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Oct. 31, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:42
The Greatest Lesson!
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Today, my friends, in the year of Our Diabetes 2019, October the 31st, yes, it's that time of the year.
The time when in Ontario, when citizenry is faced with a solid foot of snowfall tonight, people will do what is completely insane.
They will go out and trudge their deep and deepening way through World War I-style trenches of snow in order to wander from house to house to pick up 20 bucks worth of candy that they could have got at the local store in about five minutes.
Parents will face paint their kids.
Kids will dress up. There won't be any tricks.
It'll all be about the treats.
And none of it makes a single lick of sense.
Not just in terms of how you get the candy, which you could get much cheaper elsewhere and without any real effort, but also just in the houses themselves, right?
If you've been on the receiving end of the Halloween hoard, then you know you got your big bowl of candy.
And you've got to sit by the door, and every 30 to 60 seconds, some kid ding-dongs your bell in order to get ding-dongs in his loot bag.
And none of it makes a single lick of sense.
Yet, every single year.
It happens. It's completely, not just inefficient, it's anti-efficient.
It's middling amounts of fun for the parents.
It's less fun, in a way, for the people on the streets who are giving out the candy, although it's fun to see the kids in their costumes.
But nonetheless, it happens.
Why does it happen?
That is a very important question, and once you understand the answer to that question, a certain kind of divine-wing freedom will descend upon your brain, and you will ascend.
To the true heights of philosophical liberty.
So, think of Halloween.
Think of things like just giving gifts.
Giving gifts makes a whole little bit of sense, right?
Because somebody could use 50 bucks, but when you choose how they're going to spend that 50 bucks, so to speak, you say, I'm going to buy you an X or a Y or a Z, and don't give me any of that.
Crap! About, well, I'm getting them gift certificates.
Because that's just saying, well, I don't know what you want to spend, but I sure know where you want to spend it, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
So gifts make no sense.
If you want to give someone 50 bucks, give them 50 bucks.
But instead of going out to buy something for them, which is less likely...
I mean, it's almost impossible that you will go out and buy something that they want more than what they would spend their own money on or the money you gave them.
None of it makes any sense, right? Maybe they need the 50 bucks to pay their electricity bill.
But if I go out and buy you...
A glow-in-the-dark candelabra for when your electricity runs out may not be the most helpful thing in the universe, yet every single year, every single holiday, every single birthday, it happens.
Makes no sense.
So, I want you to understand something about spontaneous self-organization.
This is very, very, very important.
So, If you've ever gone to Disney World or stuff like that, you know they've got those lines, right?
And there is this idea that if those rows, like those little roped-off rows or the metal rows that kind of get you in that sheep pen zigzag to the ticket window or whatever, there's this idea that if those are somehow not there, it's just going to be a chaotic mob, people are going to be crawling over the roofs, they're going to be elbowing the attendants and plunging their way through, having to burrow through Mickey Mouse's belly if they have to, and it's just going to be chaos or the cliché of what is called anarchy.
This is not the case, right?
So there are traffic lights in a town.
If you've ever been in a town or a city, when there's a foundational power outlet, a power outage, right, what happens?
Because people say, well, you see, there are these traffic lights, you see, and if the traffic lights aren't working, people are just going to drive into each other and crash, bam, boom, right?
It's going to be like some disassembling Terminator-style Jenga block madness in the middle of the street.
None of it happens, of course.
What happens is, when the traffic lights go out, what do people do?
They slow down, they look all three ways, other than the one they're coming in, and then they proceed cautiously, and it's actually fine.
I did a show years ago about a town in Europe where they had too many accidents, so they got rid of all the lanes, all the traffic signs, all the stop signs, All the traffic lights and traffic throughput was much faster and traffic accidents, injuries and fatalities virtually disappeared.
It's a funny kind of thing. People think this around airbags or seatbelts, that it makes people safer.
But it doesn't make people safer.
Because when you have airbags and you have seatbelts, you simply drive more recklessly.
People adjust their behavior based upon the environment.
When we have a lot of external rules coming in, people will often conform to those rules.
And then what happens is, people have this fantasy that if those rules are withdrawn...
Then there will be no rules at all.
And that makes no sense.
That's like saying, well, if the traffic lights aren't working, you're just going to drive through as if they were and then risk an accident.
Of course not. When the traffic lights stop working, you adjust your behavior.
It's an old economist idea that says that you basically would have the same amount of traffic fatalities if every steering wheel had a giant spike pointed at your heart coming out of it.
Because people would then say, oh man, there's a giant spike.
People wouldn't just keep driving the same way.
They would adjust their driving behavior to say, hey, there's a giant spike pointed at my chest.
I guess I better drive really, really carefully.
So when rules, formal, external, coercive, hierarchical rules are withdrawn, people just don't go crazy.
They adjust their behavior and they internalize and socially negotiate those rules instead.
So there's a basic thing that you're taught about in the government and in government-controlled media and in universities and so on, which is this.
Which is, there are these rules, you see, like children need to be educated, so we're going to have the government educate the children, right?
