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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:05:20
The Ethics of Capitalism Part I (Capitalism
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Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to another year of Capitalism and Morality Seminar.
I want to tell a small story about my childhood from Bhopal, Central India.
This is a story which happened on the 2nd of December, 1984.
Late in the night, I woke up from non-stop wailing of sirens When I woke up, I felt pungent air and irritation in my eyes.
So I ran up to the rooftop to see what was happening.
Those days, most of the cars were owned by the government.
And the only sirens and red lights that you ever saw were the sirens and red lights on the top of the cars as a status symbol of cars of bureaucrats and politicians.
And so I saw hundreds of such cars going in only one direction.
They were all leaving the city.
This was a very weird scene for me.
I knew something was seriously wrong.
My survival instincts, honed over years, had told me there was something very bad going on.
It took us many years, many hours, given that we had only one government-run radio station those days, it took us many hours to figure out what was happening.
But when I woke up at that moment, a chemical factory of Union Carbide was spewing a poisonous gas, methyl isocyanide, into the city, killing thousands of people.
Now, I won't go into much details about the event right now, but all those sirens and the cars that were leaving the city were of politicians and bureaucrats.
They were all running away, and they did not return back to the city for many months.
People of Bhopal learned a very important lesson that day.
When emergencies strike, the government runs away.
There was utter contempt in the minds of people for politicians and bureaucrats.
It seemed, and I worked in the area for many days after that, it seemed that when the government would return, people would kick them out, quite rightly, at the first available opportunity.
Alas, as you can probably guess, when the government returned, it not only came back, but a new department came into existence with the full approval of the people of Bhopal.
And the name of the department is Department of Gas Tragedy.
Now, I went to that department recently, and it reminds me of something that comes from the stories I read about Stalin's time in USSR.
But that's another thing.
Let me expand a bit more of the scene of those days, just prior to the gas tragedy in Bhopal.
Just over a month earlier, Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, had been assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.
Sikh is a minority religion in India and they are the people who wear turbans.
A few months earlier, Indira Gandhi had sent army tanks, proper army tanks, battle army tanks, and commandos into a Sikh temple.
Some people who Indian government had designated as terrorists were holed up inside the temple.
But really a simple disconnection of water supply and electricity supply would have forced these people inside the temple to surrender.
But Indira Gandhi wanted to humiliate the Sikh.
So she sent the army tanks in.
Hundreds of people died in this senseless army attack.
Exactly the people who were paid to protect Indians.
And then Indira Gandhi's assassination resulted in anti-Sikh riots all over the country, killing another thousands of people.
Unlike the people in the West, Indians do not trust their government.
I have probably never met an Indian who trusts the government.
I worked in India for many years.
In my various jobs in India, I met hundreds of very senior politicians and bureaucrats.
I have never met one public servant who does not ask for a bribe.
In fact, I have never met an Indian who has met a public servant who does not ask for a bribe.
Moreover, Indian bureaucrat does not just take your money.
He wants you to beg and grovel.
And when all this drama is done, he does not deliver on his part of the deal.
Really, when I think of Indian bureaucrats and politicians, I feel the same revulsion that I feel when I encounter cockroaches and leeches.
But really, most Indians feel the same way.
Or let me correct.
I was born in a relatively well-off, well-connected family with access to top politicians.
The average guy lives in horror of the local policeman and bureaucrat.
So I ask a very important question here.
India is the world's biggest democracy.
In that country, reasonably fair elections are held.
So my question is, why doesn't the average Indian who lives in horror of the government, when he goes to vote, why doesn't he kick out his government?
My view is that while governments everywhere are nothing but organized mafia, they are merely symptoms of the problem.
The reason political action makes no sense.
The real disease is elsewhere, and that resides in the beliefs and paradigms of the individuals in the society, which provide the ingredients for a tyrannical state.
Let me expand.
For a lot of Indians, and a lot of Indians I talked to when the Indian army attacked the Sikh temple, for them, it was completely acceptable that Indian army went to attack the Sikh temple.
Somewhere in their minds, they thought that they would forever be excluded from being attacked themselves.
So why care if other people are going to suffer for it?
For a lot of Indians, Indian Army's heavy-handedness in Kashmir is fully justifiable.
Indian Army exists with legal immunity in Kashmir and many other states in India.
But the average Indian feigning higher moral and nationalistic ground believes that he has the right to sanction oppression as long as he does not himself has to bear the cost.
Most Indians I know of think that it's okay to abuse Bangladeshi immigrants because they are illegal.
They think, a lot of middle class Indians who I know, they think it's perfectly fine for the government to seize land of rural people and tribal people for mining and road making purposes for the larger good.
Alas, when everyone thinks the same way, when everyone has the same attitude, all in essence underpinned by hypocrisy, dishonesty, irresponsibility, and sheer crookedness, despite that they all individually might hate their government, and despite that they all individually might want the government to get to be smaller in size, they end up with a huge, tyrannical government.
He fails, the average guy fails to see the connection and the causality.
For me, that is the real disease.
And the state is only a problem.
And we are here not to attack the state as such today.
Now why am I saying all this to you, to a North American crowd?
And that is not to make you feel better about yourself.
in comparison.
My belief is that just about everything I have talked about North America, that I have talked about India, increasingly shows its presence in North America.
And I think it's getting increasingly worse.
I'm almost convinced that it's just going to get worse and worse because that's the path this culture has taken.
And it's not worth blaming the state.
It's the cultural problem.
We are here to discuss those fundamental beliefs and paradigms that have put the West on a slippery slope to totalitarianism.
