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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:26
The Case Against Democracy
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Some arguments against democracy.
Now, democracy is, of course, majority rule.
And generally, in the US, you are told, and rightly so, that what was created was not a democracy, but a republic.
In that, the majority vote would determine the outcome of a particular election or referendum.
But... The vote of the majority would be limited by the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and whatever other legal mechanisms are quoted as being the magical pixie dust rainbow barriers to the seething will of the self-interested majority.
Now, democracy has had a pretty bad reputation in many different areas.
The basic idea is that democracy can't work because the poor outnumber the rich, and as soon as the poor realize they can vote to take away the property of the rich, then everybody ends up poor.
Which, I mean, there's some truth in it, of course, but that's a bit classist.
Because the rich are very good at taking away the property of the poor and also taking away the lives of the poor in terms of stuffing them into pretty bad public schools, which rich people gain a fair amount of money from servicing contracts to.
It is a state of civil war.
Civil war is always one of these oxymorons, you know, a battle between brothers.
As I can attest, tends to be about the ugliest battle that there is.
And there's no such thing, of course, as a civil war, except for democracy, where the battle of all against all is a little bit obscured.
Well, actually very much obscured by the fact that instead of two equal people or two equal groups fighting each other, or even unequal groups fighting each other, There's one giant death-killer robot in the middle of human society, and everyone is hitting their remote control buttons trying to get it to turn around, and whoever it turns around to, everyone throws their money at it to keep it away.
And that's the state.
The seeming civility of the looting of the public purse...
By the state, it's only apparent because the state is so powerful and people are so relatively powerless and the state is so ugly and vicious that people obey.
And, of course, that obedience makes it look like The state is not violent.
I mean, the slave master has a whip on the wall.
If the slaves comply, I imagine, it never comes down.
But that doesn't mean that they're not slaves.
It just means that they're slaves who don't want to get whipped.
But the whip is always there.
It's just a little harder to see.
And by the by, somebody asked me yesterday, and I was giving a speech, they said, what's a good way to introduce libertarianism to other people?
It's a fine question. Well, one way you can do it is to say that human society started off like super-violent, and then it became less violent as time went on.
And now we live in a society which has staggering levels of predation, which has always been the case, but relatively low levels of violence.
In other words, the creation of the colossus of the state In modern times, combined with some vestiges of outraged violations of personal liberty left over from the age of reason, the 19th century, and so on, that has combined to produce a society that is not too violent.
I mean, we've gone from societies where people would dash children's heads against rocks to appease the volcano gods to To a society of pious pickpockets, which is really what democracy is.
Now, I would rather have my pocket picked than my head dashed against a rock.
Yay! This is what we call progress in the state.
I mean, it is progress.
It is progress. This is...
Almost infinitely, by far and away, the best possible time to be alive to date.
But democracy has a bad reputation because the masses are so bribeable, particularly when the state runs the educational system, the masses are so bribeable that what happens is people who are politicians And I guess I have to remind everyone that they are people, just a different kind of people.
Politicians will spout all of the pious, mindless, cheering, sloganeering that makes the masses jump and cheer.
And what they're cheering at, sloganeering, what they're cheering at, propaganda, is they're cheering in relief.
That they don't have to think.
That's why people cheer.
So somebody was telling me that they were at a Gary Johnson speech.
And she said, are you going to fire all the people in the government that you want to cut?
How are you going to actually achieve these massive savings that you talk about?
And Gary Johnson said, you know, vote me in and watch me do it.
And everyone went, you know, and it's like, But there are no facts there.
There's no information there.
But everyone's relieved. And why are they cheering at such a ridiculous statement?
And Gary, if you never said that, I apologize.
It's just hearsay, but I'm sure we can think of examples from other politicians.
But why would anyone cheer such nonsense?
Well, because they don't want details.
I mean, it's the same reason that politicians will always talk about cuts and will never talk about cutting.
That's why budget savings are always vague, undelineated, future foggy reductions in spending, never to be specified.
I mean, there's obvious reasons for that, which I'm sure we can just touch on very briefly.
The obvious reasons is that if you are a politician, And you are actually getting somewhat close to getting into power, and you begin to actually tell people, in very great and specific detail, exactly what you're going to cut.
Everybody knows that what happens is the people whose jobs you're going to cut, whose budgets you're going to cut, We'll go completely mental and we'll attack you six different ways from Sunday, spread all the lies and slander they can get their scurvy, squid-like, tentacle, acid-based jellyfish hands on and hurl it at your ever-smiling visage.
We have evolved to slander as a species, from murder to slander.
And everybody knows this deep down, so what the crowd is cheering...
When Monsieur Le Janson says something silly like that, is they're cheering in relief that he does not have to provide details.
Because if he provides details about what he's going to cut, and he provokes no animosity, then it's because he has no chance of winning, you see?
So, there's no good result of him explicating exactly what he's going to cut.
Either he says, well, I'm going to cut...
X, Y, Z in very specific detail.
And those people don't get upset at all, which means that they know that he's not going to win, because they have much more interest in it than the average voter.
And if they don't care, then that's about as empirical a proof as you could possibly imagine that he's not going to win, in which case people feel upset.
Or, if he is going to win, they'll go completely insane and call down all of the horrible skyswords of Damocles to his reputation.