That's how it's going to work.
And then this idea happens in our minds, explicitly, implicitly becomes kind of the bedrock of our non-thinking.
Kids need to be educated, the government educates the kids, but if the government no longer educates the children, children will not be educated.
So there's not a foundational principle like, parents want their children to be educated, right now the government does it.
If the government doesn't do it, parents will find another way, and in fact a better way, to educate their children, right?
That's what we think.
We are so used to the government delivering particular services, that we think if the government does not deliver those services, Nobody else will.
Ah, now you're getting to the real heart of how power works in the world as it stands.
You like roads?
You like clean water?
You like safe food?
You like children being educated?
You like electricity?
Well, you see, most if not all of these services are provided for or licensed by or controlled by the state.
And if they can get you to believe That without the government, no roads, no education for children, no clean water, no safe food, nothing of that will occur.
Well, then you will forever bow before the altar of the state, imagining that without the state, All would be the purge-style chaos and madness and so on.
In other words, if the government withdraws the imposition of particular goods and services, that people will not spontaneously find a way to recreate and improve upon those services themselves, well, then they've got you by the short and curlies, right? They have got you!
Because, of course, we want children to be educated.
Of course, we want clean food. Of course, we want electricity.
Of course, we want safe...
Medicines and so on. And the government is in control of a lot of these things.
And once they get you to believe that once the government provides a service, if the government doesn't provide that service, that service can never be provided in any other manner.
Man, have they got you!
And then you fight like hell against anyone who says the government should not be running these things.
It's a very, very powerful idea once you understand it.
So, for those who are relatively new to the channel, as a philosopher, The central moral principle.
Because morality is the essence of philosophy.
Morality is the one thing that philosophy does that other disciplines don't do.
You want to talk about metaphysics or the nature of reality?
Yeah, physics is all over that bitch, right?
That's all. You can find lots of scientific disciplines that deal with the nature of reality.
You want to talk about...
Epistemology or the theory of the acquisitions of knowledge.
Yeah, there's lots of educational institutions and educational theories about all of that kind of stuff, right?
There's political science for the analysis of state power.
But when it comes to the one thing that philosophy does that other disciplines don't do, well, we're talking about ethics.
And yeah, there's some reciprocal altruism garbage that comes out of biology, but that's not really ethics.
And it's not universal and it's not absolute.
So when it comes to ethics, The foundational moral principle is the non-aggression principle, which is, thou shalt not initiate the use of force against others.
And fraud is a subset of force.
No initiation of force against others.
Now, a funny thing happens when you take a central principle that seems almost incomprehensible, and you apply it universally.
It's a very, very powerful thing.
When you take Principles that we accept locally and you apply them universally, incredibly powerful things happen.
If you look at something like the speed of light is constant and you apply that universally, you get, you know, theory of relativity, you get access to nuclear power, you get a deeper understanding of the nature of reality.
It's incredible! And that's not even something we see locally.
I remember as a kid, I'm sure you did similar things, I remember as a kid saying, oh wow, speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.
I know what I'm going to do.
I'm going to stand... By the door of my bedroom, with my hand on the light switch, I'm gonna switch the light switch from on to off and close my eyes at the same time so that I can see half my room in darkness and half my room in light.
Or vice versa, right? So, of course you can't.
Eyes are 30 frames a second and can't quite catch up at the speed of light there.
Bucko! So, that's a very powerful thing.
When you look at The question of the center of the universe, right?
So in a religious worldview in the past, the Earth was the center of the universe, right?
So the Sun and, you know, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, et al., all rotated around the Earth, and the stars were like this, holes in a giant colander bowl put over the Earth, and on the other side were flickering disco lights of eternity, right? So The Earth was the center of the universe because it was created by God as man's first playground and then land of punishment after Adam and Eve, and that was how things worked.
Now, when, in the famous story, probably apocryphal, of the apple falling on Newton's head, and he was like, Whoa!
Whoa! Dude!
What if everything falls?
What if gravity is a constant throughout the universe?
What if we're falling around the sun?
What if the sun is falling around the galaxy?
What if the moon is falling around the earth?
Just as the apple fell on my head, the balancing of inertia and centrifugal forces and gravity creates stable orbits.
So he took a principle called gravity, which we, of course, locally experience, particularly those of us over 50.
Boom! Dead joke.
We all understand gravity locally, but what if gravity becomes a universal?
Then our whole view of the universe changes.
And once gravity, well, once it was understood by Kepler and Galileo and Copernicus and others, that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system, wrenched everything out of whack in people's minds.
Why? Because in the past, the justification for the king, the queen, the lords, the aristocracy ruling over The serfs, the plebs, the proletariat was the divine right of kings.
That God appointed certain people to rule over the rest of mankind and to disobey the king was the equivalent of disobeying God himself.
So the king received sanction from the priests and in return the king gave a monopoly on religious edicts to the priests.
But all of that was reliant upon the central narrative of the earth being the center of the universe.
