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July 31, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:07
4155 Why I Am Not A Conservative
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So I guess there's a question I'd like to address, something I'd like to answer, which is why I'm not a conservative.
It doesn't mean I don't have things in common with conservatives.
It doesn't mean that there's an overlap of interests, just as there is with progressives, with me at least.
But no, I'm not a conservative, and I will tell you why, and perhaps I can convince you that there's another way to go.
So first of all, we have to talk about labels, why people need these labels so desperately.
Labels are a way of emotionally priming people to like or dislike certain arguments or perspectives or positions without actually having to understand them, to reason them from first principles.
And really understanding someone else's argument is a really tough and complicated thing to do.
I remember taking a course We're good to go.
And so I don't like the labels.
It's really the opposite of philosophy.
What people do is they create these labels, they infuse them with negative emotionality, and then they attach these labels to people as a way of driving you away from their arguments, of allowing you to dismiss the arguments that people are making without actually having to understand those arguments.
So... The labels is not good.
And conservative is just another kind of label.
It's not an argument. It's not a recent position.
It's a label. And if you like...
Tradition. If you like tradition, if you like old-timey ways of doing things, if you have a soft spot nostalgia for the 19th century, then it invokes in you a time when you can mentally project that things were better, that society had a future, that whatever it is that you like about society, government was smaller, which of course it was.
But it allows you to have an emotionality regarding the past that I don't think really helps you build a better future.
It's easy to get lost in the past.
It's easy to get lost in...
You know, it's funny. So, I mean, I played Dungeons& Dragons when I was in my early to mid-teens.
Developed a little bit of nostalgia for the Middle Ages, which was cured, of course, when you see...
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, because I think that's more of an accurate depiction of what was going on in the Middle Ages.
And spending a week in the Middle Ages desperately hoping not to get a cut so that you get infection, gangrene, or die of tooth decay by the time you're 25, well, the modern world is pretty sweet and pretty nice.
And to live in that kind of world of superstition, I remember reading a statement a historian made about the ancient Greeks.
And I'm paraphrasing, but it went something like this.
But of course the reality is that the ancient Greeks were unimaginably far from us in terms of modes of thought, the perception of their gods, the perception of their role in the universe, that it would be almost impossible to have a meaningful conversation about that.
The idea that the past is sort of a foreign country, they do things differently there, as another saying goes, is kind of interesting and has value to ponder how different the past is from the present.
And it is easy, of course, when the past recedes into history.
The general garbage tends to fall away.
Like what used to be called the Penny Dreadfuls was like the terrible novels that were written.
I guess the modern equivalent of, you know, the airport novels.
They're sort of thick and designed to not challenge you too much and kill time on a plane and so on.
That kind of literature doesn't tend to make it.
Like if you look at songs from the 60s, well, there were a lot of crap songs in the 60s, but the songs that have survived the 60s are the highlights.
If you go back even further and you look at classical music, well, there was a lot of bad classical music, mediocre classical music around, but what has survived the test of time tends to be the greatest.
Tons of playwrights in Shakespeare's time, lots of novelists in Dickens' times and so on, but they tend to fall away.
So when you look back at history, it's like you're looking at a jewelry store rather than a riverbed, you know, in terms of the gold, right?
So the gold is somewhere buried on the riverbed up in Alaska or something.
You look at the riverbed, it's like, wow, there's not a lot of gold there, and it takes a lot of work to get that gold, to get it out, to mine it, to refine it, to turn it into jewelry, and then there's a jewelry store, right?
So history... Has kind of a habit, the way history works, is the silt falls away, the water falls away, and what's left is the gold and the treasure and the jewelry.
And so right now we look at the world and we see all of the accumulated mediocrity, right?
I can't remember. Heinlein, I think, said.
Sturgeon? Sturgeon said 90% of everything is crap.
That's actually quite generous. Quite generous in terms of what's actually crap.
And so the past...
The mediocre, the average, the boring, the dull, the inconsequential, the distracting, the detritus, this all kind of sifted away.
And when you look at 19th century literature, you're not looking at the 19th century equivalent of an airline bookstore, an airport bookstore.
