are destroyed.
But those communities which are destroyed by, you know, the helicopter drop bombs and bales of money, Iraq-style, onto poorer neighborhoods, well, when those crates of money stop falling, your neighborhoods will reform very quickly.
People are incredibly adaptable and men adapt from peacetime to wartime with very little difficulty and women will simply adapt and they will find providers and they will share workloads and they will watch each other's kids while one of them goes, they'll just sort it out.
I'll just sort it out. I mean, it's one of these things that you think it's impossible, but then when it happens, it's like, you know, it really wasn't that bad.
I mean, I take this argument from the late Harry Brown, who, you know, people say, oh, well, if you get rid of government schools, it'll be chaos for years, and he's like, nah, it won't be.
It'll be like a week where people are, like, flustered, and then people will start opening schools in their garages, and people will start figuring out how to provide online courses better, and The best teachers will rent halls and amphitheaters and give lectures.
I mean, it'll just work itself out very quickly.
When the government moves out of the way, it's like taking a huge rock out of a charging stream or river.
I mean, you take the rock out and the water rushes forward to fill the void, right?
Nature abhors a vacuum. And when you take out state power, voluntarism and therefore quality.
Voluntarism is the same thing as quality.
It rushes in to fill that void and this has been happened over and over again.
So the only thing that we can do I think at the moment is push back against the lies.
The welfare state is the initiation of force.
It is a violation of the non-aggression principle because you're holding guns to people's heads saying give me your money so I can buy votes from these people over here.
It has nothing to do with concern or care for the poor.
Concern or care for the poor would be an objective evaluation of the future prospects of the poor and If you know a particular drug is going to vanish, like some addictive drug, heroin or something like that, if you knew for certain that that drug was going to vanish over the next few years, upping people's dosage is just cruel.
What you need to do is start tapering off their dosage so that you can have a soft landing rather than a hard crash.
Now, the drug, the most addictive drug in the world is fiat currency because it gives the illusion of power and free things and distorts people's sense of reality and has them deny and hate basic mathematical standards And diverging trend lines of income versus expenses and so on.
And it puts them in this unreality, this absolute unreality.
It's funny, you know, because the government is supposed to spend 12 years teaching you basic math and then advanced math.
But then the difference between income and expenditure is somehow a grand mystery to everyone.
There's an old saying, comes from Charles Dickens, from one of his novels.
And I read this as a kid.
It always stuck with me.
It's been a very, very guiding principle in my life.
Hopefully, pass along to you, see if it helps you.
It went something like this.
Income, £20 a year.
Expenditures, £19 a year.
19 shillings and sixpence.
Result happiness, right?
Six pennies below 20.
Income is 20. Think of it in modern terms.
Income, $20.
Expenditures, $19.95.
Result happiness. Income, $20.
Expenditures, $20.05 a year.
Result, misery. Of course.
Of course we understand all of this deep down, right?
And so the welfare state is going to end.
I mean, it is certainly with all of these immigrants and migrants piling on the welfare state and illegal immigrants accessing the welfare state without paying anything substantial towards it, with people piling their kids into schools.
It's not just the migrants.
It's like all the health care costs.
The welfare state is going to end.
It's either going to be a soft landing or it's going to be a hard landing.
And the way that we prepare people for it is to say, the drug is going to run out.
And it's going to run out like it's going to slowly run out.
It's going to like...
So if we up your dosage when we know the drug will end, if we pour more money into the welfare state and other government redistributionist programs, including the welfare warfare state.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I understand all of that.
And I'll do a separate show on all that stuff because it's very important.
But... Upping people's dosage when the drug is going to run out is very cruel.
Very cruel. And this just tells you how much people actually care about the poor.
Government money is going to run out.
We can either taper it down and have them survive the transition With less agony, less pain, or we can continue to crank up their dosage, pretend to the poor that the free drug of fiat currency will go on forever, in which case we're setting them up for a failure that is going to be extraordinarily harmful, perhaps even fatal, not just to the poor.
But to all of us. Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you so much for watching. Please let me know.
I could continue to do this all day, every day.
Please let me know what you think of these kinds of comments.
It's nice to be working without notes for a change.
Someone said, Komi said this.
So please let me know what you think.
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