Now once the earth was displaced from the center of the universe, And the sun was put in the center, then the entire idea that the divine right of kings was valid and just, and that when you looked at a king, you weren't just looking at a dude, probably with carbuncles and gout and so on, and a wide variety of STDs, you weren't looking at a dude, you were looking at some shadowy hand puppet of the divine that ruled over you in an infinitely just manner.
No, it's just a dude.
So once you take the earth...
From the center of the solar system and replace the sun there, in.
The divine right of kings takes a mortal blow, and it didn't take very long, in terms of human history, after the introduction of the heliocentric model of the solar system, sun-centered model of the solar system, for the aristocracy to crumble in Europe.
Now, I mean, there was still some, there's still titular aristocracy in the UK and other places, but it doesn't take long.
Apple falling on Newton's head was the king's head falling in a basket in the French Revolution.
Some of it, of course, more peacefully than others.
But that's a very powerful thing.
You take a principle you accept locally and you apply it universally and you get knowledge.
You get power and you fundamentally transform The mental and therefore the moral models of the universe.
So the non-aggression principle.
Do not initiate force against others.
That's something we all accept locally.
You go to somebody who's a teacher in a daycare and don't push, don't hit, don't take, don't threaten, all that, right?
We accept all of that locally.
But, but, but, but, what happens?
If we take the non-aggression principle, which we all accept locally and in our immediate life and in our legal systems, what if we take that and make it truly universal?
Truly universal.
Incredible things happen to your mind and to society.
Now, once you take the non-aggression principle and you make it universal, the state is no longer legitimate, because the state is a mere concept inhabited by human beings, and the moral law applies to all.
This is why taxation is theft.
If you can get people to say taxation is necessary for the continuance of a civilized society, taxation is necessary for roads and education and health care and blah blah blah...
Well, then you're just bribing people to create massive exceptions to the non-aggression principle called the state, where it is not only allowed, but it is necessary to initiate the use of force against your fellow citizens.
And you might have pretty buildings, and you might have flags, and you might have costumes or uniforms, but nonetheless, you are still creating oppositional exceptions to the non-aggression principle, which is catastrophic to society as a whole.
No state-based society has ever sustained itself more than a couple hundred years.
So, this is the great power of true universalizing.
Now, I'll give you another example.
You say, oh, well, the state, all human societies have had states, all human societies have had governments, therefore they always will.
Ah, come on. Come on.
No societies until relatively recently gave equal rights to women.
No societies until relatively recently gave Banned or forbade the practice of human slavery.
We've outgrown those injustices.
What's one or two more?
We're not done yet, obviously, right?
Because here's the thing. In the past, the slaves did the manual work, did the manual labor.
And, I mean, there were slaves like total slaves, and then there were slaves like serfs bought and sold with the land and so on.
So in the past, the slaves did the physical labor.
And when the abolitionists came along, particularly under Wilbur, forced in the UK in the early 19th century, mid-19th century, the argument against them was, well, I mean, look at the South in America.
The slaves pick all the cotton.
The slaves do the manual labor.
So, we need cotton.
We need food. We need fruit, we need wheat, we need bread, we need all of these things.
So without slaves, you see, there will be no cotton, there will be no fruit, there will be no food.
This was the argument. Because, you see, slaves had always provided labor in this way.
And so, if you eliminated slavery, the products or the fruit of slavery would be eliminated as well.
In the same way, you say, oh, well, if the government doesn't provide education, no one will be educated!
And if we free the slaves, nobody will pick any cotton!
Or the price of cotton will be so high that no one can afford it, all this kind of stuff, right?
But, but, but, if you were to say, imagine this, early 19th century, people say, we'll get rid of slavery.
You say, oh, yeah. Okay, here's what's going to happen if we get rid of slavery.
If we get rid of slavery, labor-saving devices become economically viable and productive and worth investing in.
So here's what's going to happen.
Within about a hundred years, maybe a little more, or maybe a little less, within about a hundred years of eliminating slavery, do you know how food is going to be kicked?
Well, they're going to suck long-dead dinosaur and tree juice out of the ground.
They're going to pump it into giant robot machines that, with arms half an acre wide, are going to sweep across the fields And grab all of the wheat.
And not too long after that, they'll have robots capable of picking strawberries and cotton and blueberries and apples and you name it.
People would say, oh, come on.
Dinosaur juice powering giant robots half a field wide.
But that's what happened, right?
When you eliminate an injustice, you open up not just a moral justice, but economic opportunities that we can't even fathom at the moment, right?
As people say, oh, the birth rate in Western countries is low among white people.
So, fewer people is simply more incentive for automation.
I mean, that's what they're doing in Japan, right?
Just automate stuff, right? So...
That is the foundational, to me, lesson of Halloween, which is people spontaneously self-organize in ways that are incredibly powerful, incredibly positive.
And if you think that the withdrawal of centralized, coercive, oligarchical, political power results in chaos, I invite you to study history.
Violence, well, it provides benefits to a minority in the short run.
Like any drug, it gives you a high and then a catastrophic crash.
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