You're looking at everything that has survived the test of time.
So it's, of course, easier for the past...
To look better. People have this in their own lives too.
They look back at their teenage years and they forget the boredom or the insecurity or the ZOMG I have a pimple stuff and they just remember the highlights, the physical strength, the robustness, the flexibility, the ability to go partying on two hours sleep.
I remember those days.
The immense flexibility on the dance floor that I recall.
It is easy to look back and see the highlights of the past and say that the past is magnificent relative to the general detritism mediocrity of the present, but in the past there was a lot of garbage too, and people could certainly recognize quality.
Dickens was very popular in his day, as was Dostoevsky, Nietzsche not so much, but Shakespeare was enormously popular and recognized as a literary and artistic genius of the very, very first order, literally the first, number one, first order.
So, I don't... I mean, having recognized that basic issue, that the crap gets washed away from the past and all you're left with is the gold, so it's easy to look back on the golden era of the past as opposed to the tin, aluminum, garbage crap of the present, but that's not valid.
It's not fair. Well, and of course, in the past, there were great mechanisms for filtering out inconsequential or bad, say, writers, whereas now anyone can have a blog and, you know, you understand.
I mean, I think the meritocracy is good now.
I think the very best tend to do better, but...
Recognizing that the past is seductive in the way that the present is not is just something to weigh when you sort of look at the past versus the present.
Now, a conservative generally is somebody who believes that Long developed, hard won, hard fought for, filtered by evolution and history that particular social norms, social values, social institutions, social structures develop over a long period of time should not be Destroyed on a whim.
That we cannot trade the painfully developed structures of history for the utopian delusions of the present.
That when you break down, let's say that you're living in a cave.
And that cave took thousands or millions of years to develop.
And people say, well, it's just a cave.
It's just kind of accidental. We didn't really build it.
We just kind of shaped it, what we found.
And let's say there's a storm.
There's a storm going on. You're in this cave.
And people say, this cave was not designed from scratch.
This cave was just inherited.
It was the result of natural forces.
It's no good. And they say, get out of the cave!
And you get out of the cave.
You know, storm giants are hurling thunderbolts across the valleys.
And there's hail and frozen frogs are flying through the air and so on.
And you're like, okay, so we're out of the cave.
Where do we go now? And he's like, we're going...
To the platonic perfection of a house.
And you say, okay, where is that?
And he's like, it's all up here.
It's all up here.
And you're like, you know, I'm getting pelted in half a concussion from these giant frozen frogs.
Any chance we go back in the cave?
No! The cave has been destroyed because it was not designed from the ground up beautifully according to best architectural principles.
It's a bad cave.
Bad, bad cave. Well, all that's happened is you've been kicked out of a structure that gave you shelter, however accidental and geological it may have been, into something which does not exist as yet, right?
Which is some wonderful, perfect house that the person's utopian vision is coming up with.
So I think some of the conservatives would say, hey, it's not that we desperately love the cave.
It's just that's the shelter that we're all used to.
That's what evolved. That's what we've made our home.
Maybe we can look at a house, but I'd sure like to see it built first before we just go wandering off.
And of course, this is what happens, right?
I mean, in the West in particular, cultural icons and statues and a historical sense of self and any kind of nationalism is all being destroyed and smashed because it's not ideal, it's not perfect, it's bigoted or whatever.
But the problem is, well, where do we go, right?
Where do we go? There's no particular answer as to where we go.
Smash what is, and we'll get to someplace great, is not good.
Not good at all. So, from the perspective of, like, smash marriage.
Smash marriage. And we'll have a welfare state, and the state will be responsible for raising the children through daycares and government schools, and just smash the whole family structure.
You don't need men around. It's like...
What's that going to look like?
How's that going to work? Where's the proof that that's a better solution?
Well, there isn't. So conservatives, I think they don't mind at all the evolution of society, but in particular, conservatives say, we should not use the armed might of the state to reshape society in the image of untested utopianism.
That's a pretty good phrase. Just rolls off my tongue, what can I tell you?
No notes, baby! I am a silent symphony.
