All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:16
The Origins of the State: Part 2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux.
So this is part two of The Origins of the State.
In the first part we talked about memes and the reproductive capacities of Gene Simmons, I think it was.
It's been a while.
Anyway, well, it's been this morning.
So in part two I want to talk about the origins of the state.
And specifically, since the state is a concept, we're really talking about the origins of concepts, and a really fascinating thing to explore mentally.
I'll give you sort of a framework for how I approach these things, and then if you find the framework nonsense, you can save yourself a certain amount of time by not listening to this.
Go listen to a couple of live Queen version intros to Somebody to Love.
We'll give you goosebumps particularly if you've ever tried to sing in your life and can appreciate the magical mastery of Freddie Mercury's vocal talents.
So, I believe or accept the efficacy and value of evolution It's culture to the nonwithstanding.
So when I look at the development of concepts, I look at the development of the capacity to transfer resources, to pillage resources.
I look at it as a predator-prey relationship.
That which enhances the transfer of resources is more likely to survive than that which either is neutral or enhances less or inhibits the transfer of resources.
So, if you can get people to give you tribute, and obedience, and women, then, like through a set of concepts, then those concepts are going to have their own evolutionary advantage.
And those concepts are going to be more likely to survive.
Alright, so, what a couple of things that we know, or at least we can reasonably surmise from the origins of human consciousness.
Well, the first thing is that pattern recognition is dangerous because it is so faulty.
Right?
So, let me give you an example.
So let's say there is a chimpanzee, like an ape, a pre-human.
I know we didn't evolve from chimpanzees, cousins of chimpanzees.
Let's say there was some Pre-human who was learning how to do that weird squeaky whistle by putting the blades of grass between his thumb pads.
And what happened was a tiger leapt at him and the tiger had a heart attack and died.
Well, okay, so pattern recognition might be to say, well, the best way to protect yourself against tigers is use the magical properties of the small blade of grass between your thumb pads and make that squeaking sound, because that stops a tiger's heart dead in its tracks.
Well, if everybody practices doing that, rather than looking for tigers in the grass, you have a pretty tragic situation occurring where that meme, that concept, will not I guess that's something important to process when it comes to concepts.
Concepts can be faulty.
And this makes illness so difficult to solve.
Problems of illness make them so difficult to solve.
Because, let's say, so cancer, right?
Cancer can spontaneously stop.
It can go into remission spontaneously.
And if someone happens to be eating apricot seeds or something like that, when this happens, then they'll say, my God, the apricot seeds cured my cancer.
Right?
Where someone else might go into chemo with a very aggressive cancer, and that cancer will not spontaneously go into remission, and it will kill the person.
And then somebody says, well, you see, they hear these two stories, they say, well, apricot seeds cures cancer, but chemo kills you.
Right?
I'm not saying that's the objective truth, I mean, but that's certainly what can happen in terms of our concepts, our concept formation.
I mean, you all know the stories of the athletes with the lucky socks, you know, as long as I keep wearing these socks, I can't lose and all this kind of stuff.
And, you know, I guess maybe there's a certain amount of self-fulfilling prophecy and all that, but, you know, it gives you the confidence and so on.
But we can very easily mess up cause and effect.
Correlation is not causation, blah blah blah.
So all of these statistical mistakes and logic mistakes that we can make harm our survival as a species.
So In a tribe there are two major evolutionary pressures.
The first is the survival of the tribe as a whole, but the second is the constant improvement of the tribe's DNA pool.
So the survival of the tribe as a whole is a meme that benefits only one man, or one male pre-human, at the expense of all of the other tribe members.
is less likely to survive.
The one that benefits everyone, even if it benefits some people, disproportionately benefits other people to some degree.
So if there's a gene that makes your toe very attractive but at the same time renders you sterile, then women will come to you for your toe but will not leave with fertilized eggs and therefore that gene will.
It's good for the toe, not good for the reproduction of the genes, of the DNA.
So, once we understand that, then we can understand the evolutionary pressures on concepts justifying social organization.
Right?
This is pretty important.
So, if you were to design, in a pre-philosophical, pre-market-based, state-of-nature environment, if you were to try to design a social hierarchy which allowed for the survival of the tribe, and also aimed to improve the gene pool, you would have the alphas, the betas, and the zetas, right?
So the alpha males would be the ones in charge, you get most of the resources, and they would pan those resources to the beta males, who are like the cops, the soldiers, the enforcers, the jail guards, and so on.