With that, I would like to introduce our keynote speaker, Stefan Molyneux.
My first introduction to Mr. Molyneux was a video of his on anarchism and minarchism.
I thought it was absolutely the best analysis I had ever heard on why the concept of minimal government does not work.
He's a prolific producer of YouTube documentaries, author of many books, and the host of Freedom Main Radio.
His hundreds of podcasts, and I think maybe there are thousands actually, and videos, and several books might give a feeling that he runs a major libertarian organization, but he is the organization.
He's a staunch supporter of liberty and rationality, an extraordinarily entrepreneurial philosopher, Last year, on a visit to Beijing, I was invited to a party organized by a bunch of libertarians who had left North America to seek freedom.
Very nice and very rational people.
There I met several who had sought the path of rationality and integrity.
After listening to Mr. Molineux, I could not resist inviting him to speak in this seminar.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Molyneux.
Well, thanks, everybody.
Good morning.
Oh, I've got an hour and a half to talk about ethics.
It's my favorite topic.
I think it is the most important topic.
And actually, and thanks again for the invitation here, do you know this is the first time I'm speaking at any major event in Canada?
It's interesting, you know, it's always the case, you have to go south to make it.
And then you get invited back to Canada and they will give you a microphone.
And I've also been told we can go a little bit over.
And as you know, once I get this microphone, I've actually been informed that it takes about, I think on average, about four security guards to get it away from me.
And for those security guards in the back, remember, I'm a biter.
So be careful.
It's a nice, I'm actually really happy to see the demographic here is very varied, right?
Young to not so young.
And that's nice, because some of the libertarian events in the US can be a little slanted towards the, I don't know how to put that nicely, the older side of the spectrum.
And basically, when I do a speech there, I usually hear, what?
What?
Anarchism?
We supposed to strangle each other?
What?
I just drove up from Vegas, actually, to the chilly realm of Vancouver, so it's really nice to be here.
We're going to go a little bit over.
Around 9.30 there's going to be a break and you can all flee if you like.
I'll stay.
If anybody has any Q&As, we'll set the mic up there and we'll talk some more Q&As.
I'm talking twice today because other speakers cost money.
Two for one!
He found the secret coupon on my website.
So this morning, I'm going to put forward a theory of the history of ethics.
I think this is going to be fascinating, for me at least, hopefully for you too.
And then this afternoon, I have a theory of ethics called universally preferable behavior.
This is going to be like the comedy club.
Well, not funny.
But it's going to be like the comedy club in that if you're close to the stage, I'm going to borrow you.
Because I think that ethics is way too conceptual a lot of the time, so I'm going to bring people up and we're going to demonstrate how a rational ethical theory can work in particular situations.
So, if you're into audience participation, please sit at the front.
Otherwise, I'll just have to... I think I've got a little harpoon to pull people onto the stage.
But it would be really helpful because I think I'd like to keep it more dynamic that way.
So, ethics.
Generally, it's a call to good behavior.
It's a call to Be truthful, to be courageous.
In the ancient world, in Athens, of course, Greeks came out of a martial culture.
And so the warrior culture, the dominance culture, was very powerful in the ancient Greek ethics, right?
So it was all about a good man is a man who achieves power, who benefits his friends, and punishes his enemies, and comes to no harm himself.
That was sort of the basic Socrates came along with a very surprising ethic for the time, which was that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil.
Because suffering evil doesn't harm the soul, which was his major golden calf to save.
Whereas if you do evil to others, then it harms the soul, and this was not good.
And like most moralists through the ages, I'll just give you like, I mean, this is a very, very brief tour, so I apologize for not going into any detail.
But the question, of course, that moralists have to answer is, why be good?
Why be good?
I mean, there's obviously great advantages in a material sense to not being good.
I mean, you get lots of stuff for free.
And the other thing, too, is that lots of people like not being good.
I mean, presidents run for re-election.
Seriously, you couldn't cattle prod me into running for it.
Should some ancient Egyptian curse land on me and I wake up in some oval office, I'd be cloying to get out like a ferret in an old aquarium.
But they want it again.
Because, I mean, the government is what?
The government is free evil.
You get to do bad, and other people get to pay.
And so, people really like not doing good.
And so, this is sort of the great challenge that philosophers face, and they face throughout history.
And so, because philosophy has had, ethics in particular, has had this really tough problem, why should we be good when it's so advantageous to be bad?
I mean, the bureaucrats that Dave was talking about love that power, I would assume.
I was talking to a listener who came through customs this morning, grilled.
Is this your boyfriend?
How on earth could that conceivably be relevant to anything?
When I was crossing the border to go to Vegas, they used to say, do you have more than $10,000?
I'm a podcaster.
Does that answer your question?
But they ask, how much money do you have?
Which is a much less open-ended question.
But they like it.
They go shop for work every day.
They could do any bunch of things.
They like that power.
I don't know if you've read some of the latest studies.
Completely fascinating.
Dopamine is a natural opiate within the body.
And when you rise in power in society, your body releases more of these natural opiates.
You get high from power.
And according to the measurements, it's actually more powerful than cocaine.
The gaining of political power, the exercising of violent power over other human beings is more addictive than cocaine.
This is why it's so ironic that we have politicians Fighting a war on drugs.
Who themselves, of course, are addicted to politics.
In a very real, very physical sense.
And if you go back down, if you lose hierarchy, they've done these studies on monkeys, if you lose your place in the hierarchy, your dopamine production begins to diminish considerably.
You get withdrawal.
I think that's why they want to go back to office.
That's why they're addicted.
So this is a big problem.