Things can evolve, things can get better and so on, but we shouldn't have utopianism united by the power of the state to force a change in society that is not arising organically out of the will of the people.
Nobody really decided that the welfare state was going to be the permanent situation within the West.
Among American conservatives, the majority want zero immigration.
Nobody's asked for this mass waves of third world immigration into the West.
It's being forced on people and they're being forced to pay for it.
It is not a free movement of people.
It's a bright movement of human people.
It's... The difference between a prostitute and a date.
A date is with you voluntarily.
A prostitute you have to pay to be there.
And you've got $340,000 plus just for one year per migrant in Sweden being charged to the taxpayer in the long run.
Well, this is not a chosen situation.
So the conservatives say, we've developed these institutions, trial and error, pain, success and failure and so on.
We can't just throw them away, use the armed might of the state to reshape society in the image of some perfect...
World, that is never particularly defined, because when society evolves organically, there's a lot of play back and forth, and it's voluntary.
It's voluntary. When society is changed by government force...
Let's just have a welfare state.
Let's have a giant bureaucracy. Let's force parents to pay for government schools, whether they like them or not, whether they have children or not, whether the children go to those government schools or not.
Let's just have the government do all of this while power corrupts.
And it is not the will of the people.
It is not the free market of societal reshaping, which occurs through convincing people and so on.
And of course, if you do like the idea, for instance, of income redistribution in a free society, No one's stopping you, right?
If you want to buy attractive land and get together with 100 of your closest friends, all give up your property rights and live in one giant STD swamp of orgiastic bliss, well, you're not initiating force against anyone.
You can make the man mountain of prehistoric dysfunction if you want.
As long as you're not initiating force or fraud, you know, go for it.
You can experiment as much as you want.
But having the government use force to transfer resources from people is not part of the free play of ideas and choice and is very wrong all around.
So it sounds like I'm in the conservative camp, yet still I demur and I'll tell you why.
There is a philosophy called pragmatism.
And pragmatism is very popular among agnostics, atheists, secular humanists, and so on.
Consequentialism, it can be called as well.
And it's basically, try a bunch of stuff, see which works the best, and that's the good.
Try a bunch of stuff, see which works the best, and then that is the good, right?
Now, of course, throughout a lot of human history, this is how farming improved.
You just tried a bunch of different stuff and saw which worked best and so on.
So there's nothing wrong with that as a whole.
I mean, I've tried a bunch of different show formats and so on, and some are more popular than others and some work better than others.
So I'm constantly experimenting to see what the best format and way is to get good ideas across to good people like yourself.
So, I mean, trial and error from a personal standpoint, from a business standpoint, and so on, has some real value.
But it doesn't really answer the question of ethics, fundamentally.
So, consequentialism is...
Well, you know, we tried the welfare state.
It lifted a whole bunch of people out of poverty.
So that's good, right?
Or the government has taken over the healthcare system and now more people are getting healthcare.
So that's good, right? There's no fundamental principle involved.
It's just, is there some quantifiably measurable benefit in the moment that For all of that.
Now, to take an extreme example as to why this makes no sense is that, let's say you've got two men and a woman hiking in the middle of nowhere, and the men want to have sex and the woman doesn't, and they have a vote, and they say, well, we're going to rape you.
And horribly, disgustingly, immorally, they rape the woman.
Well, she's unhappy, but two of them are happy.
So you have two happy people and one miserable person, so society is better off, right?
This is what happens when you don't have sex.
Principles. When you have the poor outnumber the very wealthy, right?
Obviously, right? And so there's this old argument that says if you give the poor the vote, they simply vote to take away the property of the rich, and then everyone ends up poor.
So the poor outnumber the wealthy.
And so in a democracy, when the government is not separated from the economy...
For the same reasons you'd want to separate the government from the church, from religion.
Then what happens is the poor, who are, you know, let's say 30-40% of the population, vote to take away the property of the top 1 or 5 or 10%.
They outnumber them, right? 40 to 1, 10 to 1, 4 to 1, whatever.
And then what happens is the money is transferred from the wealthy to the poor.
Now, the poor end up better off in the short run.
