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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:34
Freedomain Radio: Practical Politics
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope that you're doing very well.
I'd like to step you through a short presentation with your kind indulgence called Politics, Philosophy and Practicality, wherein I will attempt to make the case for the anarchist approach to political activism.
So, let's start off by defining our terms.
Of course, political activism is the act of educating yourself about political matters, following political news, talking about your political beliefs with others, taking action in the political realm, investing time, money, resources, and so on, becoming, of course, emotionally invested in the outcome.
Anarchist philosophy, or the anarchist approach to philosophy, the philosophy of political involvement, is to ignore politics, to apply the principles of ethics and voluntarism to your own life, to reject optional relationships with people who support the use of violence, and to pursue relationships with truly moral people.
And that is the approach to personal freedom with the goal or effect of achieving political freedom over the long haul.
Now one of the criticisms that anarchists hear pretty continually is the following.
Anarchy is completely impractical.
Anarchists by definition thus are completely impractical pie-in-the-sky dreamers.
A stateless society will never be achieved in our lifetime.
Political action is the only way to practically secure personal liberty.
Those who avoid political action are only contributing to the growth of the state.
Thus, anarchists are abandoning their post when it comes to securing and defending freedoms.
That is bad, and all the bleating about a stateless society won't save you when the jackboots kick in your door to drag you off to the intellectual's gulag.
Therefore, we must engage in politics.
That is the general argument.
Now in general, Most libertarians who are minarchists, or who believe in a small government controlled by a limited government, would prefer if it were feasible for there to be no government.
Government, of course, is a kind of overhead.
Anarchy is considered to be an extension of libertarian political goals.
In libertarianism, the goal is to reduce the power of the state.
In anarchy, of course, the aim is to eliminate the state.
If the state that governs least governs best, the state that governs best but governs not at all.
And so anarchy is considered to be a much like if politics takes you halfway there, anarchy goes the whole way there.
And of course, those interested in politics complain that if anarchists want to overleap politics and go straight to statelessness, they are completely mad and self-delusional.
For this criticism to be valid, political action must, of course, have proven to be effective.
If you say that anarchism is ineffective and politics is effective, well, like all rational and empirical people who respect the scientific method, we are going to go to the actual, I would say, we should go to the actual source, the data, and find out if this is the case.
The benefits of political action must be greater than the costs.
If you have to work 10 weeks a year for 50 years to achieve a 1% reduction in the income tax, this could scarcely be considered a rational or positive goal.
Again, we're not talking sort of from first principles with regards to ethics here.
What we are doing, though, is we are saying if the term practicality is the criteria by which we judge politics or anarchism as an approach to personal and political freedom, then we are just going to work with the practicality.
We're going to say it's a cost-benefit analysis and so on.
Acting on anarchist principles must be proven to be ineffective, as opposed to acting in the political arena, and the cost of acting on anarchist principles must be greater than the benefits, if we're just going to go with the practicality argument.
So, I've created a little XY thing here, which I hope will be helpful.
On the X-axis, we have on the left-hand side those activities which cause you to lose freedom.
On the right-hand side, we have those activities which cause you to gain freedom.
On the Y-axis, we have low-cost activities at the top, high-cost activities at the bottom.
So, of course, high-cost activities that cause you to lose freedom are bad.
And what we want is low-cost activities that cause you to gain freedom.
And I'm going to just throw a few entirely arguable categories in here.
If you give a cop the finger, it's relatively low cost, but it might cause you to lose freedom if the cop gets upset.
Civil disobedience is a higher cost and also can cause you to lose freedom.
Going to jail clearly is a very high cost and certainly causes you to lose freedom.
On the other hand, you can gain freedom from irrational people or If you have no social contacts at all, let's say you work at home on eBay and so on, you're going to have fewer interactions with those people who are irrational or destructive.
If you eschew society completely, take the Walden route and live in a cave or in the foothills of Montana, clearly you are going to have a benefit in terms of you're going to gain freedom, but it comes from a high cost.
It comes with a high cost.
If you want to get rid of taxes and government power in your life completely, you can jump off a cliff.
But that has very high costs, although it will certainly reduce the power of the state over you in general.