You know, Ron Paul is a racist, whatever they'll come up with, right?
They will simply attack him and the mainstream media will join in and shred any chances that he has of gaining votes.
And also, the more negatively he's portrayed, the more socially difficult it becomes for his supporters to support him.
We all understand that, right?
So he knows, as a politician, that he cannot provide any specifics.
Because either people won't care, which is really bad, or people will care, which is even worse.
And so they're cheering the non-specificity, because in non-specificity you can maintain illusion.
Non-specificity is the Mirkwood foggy spider colony wherein illusions can continue.
And wherever people try to avoid specificity, they're trying to maintain their illusions.
Now, you can be very specific about what you're going to add to the government, additional spending, additional programs, additional departments, because those people are very happy.
To receive it, right? This is the basic imbalance of the recipients versus the victims of government transfer of wealth, the forced transfer of wealth, is that the recipients gain concentrated wealth, whereas the victims lose diffused wealth, right? A couple of hundred million people in the United States, and if I get a buck from everyone, I get a couple of hundred million dollars.
I've got a huge amount of incentive to pursue that, But everybody who loses a dollar has about a dollar's worth of incentive to prevent that from happening.
And when you throw fiat currency into the mix, when you throw manipulation of interest rates, and when you throw debt into the mix, then even the tangential connection with reality that the delusions of the masses have, there's a little... Ping!
And the silver cord that binds the mind to reality is cut and thrown to the wind and shredded and pecked out by birds and atomized by clouds of acid, spun into space, thrown into the moons of Jupiter, scattered among the rings of Saturn and vanishing into the ether never to be seen again.
It goes, is really what I'm trying to say.
Because then what happens is, it's like taking a liter of wine from a man and Keeping half a liter for yourself, adding another liter of water to the remaining half liter and giving him a liter and a half of heavily diluted wine back to himself, and then he thinks he's got a raise.
This is the reality of inflation.
And it's kind of technical and it's kind of esoteric.
It's knowledge you pursue, which you can't do anything about.
Falls under the purview of, I think, as Friedman talked about, rational ignorance, like, why would you bother learning about these things that you can't change, and which only upset you?
I mean, really, what's the point?
It's the question of, would you like to know the day of your own death?
I don't think so. Not so much for me.
Not for me. The centaur crawl scenario.
Oh my goodness, my references are getting so obscure, it's like I could be the third wheel on psych.
Oh my god, there's another one.
Democracy, of course, suffers also from a really schizoid view of the citizen.
A really schizophrenic view of the citizen.
The citizen is proposed to be a true intellectual savant.
A citizen can pour through...
Complex proposals from politicians determine the best ones according to his deep knowledge on a near infinite variety of subjects.
Healthcare, budgeting, finance, law, order, culture, art, I mean, you name it, right?
The citizen can review all of the detailed proposals put forward by politicians and can find that politician, Whose proposals match the citizens' deep knowledge of these areas in a way that does not require him to vote for an evil.
I mean, good luck, right?
I mean, even if we accept the tenets of democracy, that's impossible.
You're never going to find a politician, if you're a deep expert, you're never going to find a politician whose...
Views match yours perfectly.
And even if you do, of course, you have no capacity to compel a politician to keep his or her promises.
It's not possible in democracy.
You must keep your promises to the state, even if you never made them, i.e.
social contract, taxation, and so on.
But, dear Lord above, the politicians are never bound to keep their promises to you, even if they did make them.
Do you see? Ethics is for the sheep, not the wolves.
In fact, the greatest wolf is ethics, so that's really only for the sheep.
Wolves don't invent tigers for themselves.
Only the ghost wolves of ethics to round up the sheep.
Now, in the 50 to 5,000 spheres that the government claims legitimate moral productive authority over, we assume that the voter must be an expert in these areas in order to be able to determine what is the right and wrong course of action in these areas.
Let's talk about Financial regulation.
I mean, finance is one of the most regulated sectors of the American economy, at least, although I think it's pretty heavily regulated, cartelized, and controlled by the government.
I mean, there's direct control like laws, regulations, and so on, licensure standards and that, all enforced by the government.
There are those direct controls.
There are the indirect controls.
The government fear currency setting, inflation and so on.
And there are even more indirect controls or incentives and controls like the government herding everyone's money into the stock market even if they don't want to be there.
It's like, put your money in that mad jail or I will take it away.
Okay, I guess I'm putting mad jail.
A potential vulture in the hand is worth two in the government's pocket.
So... In the realm of financial management, we'll put on our status hats for a moment, in the realm of financial management, financial controls, financial regulation, control of the finance sector by the government, in that realm, there is either expert consensus on what needs to be done, or there isn't. Expert consensus is important.
I mean, the expert consensus is that Managing diet is actually quite important for maintaining health when you are diabetic and you need insulin shots.
Now, I'm sure there are some people out there, you do the search, who say that's all nonsense and asparagus will cure diabetes and it's all a racket set up by the insulin companies to rip off the poor, sick and suffering and so on.
You always find these kinds of things.
But the expert consensus is that if you're diabetic, you watch your diet, get some insulin shots or get your insulin daily.
So either there's expert consensus in a particular field, or there's not.