But you would not deny You would not deny reproductive capacities to the zeta males, right?
To the vast majority of males who are neither alphas nor betas.
The zeta males would want to become alphas or betas, so you'd have that improvement capacity, but they would not be denied reproductive capacity.
You need the zeta males for someone, right?
If the alpha males are the kings and the betas are the generals, then you need the cannon fodder, right?
So you need to have Low-status males able to reproduce with low-status females.
But you'd want, of course, everyone to be working towards higher status.
Which is why, you know, we're fascinated by celebrity, by beauty, by money, all these kinds of things.
And we want those things.
That's how the evolutionary pressure to, quote, improve the gene pool exists.
So here we have a framework for the state, the early state.
Which has evolutionary advantage.
Now, the problem is that this is a template for the states, not the state, yet.
And the reason I say that It's that the state is a moral argument.
And we're talking, like, anything which is reproduced in a troop of chimpanzees is not really a moral argument.
Now, please understand, I'm not saying that chimpanzees aren't capable of being nice to each other or altruism.
Of course they are.
I mean, all animals which reproduce give up resources in order to raise their children.
And so I'm not saying that at all.
And don't write me all these emails about, oh, you're saying that monkeys can't be nice.
Monkeys can be nice.
I'm there.
I've read those experiments.
I'm there with that.
But what I'm saying is that monkeys don't have a theory of nice.
I mean, a dog can catch a ball, but a dog can't do physics.
A dog doesn't have a theory of catching a ball.
A dog can catch a ball.
A cave fish knows where the light is, but that doesn't mean that he has strenuous debates with other cave fish about whether light is a wave or a particle.
I just want to be clear about that.
Instinct is not concept.
The senses is not theory.
Evidence of the senses is not theory.
And human beings alone have theories, have universals, have these kinds of concepts.
Concepts about concepts is really what I'm talking about.
Morality is a concept.
Having theories about morality is a concept around a concept, right?
You know, cats know the difference between food and feces.
This does not mean they are biologists or scientists or anything like that.
They don't have a theory of science.
So, we have a template of the state in this sort of alpha, beta, zeta setup of the ape tribal structure.
But, that's not really that great at maintaining the transfer of resources.
The reason being That everyone who's a king, everyone who's the alpha, wants to remain the king, wants to remain the alpha, and wants to pass that along to his offspring.
But there's a problem.
The offspring of the alpha tend to be less ambitious because they didn't fight to become the alpha.
This is what they used to call in America in the 19th century Rags to riches to rags, in three generations, right?
First generation makes sacrifices, works like crazy, second generation inherits all the wealth, third generation pisses it all away.
Because they've grown not comfortable, not hungry, and so on, right?
So this is, this is the great challenge.
If you are an alpha, what you want to do is make being an alpha hereditary, but you can't do that without concepts.
without gods and the divine right of kings and without inventing super apes in the sky who demand that you either appoint your own kin, your son, usually as the alpha or, you know, if you don't have a son you choose the bride of the daughter or if you have no children you at least choose your successor.
And the reason for this, of course, is that alphas get old.
And when alphas get old, someone is going to come and beat them up and take their place.
But the alpha doesn't want to have someone come beat him up and take his place.
And he wants... The meme for passing the alpha mantle to the child, to your own child, is very strong.
But how do you achieve it?
How do you achieve it?
Well, it's a very interesting challenge.
And so I would argue something like this.
tribe A attacks tribe B and tribe A wins and they say we won because we have tribe A alpha is the best Bob is the alpha for tribe A and we won because of Bob and that's how Bob stays in power right?
now the problem with this is that In general, sometimes tribe A is going to win and sometimes they're going to get their enormous baboon asses kicked, right?
And this is a problem.
The problem with the the vagaries of fortune is that it's really hard to maintain a conceptual grip on power when power is granted as a result of success but success can never be guaranteed.
Right?
So, some guy, there's been no rain for 20 days.
Everyone's really thirsty.
Some guy does a funky dance, and then it rains.
Woohoo!
Right?
Correlation is perceived to be there, right?
Causation is perceived to be there, it's only correlation, but OK, it's the rain dance that made the rain, right?
OK.
OK!
Sounds believable to me, as an ape.
Now, the problem is, of course, that this person who, the person who does the rain dance, who claims to be able to control the weather, if it rains for too long, they'll say, okay, make it stop raining, and he's going to do some other dance, and it's going to keep raining, and then they're going to say, well, I think we've teased out that correlation was not causation, and by the way, here's an ass bone to the head.
