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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:43
Digital Gutenburg Part 2
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Hello, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
We are back in the car, my friends.
And it's time for part two of the Digital Gutenberg, the revolution of the internet, part two.
And to those who are posting comments on YouTube saying that they're concerned about me being a good driver while I'm doing podcasting, I certainly appreciate and respect the sentiment.
And of course, I'm fully aware that If I were to be a dangerous driver while podcasting, it would not do much to try and save the world while at the same time endangering myself and others.
So, I do recognize that, and I'm sensitive to that.
It's only going to be... You'll only have to suffer through the dangers of watching me do this in the car for another few weeks, and then I go full-time on Freedomain Radio, the show, and we've got... My wife and I have big plans for the show.
And so, hopefully we'll be able to I'll be able to talk to you in a more comfortable venue where you don't feel uneasy.
So I really do appreciate that and thank you for your concern.
I do share it.
I do value my own life enormously and of course the lives of those who I might endanger.
So I do try to be as careful as possible and don't podcast when the weather conditions are bad or there's any other sorts of things going on that may be problematic.
So thank you.
I'm on the case.
So, I just came back from two weeks in Punta Cana, which was great, and while I was out in Punta Cana, lazing around like a beached whale, beached white whale, I came across, I was puzzling over an idea, which has culminated in this two-part series, and I'll share with you the second part of the idea, which actually came first, but not logically sequentially, so hopefully this will make some sense to you.
So I was thinking about an alternate kind of life.
I don't think I've mentioned this to the YouTubers before, though I think I've talked about it on the podcasts, that my family has a not inconsequential history of involvement with philosophy.
In my first year, a textbook, an ancestor of mine, William Molyneux, actually came up as a contemporary and a very close friend of John Locke, a rationalist enlightenment philosopher whose second treatise on government is well worth a perusal.
So, on my, and that's on my father's side, there's quite a lot of intellectual horsepower throughout history.
And on my mother's side, there's, I think I've got more of my artistic bent, I like to write poetry and novels and so on.
And I've been an actor of sorts, and a playwright, a director, and they are writers, mostly in the creative field.
And one of my uncles received a national award for a poem of his.
And I was sort of thinking about this ultimate kind of life.
My father's side were aristocrats, came over with William the Conqueror, 1066, Battle of Hastings, and were then granted large tracts of land in Ireland, wherein they lorded it over the hapless peasantry for, I guess, a couple hundred years, 800 years, 900 years.
And then, as is always the case with these kinds of family trees, where you don't have like a really sick amount of wealth.
The one profligate guy came along who just drank and whored and all that, spent the money, blew the money, sold the land to pay for his absolutely horrendous Nero-like appetites.
And then my grandfather took the last remaining, I mean sort of seeing the way things were going, took the last remaining plots of land and ended up funding his one son and four daughters education.
So they are well-educated and launched them into the ranks of middle-class prosperity.
And this fall from grace of my family's fortunes has troubled my father greatly for many years.
It doesn't matter to me at all, but it has troubled my father greatly for many years.
So I was thinking about an alternate life.
And the alternate life is a life of wealth and privilege, which would have come in from this family fortune that was established many, many centuries ago.
Let me just do my merge.
It was sort of interesting for me to think about it.
Of course, looking at it with the moral clarity that I try to bring to all the topics here on Free Domain Radio,
It's fairly clear to me that the money that I would have inherited, the lands that I would have inherited, would have been a bribe for efficient murder, or the spoils of war, the rewards of being a most efficient, brutal and cold-blooded clan of murderers, right?
Those aristocracy, those who are aristocracy in Throughout the world, our aristocracy almost always, because they have been the most efficient murderers, the most brutal murderers, all land wealth historically is based on a blood crime.
So, if I had received wealth, and this is sort of the paradox of communication about morality, that I think the internet resolves.
Or at least I think we're trying to use the Internet.
I'm trying to use the Internet to resolve this paradox.
If I had received wealth and privilege through historical crimes, and this is true of just about all fortunes prior to America and certain more capitalistic countries throughout the 19th century, but even now, with some notable exceptions,
The wealth that is created in the modern world is created tongue-in-cheek or cheek-by-jowl with the state, in terms of the state's power to destroy businesses, the state's power to help businesses, corporate welfare, tariffs, protection subsidies, and all these sorts of things.
So even fortunes now, even, quote, capitalistic industrial fortunes,
achieved through participation in state violence, or if they are not, they are threatened, as Microsoft found to its woe when the embittered shareholders of the debunked Netscape fiscal fantasy got the Department of Justice to do the same malingering cancer-like antitrust policy boondoggle that plagued IBM for many, many years in the 80s, then got turned on Microsoft.