Now, if there is expert consensus on the field, then the voters, of course, are really deferring to the experts.
That's what they're all about.
They're just deferring to the experts, and therefore what needs to be done doesn't in particular need to go through a vote.
There are no resolutions that the world is round.
There are no resolutions that diabetics need insulin.
There's no resolutions that gases expand when heated and so on, right?
This is not necessary because it's generally accepted and understood.
So if the principles of regulating financial companies are generally accepted and understood and under no particular dispute by experts, then really there's no need to vote for these things.
So voting really only occurs when there are differences of opinion.
I mean, the welfare state is social security, let's say.
Sorry for the US-centric things, but I'm in Texas.
What can I say? Social security is accepted by everyone, and therefore there are no votes on it.
There would be no point having votes on it, because whoever proposed getting rid of social security...
We'd simply lose the vote, and everybody knows that ahead of time, and so they don't bother doing it.
So we only vote where there are significant differences of opinion.
Now, if there are significant differences of opinion, then either the experts agree and the people disagree, or the experts and the people disagree.
Now, if the experts disagree and the people agree, then the people are wrong.
Because there's significant disagreement among the experts, which means that if there's significant disagreement among the experts and there's agreement in the general population, then the population is lacking the rigorous subtlety, expertise and training to understand the nuances and the complexities and so on.
If the experts agree, but the people disagree, then the people have an incentive.
To disagree, that is overriding the opinions of the experts.
And therefore, the people are wrong.
Almost all economists will say that free trade is beneficial.
And yet, when free trade is proposed, people get pretty upset.
Because some of their jobs depend on trade barriers and tariffs and all this kind of stuff.
So then the people are wrong.
Now, if the experts and the people disagree...
Then, by what standard would the people choose which experts they prefer?
So, if half the experts say, we need more financial regulation, and the other half of the experts say, we need less financial regulation, how are the people supposed to know the difference, and who is best, and who is right, and so on?
Now, of course, I would argue it would be through an appeal to principles, through a review of the non-aggression principle, respect for property rights, and so on, which are two ways of saying the same thing.
And that's how we would resolve these disputes.
However, if you are in a culture where the majority of experts disagree on things as fundamental as the non-aggression principle and property rights, then you live in a culture that is extremely debased.
Because people can go through 20 years of education and have no clue about or violently reject the non-aggression principle, in which case you have an extremely corrupt culture.
And... Therefore, if the experts do not have a grasp of ethics, then it's extremely unlikely that the people will have a grasp on ethics.
There is one exception to this that has popped into my mind when I was landing in Shreveport on my fantastically planned journey wherein I flew an hour to get to Shreveport and then drove two hours back towards Houston to get to my hotel when I could have just driven two hours from Houston to get my hotel.
But anyway... I was landing and I was chatting with the man next to me and he was talking about how the moral fiber of the nation and people don't respect property and so on and so on.
And he was religious and we had a chat about that.
And there is that exception where the experts...
But the experts in Christianity would not be relativists, I would assume.
But the experts in the financial industry, it comes from pretty much the Roman model of what are the consequences.
Let us aim for good or bad consequences, which, as I just argued...
And negaduches is just a recipe for expanding state.
Let's try stuff. And then the stuff you try, even if it doesn't work, well, perhaps even especially if it doesn't work, never goes away, but simply expands.
So if the experts disagree, by what standard are the people supposed to judge?
The experts. In other words, if half the experts say that deregulation is the answer and the other half say additional regulation is the answer to the problems of financial corruption, if the people are then unanimous that deregulation is the answer, then what's happening is you have experts who disagree with the people who unanimously agree.
And this does not seem to me to be very possible.
Experts who disagree, but a unanimity, or at least a clear majority of people who agree.
And the reason for that is that when experts disagree, they create a divide among the people.
Because if you disagree with someone and you have lots of Nobel Peace Prize winning experts on your side, Krugman, then what happens is you end up saying to your space aliens, apparently Dr.
Paul Krugman says that you are very welcome here.
Thank you for unifying mankind with your economy enhancing death rays.
By the by, I always found it curious that when space aliens land, it's always imagined that they're going to say, take us to your leader.
Whereas the reality is going to be that the only way that human beings are ever going to solve the technological challenges of space travel is if they don't have governments.
In which case, the only aliens who are ever going to come at us are going to say, I'm sorry you still have leaders, that's why you're bound on this planet, and why it smells so bad around here.
They will not come with anal probes, they will come with malls, because they will be traitors, and free market here is the only way they're ever going to get into space, in any sustainable way, right?
So if the experts are in agreement, you generally don't need a vote.
If the experts are in disagreement, then they will divide the people.
Because the people will say to those who disagree with them, look at all these experts who agree with me.
Are you smarter than all these experts?
Do you, my friend, have a Nobel Prize in space alien unifying economics?
I thought not!
Aha! Dr.
Ewok fuzzy face to the rescue!
And we're just talking about one field.
Can some autodidact savant become an expert in simply every conceivable field?
Well, yes. If you study philosophy, you could become an expert in every single field because you realize that there's really only one field, which is ethics, and everything else is just a footnote.
And I wonder if there would be economics without the state.
I think they'd just become accountants.
I really do. I still do.