Right for taking our resources and lying to us about your ability to control the weather.
So the problem with the witch doctors is the uncertainty of what they provide.
Because what they provide is only the illusion of control, of cause and effect.
Now, the other challenge with the witch doctors, with the shamans, the priests, the magic makers, is that everybody wants the benefits to be exquisitely empirically verifiable.
So, we must win this battle!
I need rain now!
I want this child to be a son!
You know, whatever it is.
They want it to be now.
But the magic maker, the shaman, the witch doctor, he doesn't want things to be empirically verifiable in the here and now.
Of course, right?
Because then his bullshit is going to be disproven.
So everybody wants the benefits to be like now, except the shaman does not want the benefits to be now.
Now the challenge of course is that as the shaman pushes off the benefits, he must increase those benefits.
Right?
Because of people's time preference.
So if I offer you $10 now or $10 a year from now, you'll take the $10 now.
Obviously, right?
It might not be alive a year from now, it might be worth less.
Whatever, right?
So, if I say, well, I'll either give you $10 now, or I'll give you $500 a year from now, well then it starts to balance out, right?
So the further I push things off, the higher the reward has to be.
But the further I push things off, the more skeptical people are.
And I'm always facing competition from the people whose magic funky dances have produced, quote, produced rain in the here and now, and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, it's clear to see that this is why almost all religions end up promising a paradise after death, right?
Paradise being the greatest conceivable possible reward, and after death being the furthest and least verifiable that reward can be.
I mean, this has nothing to do with theology.
This is simply to do with resource acquisition.
That's the common pattern, right?
I have to promise you the most, the furthest away.
Those two are highly related.
And so I have to promise you life after death, Paradise is all unverifiable, all infinitely far away and infinitely great.
It always struck me that visions of heaven are so pedestrian.
Anyway.
So this is what the witch doctors are doing.
Constantly pushing off value and increasing that value to wildly disproportionate levels in order to cover up the fact that It's being pushed away.
Now, the life-after-death meme has value, obviously, in that it gives people the illusion of control over their environment, which can be helpful.
I mean, it can be good.
Stress is bad for an organism, right?
So if you live at the bottom of a volcano that seems to keep erupting and you can't move for whatever reason, then some guy comes along and says, well, we, you know, we sacrifice a kid and that will satisfy the anger of the volcano god and he won't spew on us, right?
And, you know, that may get rid of excess useless eaters from the tribe's perspective and it also allows people to live in the shadow of a volcano without constantly freaking out that it's about to erupt.
This, of course, is also another reason why, like the tax code and federal regulations, religious edicts tend to pile up in an ever-increasing complexity, an ever-increasing contradictory complexity.
Right?
Because If you sacrifice a boy, and then the volcano erupts anyway, then they'll say, well, the problem was the boy wasn't young enough.
And then you sacrifice a young boy, the volcano erupts anyway.
Well, the problem was that we need girls too, and then they have to have a blue headdress, and then you have to have an orange knife, and the altar has to have these words written on it, and these are all the things required by the volcano god.
Right?
So you basically have to keep, because The specific injunctions, the specific commandments, the specific rituals are not having anything to do with reality.
So because of that what happens is the witch doctors keep piling on more and more requirements.
Oh, it didn't work because of X and Y and Z and A and B and C and then you end up with this, you know, alphagetty theology which is all designed to cloud the fact that cause and effect is not occurring.
I just want to point that out.
Now, one of the things that transforms ape-like tribalism to the foundations of the state is, or are, ethics.
Ethics.
So, the king, or the alpha, Says, well I really wanna make sure that my line continues.
I get to pass the crown to my son.
The king is dead, long live the king!
That kind of stuff.
Didn't understand the power or point of that when I was a kid, but I sort of get it now.
One king dies, they put the crown on another king.
The king is dead, long live the king!
Because king is a concept.
The person is dead, but kingship lives on.
And what this changes, it's a very very powerful change.
The traditional alpha ape-like structure is you can't.
I'm bigger and stronger, you can't overthrow me.
And then when I get older and weak, you can.
So the you can't is the physical intimidation.
But if you switch that you can't to the magic of you mustn't.
That is very, very important.
It's from a could to a should.
Two very, very different things when it comes to lineage.
You can't overthrow me because I'm bigger than stronger.
I'm bigger and stronger.
But the moment you can overthrow me, then you can.
