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Jan. 4, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:53
How to Fight Lies!
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So you're being sent this because somebody really, really believes that you need help.
And you can view this as kind of an intervention.
An intervention that is designed to give you happiness, autonomy, identity, joy, clarity, truth, reason, evidence.
All of the wonderful fruits of philosophy that the intellectual life has to provide.
There is a strange belief that people have, which is very conservative in its own way.
So conservative has two elements to it.
Conservative means that the hard-won lessons of morality, of society, of family, of crime, that the hard-won lessons of humanity about what works best should not be thrown overboard on the whim of some political motivation or some government bureaucrat or some radical ideologue and so on.
You know, the fact that children tend to do pretty well.
In fact, it's the best and safest situation for children to grow up in a two-parent household.
The fact that mistreatment of children leads to criminality in adults.
The fact that voluntary solutions are better than coerced solutions.
The fact that charity is complicated and we shouldn't just hand money to people and think it's going to make them better.
The fact that money doesn't in fact buy happiness.
All of these things A kind of hard-won and difficult lessons that society has over the tens of thousands of years that has existed, tinkered with a wide variety of formulations of society and family and the economy.
And these hard-won truths should not be abandoned on a whim.
It's one aspect of conservatism, and that tends to be more on the right.
Now, on the left, the conservatism is very interesting.
And the conservatism on the left is the idea or the argument that somehow breaking from existing government institutions is a complete disaster no matter what.
So, on the right, they say, look, breaking with social institutions, hard-won and developed over thousands or tens of thousands of years, you know, monogamy, marriage, property, incentives, free trade, breaking with those social institutions is really bad.
But on the left, breaking with existing political structures is really bad.
So... On the right, there are concerns that single mothers, it's not a great environment for children.
There's lots of data to back that up.
So we should not just immediately abandon the nuclear family and come up with some other weird, what they perceive of as creepy, Plato-style, culty, everybody raises everybody else's children in a giant pyramid, flesh heap of collectivism.
So we shouldn't just throw out the nuclear family.
But on the left, they say, ah, well, you see, but if the government doesn't control education, if the government doesn't control health care, if the government doesn't control roads, whatever, then certain disaster will result.
In other words, the conservatives on the right are strongly wedded to social institutions developed over thousands of years Whereas on the left, the conservatives are ideologically wedded to political institutions that have only been around for a couple decades.
So, if someone has sent you this, it's because they believe, or they perceive, that you are a conservative on the left, and you are a sort of torchbearer.
I won't say a shill, that's got a negative connotation, but you are a torchbearer For the conservatism of the left, which is that you praise and approve existing political institutions, and in other words, you are a torchbearer for coercion, because politics is the art of the gun.
Politics is coercion.
All laws are backed by force, and the government will escalate force against you until you comply or die.
It's as simple as a traffic stop.
As complicated as a murder charge.
So one of the things that you hear from the conservatives on the left is something like this.
People say, well...
Private, voluntary, parent-driven, free market education is both morally and practically infinitely superior to coercive, politicized, propagandized government, quote, education.
That's sort of what you hear. And then, of course, for the conservatives on the right, they say, well, yeah, parents teaching their children, the community teaching their children in a voluntary way was how most of human history went, for the most part, and...
They have, of course, tried a variety of educational solutions, and the one that generally tended to be the best was voluntary, private teaching of children, parents, communities, schools, but voluntary because on the right, they believe, or you could say they accept, that quality and voluntarism Are exactly the same thing.
Quality and voluntarism are exactly the same thing.
In other words, if you're forced to consume a particular product and other people are forced against, they're not allowed to compete with that particular product, that you're going to end up with crap.
And they will cite, say, the Soviet car, the Lada, or whatever it was, as sort of an example, or that which is coerced is low in quality.
And of course, we know this as an extreme moral scenario of something like rape.
Where the quality of the sexual experience is directly proportional to the voluntary nature of that experience.
Because rape is coercive sexual encounter.
It's violent and coercive or threatened sexual encounter.
And therefore it's of extremely negative cause.
It has extremely negative characteristics.
It's traumatic, it's brutal, it's a violation, it's an intrusion, it's an invasion, and it leaves people with PTSD to some degree, to a significant degree.
So, if sexuality is not voluntary, if it's coerced, then it is extraordinarily negative to the point where we throw people in jail, and rightly so, under the current system, for many years for committing rape.
Now, if sexual encounters are voluntary, it doesn't mean that they'll be perfect.
They may not even be necessarily enjoyable if there's no skill or whatever, but at least it's not a negative traumatizing experience.
So quality and voluntarism tend to be the same.
And of course, if you're dealing with a voluntary organization that you can choose to deal with or not, they tend to work harder to keep your To keep your happiness, to keep you as a customer.