I think I just mentioned that in the last episode. Anyway, maybe I'll do a show on that.
Once the stars are the stars and not stories, you don't need astrologers.
There's no place for them. When the state is a story, and the economists try to guess the ending.
But when there's no story called a state, why would you need to guess the ending?
And when you look at it, almost all economists are trying to predict the effects of state power.
And if there was no state, what would they be doing?
What would they be doing?
So the people, for democracy to have any validity at all, even within the principles of democracy, must be in agreement with the majority of experts in some particular field, which means you don't actually need to really vote on it.
Or if there's some disagreement, must be on the right side of the experts, which means that they must...
Be among the best experts in those fields, in all the variety of fields.
Forest management, park creation, road construction.
How much should we spend on maintaining infrastructure versus building new infrastructure?
How should things be financed?
What length of term should government debt be issued at?
There are some places in Canada which they're issuing debts that are due in 2085, issuing bonds and so on, right?
What should the interest rates be?
How much money should be? M1, M2, M3. How much money should we create?
What should foreign policy be?
How should we create peace in the Middle East?
How much money should we spend on the diplomatic renovations in Belgium?
You understand, everybody has to be an expert.
The Significant majority of people must be the best in all of these factually infinite fields.
Now, how do people become experts in these infinite fields?
Are they taught all of this in government?
No. Sorry, in government schools?
No, they're not taught any of this by the government, any of this fundamentally.
I don't think there are any courses on the creation of money or the Federal Reserve, for instance, in...
Government schools, because if there was, I mean, kids would set fire to the school just as the government is setting fire to their future.
Think I'll take another child and slowly watch him burn.
So they would have to learn this on their own.
And obviously this is completely impossible.
Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours, seems to me quite about right.
To become an expert in any field, you need about 10,000 hours.
And we're asking voters to become experts in approximately infinity fields.
And the lifespan of Methuselah is not long enough to become an enlightened voter.
Now, the reason you need a significant majority is that we all understand that in a democracy there is the problem of conflict of interest.
And let's say that 20% of people will vote against a particular measure because it harms their economic self-interest.
Which means you need 70 plus percent of people with expertise to overcome the 20 percent of people who will vote along the lines of economic self-interest.
So if free trade in a particular area is a good thing, but 20 percent of the population will be negatively impacted by it, we can assume that the majority of the 20 percent, let's say it's 25 percent, 20 percent of the 25 percent are going to vote against it because of economic self-interest and therefore you need 75 plus percent, or 70 plus percent, to overcome that, right?
So, as I was talking with my bushy-faced friend on the airplane, he was saying that there aren't enough libertarians in the world, and I sort of disagree.
The fact that if we assume that those who favor smaller government are generally on the Republican side, and those who favor larger government are generally on the Democrat side, If we go along those lines, then there is a plurality and a majority, a clear majority, of libertarian-leaning people.
Because you have to take out the economic self-interest.
There's no immediate, concentrated economic self-interest in shrinking governments for any individual.
Not concentrated, right?
Whereas the maintenance of government, the expansion of government, has significant gains for people on the left.
So you have to take out, say, for instance, public sector workers who don't want to see a precedent of government shrinking.
You have to take out people on Social Security.
You have to take out people on welfare.
You have to take out the financial thumbjiggery, post-fascist, brain-squid, tentacle-sucking, mankind raping and eating financial sectors because they benefit, of course, from massive amounts of state power.
Hey, I'll make a trillion dollars.
Okay, fine. I'll pay you a $12 fine.
And all of this is really important to understand.
If you take away from the democratic vote all of those who are benefiting from democratic power, in other words, those who are not voting with any kind of ideology, but voting for their economic self-interest and claiming an ideology on the other side of that, well, then you end up with a significant majority of libertarians.
So, I mean, if the vote is split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans...
And 90% of the Democrat vote comes from people who have financial interest in it, right, then you have a clear majority of libertarians in terms of their belief systems, because the other people are just voting for their immediate economic self-interest.
Now, the problem of self-interest is a huge problem in democracy.
Obviously, all of these problems are ridiculous and completely insurmountable.
But what is the problem of economic self-interest?
So, a conflict of interest should generally exclude you from decision-making, right?
So, when you run for office, you put all of your finances in a trust because you don't want conflict of interest.
And you basically have to give control of your money away for the term of time that you're in office because you would not want to be perceived as making decisions based upon your economic self-interest.
So you have to try and remove the economic self-interest in order to ensure any kind of objective decision-making.
And in the DSM-5, the Manual of Mental Health, which will be classified to the future under dangerous fiction, deadly fiction in fact, Because 70% to 80% of the people writing it have conflict of interest ties to the pharmaceutical companies, and in some areas, it's 100%.
Every single person writing that book has strong ties and strong consulting fees and paychecks coming to them from the pharmaceutical companies.
The pharmaceutical companies whose sales will increase through these psychiatrists as more diagnoses are put forward, which is why the book gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and why these invented...
I mean, it's a modern form of demonic possession, which is, I mean, what psychiatry, at least the medical version of it, has always been, and has been revealed as fraudulent so many times.
It's just the modern version of demonic possession, and The problem with your child is not your crappy parenting, but demonic possession!
The problem with your child...