Right?
You can't because I'm bigger and stronger.
As opposed to, you mustn't overthrow me, Macbeth, because it's immoral.
Don't you see?
And then, when the king gets old, the old get old and the young get stronger.
Might take a week, but it might take longer.
They've got the guns, but we've got the numbers.
Gonna win, yeah, we're taking over!
Come on!
Well, that's the essence of it.
So, old King Duncan and Macbeth is old.
He's not out fighting.
Macbeth is out there beheading those the king points at.
He's young, he's strong, he's healthy.
And he kills the king to become king.
Ah, but then he is cursed, you see.
And curse is, since curses don't affect anything in reality, curses are getting you to self-attack.
But you can only self-attack based upon morality.
Right?
Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
There's a scene in The Godfather 2, the book, I don't think, don't know if it's in the movie, where the older thug, right, the older Mafia Don, is demanding, I think, $600 for the young guy who's importing something.
That's his sort of cover.
And the young guy, who grows up to be Don Corleone, the young guy says, well, you know, I don't really care about this guy.
If he was dying, I wouldn't spend $600 to save him.
So why on earth would I give him $600 when I could just kill him?
He can kill the Alpha.
And then he becomes the Alpha.
And the Mafia is fascinating because it's a pre-state situation.
I mean, there's some rough, you know, code of honor or whatever, but fundamentally it is a pre-state situation, which means that you always have to watch your back and there's a constant turnover of power and so on.
I mean, of course, they're all trying to get the money that is provided by state bans on various things, gambling, drugs, prostitution.
All that kind of stuff.
Alcohol, at one point.
Not the free market, but anyway.
If the king can say, if the alpha can say to the betas, right?
If the king can say to his knights, you mustn't overthrow me, because it's immoral.
Well, the problem is that then he's achieved lineage, right?
Now the problem is, of course, that morality doesn't work on sociopaths who have no conscience, right?
It's like, if you don't give me your wallet, my invisible monkey is going to attack you.
Well, I think I'll just keep my wallet, thanks.
I believe in your invisible monkey, can't do any harm.
So the problem is that basically the power structure of the ape is sociopathic based, right?
It's just, if you can use enough violence to get your way, then you will.
If you can't, then you won't.
Not out of any moral considerations, but just because of the negative repercussions.
If you challenge the Alpha and lose, you may be cast out, you may be killed, and you may lose reproductive privileges, and so on.
Like with the women.
So, the problem is how do you enforce morality on the sociopathic betas, and maybe even zetas, who want your crown?
Well, you have to invent someone who is going to punish them on your behalf.
Somebody infinite, somebody all-knowing, who's going to punish anyone who challenges the thou shalt not, rather than the thou can't, until you can.
You have to invent a super-ape who will punish the people who want to take your crown on your behalf.
And you only need this when you can't punish them on your own behalf yourself, right?
You need this when you get old.
Now the problem is, of course, that somebody who calls in the Ultra Ape Deity Airstrike, reasonable name for a band, they face the considerable challenge that nothing happens, right?
Oh lord, smite down this orangutan pretender to the throne!
Now!
Right, nothing happens.
And so, you have to say that the orangutan ape pretenders to the throne who want to take over the alpha crown, that they will be punished after death.
Or, you know, if you're Shakespeare, with your quill and tongue firmly up the ass of the king, then you will say, well, he's punished by not being able to sleep, and his wife doesn't like him anymore, and she goes crazy!
And then he goes crazy.
And he's miserable.
See?
Now, you can't invent the super-ape directly with much credibility.
Because there's so much of a conflict of interest with the alpha male saying, well, I have a super-ape brother who's gonna kill you after you're dead, who's gonna torture you after you're dead, if you should dare to try and take over my throne.
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's such obvious self-interest in it, right?
So you need someone else who's going to do it, which is why having the king and the priest united really works very well.
Also, warriors tend not to be that interested in children and priests are extremely interested in children, not just for the obvious jokey reasons, but they know that they need to get to children before reality does, before they can develop enough reason to repel the infection of the priest's cobwebby brain nets.
And so warriors don't really care about little kids that much, but priests will fasten onto their mental veins like vampire bats.
There's a femininity around the priesthood.
They spend so much time indoctrinating women and children.
That's just the kind of femininity about, to me at least, about the priesthood.
Not in excess of testosterone, which is why they all had to Shave those tonsures!
So the priest indoctrinates the children and tells him that the king is divine.