I mean, when the body says it feels really good to do bad, it's a little tough to say you'll be happy if you do good, because the body is saying otherwise.
And of course, in the ancient world, they didn't have all of this knowledge.
I mean, all this science and all that, which is why it's tough to analyze the ethics of the ancient world in the same way that we would now, because they just didn't have the science.
Aristotle promised eudaimonia, which was the general sense of well-being that comes from living a good life.
Of course, Epicurus, Epicurean, you know, everyone assumes that just means eating a big meal, but Epicurus was saying, well, pleasure doesn't result from virtue.
Pleasure is the purpose of virtue, happiness, freedom, peace of mind, and so on.
That's the purpose of it.
Of course, philosophy took a bit of a hiatus during the Dark Ages, and then Thomas Aquinas tried to synthesize biblical and Aristotelian philosophies, and he started to bring in the nature of man argument, which objectivists, of which I've been for many years, are very familiar, which is it is the nature of man to require which is it is the nature of man to require X, and therefore it is good to do X, right?
The nature of man is rational, so to be rational is that which is good for man and so on.
And so he tried to make the nature of man argument.
So he said, well, human beings need life, therefore to take away life from a human being is evil and so on because that's what we need to live.
That didn't take either.
Again, you know, the problem with ethics was ethical arguments were not solving the problems of evil throughout human history.
That's why you keep seeing it mutate, you know, like the Terminator at the end of Terminator 2.
Anybody?
I think that's right in the middle of the demographic here, so if you don't know.
You know, he switches into all these different characters.
There's always this change that they try and keep solving the same problem.
Because then you got, after Aquinas, you got a lot of universals.
People started really going into universals, which I mean, I think is great.
I think it's kind of the key, which we'll talk about this afternoon.
Kant, we got objectivists, normally Kant, spit down to the side, because I'm not such a big fan of Immanuel Kant, but he had the categorical imperative, which is sort of act as if The principle of your action becomes everybody's duty.
Everybody has to act that way.
So if you steal, everybody has to steal.
And if that can't be sustained, then you shouldn't steal.
That was his approach.
Well, that didn't work.
Evil continued, right?
So it's all these inoculations that don't work.
The Founding Fathers.
All men are created equal.
I wish they'd just stop there, you know?
That way you don't need a constitution, because if all men are created equal, no man or woman should have political power over others.
But they always got to have one more sentence.
And so we need a government.
And that didn't work.
I mean, right after the Constitution was enacted, wasn't it George Washington riding down to Pennsylvania at the head of an army because the whiskey tax wasn't being submitted on time?
Slavery.
No rights for women.
Few, if any, rights for children.
Didn't work too well.
Worked for a few, as ethics always tends to.
I'll make the case for that this morning as to why.
So then we tried utilitarianism.
Sir John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Spock, remember?
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.
Where's the demographic here?
Oh, there are a few people.
Okay.
So this is the idea that it's the, you know, something is good if it provides the greatest good for the greatest number.
And then we had the 20th century.
Still not working very well, is it?
Still not working.
See, this is important.
That's how I'm going to make the case today, this morning, that ethics sucks.
It really does.
It sucks like an intergalactic vacuum.
Doesn't have to, but historically it has.
And then, I mean, Nietzsche took a significantly moustached machete to the base of the traditional Christian ethics of his time.
He said that ethics was invented by the weak to control the strong, to infect them with guilt and a sense of obligation to the less powerful.
that Christianity in particular was a slave morality, was popular among slaves, and that's why the most powerful become the least powerful, the least powerful become the most powerful, the meat shall inherit the earth, and it's a way of restraining the powerful.
I don't think that's particularly true, but it was a very powerful argument at the time.
And then in the 20th century, with all of the relativism that came out of a lot of the German philosophers of the 19th century, you got the horrors of the 20th century, you got the Holocaust, and then people said, well, there's got to be something that we can be doing that's better.
Unfortunately, then you got the twin horrors, I would say, of relativism and political correctness, which are two very strange things, right?
Nothing is true, but you can't say this word.
So, I mean, sorry, that's a completely ridiculously brief overview, but I just want to make the case.
So, some of the very first ethical statements, I actually wrote down in the books, some of the very first ethical statements, ethical norms that came out of history, the Sumerian farmers' almanac, and the Egyptian instructions of amenomenopy, they said, listen, if you're a rich farmer, leave some gleanings for the poor people.
Because if you do, the gods will give you hair, favors, whatever it is.
The gods will bless you.
And this is the weird thing.
This is the fundamental thing around ethics.
Two things that are essential about ethics that have failed, I would argue, in history.
Why be good?
Well, number one, what do they say?
You'll be happy.
Reason equals virtue.
Equals happiness.
That's what the Greeks gave to us, I would argue.
Gotta be rational.
If you're rational, you can be good.
And if you're good, you'll be happy.
That's the carrot that they always hold out.
And that's true of utilitarianism.
Greatest good for the greatest number.
They'll be happy and so on.
They don't just mean material good.
They mean well-being and happiness.
So that's the carrot that they always hold out.
The ethicists always hold out this carrot.
You'll be happy.
But it doesn't work very well.
For a number of reasons.
First of all, there are sadists and politicians.
Sorry, I repeat myself.
But there are people who enjoy being bad, who are happy doing ill.
And not just because they're sadists, but because there's this whole physical system that rewards you for the gaining of power.
Because we're mammals, right?
We're not, you know, necessarily divine sparks that, you know, just happen to be passing through this fleshly realm.
We are mammals.
And so, like all animals, what we want to do is we want to maximize our resource consumption while minimizing our effort.