Demons don't exist. The problem with your child is not your crappy parenting, or their crappy schools, or some terrifying Sunday school, but rather a chemical imbalance, which doesn't exist.
Here, take these pills.
Give me some money. And, of course, the state ends up paying, right?
We are paying to drug children to avoid confrontations with shitty parents and shitty teachers and scary priests.
So, if we were to look at conflict of interest provisions which are all over the place in the free market, and in some places in politics, If we look at conflict of interest provisions,
which go back to ancient times, it's not exactly a new field, then we would have to recognize that there are massive swaths of the population who cannot vote according to conscience and according to reason because they are too influenced by economic self-interest.
Right? We all understand that, right?
Can somebody on welfare vote objectively about welfare?
Well, of course not. Can somebody receiving subsidized government health care vote objectively on health care?
Well, of course not. That's why the president has to put his money in a trust to avoid even the appearance of self-interest.
Of conflict of interest, right?
To avoid even the appearance.
See, conflict of interest is something which, I mean, at least according to my understanding of ancient tradition, it's something that needs to be avoided, not proven.
Because proving conflict of interest is really tough, right?
And so you have to take preemptive action to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest.
In other words, it's assumed a negative automatically.
And you take actions to remove yourself from the situation of conflict of interest.
And you can do that two ways, right?
I mean, guess three ways. One is that don't even pursue a position which will put you in a conflict of interest problem.
So you can either withdraw from the decision matrix.
In other words, the president says, well, I don't want to put my money in trust, so I guess I'm just not going to take the presidency.
Or you remove the conflict of interest.
What this would translate to in terms of welfare and social security, and I can already imagine people saying, ah, Steph says that the poor should not vote.
The poor can't vote. Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Well, I am not going to self-censor because there are trolls in the world.
That's their job and their conscience to deal with, not mine.
I just tell you, I'm aware of it, but I'm not going to change what I say because of it.
Anyway, it's actually kind of funny.
So, it would be to say, well, your vote can't be viewed as legitimate unless...
You withdraw from the welfare system.
Now, if you withdraw from the welfare system, then we will take you more seriously when it comes to your opinions about the welfare system.
Ah! But then you have another problem, right?
You have another problem, which is that if you're not on the welfare system, can you be objective about the welfare system?
Well, I don't know.
I would argue that you can't really be objective about the welfare system if you're not on the welfare system.
Because if you're not on the welfare system, then you're paying for the welfare system.
So then, is your vote because you have an objective, rational, empirical, deep, moral, scientific, statistical understanding of the welfare state, or is it because you just don't want to pay for the welfare state?
I mean, it cuts both ways, right?
And there's no solution to this, because it is a coerced relationship.
Because you cannot escape your relationship to the welfare state, or the welfare state, or whatever.
It's rich or poor, it doesn't matter.
But because you cannot...
Yes, I will.
Traffic witch. Anyway, because you can't...
Get out of the relationship of the welfare state.
And because you're either forced to pay for the welfare state or you are receiving money from those who are forced to pay, there's no possibility of escaping a conflict of interest with regards to government programs.
Somebody who's receiving welfare money may rise above it and vote to get rid of welfare.
But since it's actually quite easy to get rid of welfare in your own life, you know, get a job kind of thing, then you wouldn't really think that would be so necessary to vote on, right?
I mean, if the vast majority of people who are on welfare wanted to get rid of welfare, well, they kind of could, right?
Because they just stopped taking welfare, and then the welfare state would shrink.
Well, I mean, in the general understanding of things, of course, they just try and make more poor in a variety of ways, right?
I mean, that's their job, is poverty.
So they're not going to eliminate poverty.
They'd rather try and expand it, which they're doing a great job of doing, by the way.
And they've really put aside some money for a rainy day with all this deficit financing, because when that hits, boy, when the debts hit, there will be many more poor people for them to harvest.
So that's another important aspect of it.
You can't escape these relationships.
Now, it's true that somebody who's paying for the welfare state is in a slightly different position because they cannot.
I mean, you can detach from the welfare state in terms of receiving it, and then you switch from a receiver to a payer.
I mean, not generally true, I guess, because if you're getting out of the welfare state, you're probably going to get a pretty low-rent job and not pay many, if any, of the taxes that go towards paying for the welfare state.
But you still are going from a net receiver to a net contributor in some fashion.
It's a little bit different for the people who are paying for the welfare state, because somebody who's on welfare can choose to get off, but somebody who's paying for it can't choose to not pay for it.
So, When there is a coerced relationship, and I hate to say coerced relationship.
I mean, that's like saying when there's a voluntary rape.
I mean, if something that's coerced is not...
You can't use the same word for a marriage as you can for a rape.
And so, I'm sorry about that.
I just... I've only had one coffee and I don't have the...
Caffeine, disco-dancing, gremlin-brain metaphor generators currently hopping up and down like Herb Tarlick's chicks on a hot pan.
Anybody? Bueller, reference, anybody?
Good show.
Now, even when a government program is proposed, because it is coerced, there is a conflict of interest, even before people are on the receiving end of it, because people are going to be on the receiving end should it pass. because people are going to be on the receiving end
So when Social Security was first voted into existence, there was significant conflict of interest because there were two major groups of people who were going to benefit from it.