And so quality and voluntarism are pretty much two sides of the same coin.
And of course, coin is apt because it tends to be based upon economics.
If people can't be guaranteed your dollar, they'll work harder and provide a better service in order to get your dollar.
Whereas if you are forced to consume a particular product and other people are not allowed to compete, there's no incentive for quality, there's no incentive for productivity, there's no incentive for customer satisfaction, and so you will have that deteriorate extraordinarily quickly.
Human beings respond to incentives, and where you get the fruits of someone else's labor without having to work for it, it's a form of enslavement, of course, and quality is Is not present.
And quality has a moral aspect to it.
It also has a practical aspect as well.
Slavery was horribly immoral and also horribly unproductive.
The modern world came about as a result of the largely British goal of eliminating slavery around the world, which it finally finished paying for in the 1980s.
So... When people come to you, as I assume someone has and they've sent you this, when people come to you and say That education should be part of the free market.
If you immediately jump, as most people do, and no harm, no foul, it's just the way that we've all been raised and it's hard to see the propaganda until it's sort of pointed out in a clear way, which I hope to be able to achieve in this little chat.
If somebody said, oh, the free market should run education.
Voluntary choice should run education.
If your immediate belief or response is And look, the more immediate, the more programmed, in general.
The more immediate your response, the more programmed it tends to be.
People say, the free market should run education.
If your immediate response is, well then, nobody will get educated.
Then that's very interesting, and I would put you then as a conservative on the left.
In other words, government coercive control of education It's maybe a century and a third century and a half old in many places.
So, you know, in the full span of human history, it's pretty new.
And so you are a conservative on the left, because you are saying, well, look, this is the existing political structure.
We've got your property taxes, which go to the Board of Education, which funds the schools, and you have to pay for the schools, whether you have children or not, whether your children go to school or not, you're forced to pay no matter what.
And then there's a dot, dot, dot, like all the ellipses.
The dot, dot, dot is, otherwise, Children won't be educated at all.
Now, it's a very interesting thing to notice in thought patterns, right?
When a massive negative consequence is given in place of an argument, boom, propaganda right there.
That's how you know you've been programmed.
Remember, the dot, dot, dot.
And then the massive negative consequence, right?
So if the government doesn't force people to pay for government schools, dot, dot, dot, well, democracy will fall apart.
The children won't be educated.
They'll run wild in the streets.
It'll be lord of the fly. Then you have this massive negative consequence, right?
In place of a rational, practical, or moral argument.
Ooh, that's important.
So imagine you're in a relationship, right?
You're in a relationship with a boyfriend or girlfriend.
And you're thinking like, hmm, I don't know.
I don't know if this is really working out for me.
I'm kind of bossy, kind of controlling, kind of naggy, kind of negative.
I'm not really having that much fun anymore.
We're not having much sex. We don't seem to laugh as much.
Or as the old saying goes, we do laugh, but never at the same time and never at the same things.
I think I'm going to break up with this person.
I think I'm going to end the relationship, right?
Now, if that person, boyfriend or girlfriend, says...
That if you break up with me, you will never, ever, ever be able to date anyone else again.
You're never going to get laid, never going to have sex, never going to fall in love, and you will be alone, bitter, miserable for the rest of your natural-born life.
Breaking up with me would be the first-order catastrophe of your entire existence.
It will destroy your life.
Huh. And maybe that's how the conversation goes.
You say, you know, my friend, my soon-to-be friend, it's not working out for me.
Sorry. I'm not particularly happy.
I've tried a bunch of different things.
We're just not getting along. And so I think I'm going to strike out for greener pastures.
I wish you the best. And thanks for the relationship.
But I'm afraid it's not working out for me, so I'm going to move on.
And if they then turn around to you and say, with some weird try-witch-Macbeth-gypsy curse of a bubbling cauldron, You will never date again.
You will never be happy.
You will be miserable for the rest of your life.
You will look back upon this as the greatest mistake of your life, and I will make sure that your reputation is so destroyed that you will regret ever breaking up with me.
Well, you'd be like, oh, okay.
Didn't see this particular...
Son of a witch side of you before, but I kind of think that you're reinforcing my first opinion here that it's probably a good idea to get away from you, right?
If you're going to be threatened and stalked, and if you're bullied, or even if they just say.
Now, if you believe that person, that if you break up with them, that you will be cursed to a life of solitary, forearm-building, fapping, loneliness, isolation, bitterness, negativity, For the rest of your life,
well, see, then what they're doing is they're saying to you, not that they're a great girlfriend or a great boyfriend, but they're saying to you that an intergalactic curse will strike and wither your very heart should you deign to choose not to date them.
They're not saying, oh, I'll change, I'll be better, I'm so sorry, I didn't realize you were unhappy, let's talk about this, I know you've got options, so I really want to be the best partner for you, blah, blah, blah.
