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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:21
Why Freedom Will Not Breed Tyranny
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well. So, this is my hopefully comprehensive take on the problem that is often brought up about anarchism, which is something like this.
Okay, so let's say that we carve the heart of the state out of society as a whole.
And we have a stateless society, a society populated by reasonable, rational, decent people to the most part.
And let's just say that things chug along for a while.
Well, what you've done by taking the state out of society is you've created a power vacuum.
And people will clamor for a leader at some level, and leaders, of course, will be provided, or will jump into the fray and enter into the vacuum, and society will re-coalesce around a state.
It will reform, and you'll be right back where you started, but with a lot of instability in attempting to get rid of the state, and then a lot of instability as the state comes back.
And so we don't want to do that.
That's... That's not good.
There's no point half killing a patient by cutting out a tumor that's only going to regrow if you can kind of live with it anyway.
So that's one of the major arguments against a state of society, this idea of eternal recurrence.
Or that the social configuration is subject to a kind of original sin gravity.
In other words, that you can throw dust into the air and it looks like it's left the ground and so on, but over time, of course, the dust begins to settle back down to the ground and resumes its original place, so to speak. And so...
There is this gravity well at the center of society that forms it into a pyramid, that forms it into a hierarchical oligarchy, and you can scatter, you can do this, but it's like throwing a rock into a pond.
All it does is eventually smooth back over to the way it was, no matter how many ripples show up in the pond.
I think I did that fairly fair justice.
Now, it seems believable, and it's one of these arguments that really, really does seem believable.
Believable. And it seems believable in the complete absence of any practical evidence that it's true.
See, that's a tricky thing, right?
It seems believable, but no evidence is put forward to support this claim.
Ah, you see, this is where you have to be really, really careful of arguments that are put forward.
If an argument or a perspective seems believable, but no evidence is put forward, then usually you're dealing with something that only seems believable because of either the momentum of history or our general personal experiences in families.
So, this is of course a human nature argument.
And the human nature argument runs something like this.
People clamor for a leader and this is a vacuum, a need that creates the leader and supports the leader and configure society around the dominance of the leader.
In the same way that if people want a lot of food, and they can pay for it, then they will bring food.
Demand creates supply.
There's a demand for leadership.
That's what generates leaders in society.
That's one side, and sometimes there's another side, which is that...
There are lots of bad people in the world who want something for nothing and to escape the consequences of their actions.
And those people will work tirelessly, tirelessly, I tell you, to create a state.
And their desire to have power over others is greater than other people's desire to not be ruled.
And therefore, since they're going to work harder to rule than others are going to work to resist their rule, eventually they will win and there will be rulers.
And we will be right back where we started.
Well, there's no possibility of sustaining this thesis according to any argument from human nature.
An argument from human nature has to be consistent to all humans.
You can't say X is human nature...
And yet, the opposite of X is very prevalent and ineradicable among human beings.
You understand that? You cannot say X is human nature, but the opposite of X is highly prevalent and ineradicable among human beings.
And so you can't say, you simply cannot say...
That human beings, say, have a desire to be ruled.
That's human nature. Human beings have a sheeple, they want to be ruled, all these livestock in search of a shepherd.
Because, of course, if all human beings want to be ruled, then there are, in fact, no rulers.
Because all human beings want to be ruled, and therefore there can be no rulers.
Now, if you say, as many people do, that some human beings want to be ruled, and then there are other people who want to rule them, then you kind of have...
An opposite. It's like saying it's human nature to be in an abusive relationship.
Well, no. Because if everyone is subject to abuse, then no one can be an abuser and therefore it can't exist, right?
It's like saying it's human nature for everyone to want to date someone who's taller than they are.
Well, no, because some people have to be taller.
Some people have to be the tallest.
And so, yeah, you understand.
So it really works on a UPB logic fail.
It doesn't work according to that UPB logic fail.
And so we can dismiss that right away.
Even if we accept the human nature argument, it can't work because it divides human beings into predator and prey, into shepherds and livestock.
Can't say it's the nature of sheep to want to be herded by other sheep.
Anyway, you understand. So we can toss that one aside.
This is, of course, another way of writing the social contract, another way of trying to find a way to maintain some sort of legitimacy of the state, in a kind of amoral fashion.
You know, the general argument for the state is we surrender some liberties in order to have a society that protects more liberties than would be possible if we didn't surrender these liberties.