Of course, the old, in terms of they will not have had to pay into Social Security, but they will receive Social Security.
So that's kind of important, right?
I mean, it's, hey, would you like a couple of thousand bucks a month or 2,000 bucks or 1,500 bucks or 1,000, whatever it was in today's dollars when it first came in in the 30s?
Well, you're going to vote on economic self-interest.
Now, that's one group.
Now, the second group of people who will benefit from it are those younger people who would have had to support their parents with money if the parents did not receive Social Security.
In other words, if the government is going to pay my mother money, then I don't have to give her money.
And so I get to keep that money.
And of course, the children say, oh good, so if grandma gets money and mom and dad don't have to give her money, then there'll be more for me to inherit.
So if I could vote, I'd vote for it too.
So massive conflict of interest even before the programs begin.
And for the people who are voting against it, they're saying, well, I've already saved up my money, I don't need it, I don't want it, I'm opposed to it, I don't want to have to pay for it, and so on.
Well, they have a conflict of interest as well.
Because are they voting because the program is objectively bad or wrong, or are they voting because they don't want to pay for it?
Financial conflict of interest.
And there's no way to evade or escape this.
And not only is there no way to evade or escape this, if there was not conflict of interest, there would be no possibility of democracy as we know it.
I mean, democracy doesn't run in spite of, but due to, conflict of interest.
So, for instance, we vote for politicians, and those politicians receive donations.
Now, since the early 20th century, corporations have been unable to donate, but the people who work for those corporations can donate, and those people receive information from those corporations about who they should donate for and why.
And so you will find, you know, like the agricultural sector gave X towards, right?
Well, I mean, obviously, corporations can't donate directly, but they can certainly marshal a lot of money, and they can, you know, sell $1,000 a plate dinners, and they can do all this kind of stuff to get people who have economic interests aligned with the corporations to donate money to politicians and If you're a corporation and half your jobs depend on this piece of government legislation,
then are your employees who themselves can donate, are they able to objectively vote for particular policies?
Well, of course not. If your job depends on government legislation, you have ridiculous amounts of conflict of interest.
So, donations...
Only, to a large degree, donations only arrive in the pockets of politicians as a result of conflict of interest.
Because the people who donate to politicians en masse do so because they want the politicians to benefit their economic self-interest.
Which is clear conflict of interest, right?
And you can't get donations without conflict of interest.
Which is why you don't see a lot of politicians openly say, I'm never going to know who donated to me.
Disclosure laws, you probably couldn't even have that as a realistic scenario.
But if there was some way for a politician to never know who'd given him one thin dime, then that politician would never get one thin dime.
Because the whole point is you buy influence with donations.
And the amount of money that you make from donating to a politician, I mean, is staggering.
I mean, it's one of the single most profitable things that you can do.
And if you don't do it as a corporation, then you're not a good business manager in the existing environment.
So all of these considerations, I would argue, are enormously important in the examination of democracy.
Now, if we recall the level of intense stone genius renaissance-based autodidactic brilliance, depth, wisdom, and expertise that the average voter must have in a near infinite variety of areas in order to vote...
For these areas. It's hard to reconcile the expertise required for a even remotely legitimate vote, even if we cast aside the economic self-interest, which unfortunately now encompasses the entire population.
The entire population is bound to the state.
Can a teacher vote effectively on the privatization of schools?
No, it's conflict of interest.
Can somebody vote for the privatization of schools?
No. Economic self-interest.
They don't want to pay for public schools.
They want to have the money to send their kids to private schools.
It's not on the principal. It's on the dollar.
It's on the control. So voting could only be even remotely legitimate, even if we put aside financial conflict of interest or other conflicts of interest.
It could only be legitimate if each individual citizen who voted was Superhumanly wise in a near infinite variety of subjects.
But somebody who is superhumanly wise in a near infinite variety of subjects would not need a government.
Right? This is really a fundamental point.
You need to ponder this.
You know, put this tobacco on your cheek and let it sit for a spell.
If someone is so superhumanly wise that they can choose the best policies or the representative of the best policies...
Then they don't need somebody to represent them.
Right? It would be like Matisse saying, I'm an incredible painter.
I'm an incredibly skilled, gifted, practiced painter.
So I'm going to get somebody who's left-handed and a decent painter to paint the pictures I want with their right hand.
I'm going to appoint a less competent representative to do and enact all of the things that I know how to do and enact far better than that representative.
I understand that would make no sense.
But like Michael Jordan saying, okay, for this free throw, I'm going to get Steph Molyneux out here, blindfold him, spin him around, give him a ping pong ball and have him shoot it with his wrong hand.
People say, dude, you're Michael Jordan.
Take the shot. Don't vote somebody in as your representative who's less competent to do what you're already more competent to do.
Like the expert surgeon saying, well, I'll open it up, but then let's get the janitor to come in here and take out the appendix.
No, no. You're the expert.
You do it. And the reason I say that you would appoint a less competent expert is that no politician is going to agree with you.
On everything. And if you're so wise that you know everything, and a politician can't possibly agree with you on everything, then the politician is a less competent enactor of your will than you are.
Right? So this is all stuff that's really important to understand.
And this is the ridiculousness of democracy.
I mean, the truly tragic ridiculousness of democracy.