And there's no better way to do that than be at the top of the political hierarchy.
You know, a hat is, a crown is not just a hat that lets the rain in, it gets you all these goodies.
So the achievement of political power from a pure, you know, what did they say?
Something like 30% of people in Asia can be traced back to Genghis Khan?
I mean, that guy got around.
So from a, you know, reproduce your genes and provide for your family, I mean, being bad is great.
And that's why the body gives you all of these happy, happy joy juices when you achieve power, because it's good for you as a mammal to have power over others.
So the happiness argument doesn't really work.
So what happens?
What's the backup position if you don't buy the happiness argument for virtue?
Anyone here go to Sunday school?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What's the backup position?
Oh, you don't buy Where you going you're going down to the toaster, baby Yeah, so you get the curse right the curse of eternal hellfire or in In the ancient Greek world I mean there was Hades and so on it wasn't necessarily the same as hell, but they would say you'll be miserable and You'll go to hell And That's how it works.
You've got a carrot called happiness or heaven.
You get to go to heaven.
You get to be with your relatives.
You get to go to heaven if you're good and you go to hell if you're bad.
Now, we have something that's almost identical in the secular realm.
Right?
We stop at the border.
We may not believe in the border.
It may be an imaginary line.
It may be, oh, this tax cage ends here.
This tax cage starts here.
I always love how they say, love it or leave it.
You know, if you're in a zoo, you can choose to go to a different cage.
We'll call that freedom.
But we stop.
Why?
Because we respect the uniform?
No, it's costume.
I don't respect fiber.
My bowels respect fiber, but I don't.
Bowel joke too early, everyone?
Yeah?
Okay.
We'll save those.
After lunch, maybe.
But we stop because they've got guns.
Right?
So, heaven, happiness, freedom is what they'll give you if you're good.
And by good, this just means obeying the law.
But if you're bad, Well, cats in blue suits will come to your house and drag you away to a cage.
I'm going to make the case that this is insane.
I mean, of course it's insane from a practical standpoint.
We all get that.
But there's a great quote from Nietzsche.
You know, we've got this carrot and a stick thing.
Be good to be happy or we'll throw you in jail.
Be good to get to heaven or you go to hell.
Nietzsche said... I don't know what Nietzsche said.
Nietzsche wrote... He wrote, all things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their irrational origins become improbable.
It's very strange when you think about it.
That there should be this carrot and this stick in morality.
Because if morality is true, if morality is valid, if morality is rational, if morality is empirical, why do you need all of these hysterical sticks and carrots floating around it?
It makes no sense.
I mean, picture this.
You pick up a copy of Scientific American.
I don't know.
It was around when Einstein was publishing in the early 20th century.
But pick up this article of some science journal about the general theory of relativity.
And, you know, it gives you the math, it gives you whatever, right?
Gives you the arguments.
And then it says, if you don't believe in the general theory of relativity, you will go to hell forever.
But if you accept the general theory of relativity, You will float up to a paradise of eternal disco-dom forever.
Wouldn't that be a completely bizarre thing?
You have to accept that the earth goes around the sun or we will drag you off to a cage for years and years and years.
That would be very strange.
If you don't believe that two and two make four, you will be miserable And your conscience will attack you until the day you die.
We would only say that if we didn't really believe it.
We would only punish people if we didn't really know what goodness was.
If we didn't really have any proof.
You know, when people are incredibly overbearing and threaten you with stuff, it's because they have no basis.
for what they're saying.
Because if you have a basis for what you're saying, if you can prove it, you don't need to threaten people with eternal damnation.
I would argue that the carrot and the stick are indicative of the hollow, shaky base foundations of ethics, that we don't know what goodness is, we don't know why we should be good, we feel there's a need for everyone to obey, and so we threaten and bribe because we can't prove
And I would say until we can prove these threats, these bribes, this nonsense, this hysteria, this abuse will just go on and on and on.
And we will feel that we need a state to make people be good because we can't reason them into being good.
Because we don't know what goodness is.
And earlier I said ethics sucks.
Boy, this really does sound nihilistic, doesn't it?
Let's all go out and strangle hobos!
And let me tell you why I think ethics sucks.
What are the four major things, major human activities that ethics is not so keen on?
Thou shalt not.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not murder.
I mean, they did get the self-defense.
Thou shalt not murder.
Thou shalt not steal.
Well, I mean, sorry, I'm giving you a bit of the, you know, the Ten Commandments thing.
Only a few of those, I think, make a whole lot of sense.
We're not allowed to kill.
We're not allowed to steal.
We're not allowed to assault.
We can't go up and just deck people, right?
Again, unless you have the requisite fiber.
And you can't rape.
Sorry?
Drops a little?
Sorry about that.
Okay, so no stealing, no killing, no assault, no rape.
Now, I mean, there's contracts and all this stuff, but these are the basics, right?
This is the kindergarten ethics.
Okay, maybe not the rape thing.
But these are the four basics.
And please let me know if I go down again.
Sorry about that.
I just, I can't stand there for an hour and a half, so it's much better for me.
I hope you don't mind.
A little closer?
Okay.
So those are the four major things.
Okay, so let's just go with Thou Shalt Not Kill.
So for, you could argue, 3,000 years or so.
Certainly, I mean, Socrates is 2,500 years ago.
For about 3,000 years, moralists, ethicists, philosophers, thinkers have all been trying to work on Thou Shalt Not Kill.
3,000 years after the project called Thou Shalt Not Kill started, we have the last 100 years.
Anybody know how many people were killed, how many citizens were killed by their own governments over the last hundred years?