They're not coming to you with a positive.
They're threatening you with pretty much an infinite negative.
Now you gotta watch out for those dot dot dots, right?
They can be pretty compelling because human beings respond the most to fear.
I remember when I was a kid, I once ate a banana and at the bottom it tasted really funky, kind of soupy, and had little heart bits in it.
And it was really gross and I spat it out.
Now, how long was it before I could eat a banana comfortably again?
Well, it was a couple of years, frankly.
You may have seen these videos on the internet where a dog is eating something, someone takes up a toy dog, like a stuffed dog, and pretends to eat it, and then the toy dog falls over, and then the dog who's eating the food immediately spits it out, because he just saw another dog basically keel over, he thinks, from eating it.
So we respond to fear.
And those who can't offer us a positive, who can't offer us a positive incentive, will threaten us with a negative.
And the more they threaten us with a negative, The worse the relationship is.
You've got to watch that kind of stuff.
You've got to be alert to this stuff.
Really, really keenly.
So they'll say, well, if government doesn't run the educational system, oh man, society will collapse.
Democracy won't function.
Children won't be educated.
So basically what they're saying is parents don't care about their children's education.
But of course, if parents didn't care about their children's education, then they'd never bother funding government schools in the first place.
They'd vote the first politician out who'd say, oh, this is a huge waste.
You guys don't care about your children's education.
Let's just end this government system.
You guys can keep, you know, $5,000, $10,000 a year back, right?
Because you guys don't care about your children's education, so...
But of course, if a politician said that, all the parents would say, oh my gosh, but my children need to be educated, which they do.
Our children need to be educated, so of course parents care about their children's education.
Because if parents didn't care about their children's education in a democracy, there wouldn't be such a thing as government schools.
If people don't care about their kids' education, but everyone's forced to pay for kids' education, then clearly democracy doesn't work and you've got a whole other set of issues.
Being a conservative on the left means that the argument is that if a particular political institution, whether it's government roads, government healthcare, government education, you name it, right? National defense even.
That's a little bit more on the right, but you know what I mean.
Relatively new things. Or the welfare state.
The welfare state in its modern form is, you know, maybe 60, 55, 50, you know, for the mid-60s, LBJs, great society through to the present.
It has two generations, right?
50 years, 60 years.
So, the welfare state's really new.
Western history goes back thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and for the last, well, it was tried once before in England, something worth looking up called Spenumland, S-P-E-E-N-H-A-M-L-A-N-D. I did a show on this many years ago.
It's a welfare state and destroyed the economy of a particular region in England for hundreds of years.
Just like the Spanish who stole all the gold from the Incas, who also stole it from each other, It destroyed the economy of Spain when they brought all that gold in because it triggered inflation and smart people fled Spain and Spain went into a depression, economic depression that lasted for 400 years.
Pretty bad. The thirst for the unearned is the curse of humanity, right?
And there's no better way to get the unearned than to use the state and propaganda together.
So, in the same way, if you say, well, the welfare state is violent and destructive, coercive, and it is.
It's coercive. I mean, we can at least admit that.
And if you don't pay your taxes to support the welfare state, then they'll come to your house eventually.
And if you resist, they'll shoot you and all of that.
Or they'll certainly point guns at you.
And if you continue to resist or fight back, they'll shoot you.
So, the welfare state's funded on coercion.
There's a moral issue with that. And is it productive?
Has it solved the problem of poverty?
Well, I know it hasn't. In fact, you could really argue, and it's good data to support it, that it's entrenched.
The problem of poverty in nearly intractable ways.
So if you look at something like the welfare state and you say, and people on the right will say this, they'll say, well, you know, this whole...
Forced, coercive charity corrupts the bureaucracy, corrupts the population.
It's blatant vote-buying.
It destroys people's capacity to independently judge political arguments and simply becomes a grab-all on the massive feeding trough of government money.
And because people don't want to pay taxes to support it, you end up indebting the next generation to foreign banksters and so on, right?
It's all good arguments, reasonable arguments.
But if you are a conservative on the left, then you are completely wedded Enmeshed with and probably identity-bound into the idea or the argument that, well, if you get rid of the welfare state, then all the poor people will starve to death.
In other words, that's your dot, dot, dot.
All the poor people will starve to death.
Now, that's not an argument.
That's a massive negative consequence that is projected.
And by the way, there's not actually much data to support that at all.
When the welfare state has been diminished, most people just shrug and say, well, that was a fun ride, and they go get a job, right?
And also, when taxation goes down, charitable donations come up, go up, and helping people is really, really complicated, right?
If you've ever tried to really help someone who's poor or addicted to something, it's really complicated.
It's very difficult. And the more complicated something is, the less you want the government to handle it, because governments, they don't do nuance.