That The voter is considered wise enough in a massive quantity of fields.
He's considered a stone genius in terms of voting for economic policies or political policies, social policies, educational policies, health policies, you name it, right?
He knows, she knows all the right and great and wonderful stuff to do in these areas.
Ah, you see, but then what happens is The politician is considered too immature, violent, deranged, and dangerous to live without a state.
So wise that they can choose their own representatives and be right, and rise above conflict of interest and make decisions on distant, implacable, objective space-alien wisdom from the Zeus and Zen-like throne of impartiality.
But boy, if there wasn't a government, we'd all tear each other apart.
I mean, it's ridiculous. You understand that this is a slate of hands, right?
Well, a slate of hands that results in a fatal chokehold.
Hey, I got your wallet. Hey, here's a bunny.
You're dead. I mean, this is all unbelievably catastrophic.
You are told you are wise when it comes to the vote, which is unnecessary and riddled with conflict of interest to the point where it could never be objective.
But then if you say, well, if I'm so smart, why do I need a less competent representative to enact what I already know how to do?
You're told, well, you're incompetent, and you're dangerous, and you're ridiculous, and you're foolish, and you're scary, and you're stupid, and without the government telling you what to do, that you'd all tear each other apart.
Well, I mean, you understand, it's ridiculous.
You're praised. For a wisdom you do not possess in order to get you to pretend you're participating in a system that runs entirely on predation and conflict of interest.
But if you accept the praise as if it's real and then say, well, there are things that result from your praise of my wisdom, i.e., I don't need you as a representative, then you're told that you're a ridiculous, dangerous, scary, infantile, trigger-happy predator.
Who has no wisdom, no peace, and will tear each other apart in the absence of a state.
I mean, you get how insane and evil this all is, right?
You also get, right, like if there was even a rudimentary 10 or 15 set of questions that somebody had to answer correctly before they voted, that nobody would vote.
Nobody would vote.
In the same way...
It's the same within the government.
If politicians were tested on the contents of the laws they voted on, there would be no such thing as voting on laws.
Politicians have almost no idea what is in the laws that they vote on.
I mean, that's not even an opinion.
I mean, this is out-and-out fact.
Because you get 1,500, 2,000, 2,500-page bills coming through that the final version is only printed out like 12 minutes before the vote, and then people vote on it.
I think it was Bismarck who said there's two things that people should not see how they're made, sausages and laws.
I mean, it's completely mad.
I mean, it's just theater.
The theater is the overhead of power.
It's the frou-frou that you need to put in there in order to get people to believe in the system.
I mean, it's a good investment.
I mean, lots of frou-frou is fine, right?
But that's the necessary nonsense that you have to cloak the fist of the state in.
And it really doesn't take much...
And we all know this. It doesn't take much thought, right?
We all know this.
If you asked the average voter about 10 or 15 basic questions about policies and positions, approximately 95% of them would not be able to vote.
If you excluded people who had conflict of interest from voting, nobody would be able to vote.
I mean, I'm just talking about a 10 or 15 point question question.
A set of questions on minimal policy stuff, not even being the kind of autodidact genius that you'd need to be in order to be able to vote on this stuff with any degree of competence.
Now, you could say, of course, as a lot of people do, you could say, well, I may not be competent in this field, but I can recognize competence when I see it.
I don't have to be good at dentistry to pick a good dentist.
We do this all the time.
We defer to experts in fields we don't have knowledge of.
Well, that's true, but of course, it's true to a degree, but we're talking about people who you can empirically validate, and they have also been trained and tested in a particular area, and you can call up the Better Business Bureau, you can look up prior complaints, you can talk to the person, and there's competition, which drives quality.
None of these apply to politicians.
Politicians can legislate in areas they've never been trained in, I mean, all you get are lawyers and professors, a small number of professors, lawyers and all that in government.
No scientists. I mean, come on.
It's all ridiculous. Where are the writers?
I mean, it's all nonsense.
It's just a couple of fields.
You don't have to be an expert to practice medicine.
You have to have a license. But to legislate about medicine, you just have to be a sophist, a rhetorician, to make things sound good and appeal to people's sentimental greed.
And of course, if the dentist doesn't do a good job, then you have recourse, right?
You can get your money back, you can sue, you can whatever, right?
You have none of this choice with politicians.
If a politician doesn't keep his word, you have no recourse whatsoever.
Ooh, you can vote him out.
Yeah, well, so what? I mean, given the amount of money in the state these days, yeah, you can vote him out, but he's still already made a fortune, and he doesn't really need to work again in his life, and you have the same thing as voting the new guy.
He's got no incentives.
You have to pay your dentist a million dollars, and you have to pay your dentist five million dollars, and your dentist has to work on your teeth for the next four years, and then you can choose another dentist with whom you will have exactly the same arrangement.
That he then has to work on your teeth for four years, and you have to pay him five million dollars, whether you like him or not, whether he does good or bad.
I mean, you understand, this would be insane.
We would never stand for this in the free market.
If somebody proposed that, I mean, it would be just, my God, that would corrupt all the dentists.
They'd just do a terrible job. Well, the people who have infinitely more power than dentists, we have this exact same setup.