Now, the best case is considered to be that which gains you freedom, but which is actually low cost, and politics is generally put into this category.
The worst case is something which causes you to lose freedom, but is low-cost, because at least if it's high-cost, there's some pain and suffering which might cause you to change your direction.
And anarchism is generally put by political people into this category.
It will cause you to lose freedom because you're not engaging in politics, and it also is low-cost, so there's not even any... at least if you keep going to jail, at some point you might say, hey, I don't really like going to jail, maybe I'll stop this aspect of things.
So I'm going to make a case that's a little bit different than what we have here in this.
Now, I chatted with a gentleman.
This, of course, is just one case study, but it was pretty typical.
It wasn't anybody I pursued.
It was just somebody I chatted with at the Free Domain Radio chat window.
He was a Ron Paul fan, a Paulistinian, as they are called sometimes.
And he reported the following.
He said, well, I spend one to two hours a day studying politics.
Web TV news, magazines, books, this kind of stuff.
This is sort of what accumulated.
He says, and I also spend five to ten hours a week debating, arguing in chat rooms, emails, face-to-face meetings, dinner parties, wherever I am with people, food courts and so on.
He also said that he donated money to political campaigns, in this case, Ron Paul, though he wouldn't say how much.
It was fairly substantial.
My impression was, but that was just my impression, and additional time and money on miscellaneous political activities.
This all totals about 20 hours per week on politics.
The full version of this is available at freedomainradio.com forward slash rpc dot html if you'd like to see more of this chat.
So what does this translate to?
It's 20 hours a week, give or take, and this was confirmed by this gentleman.
Again, one case study, this is based on, maybe yours is higher or lower, but just go with this for the moment if you don't mind.
20 hours a week is 1,040 hours per year of time spent on political activities.
This is equivalent, of course, to 26 weeks, half of your working time, on a full-time job.
Now this is not only an unpaid job, but it actually costs you money.
Donations, subscriptions, book purchases, magazine purchases, and so on.
This, if we just take the time and forget about the expense, I'm going to try and make the case as convincingly as possible, using the best numbers as possible for the political argument, just because I want to give that side respect and credence.
This is equivalent to a voluntary 33% tax on your income.
So if you have a job 40 hours a week and you have another job called political activism at 20 hours a week, that's 1.5 jobs, a third of which, or 0.5 is unpaid, one third of the time.
Now, this investment, this 33% tax on time or income, is only of value if politics will in fact set you significantly free.
As we said earlier, If it is the case that politics will only give you a 5% reduction after 30 years on your income tax, and we're talking about practical arguments here, clearly it's a massive and net loss.
In addition, there are emotional costs to continual involvement in politics.
You get problems in your relationships.
You get to be perceived as a monomaniacal, no-state-project, small-government, founding-father fetishist.
People roll their eyes when you bring up the Fed or the Austrian business cycle and so on.
You get frustrated because It doesn't get you what you want in terms of freedom.
You get desperate as you continue.
You've got the sunk costs issue, right?
So as you continue down the road of politics, year after year, decade after decade, you're going to get more frustrated and more desperate as it does continue to not work.
This results, of course, in crushing disappointment, anger, disgust with your fellow citizens and the state of the world and the possibilities of freedom and so on.
And so there's significant and escalating emotional costs over time.
In addition, to the costs of time and money.
Is that freedom?
This unholy sacrifice, over a thousand hours a year, all of the emotional costs go with it, could be worth it, if political action can succeed.
But let's say you work at this for years or decades and you achieve a 33% reduction in taxes.
It's still not worth it if it's a zero-sum game, even if you get everything back that you put in in terms of time and effort.
It's still not worth it because from a purely practical standpoint you have all of the emotional stressors that have gone along with it.
So if you work at politics for 20 years and you've got the equivalent of a 10-year deficit in terms of investment of labor and not even to count the cash, You've got a deficit of 10 person years.
So even if you can, after working at it for 20 years, get 10 years at 33% lower taxes, again, all other things being equal, you're still going to only break even and you still have all of the emotional problems that go along with the frustration and uncertainty of pursuing political action.
Does political action work?
Well, in order to determine whether something works or not, we of course have to look at the goal.