They don't do subtlety.
They don't do all of the complex plays of desire, fear, incentive that go into actually helping someone.
So... I mean, it's hard even to help yourself.
Like, 97% of people who try to lose weight gain it back, and often more, right?
So only a couple of percentage of people actually drop weight and keep it off.
It's very rare. And so, yeah, helping people is really, really tough.
I mean, smoking cessation has a higher relapse rate than heroin addiction, right?
So it's really tough to help people.
And so if you are a conservative on the right, you say, well, you know, these state charity programs have been tried before.
Spenum land, of course, the Roman Empire, with its famous bread and circuses, a giant welfare state, which, of course, undermined the family, destroyed the continuity of values, and contributed massively to the fall of the Roman Empire, for better or worse.
I mean, it was, in fact, a slave empire, so, you know, I'm no huge tears shed for the end of the Roman Empire, but it certainly did.
It doesn't promote the continuity of...
Or if you look at the Middle Eastern world where slavery was de rigueur, they didn't have an industrial revolution, of course, and neither did India with its caste system.
So, yeah, you kind of need voluntarism and trade and wages in order to stimulate the need for an investment and development of labor-saving devices.
I mean, people who buy slaves don't buy labor-saving devices because they don't want to lower the value of their slaves, obviously, right?
So... If you are a conservative on the right, you'll say, you know, we've tried this stuff before, we've got to learn from history, it's immoral, and because it's immoral, it doesn't work.
The immoral is the impractical, fundamentally.
That's not an argument, it's a statement, but I've made that case elsewhere.
You can go look for it if you want, at fdrpodcast.com.
But the immoral is the impractical.
Whereas the conservatives on the left, they say, ooh, you know, we've had these...
Political institutions, this welfare state, we've had this political institution for, oof, you know, 50 plus years.
And so, I will defend it to the moral death.
You know, that's being conservative.
We've got to conserve what is, rather than question the value and virtue of what is.
And these days, the real conservatism is on the left, not on the right.
The real conservatism is on the left.
Because if you question the value or virtues of existing political structures, Then two things will occur.
One, the coercive nature of those institutions will be completely glossed over, ignored, rejected.
If you say, well, the welfare state and government schools and all the government programs, they're funded on coercion, they're funded on violence, right?
In the same way that slavery was funded on violence, in the same way that the oppression of women was funded often on violence.
So, they will completely gloss over the fact that it's funded on violence, and then they will give you the dot-dot-dot, right?
The ellipses, the massive negative consequences.
So, the exact analogy, this is an exact analogy, by the way.
It's not like a loosey-goosey one.
This is an exact analogy.
The political conservatives...
Who are on the left, right?
In other words, they are wedded to the continuation not of cultural institutions or values or hard-won social voluntary structures like monogamy.
They are wedded to the continuation of coercive government structures.
So the political conservatives, conservatives on the left, who wish to conserve political structures, this is exactly what you would have done in the antebellum South when people said slavery is both immoral and inefficient.
You would have said, A, it's not coercive, and B, if the slaves are freed, we'll all starve to death because there won't be anyone to pick the food.
We'll all freeze to death because there won't be anyone to pick the cotton.
I mean, I'm telling you, this is exactly the same logic.
You gloss over the violent nature of the political structure, And then you do a giant dot dot dot with massive negative consequences if that political structure were to be liberated.
If voluntary choice were to replace oligarchical violence, political violence, Then, this is exactly the arguments.
This is what's so strange about the conservatives on the left.
They gloss over the violence, dot, dot, dot, massive negative consequences.
You see this pattern all the time.
All the time. All the time.
So, a carbon tax.
And listen, I'm a deep-hearted environmentalist.
I want the world to be clean and happy and healthy and clean water, clean air, clean ground.
I'm down for all of that, right?
But the carbon tax, first of all, they will deny that taxation is coercive because people, quote, vote for it, right?
Glossing over the fact that people are propagandized for 12 years straight in government schools and aren't told about the coercive nature.
I mean, a government teacher is not going to talk about the coercive nature of the state while lecturing her students to not use violence to get what they want, right?
I mean, that's just not going to play well in Peoria, as they used to say, right?
So that's not going to happen.
So, with the carbon tax, they'll first of all deny that it is coercive.
And then there'll be a dot, dot, dot, which is, well, if we don't have a carbon tax, the world is going to, like, billions of people are going to die because the planet is going to experience extremes in temperature that is going to destroy crops and cause tidal waves and entire...
Sections of land will sink underwater and the polar ice collapse will melt.
Right, so there's this glossing over the coercive nature dot dot dot massive negative consequences.
That's how it goes.