But we can't see it, because we are in the matrix of the anaconda-gripping throat of suicidal fantasy narratives of cloaking evil in gold.
And the great danger of democracy.
I mean, all of this material movement of money, and I mean, it's all tragic and wretched and horrible and so on.
But to me this is not the greatest tragedy.
I mean, those are the tragedies for individuals, and I don't want to discount that.
I'm not, you know, the Stalin, a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
I mean, this is all wretched and horrible and destroys lives on every conceivable level.
But in the very biggest picture, it's not the gravest danger.
The gravest danger of democracy is the number of lies we need to tell ourselves about what democracy is.
To be deceived is wretched.
To self-deceive is suicidal.
The degree to which we have to set our minds against the reality of our system is the degree to which our future is corrupted by the most elemental and satanic falsehoods, which are the falsehoods about morality, and the dichotomy that we have to set up between our political system and every other system in the world.
Every other system that we conceive of.
And the degree of mind-bending, brain-shattering hypocrisy that we have to revel in, praise, worship in our own mind...
It's staggering. I mean, literally voters are Winston Smith with O'Brien in the How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up scene in 1984.
I mean, if you haven't read it, stop listening to any of my podcasts.
Go read that book or get the audiobook from audible.com.
StephBot is my login name.
Please tell them I sent you. But, you know, O'Brien says he holds up four fingers.
How many fingers am I holding up?
Four. Zap, right?
Sharks him. How many fingers? Five.
I don't know, right? He has to really believe that there are five.
He has to look at four and believe that there are five.
Freedom is the freedom to say two and two make four, if that is granted, all else follows.
But you see, in a democracy, when people are enslaved, what happens is their ex post facto ethical justification machines, which is tragically the essence of humanity throughout history, at least until philosophy rescues us, begins to Stockholm syndrome up the worship of the oppressors.
This cannot be avoided.
When you enslave someone and he cannot get free he will automatically begin to justify his enslavement.
If the Christians are persecuted they will automatically say that persecution is good.
If the Christians become rich they will automatically say that wealth is a sign of God's grace.
If the Christians become poor they will say that poverty is a virtue.
If atheists criticize the irrationality of religion and then are criticized by anarchists for their addiction to the religion of the state, they will switch their tune and the reason by which they clubbed the Christians now becomes...
It's irrelevant and inconsequential and immoral in their discussion.
In other words, they attack Christians with reason.
When they are attacked with reason, they become the Christians and they defend the religion of the state.
Most atheists, of course, are socialists.
It comes from the communist tradition and the Fabian socialist tradition.
Most people abhor violence against adults and would never imagine hitting an adult and would call it wrong, but then praise the hitting of children because that's what they do or what was done to them and they need to justify it.
So people will effortlessly float between these ridiculous contradictions.
It's double-think. And democracy is one of the most powerful, truly venomous snake-clamp jaws onto the human brain.
The venom of unreality that needs to be imbibed by the democratic mind is unbelievably tragic and unbelievably destructive to everything that we do.
It shows up everywhere when you begin to really see it.
And we could not believe it, had we not been conditioned to that by parents, priests and teachers for many, many years.
Before we ever learned what democracy was.
Democracy only seems sane because we were raised, most of us, in crazy ways.
Well, thank you everybody so much for listening.
I appreciate your patience.
And if you made it this far, your interest in these lengthy topics, I mean, it's just important stuff.
This is really important stuff to understand.
You know, we are in an experiment of trying to minimize violence in society.
And you cannot minimize violence if people don't see the violence.
I mean, that's like trying to sell people vampire insurance.
I mean, there are no vampires, so what are you doing?
Well, what are you fighting? I mean, we look to people like we're administering medicine to the dead, or we're shadowboxing and calling ourselves experts in expert boxers, right?
I mean, it's horrible.
It's tragic. Monstrous.
We look ridiculous to people because they cannot see the demon that we're fighting.
They cannot see the demon that we're fighting.
And because of that, We look like that guy in Fight Club who's punching himself or wrestling something that doesn't exist.
When I was a little kid, gosh, four or five, I had a babysitter over and I think I was trying to entertain her with a variety of goofy routines and not much has changed, has it?
And what I did was I... There was a couch that had...
There was a hallway and I went into...
She was sitting there and she couldn't see the hallway and I went into the hallway and I pretended that I was fighting an ant and the ant was incredibly strong and the ant would throw me over the couch and...
Now, she couldn't see the ant, but the ant was much more strong, and was much stronger than I was.
And that was my goofy routine, and I'm sure it was actually quite amusing in hindsight.
And that, of course, has become my entire occupation, right?
Because people can't see the ant.
The ant is irrationality, and the ant is tinier than the human mind, but because it can't be seen, it dominates the human mind.
And so, people think that democracy is order.
People think that the state is government.
People think that the state is civilization, a society.
And as Steph Kinsella pointed out yesterday, to confuse the state with society is exactly what the state wants.
So that you think that without the state, there will be no society.
Without the state, there will be no order.
And, I mean, that's all nonsense.
Your governments operate, as he pointed out, in a state of anarchy.
I mean, they don't have a government that keeps them in line.
And if the government doesn't need a government to keep them in line, why do we?
Thank you, thank you so much, everyone, for listening.
Please, please donate at fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
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