And so they found that there is an enormous amount of danger in the government.
So now, of course, they have their lobbyists there, and the government has shaken them down for a large amount of money and has won popular support because everybody wants fewer features and more unstable software.
So they like to hate the big capitalists without realizing that all the money and time and effort that Microsoft has had to put into the Department of Justice lawsuit has resulted in less stable, slower, and worse software.
So, the fortunes that are created in the modern world are created very much in the shadow of the state, and this is particularly true of the media fortunes.
So, if I had had, prior to the Internet, money and power, land an opportunity, then I could have used it, given my philosophical bent, I could have used it to, say, start a television station, or to fund a television program and get it on the air, a radio show, whatever it was, right?
Whatever it was.
So, I'm going to call that the microphone.
This guy.
I'm going to call that the microphone.
I would have a microphone prior to the Internet, or alternative to the Internet, when it took a lot of money to communicate, and middlemen to communicate.
So, I would have a lot of money.
And with that money, I could buy a microphone.
Now, the paradox is this.
I would have that microphone to argue against violence.
I would have that microphone and I would desire that microphone and I would use that microphone to argue against violence.
However, I would only have that microphone.
I would only be in possession of that microphone as a result of violence.
This is the enormously deep, Mariana Trench, Grand Canyon-type chasm that is at the root of why society simply keeps reproducing itself, reproducing itself, and decomposing its reproduction every instantaneous nanosecond, meme-like generation.
You only get the microphone as the result of a murder.
or a threatened murderer, or whatever.
you only get to talk to people as a result of violence.
So naturally, it is logically impossible to...
To use a microphone that results from violence to preach pacifism.
To preach anarcho-capitalism, market anarchy, true pacifism, stateless society.
To use the proceeds of a crime to argue against criminality in general.
It's not a problem.
is something that is so paradoxical that people just don't go there.
They just don't go there.
And you could make arguments about it.
You could make arguments about it, and you could say, yes, well, I'm trying to turn blood into wine, I'm trying to turn shit into gold, I'm trying to turn vice into virtue, and so on.
But people, they just shy away from that kind of paradox.
They really do.
And who complained them?
To have a microphone because of a crime makes it logically impossible to argue against crime.
And this is the fundamental paradox that is at the heart of pre-internet communication.
Now, there are those, and I'm perfectly willing to have that debate, of course, and I've gone through it in my mind only about a billion times since I was about 16, There are those who will say, well, Steph, but you only have a microphone because you have paid your taxes and you only have a microphone and are free to do this broadcasting because you have been involved in the software industry and have at times made sales to government agencies who have paid you and this and that and the other.
I totally understand all of that and I'm perfectly sympathetic to it all.
And that's an interesting debate to have and we've talked about it before on this show.
But The fact that I have to survive in a corrupt world doesn't create the same fundamental paradox.
I have a microphone despite violence because I've paid off the brutes.
I don't have a microphone because of violence.
Because my family were efficient murderers throughout history.
Which they were.
And that brutality exists and transmits itself even down to the current generation.
There's a difference in having money despite violence and having money entirely due to violence.
That's a very, very big difference there, I think.
I mean, certainly willing to hear arguments to the contrary.
Because then you're in a situation where Because violence exists, nobody can argue against violence.
Because violence is endemic to society, everybody has been touched or affected or profited or lost by violence to some degree, and therefore the existence of violence becomes an axiom, becomes an absolute.
Nobody can argue against violence because violence exists and is pervasive throughout society.
And of course, if that approach had been taken, there would never be any such thing as capitalism.
There would be never any such thing as freedom.
To the degree even that we have it now, which is not inconsiderable.
And of course, since everybody in the 17th and 18th centuries had had their economic life affected by slavery to some degree or another.
Nobody would ever have been able to argue against slavery, and slavery would continue to be an institution, because people would say, oh, that hat you're wearing was made by somebody who bought it from somebody who had the cotton picked by slaves.
Therefore, you can't be against slavery because you're wearing a slave hat.
I don't know how many cotton hats there are in the world, but I'm no fashionista.
It would be the same thing with women's rights.
You can't say that women are equal to men because you live in a society where women are sent home and this affects the economy and kept home and women can't enter into property rights and contracts and so on.
So therefore it's totally hypocritical for you to argue against women's rights.
You could go on and on like this.
Basically it's an argument for immobility.
And it's an argument that says because there's corruption in the world Nobody can argue against corruption because we've all been touched by it.
I don't really feel that that is my moral responsibility.