If you have socialist health care, and this is true even in America where more than half of every dollar spent on health care is controlled or spent by the government, So if you say, well, healthcare should be voluntary, it should be charity-based, it should be peaceful, then the first thing they'll do is say that they'll gloss over the violence of government-enforced healthcare, and then dot, dot, dot, massive negative consequences.
Poor people will die in the streets by the millions, right?
So you gloss over the violence, dot, dot, dot, massive negative consequences.
Massive negative consequences.
And you've got to look for this.
You've got to look for this.
Massive negative consequences.
Deny the violence. Massive negative consequences.
In the same way, if you have a society, I'm telling you guys this because I think conservatism is not philosophical.
Simply something being of value because it's been around for a while, That's not philosophy.
Philosophy is like blank slate.
Like, let's start from first principles and work out, it's like science, right?
The belief that the Earth was the center of the solar system, or the Earth was the center of the universe, have been around for thousands of years.
And then people blank slated that son of a gun and said, okay, well, how can we explain what happens with Mars?
How can we explain the moon and the sun and all of that in a better way?
Just blank slate. You wipe the slate clean and you start from scratch.
That's Slavery had been around for all of human history.
In all societies, all continents, slavery had been the norm.
So just because something is old doesn't mean that it's good.
Just because something is old also doesn't immediately mean that it's bad.
It's kind of usually that way, particularly with political institutions.
So just because the welfare state's been around doesn't mean that it's good.
Just because government education has been around for 150 years doesn't mean that it's good.
So, you've got to blank slate this stuff.
It's the same thing, people say, well, the free market should manage roads.
Well, I mean, if there was no government running roads, there would be no roads!
And we'd all, I don't know, pogo stick through Florida swamps to get to each other, and we'd be eaten by alligators and massive, blah, blah, blah, right?
Negative consequences, negative consequences, no roads!
So, this sort of longish introduction takes me to the really heart of the matter.
So I asked some friends of mine, you know, what do you want me to tackle?
What would you like me to tackle in my show?
And they said, God bless them, they said, well, I have this argument with my socialist friends, right?
And I say, no state, right?
Stateless society. Stateless society, morally the same as a slaveless society.
Now, of course, people glossed over the evils and violence of slavery and then said, well, without slaves, we'd all starve to death and freeze to death and society would collapse and we'd all die.
Gloss over the violence, massive negative consequences.
It's always that same one-two punch.
One's more foggy, the other one's more direct.
And so a stateless society, a society without a government, government is an imaginary social institution with a legal monopoly over the initiation of the use of force.
Populated by people who, when they step out of the office, would be arrested for doing exactly what they do in the office, such as initiate threats against people to take their property.
So, when people say stateless society, voluntary society, Voluntarism, it can be called.
I mean, you could say technically anarchism, which means without rulers, without political coercive rulers, but anarchism's kind of been taken over by a lot of the lefty Marxist types.
So, if you say, well, state of society, immediately the left conservatives will say, well, you can't have property rights without the state.
Aha. Now, if you break out that argument, right, just slice and dice it Fruit Ninja style into its two component pieces.
So first of all, saying that you can't have property rights without the state glosses over the coercive nature of property rights with the state.
In other words, property rights arise from self-ownership.
It's actually a deep identity issue.
It's a deep, personal, psychological identity issue in that you own yourself and you own the effects of your actions.
If I make a mistake in this podcast, I come up with something really contradictory or whatever it is, or say something really horrendous, then, you know, who is responsible for that?
Well, given that I'm not currently being possessed by any ghost of Rothbard or anything, then it's me.
It's me. I stand, look in the mirror and say, you done it.
It's not a whodunit, it's a you done it.
So I am responsible. For myself.
I own myself.
I own my brain. I own my voice.
I happen to own this microphone.
I own myself.
And therefore, I own the effects of my actions.
And you can't have a debate without accepting this, right?
If person A is debating person B, person B says something foolish.
Person A says, your argument is foolish.
Person B doesn't say, whose argument?
I never made that argument.
I mean, if it was like right before, or it's been recorded, right?
They could deny it, I suppose. But they're denying that they made it.
They didn't say, well, I made it, but it's not mine.
Oh, I did say that, but it wasn't me.
I mean, that would be a weird thing, right?
I mean, it'd be like if somebody had a tape, a videotape of you committing a crime and you said, oh, that was me.
I chose to do that, but it's not me.
That would be kind of a performative contradiction, right?
A self-detonating statement. I did it, but I didn't do it.
It was me. It's not me.
Now, people might say, well, I did it, but I wasn't responsible.
Okay, well, maybe you're insane.
Maybe somebody's got a gun in your back.
Maybe you had epilepsy and you lashed out and hit someone.
Okay, I get that, but that's because you lacked self-ownership at that moment.
You lacked self-ownership because you were insane.