What is the goal of political action?
Well, clearly, it has been to reduce the size and power of the state.
This is as true today as it was in 1776.
As it was even before that, in the late Enlightenment period, when the questions of the issue of monarchy and historical privilege based on aristocratism was under review, let's say.
But just to focus on the US, the entire American experiment has been to control, as an aim to control, through the separation of powers, through the Constitution, through the Bill of Rights, through states' rights, has been to control the growth of the size and power of the state.
We have over 300 years of evidence to look at just in terms of the US government.
And how's it looking?
Well, total federal public debt as a percentage of GDP.
This is the nicest and kindest graph that I could come up with from the political standpoint.
This is only a percentage total federal public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product 1791 to 2006.
This is the nicest graph I could come up with.
This is not municipal debt.
This is not state debt.
This is not unfunded liabilities, which at the moment are in the tens of trillions of dollars for the U.S.
government.
So this is the smallest conceivable measure for the size of the increase of the growth of power of the state that I could conceivably come across.
But again, I want to make the case as nicely and kindly as possible for politics as I can.
And here we can see that it hasn't worked.
It hasn't even come close to working.
We have a government that is dozens of times larger now than it was in the past, and if we look at political libertarianism, or the small-state stuff, you could even count Goldwater's campaign in the early 60s, but even if we just look at modern libertarianism, which got cooking in the early 1970s, we have a state that is a couple of times larger now than it was back then, even by this most conservative measure.
So that is what What is the example from modern times?
So this is trillions of dollars normalized for inflation.
say, "Well, yes, but now we have the internet." But that's not an advantage specific to libertarianism.
That is an advantage that everyone gets, and therefore everybody gets to claim it as an advantage.
There's no reason why it would be more so for libertarianism than anything else.
What is the example from modern times?
So this is trillions of dollars normalized for inflation.
So this is a similar purchasing power.
And we can see here that this is the debt in terms of trillions of dollars We've gone from a tiny, tiny amount, or we could say $400 billion to $500 billion in 1971, when modern libertarianism started.
$500 billion in 1971 when modern libertarianism started as of 2007.
We are over $9 trillion, which is almost a 25-fold increase in the trillions of dollars of public debt.
And that is not an example of something that is working in terms of being able to control the growth of the size and power of the state.
Empirically, it doesn't only not work.
See, if I said I wanted to reduce the infections of a particular kind of virus, and I had a medication that was supposed to do it, and not only did I not reduce the size of the increase, but the size of the increase continued to go up asymptotically, clearly I would not be achieving my stated aim.
I would, in fact, be achieving the opposite.
Now, I'm not saying that libertarianism caused this stuff.
There's no causality here, but there is coincidence that the goal was to reduce the power of the state.
We haven't even slowed the incredibly accelerating rate of the increase of the power of the state.
So, empirically, it doesn't work.
Hundreds of years of evidence.
Empirically, it does not work.
It's just a fact we have to deal with.
The overwhelming evidence is that political action not only fails to achieve its stated goal, it actually achieves the exact opposite.
Again, I'm not claiming causality here, but it certainly is coincident with.
As a result, political action results in a net loss of time, money, and emotional happiness.
What you invest comes back to you with the exact opposite of what your goal is.
It's like investing to make money costs you your house.
It's not just you fail to make money, you lose your house.
Investing time and energy in trying to control the power of the state through politics results in, not saying causes, but results in, or is coincident with, a massive increase in the size and power of the state.
So it's a net loss.
Thus, political action is 33% plus, plus, plus.
Maybe for you it's 20%.
Maybe it's 15%.
Maybe it's 40%.
But it is a massive additional and entirely voluntary tax upon individuals.
You don't have to pay it, but so many people do.
Now, I'm going to propose.
I can't speak for anarchists as a whole.
I don't know.
I can speak for myself and I can speak with the tens of thousands of listeners and the thousands of people that I've talked about this stuff with over the past few years of Free Domain Radio.
So we're going to call... I'm not going to say anarchism as a whole.
I don't speak for, you know, the crazy-ass Marxist anarchists, the anarcho-syndicalists, the anarcho-communists, the weird hippie... I just don't speak for those people.