I did not invent the world.
So to me, if you have a microphone as the result of a crime, then The challenge that you have is sort of twofold.
One is that people can dismiss your arguments.
And the second thing is if you say that to profit from a crime is wrong, and you're using a microphone that has proceeded from the results of a crime.
That has resulted from the proceeds of a crime?
Something to do with results and proceedings.
Then really, the only logical thing for you to do is to put down the microphone and walk away.
And even if you feel, and I can sort of feel the tendrils of that myself, that the argument about not making the world is strong enough that you could say, well, you could still have the microphone and talk about peace, pacifism, anti-violence, even if what you're doing is the result of a crime.
But people don't generally want to go there.
To work and to create an income and then have to pay off thugs who will throw you in the rape rooms if you don't pay them off is quite a bit different than somebody handing you five million dollars, which is the result of a crime, and living off that.
To me, there's very big differences as far as that goes.
If you truly grasp that your family fortune results from a crime, then you have a great deal of challenge.
In your communications, if you're interested in communicating about freedom.
And you can be a sophist about freedom.
In sort of the Bush way, right?
You talk about freedom this and freedom that.
You can talk about it, but you can't really live it.
And you can't really confront corruption.
Because you're totally submerged in corruption.
There's a difference between swimming a challenging river to get to the other side and drowning at birth, which is sort of the difference between paying off the thugs and being paid off by the thugs, in terms of the fortune that you inherit as the result of prior brutalities or participation in brutalities.
Some of the larger U.S.
corporations, ADM, Archie Daniels Midland is one of them, Boeing International, of course, is another.
And there are dozens and dozens and dozens, if not hundreds more, whose primary income is the support of the state, the paying of the state.
They're thoroughly enmeshed with the state.
And, of course, some of them really do create weapons for the state and sell those weapons to the state.
That's quite a bit different.
For me, at least.
I mean, at a sort of pretty fundamental level.
That's creating weapons and selling them to the state.
And using the power of the state to crush competition and to exclude foreign imports and so on.
That's all, to me, very different from just having to pay off the thugs to leave you alone as you make your way through life.
So the Internet has changed that by lowering the barrier to entry, the cost to enter the communications game.
What it's done, it has allowed people who have not been bought off ...who do not face this fundamental contradiction.
It has... ...given those people a voice.
It has taken out the middleman.
The middleman makes it very expensive.
And, of course, the production of media is enormously expensive.
And I know this having funded a short film myself.
Written, I guess, produced and funded a short film myself.
I know just how enormously expensive even 23 minutes of a movie can be.
And this kind of show, where I'm talking to you from a car, has allowed those whose microphones are not covered in blood access to you, the enormously valuable, essential, and crucial listener.
That's a total revolution.
That is a total revolution.
Now, there are those, of course, who have enormous talent in communication.
No, I didn't say thinking.
I just said in communication, right?
The Katie Couric's and all of these sorts of people.
Aaron Brown with his spaced out monologues and so on.
Those people have enormous talent for communication and they are given a microphone as long as they don't talk about anything essential.
As long as they don't talk about anything elemental.
As long as they don't talk about anything moral.
The moment that they do talk about something moral, as we talked about in the show yesterday with regards to Barack Obama, it could be anyone, I don't mean to pick on him, the moment that anybody does talk about anything essential, then their entire investment as a communicator is out the window.
Nobody is going to work for 20 years to get access to a one-on-one conversation with the president, like in the Tim Russert kind of way.
Nobody's going to work for 20 years, travel millions of miles around the world, stay up all night, do all of that kind of stuff.
All that broadcast news, OCD stuff.
Nobody's going to work for 20 years And then destroy their career, credibility, access to power, and so on, with a question that is related to any sort of fundamental moral approach to the nature of government, or the nature of war.
Tim Russert is not going to crack open international codes signed by the United States, which say that the act of aggression is a war crime, and ask him whether he feels that the abrogation of these sorts of treaties is rational or not.
Nobody is going to sit down, who is at the top of their profession, and of course, they're the only people who get access to people like George Bush.
Nobody is going to sit down with George Bush and say that what we have done to Iraq is many, many times worse than what was done to America on 9-11.
Thousands of times worse.
Well, hundreds.
On a base body count metric.
Thousands if you count the destruction of infrastructure which did not occur throughout the US.
And that if Osama Bin Laden is a criminal, then George Bush is by the same logic a criminal.
Nobody is going to ask that question.
It's inconceivable.
It's inconceivable.
It would be like asking someone to breathe underwater.
It's like, why would I kill myself?
You can't breathe underwater.
It's impossible.