I will surrender 5% of my liberties in order to maintain the 95%, because if I surrender 0% of my liberties, then I get a war of all against all, and I get no freedom.
So you've got to strike that balance.
And this argument is to say the state serves a need.
The state is created by the vacuum need for leadership for being ruled by the majority of human beings.
See, we're serving their need.
This is what all abusers use, right?
It's what the abusive parent says.
You made me hit you. It's your behavior that made me hit you.
You asked for it. You deserved it.
The rapist saw she was begging for it, right?
The robber, anyone stupid enough to walk down that dark alley deserves to lose their wallet, by God.
And all violent people attempt to blame the victim and the state, of course, those who justify the state.
No difference.
Saying that the state is an effect of a fundamental flaw in humanity is to make the argument that the state is not imposed upon humanity, but it's drawn into existence.
It is summoned by the evil inhabitants of the depths of the human soul.
It is summoned by people's desire for rulers, their desire to be ruled.
That is where the state comes from.
It serves the need, you see, of everyone's desire to be subjugated.
Okay, so we can't say that human beings bring the state into existence because they want to be ruled, because that divides human beings into rulers and ruled.
There's no human nature argument then.
The second problem is that the state is not rulers and ruled.
I mean, that's worse than simplistic.
It is ridiculous.
It's like saying the only thing in nature is predator and prey.
That's not true. A forest, a river, they're all ecosystems with symbiosis and helpers and, of course, within every organism there are helpers and hinders, there are beneficial and harmful bacteria, there are, I mean, you name it, right? And so every one is an ecosystem, every system is an ecosystem.
It's very, very complex, not just predator and prey.
It's true that there are those categories, but to say that that's all there is is ridiculous.
In the same way, in the world, there is not rulers and ruled.
That is not how it works.
It is impossible for it to work that way, because the ruled outnumber the rulers.
Oh, what, 200,000, 250,000 cops in the U.S., 300-plus million people.
Well, there's not just the cops and the citizens.
There's not just people, there's not just one guy with a gun, and then 500 other guys with guns, and the one guy with the gun gets to rule them.
That's not how the state works.
There's a tiny minority. Okay, so there's the politicians who are like the civilized veneer, the sort of the velvet glove on the fist.
It's the media, which is the baying mob that shouts down anyone who questions the ethics of the system and constantly programs and bewilders and dizzies people with endless false ethic fairy tales, you know,
the poor, the rich... There's the academics who wave around their paper certificates, which prove to everyone you see that they should be listened to, not because of the quality of their arguments, but because of the impressiveness of their state-supported pedigrees.
And there are the indoctrinators of the young, the public school teachers...
There is the art media, which constantly reinforces that there are dangerous predators out there and rapists and serial killers and only the thin blue line of the cops keeps this chaos at bay and keeps everyone safe and we stand upon this wall so you sleep at night, you can't handle the truth, etc., etc.
There is the sort of journalistic print media, Which is obsessed with the state, of course, as it draws your attention to the state, because anything you see so closely, you can't see the pattern of, right?
You can't see...
You can't see Jupiter if you've got your thumb at arm's length and you're looking at your thumb because Jupiter's out of focus, right?
You can't see the mountain if your face is pressed against the rock.
And so the media is constantly pressing your face into the state so that you can never see what the state is, never see the shape of the state.
That's why everything in the media, almost everything, you see this constantly.
If you look for it, you'll see it everywhere.
It's almost always all about the state, all about the state, almost always all about the state.
Government's doing this. This legislation passed.
This guy's running from office. This guy dropped out of office.
There's this scandal. There's that scandal.
This person overspent. This person underspent.
This person is lying.
This person is telling the truth.
Right? I mean, it's all politics, politics, politics.
So that you can never see the forest for the trees.
All the inconsequential details are put forward.
Did Newt Gingrich have an open marriage?
Was there? Hellman McCain had an affair.
What did Rick Santorum say about gays?
You can never look at the system as a whole, you see, because you're always looking at the details.
It's like you've got a microscope looking at a newspaper picture.
You'll never figure out what the hell it is.
You never see the shape.
All you see are those dots.
It's like trying to read a book in font size 24 million.
It takes forever even to figure out half a letter.
You're constantly pressed up against the state, so you can never see it for what it is, never see the shape.
You could go, I mean, you could go on and on.
The state is an incredibly complex ecosystem of propaganda, distraction, bewilderment, entertainment, stimulus, and disapproval, and threat, implicit and explicit threats of ostracism, of attack, of...