The wealthy end up worse off, but still relatively wealthy.
They're still richer than the poor. And so you have 40% of the population that is double happiness and 5% of the population that is down 50% happiness, let's say.
So you've got a net increase in human happiness.
And it's this kind of stuff that occurs that is just terrible.
Like, you know, 10 guys...
Rob a guy in a back alley.
Well, you know, the one guy is unhappy, but the ten guys are happy.
So you've got a net increase in human...
Like, there's none of this. There's no principles, no morals, no ethics involved here.
And this is the, you know...
Amoral calculus of pretend happiness in the moment that passes for ethics in a lot of secular communities.
No principles. And of course, the Christians, no issue with any of that, because they don't recognize that.
It's thou shalt not steal. Doesn't matter.
Like whatever else, right? Doesn't matter.
Whatever else is going. Net increase happiness, unhappiness.
It's all central planning. It's all...
Some human god looking over society and saying, well, these people are happier.
These people are unhappier. But the mathematics of this happiness is better than the unhappiness of this.
It's madness.
We're not human pawns.
We're not interchangeable.
We all deserve freedom from coercion, freedom from theft, freedom from violence, and freedom from fraud.
And there's ways to do that.
I've got whole books on my website, so I won't get into that here.
So... If society evolves, and it has to some degree through trial and error, right?
If you have two tribes and one tribe decides, well, we can own everything collectively.
And the other tribe says, we're going to have private property.
Well, you're going to end up with the private property generating, say, more, a better livestock.
It's going to generate more crops.
So that one tribe that says, let's do collective ownership, is going to get probably taken over or submerged or subjugated.
Or the women hypergomously are going to say, wow, the men in that tribe are way wealthier than men in my tribe.
And they're going to slide all over with their fishnet stockings and their, I guess, prehistoric equivalents are swinging.
Handbags and say, hey big boy, you want to come and try a bit of strange?
We're just over the river. You look well off.
I'm ditching these loser no-bull men that we've got and I'm coming to your fine mansion now.
Want a meal? Right? I mean, there's a meme for you.
So, there was a lot of trial and error throughout history.
Let's try raising a society matriarchally, as we're trying now.
Well, not matriarchally, but with gynocentrism, with female chicktatorship, female totalitarianism, or close to it.
And we can see, when you experiment between the Middle Eastern world and the Western world, is the Western world is giving women the power, and in the Middle Eastern world, generally men have the power, and I think it's not hard to see who's growing and winning and who's not.
And so there's all these experiments going on and they're all horrible and terrible because generally they're, right, you've got theocracies in the Middle East that are enforcing the patriarchy at the point of a gun or with the religious clubs and so on.
And then you have the state that is taking the votes of women and using that as a justification to redistribute trillions of dollars largely from men.
who are the majority of taxpayers, major taxpayers, two women who are the majority of consuming the bloody fruits of state power.
So this trial and error stuff, it's not good.
It's not good at all.
There's a lot of misery, a lot of destruction, a lot of death, a lot of murder, a lot of failure, a lot of just gruesome, dismal, horrible stuff that goes on with this trial and error.
So rather than the conservative approach, which says, you know, time-tested, battle-hardened institutions should be retained, okay, let's look into the value of those for sure.
But some of those are terrible as well.
So what we want to do is we want to Organize things philosophically.
We want to use reason and evidence to figure out what is the right way to organize society.
The right way to organize society is the universal application of the non-aggression principle.
No one gets to initiate the use of force against anyone else.
Now, is that utopianism?
Well, no, it's not utopianism if that's what you do every day in your life.
I doubt very much that when you want a meal, you go and, you know, hijack a Pizza delivery car and steal from it and beat the driver half senseless, right?
I mean, you go and trade for it.
You reason. You negotiate, right?
So this is how we all live.
It's just saying how we all live and what we all accept and what we tell kids in kindergarten, don't hit, don't steal, don't lie.
Well, maybe we can just have that as the basis of society and...
For that, unfortunately, or just realistically, the state, which is an agency that has a monopoly on the initiation of force against its citizens who are usually disarmed, at least proportionately, sorry, you had to go.