Why would you even think about it?
When you're snorkeling, you don't sort of say, well, I'll just take the snorkel out and use my gills.
It's just incomprehensible.
Unfathomable.
And what good would it serve, right?
You would just get laughed at.
Nobody would respect or admire it.
You would destroy your entire career.
You would be fired unceremoniously.
You would never get a job again in any way, shape, or form.
Anywhere within a million miles of the media.
You would probably get sued for some sort of breach of contract, harming the material well-being of the network or something like that, because how many other reporters from that network would be allowed to interview any senior officials after a stunt like that, after you actually talked about anything real to do with morality?
Or logic?
Ethics?
And this is fundamental.
So you can ask questions about ten fired lawyers.
You can't ask any fundamental questions about the morality of the state system.
You can't say, at all, that... They're just passing the police.
You can't say at all, well isn't the problem with the welfare state that it's based on Violence.
That you throw people in.
Isn't the problem with public school that it's based on violence?
How can we as a society say that our children should be moral when their education is enforced upon them and their parents at the point of a gun?
How ridiculously hypocritical can you be as a society?
But you can't ask those questions.
You would end up broke, possibly in jail through a lawsuit, You would be ridiculed.
You would not be able to go anywhere.
You would receive death threats.
I don't, because people have to get through a whole bunch of podcasts if I weed them out.
with abstracts before we go for the jugular, right?
I don't want to start off... I didn't want to start off my podcast series with the family, because then I would get all kinds of crazy people.
And I've read about this with other people who have confrontational podcasts, that they get very unpleasant interactions, right?
I've got a lot of intellectual, abstract, philosophical stuff at the beginning, so that when you get to 183, only those people who actually get it are continuing with the message.
This is not accidental.
But if you startle and shock people with the truth when they're not ready for it.
Imagine some patriot at dinner.
Some bushy at dinner.
Somebody is equating Bush to Osama Bin Laden.
Imagine their reaction.
Visceral shock and horror and rage.
And rage!
You'd have to live your life in hiding.
You'd have to live your life in fear.
You may have to live your life in jail.
And you would be broke.
And you would be audited.
And people would dig up whatever crap they could about your past, even to the point of making it up.
And they would simply smear you.
They'd say you were on drugs, they'd say you were a pedophile, they would... whatever, right?
I mean, it would be a complete life catastrophe.
Diluted hemlock.
So, you only get the microphone as the result of a crime prior to the Internet.
You can only give the microphone as the result of a crime.
FCC slavery, enslavement, and enslavement to the prejudices of your ignorant listeners, of your brutalized and propagandized listeners.
And So there's just no way for the truth to get over this soft propaganda wall, right?
There's hard propaganda like Pravda in the U.S.S.R., from sort of 1917 to 1989.
There's the party line.
You get killed for not spouting and parroting the party line.
There's that kind of hard propaganda, hard dictatorial.
And that's where, as Noam Chomsky points out, that's where you can rule by force, openly.
By force.
Where you can't rule openly by force, which is the case in the US, both for historical, philosophical reasons, and also based on the fact that large numbers of people have guns, right?
It's going to be more difficult to rule by force, right?
As they're finding out in Iraq, you can do a lot of damage to even an overwhelmingly powerful Army, just through insurgencies.
You can't rule America by force, and you can't rule most of the western country by force.
So, you have to have soft propaganda.
You can't have hard, throw them in the gulags, throw them in the concentration camps, turn them into zeks.
You have to have the softer kind of propaganda, where there's just this insistent, endlessly chattering, banal wind of clichés and repetitions, which is so seamless that nobody can eventually think outside of this, any more than a fish imagines it can swim in air.
Feel free to come mighty close to my car, my friend.
One extra layer of paint and we'd have a different story.
So, the question now becomes this.
When you don't have to have criminality or adherence to and obscuration of criminality in order to be able to communicate to people, what happens?
Well, as we talked about yesterday, society fragments.
Society fragments.
And lots of crazy people come out of the woodwork, right?
Lots of people who don't have the mic because they're nuts.
I don't think I'm one of them, at least I hope not, but that is one aspect that occurs.
Now, of course, where you're starting to have mutations, where you have mutations, both biologically and in terms of social thinking, where you have mutations, you have progress.
Where you have variety, you have progress.
Where you have a beehive of aspirations, you gather the honey.
So, The challenge then becomes, when you're not faced with this insistent, banal, chattering, dull, empty wind of soft propaganda, then what happens is you begin to actually have to evaluate real alternatives.