Well, it depends.
You know, of course, the sad thing is you can't even get within 10 million of it.
I mean, isn't that terrible?
It's a rounding error.
A Holocaust and a half is a rounding error in these calculations.
250, 260 million citizens killed by their own governments.
Not including war.
I mean, that's just camps, collectivized farming.
That's a quarter of a billion people at the end of a 3,000-year project called Thou Shalt Not Kill.
That sucks!
Thou shalt not steal.
Do I even need to say it? .
LIBOR, the Federal Reserve, central banking, national debts, counterfeiting, fiat currency.
Thou shalt not steal.
I think they just may have dropped one word from that.
So that has been a terrible result.
What is it?
Every American child... Sorry, I know, I don't know.
The numbers in Canada are similar, but every American child is born now half a million dollars in debt.
That's some pretty good thieving.
I mean, if you can thieve from a fetus, You're good.
You know, a pickpocket to get into your pocket is tough enough.
Going through the belly button?
That's some nimble fingers.
So thou shalt not steal.
The US is now 75 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities, monies that they promised to pay in various programs that they don't have the money for.
75 trillion dollars is truly astounding.
Thou Shalt Not Steal has resulted in, in the last, well, since 1913, or I don't know, when was the Central Bank put in in Canada?
I'm so sorry to not know more Canadian references, but as I said, I'm new here.
But over the last hundred years, there has been more theft in the world than has occurred, I would argue, in the previous 10,000 years.
That's the result of the 3,000-year program called Thou Shalt Not Steal.
Thou shalt not assault.
War on drugs.
Eminent domain.
Prisons.
The weird thing about statism Let me just do my first official tangent of the day.
Probably not the last.
But the weird thing about statism is it freezes everything in time.
The moment you put coercion around any particular solution, it becomes immune to time.
It becomes like the picture of Dorian Gray.
The world changes, but it stays the same.
I did a speech at a university in Philadelphia where I was pointing out that when government education in sort of the mid-19th century came into being, you had a teacher, 30 kids, and a blackboard.
Fast forward 150 years of the greatest technological change in the history of mankind, and what do you have?
30 kids.
A teacher, wait for it, it's a whiteboard.
That's what we call progress in a status environment.
And the problem of crime, what do we have?
We have exactly, fundamentally, the same solution, or non-solution, that we had thousands of years ago.
Give some people some guns and tell them to go lock people up.
It's horrible how little things change when you wrap them in coercion.
It becomes like a cyst, you know, it becomes out of change.
So, the reason I say ethics suck is if you look at the big picture, like I'm a, I come out of the entrepreneurial world.
I was an entrepreneur for 15 years.
I guess I still am, but I like in the actual business world and you measure progress all the time.
You have to.
Because resources are limited, desires are infinite.
You have to.
I remember when Bill Gates, makes me sound like another guy, that guy, deadbeat, still owes me money.
But I remember when Bill Gates went from his, you know, profiting from the patent system to doing charity.
He, you know, would start to work with these non-governmental organizations and say, well, we want to get these mosquito nets out to people, we want to do all of this stuff.
And they'd be like, yeah, we're on it.
And he'd be like, well, where's your numbers?
How many did you do?
And they had no numbers.
And he said, OK, well, forget the money.
First thing we've got to do is put in reporting.
We've got to measure things, because we've got to know if we're making progress.
And my concern, as I always look at the big picture, what is the claim?
And what are the results?
I mean, I was a manager of R&D for A little over a decade.
R&D in the software field, that's really ephemeral stuff.
I mean, it's really abstract stuff.
And so R&D, well, you make, you say, this is what I'm going to produce, and here's how much money I think it's going to make, and here's the market, and here's the arguments, and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, I find that really interesting stuff.
I love business.
But then you have to actually measure your progress.
And then you have to see, did you achieve what it is you want to achieve?
And so I look at ethics as a project.
Is that fair?
I mean, it's fair, right?
They make claims.
We are going to be the people who are going to get rid of, rape, theft, assault, and murder for you.
At the end of 3,000 years, we have a century of staggering evil that dwarfs the imagination of the most satanic mind you could imagine.
Because if you throw in the wars to the deaths by government, to democide, you can Google that, If you throw in the wars, probably close to half a billion people murdered after 3,000 years of thou shalt not kill.
That's why I say that ethics suck.
It is not achieved.
What it claims is its goal.
Does that, and if you have questions or comments, other than am I loud enough, just let me know.
So let me make a case for checking the time.
Okay.
So, let me make a case for why this is the case.
So, how many here have studied government programs?
Interested in government programs?
I mean, there's this fascinating thing about government programs.
They never work and they never stop.
I mean, it's fantastic, right?
And the argument, I think, as to why they never stop is There's a... I shouldn't say a hidden agenda, because it's not even that hidden, but anything which continues despite not working on the surface is working in some other capacity.
Does that make sense?
Right, so the welfare state is supposed to eliminate poverty, right?
We all know the numbers, right?
The post-war period, poverty declining by 1% every year.
The government's like, oh man, We're gonna run out of poor people.
We better go help them.
And put the poverty programs in, poverty stops being eliminated.
And now, if you count the debt, the poor are in a far worse situation than they were in the post-war period.
Schools are worse, neighborhoods are worse, drug war, and the debt.
And the impending supernova called fiat currency meltdown.
But the welfare state, of course, only has the ostensible purpose of ending poverty.
What's the real purpose of the welfare state?
Yeah, create dependence, right, so the people have to keep voting for you, buy votes, give jobs to your friends, create agencies, get patronage, and it's doing that beautifully.