I can only speak for the brand of anarchism that I work with.
So I'm going to call that FDRA, Free Domain Radio Anarchism.
FDRA, like libertarianism, like objectivism, like minarchism, is based on an opposition to the initiation of the use of force and to support for property rights and all that kind of good stuff.
As a corollary, FDRA opposes those who support the use of force in word or deed.
Clearly, if an action is bad, those who support it or do it are bad.
If rape is bad, a rapist is bad.
You can't have a floating bad abstraction like some platonic form, and you can, but it's wrong.
So if the initiation of the use of force is wrong, then those who support that initiation of force in word or deed are bad.
If violence is wrong, if you continue to support it in word or deed, you're at best corrupt and at worst complicit in it.
And you can't have a state unless people believe in a state.
Those who support the belief in the state claim the virtues of taxation and regulation and so on, after they understand the arguments against and can't oppose them or overpower them, are at best corrupt and at worst complicit.
So let's look at the benefits, right?
Because remember, anarchism, to be considered impractical, must be a situation where the costs of being an FDRA vastly outweigh the benefits.
Well, apoliticism.
You don't have to follow politics.
You don't have to read the newspaper.
You don't have to watch the news.
You don't have to be up on the latest platforms.
You don't have to watch the debates.
You don't have to learn a damn thing.
About the Fed.
If you don't want to.
If it's fun, then it's a hobby.
Blah blah blah.
Right?
But it saves you 10 to 20 hours a week.
For sure.
Empirically known.
Can start tomorrow.
Now, this is a contentious point.
I'm just going to touch on it.
You don't have to accept this at all.
But if you do follow this philosophy, in other words, if you believe that it is wrong to initiate force, And those who then support it are wrong, you ditch them from your life.
If you define somebody as evil and they refuse to give up supporting evil and can't argue, and this is not saying, you know, give them the argument once and then cut the chain, I'm just saying, if after weeks and months of talking to people they still roll their eyes, sneer at you, scorn at you, attack you, undermine you, try to humiliate you, whatever, then you either have to give up that that's a bad thing to do or you have to give up the people who are doing a bad thing.
This is a can't-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too philosophy.
So, this is a total bare minimum, and the actual savings are much, much higher.
But again, trying to make the case as positive as possible for politics, so I don't want to be accused of skewing any figures or numbers or approaches.
So, to eliminate corrupt social engagements, political donations, let's just say about 50 bucks a week.
A bare minimum.
50 bucks a week.
Let's just see what that shakes out to.
For most people it's a lot higher, but again, let's just say that's the bare minimum.
So this results in savings of between 780 and 1560 hours and about 2600 bucks per year.
If you take the Freedom Aid Radio approach to anarchism.
And it's completely free.
There's no dues.
There's no cost.
The articles are free.
If you ask me for the books, they're free.
The videos are free.
The podcasts are free.
The board is free.
Everything is free.
The Sunday call-in shows, of course, are free.
There's no ads you have to suffer through.
There's some bad music, but that's more my fault than anyone else's.
It's completely free.
Of course, I do like it if you donate, I do like it if you buy the books and so on, but you don't have to.
So this is totally optional, which is not the case with political involvement.
So, political practicality.
To achieve this disaster, this massive increase in the size and power of the state, to quote achieve, I'm not saying causality, costs each individual over 30 years.
Let's take the 2600 bucks a year that is being spent on corrupt relationships and politics.
Again, that's tiny compared to what it is for most people.
Let's make the best case possible for the political argument.
Let's take that money and instead Invest it not in politics, but in some kind of income which generates a bare minimum 7% return year over year.
Over 30 years, again, you start at 20, you give up at 50, 40, to 70, whatever it is, right?
We're talking $250,000 almost of specific resources that are blown on politics and corrupt relationships.
A quarter of a million dollars.
That is some dinero.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Let's look at the time that is spent for people to pursue this political goal, this political agenda.
This is the thousand-plus hours a year.
Let's accept or let's take it as a given that that time is going to be worth about fifty bucks over the course of your life.
It's less when you're young, it's more when you're old.
Let's just say that that's about fifty bucks an hour.