You lacked self-ownership because somebody had a gun in your back, or you lacked self-ownership because you couldn't control the effects of your limbs because you were having an epileptic attack or something like that, right?
So... To own yourself, to own the effects of your actions, is a deep identity issue.
And if you can be talked out of that, if you can be talked out of having an identity, if you can be talked out of self-ownership, then, well, you can never say, you can never chant my body, my choice again, right?
My body, my choice, right?
Regardless of your perspective on abortion, you can't ever say that again, right?
And so...
And that's not the way things work in the real world, right?
You never get that as an actual defense.
Oh yeah, that's on tape. That was me.
I chose to do it. I was sober.
I was in full control of my faculties.
But it wasn't me. I mean, unless you've got the evil twin hypothesis, right?
It's not the way it's going to work.
So... Property rights, you own yourself, you own the effects of your actions, for good or for ill.
If you go into unowned land and you go and build a hut, then it's your hut.
You own yourself, you own the effects of your actions, in this case building a hut.
If you go and kick a puppy, well, you own yourself and you own your leg and you own your neuromuscular skeletal blah blah blah and you chose to kick the puppy and so you own the effects of your actions.
You create it and you own the injury on the puppy, right?
If you give to charity, then you own the transfer of wealth that's voluntary that you do to give to charity.
You may own the accolades, if that's what you're after, for that particular action.
So you own yourself, you own the effects of your actions.
So that's the rights aspect of it.
The question is to say, well, without the government, you can't enforce property rights.
Okay, well, first question is, how does the government enforce property rights?
Well, It violates your property rights.
Come on. It's not even that complicated.
It's only complicated because you're propagandized.
And again, I don't mean to laugh.
I'm not laughing at you. I'm genuinely sympathetic because I'm sure there's still a couple of bits of propaganda floating around in my brain where someone can laugh at me at about.
So, you know, I say this with, you know, but you understand from the outside in, from outside the propaganda matrix.
Well, the only way that we can secure property rights is to create a massive armed organization that takes up property against her will.
The only way I can maintain my virginity is to be sold into the sex trade.
That's not how things are going to work in the real world.
Because the government says, well, I'm going to protect your property rights, but the way I'm going to do it is tax you.
What's taxation? It's a violation of your property rights because you're being threatened with a massive negative consequence, i.e.
jail or massive fines or whatever, jail if you don't pay the fines, in return for handing over your money, right?
So it's a threat, right?
It's a threat. Taxation is force.
So when people say...
Well, without the government, who would protect your property rights?
Then they're glossing over the fact that it's a violation of property rights for there to be a state in the first place, just as it was a violation of human autonomy and self-ownership for there to be a slave owner society.
Well, they're glossing over the coercion and then say, then they're saying that without the government, so first of all, they're not saying, well, the government is violence, but, right?
At least someone like Hobbes said, yeah, it's violent, but the alternative is worse, right?
So they gloss over the violence, and they say, well, without the government, dot, dot, dot, massive negative catastrophe, here's the ellipses coming, boom!
No property rights. You can't build anything, you can't trade anything, you can't own anything, and everything collapses.
We all starve to death, right?
You understand, right? Gloss over the violence, dot, dot, dot, massive negative consequences.
So, the glossing over the violence is so that you don't deal with the violence inherent in the system, as the old Monty Python line goes.
And also, they gloss over the violence and that massive negative consequence is to appeal to one basic thing, which is your desire to feel like a good person.
Oh, I have it.
You have it. All decent people have it.
The desire to feel like a good person.
Bad people have the desire to appear like a good person, to fake it.
Being a good person in order to throw people off their guard, let their guard down, so that they can chameleon-like swoop in and trash their lives.
But good people, like you and me, we genuinely want to feel like good people, whereas bad people just want to fake it.
You know, like the tiger wants to pretend to be grass so it can eat the antelope.
Doesn't actually love grass and want to unite with it in some Buddhist manner.
I am one with the blades.
Oh, that's my ninja motto.
So... You want to feel like a good person.
So, the one-two punch propaganda is gloss over the violence so that you don't feel like you're advocating violence, which might give you pause, and two, massive negative consequences.
So if they can get you to believe that if the government wasn't running healthcare, poor people would die on the streets.
If the government wasn't running education, poor children in particular would never be educated.
If the government wasn't, you know, pick your poison, right?
If the government wasn't running the welfare state, then, you know, poor single moms would sell themselves on the street in Les Miserables style or whatever, right?
Well... Then they gloss over the violence so there's no reason to object to it and then they can get you on the dot dot dot massive negative consequences because who wants poor people dying of illness and starving in the streets and women having to sell themselves on the black market of prostitution and like, I don't want that. You don't want that.
Nobody wants that. So if they gloss over the violence and hit you with the massive negative consequences, well, I mean, only a complete sociopath would want all of these terrible negative consequences.