In fact, if it worked, it would fail at its real purpose.
If it eliminated poverty and they shut it down, it would have failed at its real purpose, which is why it will never, ever end.
I mean, until ethics begins to work, which I'll make the case for this afternoon.
So, the question is, if ethics has lasted for 3,000 years, and completely... I wish there was a word in English.
Okay, maybe you can help me, because failure is not enough of a word for this.
The welfare state has not failed.
Failure is like, oh, I wanted to bike to BC, but I got tired, so I went home.
I mean, there's no smoking economic crater.
There's not millions of lives dragged into an underworld of perpetual poverty.
There's not the death and failure and hopes of an entire generation.
What do you call it when something fails so bad?
Catastrophic.
Okay.
Epic fail?
Yeah, but that's a boat turning over.
There's no word, is there?
There's no word.
Of course, language is just another government program, so there's no word to describe government programs accurately.
But it is a complete catastrophe for the family audience.
But what if ethics was really working beautifully?
In the same way that government programs work beautifully.
What if ethics, despite the fact that it's not achieving anything that it claims to achieve, but quite the opposite?
Murder and theft and assault are increasing enormously.
I know Steven Pinker's done the end of violence and all that, and of course, you know, I think this crew, you know, probably didn't strangle a whole lot of kittens on the way here this morning, but as a whole, you know, if you... Steven Pinker, of course, he can't see the state, right?
So, oh look, the government is controlling violence, so...
But, you know, US foreign policy, just since the post-war period, has been estimated to cause between 20 and 30 million deaths.
But what if ethics was working beautifully?
What if the whole purpose of ethics was to achieve something like what we have?
Well, I think that would be interesting.
Don't you?
I think that would be very interesting.
Let me make that case.
And I think I've got to make it quite quickly.
Sorry, I speak really, really fast.
You can slow it down later.
No, I'm kidding.
I'll start to sound like a fax.
Okay.
So, two aspects of ethics you will almost always see.
Number one, universality.
Has to be universal if it's going to be ethics.
Right?
I like ice cream.
That's a claim.
Maybe it's a true claim.
But it's not a universal claim.
Everybody should like ice cream.
That's, you know, aesthetics.
I like encre, the painter.
Doesn't mean everyone has to.
Just means those with good taste have to.
But the one thing that's claimed is universality, always in a system of ethics.
Universality, universality, universality.
I'm happy if anyone wants to disagree with that, but that's what I constantly hear.
You have to not kill because it is wrong.
It's bindable.
It's binding upon you.
That's why they call it a social contract.
It's a complete lie.
Okay, tangent number two.
Social contract.
Oh no, it's too tempting.
Should I?
Okay, just very quick.
Social contract.
So they always say, oh, it's voluntary.
You know, it's a social contract.
You know, you're here voluntarily.
It's a social contract.
Then you say, okay, well then we don't need guys and guns to enforce it.
No, no, no, we have to enforce it.
Okay, then it's not voluntary.
No, it's voluntary.
Anyway, you just get stuck at this revolving door with status all the time.
But universality is always the claim.
That's how it's different from aesthetics or, you know, just, I like the color blue or whatever.
It's universal.
It is a morally obliged standard that everybody has to follow.
So, number one claim of ethics is universality.
The number two claim, which is never talked about, is the real purpose of ethics, I would argue, throughout history.
And until we solve this, we are never going to be free.
Number one claim is universality.
The number two claim is the unspoken exception to that universality.
This side of the room is not allowed to steal.
This side of the room must tax.
Do you see the difference?
This side of the room is not allowed to murder.
That's a universal, absolute, no killing you people.
This side of the room is a heroic group of people in costume defending their country.
This side of the room gets a cage if they kill.
This side of the room gets a pension and medals if they kill.
Universality and the exception that is never talked about.
I would argue That ethics was not invented to make us good, but to make evil more profitable.
So let me give you a thought experiment.
Pretend there are no thieves in the world.
No thieves in the world anywhere.
And then you wake up one morning and you're like, hey, you know what?
I could just take stuff.
Ooh, that beat's going to work.
How easy would it be to be a thief if you were the only thief in the whole world?
Sorry?
Well, nobody's even heard of thieving, so how would they hold you to account?
Nobody's got any locks.
Nobody is even worried about they just leave their stuff lying around.
Because there's no thief.
There's no thieving.
No locks on the doors, no password protections, no, they just leave cash all over, they don't, right?
No, no, no, I agree.
That's why I said it's a thought experiment.
I'm not saying this actually happened.
But by this afternoon, hopefully, we'll be mostly there.
But if you were the only thief in the world, you'd have a pretty easy time of it, right?
Yes, let's pretend we're not primates, just for a sec.
Just for a moment.
But what you're saying is exactly right.
So, if you're the only thief in the world, it's great.
You can just wander around picking stuff up and people say, man, I guess I lost something.
Never heard of thieving.
Maybe those space aliens are beaming it up for examination.
I'm sure they'll put it back soon.
Well, no, that's what I'm saying.
It's just a thought experiment.
But you understand that if you were the only thief in the world, it would be great.
You could just go pick stuff up and you'd never have any repercussions.
There'd be no legal system around thieving.
There'd be no punishments.
Because people wouldn't even know about it.
But of course, you're right.
What would happen is people would say, wow, that thieving is completely easy.
So you'd get more and more thieves.
Until people went, wait a minute.
I didn't just lose that.
That guy's wearing it.
And then people would say, oh, crap, we've got thieves.
Damn. - Okay.