What does this add up to over the course of somebody's thirty-year career of throwing themselves off the cliff of politics?
Well, at fifty bucks an hour, we're talking 1.2 to 2.3 million dollars of invested time.
Put these two together, we have almost 1.5 to over 2.5 million dollars over a 30-year period.
That's the investment.
Maybe it's a little less for you.
Let's say it's half for you.
Doesn't matter.
So, instead of 1.2 million dollars, it's 600,000 dollars.
Instead of 2.5 million, it's 1.25 million.
it's $600,000.
Instead of $2.5 million, it's $1.25 million.
Let's say it's a quarter.
It's $300,000.
Does it really matter?
And, over and above that, what else do we have?
Well, we have all of the stress.
We have the disillusionment, when it doesn't work out, as historically we can see that it doesn't, sense of futility that grows over time, false hopes, oh God, despair, oh, disgust, anger, problems in your relationships, and so much more.
To achieve the disaster on the left, Massive increases in state and power.
Costs you one and a half to two and a half million dollars.
Massive amounts of emotional stress, frustration, despair, futility.
And these are the people, my friends, these are the people who come to Anarchists, or who come to me, repeatedly, and it seems almost endlessly, and say, This thing, what we just did there, 1.5 to 2.5 million, stress, unhappiness, upset, problems in relationships to achieve a massive increase in state power.
That's what I call practical.
I disagree.
On the other hand, let's look at the FDRA approach to liberty.
Well, what is it going to cost you to get involved in this This approach of applying your ethics to your personal life first and forgetting about politics.
Well, you're going to have to invest some time to learn about philosophy.
No questions.
Again, I'm trying to make it the work.
Maybe you'll enjoy that, but you could enjoy the politics too.
So we're just going to talk about this with a specific goal.
This is a fixed amount of time, though.
You invest it up front, and you don't have to continually invest it.
With politics, we're talking about a continual investment over time.
With anarchism, as I talk about it, it's a fixed one.
Let's say you've got to listen to 200 podcasts to get the hang of it.
After 70, 183, a couple of the high points, you kind of got it.
You can even skip the ones about roads.
If you want.
Let's say it's 200 podcasts, about half hour each.
That's about 100 hours.
A one-time investment.
Zero dollar cost.
No money down for you.
So if we're talking 100 hours, somebody else on average is spending 20 hours a week.
It's five weeks.
Five weeks of time.
It doesn't have to be.
It's just five weeks in total.
Maybe you listen to these over the course of two months.
But it's five weeks of equivalent political investment.
One time.
This political investment goes on for year after year, decade after decade.
We're talking five.
Five!
Count them five weeks to get going on this stuff.
There is emotional stress, and I would absolutely state that the emotional stress is higher up front for the FDRA approach, no question.
You've got to talk about ethics with friends and family.
You can learn more about this with the book available for free, of course, freedomainradio.com, On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion.
And if people scorn and spit upon you as a result of you talking about them, talking about ethics with them and putting some ethical standards in your relationships, maybe they hit the eject button.
There's a lot of discomfort.
I understand that.
That's a big spike of discomfort and upset.
It's a relatively short one-time cost, let's say, as opposed to politics, which is ever escalating and goes on and on and on and on until they throw you in a hole in the ground and toss some dirt up your nose.
So let's have a look at some of the key differences.
Politics.
If you take the political approach to liberty, you require that others agree with you.
They must agree with you.
You must convince them in order to be free.
FDRA?
You don't need other people to agree with you.
You don't.
You pursue the truth from a philosophical standpoint, from a wisdom standpoint.
You do not need other people to agree with you for it to work.
Politics.
Massive and continual expenditure of time and money FDRA, one-time investment of time, no financial cost.
With politics, because your time gets more valuable, both in terms of its shortness and its cost, its value, as you get older, it's actually increasing over time.
But FDRA, one-time investment up front, no financial cost if you don't want them.
Again, I appreciate donations, kind of need them, but you don't have to pay a thing.
Politics, you have no certainty of success whatsoever because you don't control any of the variables at all.
You don't control other people's responses to your arguments.
You don't control how they vote.
You don't control whether, even if they voted in Ron Paul or whoever, whether that would be able to achieve the freedom that you want.