You know, a carbon tax, so you want to save a couple of thousand dollars a year at the expense of setting fire to the entire planet?
How selfish could you be? Don't you care?
Do you care about people? I don't mean to sort of mock the arguments, because you have pretty dangerous arguments, but...
So, you know, the question is, okay, but how do you enforce property rights in the absence of the state?
And the true, glorious, liberating...
But emotionally destabilizing argument is two same first words, one different last word.
How do we enforce property rights in the absence of the state?
How do we ensure that particularly poor children get educated in the absence of government education?
How do we ensure that poor people get access to health care in the absence of government, blah, blah, blah, right?
Are you ready? Are you ready to almost feel or maybe actually feel like a bad person for just a moment?
It's just the band-aid coming off.
Don't sweat it. It's fine. You'll be okay.
You'll be okay. I don't know.
I don't care. Do you feel like a bad person yet?
Even I still have that twingy ache where the serrated sword of sarcastic propaganda slid into my innards many years ago.
Ooh, still got that old ache!
Ooh, it's like an old person with arthritis when the rains are about to come!
How will poor people be helped in the absence of the welfare state?
I don't know. I don't care.
Oh, it feels like you're a bad person.
You're callous and you're going to step over their bodies in order to get to your tuxedo, champagne, wine and caviar functions or whatever.
But look, let's be serious about this.
I don't know. I don't know.
Well, if you don't know, then we should go with the existing current system, right?
Ah. Well, no.
No. Think back to slavery.
Think back to the end of slavery. How will cotton, fruits, vegetables be picked in the absence of slavery?
Right now, almost 100% of these products of the field are being picked by slaves.
How on earth...
Will we be fed and clothed in the absence of slavery?
I don't know and I don't care because slavery is immoral.
I don't know and I don't care.
Slavery is evil.
Now, and what that does is it has people return to that little convenient part that they skip over about the violent nature of the system.
Ooh, that's important.
I guess that's kind of what matters, right?
Yes. Yes. Slavery has a negative effect on the slaves.
Yes, it has a negative moral effect on the slave owners.
Yes, it has an incredibly destructive effect on the productivity of the economic system as a whole.
Yes, we only got the modern world after the end of slavery and we wouldn't have it if slavery hadn't ended.
Yes, yes, yes. But these consequences can't be proven.
And whatever solution you come up with about how food and cotton get picked after the end of slavery doesn't matter.
It's all theoretical.
What you know, what you know, for a simple God's honest truth and fact, is that slavery is evil.
Slavery is immoral. What happens in society after the end of slavery?
I don't know and I don't care.
Slavery is wrong. Slavery is wrong.
How can you guarantee that food will get picked?
How can you guarantee even that the slaves will be happier?
How can you guarantee that all the slaves will get jobs?
I don't know and I don't care because slavery is immoral.
I mean, there are some societies now, and certainly societies in the past all over the world, where the women were forced to marry their husbands.
They're forced to marry their husbands.
And you could say, well, okay, but they maybe had a choice of two or three people, but there was still massive social pressure, and they certainly couldn't, in many places, marry outside their religion without facing extreme levels of violence and possibly murder, honor killings and so on, right?
So if you were to say, look, and you should, right, saying, well, the system of coerced marriage is immoral.
It's wrong. It's evil. Violate self-ownership.
And If you were to say that, and then people would say, but if we don't force women to get married, then women won't get married.
You can't guarantee every woman will get a husband.
There'll be no more children. It'll be the end of our entire civilization.
How on earth will women possibly get married if we don't force them to marry someone?
See, I don't know and I don't care, because forcing a woman to marry someone is immoral.
Did you get the pattern now?
Gloss over the coercion, massive negative consequences.
And so people will always try to engage you in the consequences.
You prove me how cotton's going to be picked in the absence of slaves.
And even if you were to say the truth, it's the funny thing, right?
It's the funny thing. Even if you were to say the truth, like let's say you had a magic crystal ball that only you had and you could peer into the future and see how cotton got picked in the absence of slaves.
And people were to say to you, how is cotton going to get picked without slaves?
And you'd say, oh man, you're never going to believe this.
Oh man. Okay.
So here's how it's going to work.
Giant metal robots that span half a field that are powered by crushed dinosaur juice will sweep back and forth with almost no human intervention and pick the slaves with giant rotating blades.
People would say, what the hell have you been smoking?
Wait, giant robots powered by crushed dinosaur juice are going to sweep back and forth?
Oh, come on, man. I mean, give me a serious answer.
You see? Even if you told the truth about what would happen, nobody would believe you.
So they always will try to get you involved in the consequences.
And they'll gloss over the moral evil, The immorality of what they propose and they'll try and get you engaged in consequences.