That the lineage must be respected and that God chooses the next king and that's generally the son.
And what this does of course is it creates A situation where the priest is paid by the king and the priest justifies the rule of the king.
It's symbiotic.
It's a symbiotic co-parasitism on the rest of the tribe.
But the only way this works is if they invent morality.
As I've said for quite some time, morality was not invented to make people good.
Morality was invented to provoke self-attack
and to get people to believe in life after death so that they would no longer try to overthrow the king and that's really the fundamental relationship between the priest and the king and the rest of the tribe and so concepts which
which provoke self-attack, which provoke guilt or provoke fear through the terror of hell.
Those concepts are going to really grow in a very nice and tidy fashion.
They're going to do quite well.
And those tribal leaders who invent, with the priests, who invent morality Well, they themselves, their lineage does very well.
So it makes the royalty that much more of a prize.
Which also means that other people want the royalty more and more, right?
Because it's that much of a greater prize.
It's one thing that's never been particularly believable about Lord of the Rings is the conspicuous absence of a priesthood.
So the concepts of a deity, of morality, of heaven and hell after death, they all were created to make the bloodline of the ruler closer to future ruling, to make it more powerful.
Now, there was, I would argue, some material benefits to the tribe for this, or of this.
And the material benefit was a reduction in wounding based on ritual or real combat to become the Alpha.
Right?
You know, we always hear in democracies, you know, it is the peaceful transfer of power.
That's like the big Ideal, that's the big juicy good thing, right?
It's the peaceful transfer of power that means everything.
And that peaceful transfer of power has some value.
Now, Hans Hoppe has also argued that aristocracy is better in many ways for the economy than democracy because aristocracy has a longer term view of the economic health of the country because they want to hand the country to their sons and therefore they're not going to get into the kind of debt.
Democracy lasts like four or eight years, most of the rulers or leaders.
And because it's not hereditary, the way that they can hand value to their son is by extracting it from the public purse.
Whereas what the aristocratic leader is trying to do is actually hand the public purse to his son so he's not going to pillage it quite as rambunctiously.
The challenge is, of course, that although it may be better in some ways in terms of maintaining the value of the public purse, you can only maintain The people's belief in the value or virtue of aristocracy with significant priesthood, right?
With a significant priesthood.
Where that priesthood begins to wane away in democracies and republics and so on, they're replaced by statist apologists, right?
The priesthood simply switches to statism, which is what most of them did in the 19th century by abandoning the priesthood and going into communism and socialism and Fascism and so on.
And create a secular religion called the World Spirit or the Will of the People or whatever it is, right?
It's just another bunch of nonsense.
But the origins of the state, because the state is a state of mind, and the state is the horizontal attack of slave-on-slave violence for questioning the value and virtue of the state, and that requires virtue, Punishment after death, or significant punishment, and the self-attack that comes from virtue.
Right?
So hell is supposed to scare the sociopaths, and guilt is supposed to neuter those with empathy, with self-empathy, right?
I mean, sociopaths don't feel guilt, so you'll scare them with hell, but for everyone else you will.
Give them guilt, and so on, and that's how you get them to control themselves.
So those who are earnest and really want to be good, in other words, those who have a conscience, you infect with guilt, and those sociopaths who don't have a conscience, you make them afraid of hell.
And that is how these sorts of things are maintained.
And this is, a lot of the great novels are, when hell fails, here's guilt, right?
So hell fails for Macbeth, and here's guilt.
And hell fails in the secular worldview of Fyodor... no, Raskolnikov.
I can't remember his first name.
Radonovich?
Raskolnikov, the antihero of crime and punishment.
Hell is not something he's afraid of, but guilt is his hell.
As Satan says in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, any way I fly is hell.
I am myself hell.
I can't escape it because it's in me.
And those really are the origins of the state.
It comes down to that which is beneficial to the rulers and the codependent, mutual, symbiotic parasitism of the warrior and priestly classes on the general body politic.
The minor improvements that may occur in some pragmatic ways by having less violence and the transfer of power has some benefit, but unfortunately it comes co-joined with massive superstitious irrationality.
that bars people from things like reason and science and trade and the free market and basic human virtues and keeps them addicted to slavery and all this subjugation and so on.
So, that's part two.
I have a little bit more to say about it, which I'll talk about in part three.
Thank you so much for your time and attention.
As always, my friends, Stephen Molyneux from freedommaineradio.com.
Please feel free to donate if you find this stuff enlightening.
▲
Export Selection