You have no control over any of the variables.
FDRA, you have complete certainty of success.
You control all the variables.
You control all the variables in your personal relationships.
Politics, continual escalating emotional stress, FDRA, one-time stress, higher, agreed, admitted, fully accepted, but it decreases afterwards.
Politics, all the evidence, hundreds of years, points to catastrophic failure.
All the evidence points to catastrophic failure.
It doesn't just not achieve what it wants, it achieves, or is coincident with the exact opposite of what it wants.
FDRA, all the evidence, points to immediate and permanent success.
I mean, I've talked to people who've even ditched parental relations that are corrupt and brutal and abusive, and even talked with them through the deaths of these people, and it actually works.
It works.
It works.
Now, this conversation is not hundreds of years old, but a couple of years old.
So, you know, all the caveats there, but it actually does work, no question.
It works in my own life, I guarantee you that.
I'm not prescribing any pills.
I haven't already taken copious amounts of myself.
If you get involved in politics, you are voluntarily increasing the control that others have over you.
You have to get them to accept that the government is bad, that public schools should be privatized, that the Fed is bad, that foreign policy is bad, that Iraq is bad.
You have to get people, you have to get them to accept this.
That increases the control that others have over you and your happiness.
FDRA voluntarily decreases the control that others have over you.
And permanently.
That's good, right?
We're talking about freedom.
But saith the politicos, they say, isn't it just selfish to place your own happiness above the good of society?
FDRA, anarchism, we want to achieve freedom in the political world.
It's all well and good that you get rid of bad relationships and so on, but there's a bigger good of society and it's selfish.
I understand that.
But the fact of the matter is that FDRA will achieve freedom in the political world.
I'm not asking you to believe it.
I might say so.
Of course not.
There's tons of arguments and articles and podcasts you can have a look through if you have a mind.
But yes, Now, FDRA will achieve freedom in the political world.
Political freedom flows from personal freedom.
The state is an effect of the family.
The state is an effect of our personal relationships.
Once we get rid of corruption and decadence and abuse and negativity and hostility and all these sorts of things in our personal relationships, that freedom that we gain, the happiness that we gain, flows outward from there.
That is how we achieve political freedom.
We drop a massive stone in the center of a lake called ourselves and the ripples go out from there.
By achieving a truly rational and voluntary life, by refusing to accept any positive unchosen obligations, you become a living example of how well freedom works.
That's what we need to get.
That's what we need to offer the world.
A personal demonstration of how well freedom works.
The first thing, if you've got some magic diet that's going to make everybody who's overweight lose weight, the first thing you've got to do is lose the weight yourself to gain credibility with other people.
By refusing to engage in political lemming charging off the cliff of statism, you just stop feeding the beast.
You just stop feeding the beast.
The state is going to be outgrown.
The state is going to be ignored out of existence.
We are going to outgrow the state the same way that we outgrew certain aspects of religion, the same way that we outgrew slavery.
We're going to outgrow the state.
Once the state is perceived to be a pathetic falsehood that is far smaller than human potentiality as it exists, it will vanish.
This is what happens historically.
Again, I'm not saying you have to believe this because I got it on a slide, but you can pursue the topics in more detail if you like at the website.
Because what we're talking about here is not political freedom, which turns out to be completely illusory, but real freedom.
Real freedom.
Real freedom in your life.
What is real freedom?
Real freedom is personal.
It's not political.
Real freedom is something you live in your life.
Not something you yammer on and yell at people and get them to try and you corner them and try and catch them and show their inconsistencies and their contradictions and convince them through the sheer berating weight of your intellect to achieve.
It's something that is personal that you live in your life.
You don't talk about freedom.
You show freedom.
You show freedom in your life.
And freedom, of course, is giving up illusions.
Fundamentally, freedom is freedom from illusion.
The illusion that politics will ever achieve anything other than frustration and disappointment is one of the fundamental illusions that we just base on the evidence.
I'm not making arguments up.
I'd love it if politics worked.
It would be wonderful.
I'd have to avoid all this personal stuff.
And it just doesn't.
I mean, I have to accept that as a fact.