You, like as the listener, as the consumer of the Internet media, you actually begin to have to challenge yourself, because you don't get those soft, easy, predictable lobs of left and right wing, or Democrat or Republican, or whatever the local labor and conservative, whatever the local flavorers are in your constituency, you don't get those easy lobs and those easy answers.
Suddenly, rather than having the same message thrown to you over and over and over and over again, you actually have to think about what you are being presented with.
Because the answers, as they become more fragmented, the answers become less easy.
And those who use the Internet for their primary research, or for their primary news media, of course you can go and find just your little niche of, I don't know, people who... 9-11 conspiracists and their love of goats or whatever.
You can do that, of course.
And you can just stay within your own tiny little enclave, and that's fine.
I mean, that's always been the case.
But where the message is highly fragmented, Then there is a greater challenge in terms of evaluating.
Weeding out the wheat from the chaff.
Chaff?
I don't know.
I'm no farmer.
Except of your mind, my friends.
Then you have more of a challenge because you don't get lobbed all of the easy answers and stale prejudices and historical straight-jacketed mental habits of the past.
You are given a confusing array of dazzlingly wild, crazy, deranged, possibly brilliant information.
Not just in this show.
You are given all of this, and what it does is it provokes anxiety and hostility, especially in the older people.
But in the younger people, it makes them of course very skeptical, right?
Because even if you discount 90% of the multiplicity of opinion on the Internet, 95%?
99%?
There's some valid stuff out there.
I like to think that this is one of them.
And what it does is when you have a wild beehive of activity on the one hand, and on the other hand, like on this sort of main media thing, you just get the stale bromides repeated over and over and over again, the left and right nonsense, then what happens is you begin to realize that there's an enormous amount of conformity.
In the main media.
And of course it's going to give you some skepticism and some will plumb into conspiracy theories and so on.
But you don't need conspiracy theories to explain this.
I mean, the same self-interest that drives capitalism drives conservatism in the mainstream media.
And of course, let's not even talk about the FCC pulling your broadcast license.
The FCC can shut down... Oh, freedom of speech!
Oh my God, we need that freedom of speech!
The government can shut down any media outlet in 24 hours.
The appeal will take years.
Everybody's thrown out of a job.
You can destroy a network in 24 hours.
Just pull the license.
And we think about freedom of speech and we wonder why they don't criticize the government.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
That's soft propaganda.
Soft control, right?
You either line up and shoot people who disagree with you or you give them a license and destroy their livelihood if they don't agree with you.
I mean, I...
It's, of course, more pleasant to simply have a license pulled rather than to be hauled up and shot, but the effect is the same.
I mean, the effect is the same.
So, the great thing about the Internet, and the reason why I think this conversation is so powerful, and why this is so new, and why it's a challenge to, if you've been listening this far, it's a challenge to listen to what I'm saying into this conversation, and to wonder whether or not It's crazy!
Go listen to Podcast 500, where I sing the line, filling up your brain, hopefully not too insane, right?
Hopefully not too insane!
Because it's not stuff that you've heard before.
And that has very powerful ramifications on two levels.
One is that it's new thought, which I think is stimulating.
Or I would say it's thought, but let's not go there.
But on the other hand, if this is new and highly valuable thought, as we talked about in a recent podcast that you might want to check out, The Depressed for a dissertation of a PhD in depression.
It's about a doctoral philosophy student who's been listening to the show who's got some challenges in terms of depression.
The fact that this thought is available, but that you've never heard it, either in media or academics or books or libraries, philosophical discourses, the fact that what we're talking about here is available but never talked about, I think is very significant.
And it has a very underground nuclear detonation aspect to your life, which is Why?
Why are these truths never spoken?
They're not that complicated.
They're not that difficult.
I haven't made up some alternative to Elvish slash Mandarin that takes 10 years to learn.
I mean, some people say they get it in a couple of minutes of listening to the first podcast.
It's not that complicated.
If violence is wrong, then violence is wrong.
If people are equal, you can't have a state.
If people are not equal, the state will be corrupt.
None of this stuff is particularly complicated.
But of course it's never talked about and it's never discussed and it's not available in any media outlets.
And the question is why?
And when you start to ask that question why, then you really do start to, I think, get a hold of some very disturbing but powerful and essential questions.
And so the fact that we have a microphone that has not been wrestled from the hands of a dead man, that is not the result of a crime, and does not require the sublimation of any rational capacity for truth and integrity to the self-interest of media careerism, Has given me at least a certain latitude and freedom and has given this conversation, I think, a certain latitude and freedom that has simply not existed before in history.
And that's why I think we just have the most amazing capacity to do some real amazing, real powerful and wonderful things.
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