I understand. So saying there's just rulers and ruled, It's so simplistic and wrong.
I mean, you know people just talking about family and parents and children.
And they're certainly not talking about the state.
Now, the idea that the state arises...
Out of human need of some kind, whether it's the need to surrender rights, to gain more protection, whether it's the need to have somebody tell us what to do because we're just so baffled, bothered, and bewildered by tying our shoelaces and walking in a straight line that we need somebody to put chains on our legs and force us too much in a row.
This doesn't even hold up To the most cursory, ridiculous, idiotic, foolish, distracted examination of not even the bare facts, but even the bare theory.
What do I mean? Well, if it is true That human beings innately want to be ruled and that human society, because of this weird split between human beings, the rulers and the ruled,
and forget all the other complexities, let's just pretend that one's true, if society takes its shape because of a huge and incessant bottomless desire to be ruled by everyone, then why, oh why, oh why, oh why, is so much damn effort Poured into propagandizing us from cradle to goddamn grave.
Right? Just look at things from a cultural evolution standpoint.
To rule people You need to indoctrinate them for years.
For years and years and years.
And you need to threaten them with hell to get them to be religious.
With ostracism, if you want them to toe the line.
And remember, of course, in human history, ostracism basically meant death.
And so you had to threaten people with the rejection of the tribe if you wanted to get people to believe the lies of the tribe.
I will swallow your bullshit if you people will hunt with me and let me live and watch over me while I sleep so I don't get eaten and help me till the fields and help me gather the crop and oh yeah it would be great if you provided me a handy set of willing ovaries from time to time as well so I could reproduce my DNA. If people If you naturally believed in deities,
then you would never need hell, you would never need a threat, you would never need to damn all atheists is immoral and all unbelievers is going to burn in hellfire forever and so on.
You don't need to show your average hetero 14 year old boy a porn film and say, I am going to threaten you with hell if you don't get an erection.
You don't have to bring a glass of water to a man in a desert and say, I will socially ostracize you if you don't drink when you're thirsty, now that you're thirsty.
I have to do these things because these things come naturally.
I don't need five years of propaganda to teach my child that falling on the sidewalk makes owies and should be avoided if at all possible.
I do not need ten years of indoctrination to get her to desire chocolate over broccoli for food.
This is not just true in terms of sensual experiences of sex and food and pain avoidance, but it's true of reason as well.
I don't need to indoctrinate my child for years to get her to understand that stairs go up and down and you lift your leg and the reason that the house that's here today will also be here tomorrow that you walk slowly when it's dark that the sun is hot that the snow is cold I don't need to keep repeating after her the snow is cold the basic facts of reality logic,
reason, UPB all of that stuff I do not need indoctrination my daughter in the car today We're saying that she doesn't like it.
That it's no, sorry, she said it's bad when mommy says no.
It's not right when mama says no.
And of course I paused and UBB tweaked her, which she's, I guess, somewhat used to by now.
And I said, oh, but you like to say no a lot, so is it also wrong when you say no?
Long pause. No, she's caught, right?
No. Why?
What's the difference? Why is it wrong for mommy to say no, but not wrong for you to say no?
And she said, mommy doesn't like to say no.
Brilliant. Three and a half years old.
Pure stone philosophical genius.
Using the words wrong as inappropriate and immoral at the same time doesn't fit with preferences versus universally immoral.
Brilliant blending. Trolls start early.
But I don't need to indoctrinate her to tell her that things need to be consistent.
She gets that intuitively.
That's an extension of the universalization principle of her mind.
So, let's think of two tribes.
Tribe A and Tribe B. Tribe A thinks that you need an entire cohort of indoctrinators in order for the tribe to be able to inflict its culture on the young.
You need a whole bunch of people who set up rituals.
You need your priests. You need your charlatans.
You need the storytellers.
You need all of these people. And it takes a lot of time and effort and reason.
You've got to feed these people. You've got to feed everyone while they're being indoctrinated, Rituals and so on.
That's tribe A. Now tribe B has realized that everybody loves to be ruled and there's a few people who love to rule and they fit together like an evil jigsaw puzzle and everything works hunky-dory and you don't need to indoctrinate anyone at all.
Which tribe is going to do better in conflict?
Which tribe is going to beat the other in terms of war?
Well, the tribe that is expending fewer resources on nonsensical things that aren't at all necessary.