We were doing so well, and then they figured it out.
It's like that movie, The Invention of Lying.
It's not a great movie, but anyway.
So more and more people would become thieves, and then people would say, oh crap, we've got this overhead now, I've got to buy locks, alarms, I've got to have a police force, I've got to have courts, I've got to have jails, I've got to lecture kids about not stealing, whatever, right?
And then what would happen is the value of being a thief would go down over time, because people would take defensive measures, you'd get punished, and this and that and the other, right?
But here's the point.
You're a thief, and you're a really smart thief.
This is my argument for the origin of ethics.
If you're a really smart thief, your first job will be to convince everyone else that stealing is wrong.
Universally wrong.
Not wrong like aesthetics, not wrong like personal preference, but stealing is really bad!
You'll go to hell!
You'll burn!
You'll be unhappy.
You will harm your soul.
Nobody should steal.
And then, if you can create an exception for you, you are sitting pretty.
Of course, you'll need other words.
Can't call it stealing.
You shouldn't steal.
I really should.
You gotta call it taxation.
Right?
You shouldn't counterfeit!
That's really bad.
Central banking is sound fiscal policy.
You can't kidnap people and lock them in your basement!
That's wrong!
We got laws against that.
Oh, I don't like that piece of vegetation you've got in your pocket.
You've got to come with me.
So this is my case as to why we have the ethical systems that we have.
It's that if you are evil, And you can convince other people to be good, it makes being evil more profitable.
If you're the only thief, it's fantastic.
If everyone's a thief, what happens?
You starve.
The problem is the exception.
is that That's what you were saying, right?
Yeah, the problem is the exception.
Because there's this claim of universality.
Thou shalt not everybody, all the time, no matter what.
On Tuesdays, on Sundays, on a full moon.
When Celine Dion songs are on the radio, well, that's always.
It's Canada, right?
Actually, I think she's great.
But universally, at all times, in all places, no matter what, thou shalt not steal.
But over here, we call it taxation, and it's virtuous.
Do you see, if you are a thief who can get together with other thieves and convince other people not to be thieves while justifying your own thievery, that is optimum for you in resource acquisition.
Does this make sense?
This is the first time I'm taking this argument out for a sort of audience-friendly run, so if it doesn't make sense.
And I'm not saying, do you accept it as fully true and absolutely and blah, blah, blah.
I'm just saying, does it kind of hang together, you know, in a reasonably, okay.
Phew.
Okay, my time.
Look at that nine minutes to finish the history of ethics.
We're all set.
Thank you.
You know, I always do these notes, and then at the end of the speech, I'm like, oh, that was the best point.
I completely missed it.
So, what you do is you tell everybody not to steal, and you create the exception for yourself using different language that nobody can talk about.
that.
And it's insane.
Because morality is only binding if it's universal.
But if you create an exception for yourself, it's no longer universal.
And if ethics... Sorry.
If ethics... I'm pointing at you like some Sunday school Hellfire and Brimstone teacher.
But if ethics is designed to make evil more profitable, By reducing competition.
You shouldn't steal so we can steal more.
You shouldn't counterfeit because we want to counterfeit.
Then it's doing its job perfectly.
You know, I read the other day the estimates are that 1% of US currency is counterfeit.
I'm like, that's only two zeros away from the truth.
But that's what they'll do.
They'll create a language which is evil for you and virtuous for them.
It's universal, but we are the exception.
Creating a moral obligation for everyone, creating this mystery universe of platonic reverse evil idealism, where you get to do that which is evil for everyone else and call it good and no one can even talk about it, that's the purpose of ethics.
That's why it continues.
And that's why half a billion dead doesn't stop ethics.
Doesn't make people say, wait a minute, weren't you aiming to solve this problem?
Weren't you aiming to not have people kill each other?
Okay, so how are we doing now relative to 3,000 years ago when you started?
Well, it's a hell of a lot worse now than it was 3,000 years ago.
But I would also submit, just to sort of end, if we go to Q&A, if this is useful, is that somebody posted on my message board the other day, and they were saying that in the old Soviet Union, you know those Soviet Union jokes in the Soviet Union, such and such, you ever hear those?
I just saw someone post it on Facebook.
In capitalist America, the bank robs you.
Anyway.
Yeah, have a gun, rob a bank.
Have a bank, rob the world.
But he said, you know, in the old Soviet Union or in the Eastern Bloc countries, you know, guys would sit down and start slagging off the government.
And you'd never know if there was someone who genuinely didn't like the government or a government plant.
The argument that is put forward about the universality of ethics, which is designed to reduce competition for evil, for the people who want to do the exact opposite, pointing that out throughout human history was very dangerous.
The fact that we can even talk about this is astonishing.
I mean, there is some progress.
End of slavery, at least overt slavery, rights for women, good stuff.
But it was very dangerous to talk about true universality.
In history.
Because that is to break the whole con game.
Right?
So how many of you have ever said taxation is theft?
Why not?
No, I'm just kidding.
He turned his hearing aid off after a while.
But when you say taxation is theft, what you're doing is you're collapsing the entire con game called historical ethics.
Did you see that?
You're saying that it is universal, that there are no exceptions, that there is not this opposite realm where evil becomes good.
But anybody in history who blithely agreed with treason against the realm usually didn't last very long.
I think those genes kind of got weeded out.
So what I'm saying is we're recessive.
No, we're kind of a weird throwback, right?
Because normally, if you start talking about, like you start agreeing with criticisms of the realm, it's like, haha!
I found you, right?
It's like in Mao's China, right?
In the 60s, there's a cultural revolution.