I don't have to, but it is a fact nonetheless.
Real freedom is shown, it's not debated.
The debates occur because people are interested in the freedom and the happiness that you have.
Libertarians, in fact, quite often seem kind of cranky.
You've got to understand this!
You've got to believe this!
That's not particularly inspiring for people.
You show people what freedom looks like and then they become curious and will want to know how you achieved it.
You don't just debate people.
Especially if you don't seem free yourself.
Real freedom must be under your control.
It cannot be dependent upon the submission or agreement of others.
By definition, you're not free if you require your freedom to be granted from others.
Real freedom, my friends, is an inspiration to others.
It's not something you can argue them into wanting.
You can't be a fat guy going around to other fat guys saying, lose weight, lose weight, lose weight, lose weight.
What you do is you lose weight, you become healthy yourself, and then whoever is interested in losing weight, becoming healthy, will come to you.
Will come to you.
Don't have to run around pursuing people or just talk amongst ourselves.
We can become a beacon.
A beacon of freedom that will entice and excite other people.
But that comes from personal freedom.
It doesn't come from chasing after ballots.
Real freedom is, I mean, let's face it, it's a fact.
It's a multi-generational project.
We are not going to live to see The end of statism.
Unless we take the frozen route.
Try Jennings or something.
We're not going to.
Maybe you, if you're three, you'll have to see.
I won't.
But it's a multi-generational project, which means that we target parents the same way that the church does, the same way that the state does.
We learn from the baddies in the world.
They target the children.
They target the parents.
Then that's what we do.
We talk to parents.
We talk to people about freedom.
We show freedom.
We excite people about freedom.
And we say that all relationships are voluntary.
Not just you and the state, but you and everyone.
Voluntary for mutual benefit.
Real freedom is the only way to achieve personal and political freedom.
Again, I'm not saying that this is something that you are going to believe because I say so.
Of course not, right?
But there's lots of arguments at Freedom Aid Radio as to why this is the case and how to achieve it.
Give it a shot or don't, but that's been the empirical experience that this conversation has generated.
So again, don't believe it when I say so, but have a look at the theory and try some of the practice and you'll see what I mean.
So let's resurrect our little chart here just to finish off.
Let's have a look at stuff that gains freedom or loses freedom.
Stuff that's low cost, stuff that's high cost.
The worst case scenario being the stuff that causes you to lose freedom is low cost.
Best case, stuff which causes you to gain freedom is low cost.
Politics, top right.
That's where people put it.
It's the best case scenario because it's low cost, will allow you to gain freedom.
FDRA, anarchism puts its low cost, it causes you to lose freedom, and that is considered bad.
I would agree, if that were the case, it would be bad.
However, when you look at the actual tangible costs of pursuing political action, it actually causes you to lose freedom or is coincident with the loss of freedom.
And it's a very high cost.
I don't know about you, I don't have two million bucks sitting around in my sock drawer, which I can use or justify.
It is very, very high cost.
One of the highest cost activities that you can go on.
And of course, as we can see, the outcome has been a massive, or coincident with a massive increase in the size and power of the state.
However, when we look at FDRA in purely practical terms, which I have no problem, we reason from first principles, but let's look at the practical terms as well.
It is in fact incredibly low cost.
High cost up front, low cost thereafter.
It causes you, or gives you, freedom immediately.
Freedom immediately.
Freedom from politics.
Freedom from corrupt relationships.
Freedom from spending time and money, flushing them down the sinkhole, the sewer of political action.
You're not caught in the contradiction of trying to use power to control power.
It never works.
Never works.
Never worked historically, never will work in the future, and does the opposite of working.
Sucks people into political action which enslaves them, rather than sets them free and makes other people look at us, let's say, somewhat askance.
So.
Thank you for watching.
For more on the philosophy of personal political liberty, please visit, as you know, freedomainradio.com.
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Thank you so much for watching.
I hope that I have tickled a few brain cells and I look forward to seeing you online.
I look forward to your donations.
Pick up some books and start this amazing and wonderful, thrilling and exciting journey towards real attainable freedom in your own life and becoming an inspiration to others rather than chasing them around trying to get them to agree with your politics.
All the best.
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