Like indoctrinating people about the virtue of being ruled, about how necessary the rulers are, right?
Think of the modern state, right?
They try to get their hooks into the kids as soon as possible, as early as possible, starting 12 weeks after birth, 6 months after birth, a year after birth, get them into the government daycares, get them indoctrinated, Get them de-theologized so that they can replace the worship that most people have for God with the worship for the state.
No, it's not in man's nature to worship.
But unfortunately, that is what's left over from our existing parenting systems.
We'll get into that another time.
But you have to do all of this stuff and then you've got to indoctrinate and indoctrinate and indoctrinate them year after year after year.
For almost a decade and a half or more, depending on when they start, and then the smart people, you've got to draw them into the university system where they'll further get indoctrination, and if they pass their indoctrination standards called exams, and if they pass their...
Acceptance test by the existing corrupt members of the cultural elite, why then they get a piece of paper and a job and they teach for three hours a week and $150,000 a year or more with every fourth year off for a sabbatical where they get to travel to conferences and have a pretty cushy, easy, fancy-schmancy lifestyle.
And why do the rulers expend all of these resources if people naturally want to be ruled?
If people naturally want to be ruled, you don't need to indoctrinate them.
You do not need to indoctrinate them.
The fact is that wherever indoctrination exists, whatever it is telling you is the opposite of the truth.
That is what indoctrination is, and that is why it is necessary.
The pope is just a guy, the king is just a guy, the ruler is just a guy, the priest is just a guy.
But they've got to have all these rituals, they've got to have all these threats, they've got to have all these bribes, they've got to have all these ridiculous costumes and crowns and gold hats and nonsense and flags and pomp and circumstances and hail to the chief music playing and people with thrilling sonorous voices announcing their entrance and slow and sonorous and all got to be ritual.
All to distract you from the basic fact that the king is just a guy, and the pope is just a guy, and Barack Obama, and all just guys, dudes, and dudesses.
And the fact is that human beings are drawn to reality, but human beings are also drawn to survive, and to survive in reality means subjugation to the lies and the power of the tribe.
and the faculty which allows human beings to survive best in the world is the universal integration of principles the extension of concepts to laws or rules that are universal and all of that is necessary for human beings to survive best and flourish in the world And all of that is completely destroyed and broken by culture.
Which separates people into irrational opposites while pretending that those opposites are chosen.
That inflicts power over people while saying that they beg for that power.
Which propagandizes people and then says the results of that propaganda are just...
Human nature! You see?
Just human nature. I mean, if I spend five years making a house...
It seems weird for me to say that's just how the trees naturally grow, right?
If I spend a day making a clay pot, I can't say that's how it came out of the earth, that's how the earth is, that's how clay is.
No, that's what I shaped. Saying it's the nature of clay to be that way makes no sense if I've just spent an entire day making it a different way or reshaping it from its original form.
So propaganda reshapes through threats, through bribes, through violence, through ostracism, through lies, through punishment, through threats of abandonment from parents and rejection.
Culture fundamentally reforms the human soul into the opposite of what it is born as.
That's why culture and propaganda and the state and religion has to work so damn hard, because they're trying to make human beings into the opposite.
And once they have molded these human beings into jigsaw puzzles, into tiles, into bricks that form the base of the highest bloody damn pyramid in the world, once they have molded and broken and snapped and crushed and reformed and wounded and blighted, They then turn these half-crawling monstrosities loose on the world and say, aha, that is human nature.
That is how human beings naturally are.
Well, if human beings are naturally that way, why the fuck does everybody need a decade and a half or more of intense daily propaganda to make human beings that way?
There's no ministry of, let's get teenagers interested in sex.
Okay, maybe in Japan.
So the argument that the state somehow coalesces as a result of some innate human desire to be ruled is completely put to the lie.
It's completely proven falsehood.
You don't even need to go for any evidence other than recognizing how much intense effort is required to have people even remotely live Under a status regime.
Are human beings naturally communistic?
No! Of course not!
If human beings were naturally communistic, you wouldn't need to herd them into endless Stalinist-style meetings and propagandize them from head to toe, back to front, in order to get them to accept a communist regime.
No, human beings are naturally traitors.
You can read a great chapter in Jeffrey Ducker's book, It's a Jetson's World, about watching his kids and other kids trade candy to get what they want.
Human beings are natural traders.