Slavery had to go, and the state has to go for us to really have freedom and a future.
Some institutions that develop slowly and painfully over time, such as aristocracy, monarchy, a caste system, religious fundamentalism of anti-rational kinds, well, they're not good.
They're not good. Now, that doesn't mean that we immediately burn everything to the ground and head off hoping that we can find some.
We have to have a better solution, reasonable arguments, reasonable ideas.
So, evolution, which is the sort of social evolution, anthropological evolution, political evolution, That's a lot of what conservatives are defending.
And the fact that something flourished in what was usually a very violent time in the past does not mean that it remains moral and productive in the present.
So I can't go with...
I'm with them in terms of, like, let's figure out why these things existed.
Like, why is the nuclear family the most successful?
Why are children and women in particular the safest in a long-term committed society?
Marriage. Let's figure all of that out before we start creating this welfare state that undermines and destroys marriage.
Let's do all of that. Let's figure all this stuff out.
So I'm not throw baby to the bathwater.
Everything that is evolved is bad.
But evolution is not a philosophical way to improve society.
So it's sort of the difference of saying, well, let's just randomly breed a bunch of wolves and see what happens, as opposed to, let's breed wolves, let's find the gentlest and most peaceful wolves, the ones that stay neotenized, basically stay being puppies all the way through to old age, and use them in society.
Selective breeding or further up genetic breeding.
Selective breeding of animals has been a constant throughout all of human agricultural evolution for the past 10,000 years.
So on the one level, it's random breeding and see which works better, which is very inefficient.
On another, it's selective breeding for visible characteristics.
And of course, further down, you will end up, I'm sure, with genetic breeding based upon very specific characteristics by which you can probably not spend dozens or hundreds of generations to get something productive, but you can probably do it.
In a generation or two.
For animals, you understand? Not people.
Not people. No such thing as forced or breeding or banning of breeding for human beings.
It's a fundamental right.
So philosophically, we want to do this, right?
We don't want to try and understand the universe through trial and error.
We don't want to say, well, we'll just try a whole bunch of different stuff and figure out what the universe is and how it works.
We want to use the scientific method, which is where we come up with rational, objective hypotheses.
We test them against empirical evidence.
We cast them out to be peer-reviewed and reproduced in other environments and so on.
We take a scientific approach.
That's what works in science, and that's what didn't work for thousands of human years of human beings trying to understand the universe.
When you see the progress made by science just in the last couple of hundred years or the progress made by the free market in the last couple of hundred years There's no comparison in history.
No comparison in history.
We have achieved complete paradise relative to all of human history, and we did that according to philosophical principles, not according to trial and error, and not according to let the best system win over time with huge amounts of destruction and blood for those that don't win.
So, I'm not a big fan of that evolution.
We don't need it. We can accelerate things enormously just by using rational principles.
Now, the last thing I wanted to mention as to why I'm not a conservative The question, I think, has become pretty important now, which is, well, what the hell are we conserving?
What are we conserving?
The last free market, well, there's never really been a perfect free market, but the last free market died before the First World War, for sure.
The last relatively free market died Before the First World War, and with the introduction of government control over currency through the monopoly grant to the privately owned Federal Reserve, and then of course in the First World War, massive amounts of government takeover of currency,
the separation of paper currency, which was originally just supposed to be a note for gold pieces, the separation and just mass printing of whatever currency you wanted in the government, In the 1930s, the creeping socialism that was rammed down the throat,
particularly to the American voters under FDR, you know, as a result of the Fed provoking, which is openly admitted by Fed historians now, openly provoking the massive run-up of stocks in the stock market crash and then a 13-year depression overseen by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his endless imposition of massive And so,
what would we be conserving now?
Is it a conservative position to say the welfare state is an immoral abomination that is going to destroy the West because it's a giant magnet for irresponsible Westerners and greedy people from outside the West who want to come in and squat on the welfare jugular until we all bleed out?
Is it a conservative position?
Some conservatives would certainly say it.
It's a conservative position to say central banking.
Is the immoral, illegitimate pillaging in particular the savings and pockets of the poor through the erosion of the value of their money?