Let a thousand flowers bloom so we can come in with a machete and whack them all down, right?
He did.
He said, come out and talk about the state.
It's important.
You know, get it off your chest so we can get your heart out of your chest.
And so even talking about this, It's really, really difficult.
It's scary.
When you go to people and you say, taxation is theft, I really believe a basic part of their mammal, probably closer to reptile brain, is like, danger, danger, danger, danger, agent of the state, agent of the state, I like my head on my body, I like my head on my... I really think that there's this sense of danger.
Because if you have this con game going that is so completely obvious, there's not many con games that you can expose in three words, taxation is theft.
Right?
So it's a completely obvious con game.
Oh, if it's universal, right?
That's why you remember I said at the beginning, all men are created equal.
They should have just stopped there.
Because when you say all men are created equal, you can't give people then a monopoly of force over everyone else and blah, blah, blah.
You can't, because then you don't have equality anymore.
That's why if you stop there, you have a free world.
You keep going, you end up with an empire.
But it is something that is so easy to expose that you are punished for exposing it.
You are punished for exposing it.
And I think it's important to be sensitive to that when we're out there talking in the world.
That we are cattle prodding the fight or flight mechanism of people when we expose the con game called historical morality.
It's scary for people because for the most times that was a bad tasting worm with a big ass hook inside that did not lead people to very good places.
But it is an astonishingly easy con game to get rid of.
I mean, it was tougher in the past where the king was put there by God, right?
That's why he could do different things.
Because, I mean, for those familiar with the Old Testament, well, there are a few exceptions to the thou shalt not kill that even God performs in the Old Testament.
So again, we're just used to there's a universal rule There's an exception.
And so the purpose of ethics is to raise the profitability of evil, to reduce competition for theft and counterfeiting, control, dominance, brutality.
And you see it all the time.
Have you seen a parent saying, don't hit?
It's a universal rule, don't hit.
Ah, but if you're in power.
It's called spanking.
It's called discipline.
But so this is sort of my argument as to Why ethics is such an unbelievable clusterfrack, why it's achieved, really, in practical terms, based on its goals, the exact opposite of what it claimed it wanted.
And there's no problem with that.
People don't say, oh my God, sorry, one sec.
People don't say, oh my God, ethics has completely failed.
We really need to examine this.
Because it hasn't failed.
It's succeeded beautifully in serving the powers of evil.
The millions of bodies, which for us, of course, and I think for most decent people, are unbelievable tragedies, don't invalidate the purpose of ethics.
Because the purpose of ethics, historically, has been to serve evil.
And to fatten the tax cows.
Because if we steal and kill each other, that's not good for the farmers.
You don't want your cows attacking each other.
You want your cows to be rich in milk and meat.
So we're not supposed to attack each other because that reduces our productivity, right?
The great advance of the modern age is people realize that if the serf gets to choose his own occupation, he produces a lot more value, right?
We have free-range serfs now.
But you know, the end of free-range is not freedom.
It's a chicken McNugget box.
So that's...
The downside.
Let's start the morning with an incredible downside.
But that's the downside.
That, I believe, is a reasonable and credible—you can't prove it, right?
They didn't write this stuff down.
Ooh, are we going to create this mystical realm of opposites?
But this is, I think, the natural tendency.
I'm a big fan of that which is most efficient tends to, you know, the meme thing, you know, that there's an evolution in ideas.
That which is the most efficient for those in power is the one that tends to rule, right?
Because you've got to ask yourself, why do all these—why do the philosophers not point this out?
Let me give you one example.
Oh, that bastard.
Everybody wrestles with Socrates.
Nietzsche said it, I say it.
But Socrates was a real rat bastard at the end.
What did Socrates say?
Majority of men are ignorant fools.
The law is the majority of men.
You must obey the law because it's virtuous.
What?
I mean, how do you even say that with a straight face?
But we don't know what Socrates said.
We do know that Plato saw what happened to Socrates And that may have affected his writing to some degree.
But this is constant throughout history.
Kant said, act as if the rule of your action becomes a general rule for everyone.
It's universal!
And then he wrote, but you have to obey the prince no matter what.
Now, if you're into logic and you believe that ethics is about universality and obligation and all that, then you're like, what?
That makes no sense!
But, if you accept that the purpose of universality is to make you more profitable to your rulers while excluding them from the very rules that they impose upon you, it makes perfect sense.
What Socrates says, what Kant says, it all makes perfect sense in this paradigm.
And that's my invitation to you.
So, this morning, I'm crushing everybody's soul, breaking everybody's spirit, making us all incredibly depressed.
But it's okay, there's coffee.
But this afternoon, I want to make a positive case, right?
I don't want to be the Nietzsche guy who just hack stuff down.
I really want to make a point, because I believe, I really genuinely believe, and I wrote this book, I think, five or six years ago.
It's available for free on my website, freedomainradio.com.
I believe that we can solve the problem of ethics.
We don't need punishment.
We don't need gods.
We don't need governments.
We can solve the problem of ethics from a purely philosophical standpoint, and with audience participation, and it'll be fun.
I will show you how, I think.
You can tell me if it's right or wrong, in your opinion.
But there is hope.
We can break the cycle.
We can turn ethics into what it's supposed to be, which is that which serves and enhances virtue, rather than that which fattens us for slaughter, historically.
So that's it for this morning.
Boy, I wish I had a rousing ending.
And that's it.
Do we have any questions or comments?
Are we going to take the camera?
If you want to keep talking.
Actually, I'm hungry too.
And the coffee.
Yeah, yeah, it's up to you.
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