Of course we are. Because we love the win-win, and the state is win-lose.
So, that doesn't work at all.
Now, the other argument, of course, and remember, these are arguments that have been around for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
Really, you could argue for thousands of years if you cancel the Socratic days.
And I would be highly, highly suspicious of any arguments about human nature that are more than a decade or two or maybe three old, because it really is in the last few decades that it has really been scientifically possible to study the human mind and its development from conception onwards and what has been studied and what has been proven really beyond a shadow of a doubt is that there is no such thing as human nature human beings adapt to their environment and their genes turn on and turn off according to their environment Because,
you know, there's this old idea that we're born with these genes and then that's who we are.
And, I mean, it's just nonsense.
It's not even remotely true.
And anybody who talks about how human beings are constituted and what human beings are and how society should be according to human nature and so on, anybody who hasn't studied...
You don't have to be a PhD in it, Lord knows I'm not.
But anyone who hasn't studied and read, you know, a couple of dozen, half a dozen books...
About how the human brain develops, the epigenetics of what gets turned off and on, neuroplasticity and how the brain responds to its environment, particularly in the first...
Well, I mean, in gestation and particularly over the first couple of years of life.
Anybody who hasn't studied that stuff and can't quote you the basic chapter and verse of brain development is a bullshit artist of the very first order.
And it's incredibly dangerous, you know, to try and talk about society and human nature and to justify violence according to human nature and not having studied how the human mind develops and how the personality responds environmentally, genetically to its environment pre and post the womb.
It's ridiculous. So there's, you know, these studies.
Here's a typical example, right?
So there are these studies that say, oh, these two twins were separated at birth and raised in different families, and they both became alcoholics.
Aha! You see? It's genetic.
And, I mean, it doesn't take but a moment's thought to realize that's all nonsense.
Uh, I mean, just read your basic government's work.
Um... Addiction arises from early stress and early trauma and twins who are in a situation where the mom is going to give them up for adoption are obviously in a situation where the mom is highly stressed.
He's going to give the kids up for adoption.
If she wasn't stressed, she wouldn't be doing that.
So, obviously, she's in an incredibly stressed situation, giving twins up for adoption.
And so, the twins' genetics have been programmed by the environment of the mother's womb and the presence of all the stress hormones and cortisol and so on in the mother's womb fundamentally altered their brain, their brains and their chemistry and their neurology and all that kind of stuff.
And so, of course, it's much more likely that they're both going to be alcoholics.
It's not genetic. It becomes genetic through the environment, through epigenetics.
Genes get turned on and off depending upon particular conditions in the womb beforehand.
We don't have a blueprint called genetics that is somehow fixed and stable from the moment of conception onwards.
It is all turning on and off.
Like traffic lights, depending upon the flow of experience and environment and stimuli.
I mean, all this is obvious, and of course, then people talk about, well, this is, you know, personality is genetic, and then who you are is, you know, based on, and they don't have a clue.
And look, I don't know, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, Yeah, it was much more understandable.
But now, of course, anybody who wants to talk about human society, human nature, and life, and that's all nonsense if they haven't studied this basic stuff.
So all of these arguments around Socrates' time onwards, Locke's time onwards, Hobbesian, Leviathan justifications thereof.
I mean, these people didn't have the first freaking clue about the scientific reality of how the human mind develops.
They believed in little ghosts in the body called the soul, and they believed in a choice in the mind that was independent of the mind.
They believed in gods and devils, and I mean, would you take your medicine from these idiots?
And I say idiots only, of course, they weren't dumb, but I mean, the knowledge they had was ridiculously limited, and almost all of it was entirely false.
I mean, you wouldn't go to a medical treatise on humerus to figure out how to deal with an infection in your body, and you wouldn't go to Thomas Hobbes to learn anything about the nature of society and humanity because he didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground about the facts.
And so all of these arguments that have flowed down, oh, well, you know, you've got a state because that's human nature, you're going to be ruled.
Anything that is old is false.
When it has anything to do with the mind and the body.
Everything that is old is false.
And everything that is more than a couple of decades old is false.
And so you can ask people, say, well, it's human nature to do this.
And I say, okay, well, tell me what your understanding is of human nature and how it develops.
Well, people are just like this.
And people are just like genetics. Well, what have you read of the recent research that leads you to sustain this opinion?
You'll find that it's nothing, and you can dismiss them as arrogant fools who probably know better, but don't want to bother.
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