Well, of course, there's Ron Paul and others and the Fed and so on.
That certainly is considered more of a radical libertarian position, although I understand the word radical.
It's not an argument. When they say radical, they generally mean...
Consistent. Consistent is radical these days.
Or absolute, right?
So, what is...
Is it a conservative position to say that the government should have nothing to do with funding for student loans for higher education?
And the government should certainly allow...
Certainly the government should allow students to discharge...
Student debt through bankruptcy.
Of course they should. Of course, because you sign something when you're lied to when you're 17 or 18 years old, and you end up getting a terrible education that has you worse off, in debt, confused and hostile towards your own society.
It's terrible, terrible stuff. So, of course, is that a conservative position?
It doesn't seem to be.
If you look at sort of the mainstream conservatives, like the PCs in Canada, the Conservative Party in the UK, if you look at...
Obviously, the Republicans prior to Trump in the States, none of these were seriously proposed positions and so on.
They tend to be appeasers.
They tend to say, well, you know, if we can get a 5% reduction in a tax rate that's gone up 10 times over the last century, like, yeah, 10 times, then, you know, that's good, right?
You want people to cure you, not people to say, well, I can slow down the illness by 5%, right?
That's not a cure, right?
That's just a delaying of the inevitable.
So what does it mean to be a conservative these days?
What are you conserving?
Look at Social Security. Social Security is an immoral plundering of the young for the sake of buying the votes of the richest generation the world has ever seen, who are the baby boomers.
It destroys future possibilities of the young and it is utterly unjust because the boomers say, well, we paid into the system.
It's like, no, you didn't. Your money was given to the government.
You voted for it in general because anyone who tried to vote to run against it was just voted down and screamed down.
And so, yeah, it's a horrible immoral system.
Is it a conservative position to say that old age pensions, social security, socialized medicine, and all these kinds of things are terrible and destructive and horrible and immoral because they involve the initiation of the use of force?
Well, I don't know a lot of conservatives who oppose these things.
There are a few, don't get me wrong, but not very many.
So now, think of it like this.
There's a beautiful watercolor painting, a beautiful painting, and you want to copy it, right?
I had an uncle, actually, who was fantastic at doing this.
He was wonderful at reproducing other people's art, just like a human photocopier, slow-motion reproduction.
Amazing stuff. And so you've got a watercolor.
It's beautiful. Whatever your happy place is, somebody did a perfect watercolor.
For me, it's looking at you guys and chatting with the world.
But whatever it is for you, right? The perfect watercolor.
And you say, I really want to copy this, right?
And so you set it out and you go down to get your paint.
Set it outside because that's where the light is the best, right?
Set it outside. You go down to get your paints, but you can't find the right paints.
And then your paintbrushes, you forgot to clean them last time, so you've got to clean them and blah, blah, blah.
You're down there for an hour or two, right?
You come up. And it's been raining.
It's rained on your watercolor painting, so it's all, you know, tears of a clown flowing down, and it doesn't look like it used to anymore.
Well, what's your choice? Let's just say that's the only painting of its kind.
It's not a copy. That was the original.
It's the only one that it is.
What do you do? But you can't recreate the original because it's all been rained on.
It's all changed. So do you say, well, I'm now going to copy the drizzled, dripped, rained-on watercolor painting?
Well, you can, of course, but that's not your original intention.
Now all you can do is preserve the look of that which has Been destroyed.
All you can do is preserve the look of that which has decayed.
You can no longer get...
Now, if you say, I want that beautiful painting back, well, there's no point copying the painting that's been rained on.
Because that's not the original beautiful painting that you want.
You just have to start a new painting.
And that's where I stand with regards to conservatism.
Western values, Western society, Western morality has decayed to the point where attempting to conserve anything that is or anything that has been for the last hundred years is attempting to preserve that which is immoral.
We need to make a new painting.
We need to think about how we can organize society according to rational, objective, moral principles, not according to the accumulated errors and problems of history.
So that, foundationally, is why I am not a conservative.
I am a philosopher.
Which means the only things I want to conserve are reason and evidence.
Thank you so much for listening and for watching.
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