And then they will try and keep you engaged in consequences.
Because consequences can be argued with no reference to reality.
Why? Because nothing's come to pass.
Nothing has come to pass.
And if you say, look, people will figure it out.
Say, well, how are fruits and vegetables going to get picked in the absence of Slaves will say, you know, well, people pretty much require fruits and vegetables to live.
And given that people like to live, want to live, and they'll figure it out.
Right? Oh, well, you get rid of health care, the poor are going to die of sickness in the streets.
It's like, well, I've got to tell you, man.
People don't like it when sick people are dying in the streets.
They don't like the desperation.
They don't like the crime that will come from it.
They don't like the brutality.
They don't like the aesthetics.
They don't like what it does to their property values.
They don't like what it does to the spread of disease.
For sick people to be out there dying in the streets, coughing up into the air, they just don't like it for a near infinite array of moral and practical and financial reasons.
At the same time, free healthcare gets massively over-consumed.
Yeah, put the government in charge of healthcare.
One pandemic, you can't get a cancer test.
Whoopsie, whoopsie.
So people will figure it out.
People aren't going to sit there and say, well, there's no slavery anymore.
Well, clearly I can't possibly pay anyone.
To pick fruits and vegetables?
And cotton? So, I'm not going to bother trying to figure out how to get fruit, vegetables, and cotton.
So, yeah, I guess we've just got to starve and freeze to death.
No one's going to lift a finger to solve the problem.
That's how humanity is.
You take away one brutal solution, people never come up with another solution, of course.
They just die. They just willingly starve to death rather than try and figure out some other way to get their fruits, vegetables, and cotton.
No one anywhere closer within decades to the end of slavery could possibly figure out how modern agriculture could work or would work.
Nobody had even the remotest freaking clue how it was going to play out.
They just knew that it was wrong. It's like saying, oh, well, tell me this.
If we stop forcing women to marry men, you tell me exactly who this woman's future granddaughter is going to wed.
And you can't answer that question.
And then they say, aha, then we have to keep our current system, don't we?
Because you're not omniscient and you can't say everything about the future, right?
It's a trap. It's a silly trap.
It's an obvious trap once you see it, of course, right?
So, look, there's a bunch of different ways that property rights can be enforced without the state.
In fact, property rights can only be enforced without the state because the state is a violation of property rights to begin with.
So, I don't know. I don't care.
Because to care about how things happen in the absence of violence is to say that consequentialism is more important than immorality, that pragmatism is more important than ethics.
And it's to get drawn into a fruitless discussion of future theoreticals which nobody can guess, nobody can figure out, nobody can understand, and nobody can prejudge.
It literally is like arguing about the number of hit points a hill giant has in Dungeons and Dragons.
It's an entirely theoretical construct.
Should it be 50 hit points or 60 hit points?
Yeah, yeah, you tell me an objective metric by which that can be decided.
And asking, say, well, this is why the left is so conservative.
They say, well, if you can tell me exactly how these problems are going to be solved in the absence of the state, maybe I'll think about it.
Well, it's a trap. And they're trying to get you to jump over the morals and argue about consequentialism, which you can never do successfully.
How will the poor be taken care of in the absence of the welfare state?
Well, first of all, it also implies, as it's hidden premise, that the poor are currently being taken care of by the welfare state, and they're not.
They're being trapped. They're being subjugated.
And in an odd way, both them and the taxpayers are being enslaved into a vote-buying transfer of wealth that is degrading the entire human condition.
So how will...
People stay healthy in the absence of government healthcare.
Well, if you look at the obesity rates, it's really hard to argue that people are staying healthy with current government healthcare.
And if you look at how current government healthcare has been utterly demolished by COVID because people can't get their regular checkups and tests and so on, right?
Then, because governments wouldn't acknowledge the danger of China, because governments wouldn't close borders, because, because, because...
Governments didn't do their job.
Now you can't get a doctor. You can't see a doctor.
You can't get your screenings.
You can't get your checkups. And unfortunately, a large number of you are going to die as a result.
I hate to say it. I wish it were different.
I fought against it, argued against it for 15 years straight.
But because the government didn't protect your borders, you are going to die.
And you may not know where the lump is, you may not know where the problem is, you may not know where the obstructed artery is because you can't get your tests, but you're going to wake up, have a sudden spasm, and you're going to die.
And it's really horrible.
So you say, oh, well, how will people be taking care of the absence of government health care?
It's like, they're not being taken care of this year, they're not going to be taken care of next year, and it's going to cause an untold number of deaths.
Literally untold, because nobody's going to know.
But it's going to be a lot.
A lot, a lot, a lot.
So, here's your Holy Trinity.
I guess you could say four, but once you accept and understand that the initiation of the use of force is immoral, force is a violation of personal and property rights, once you accept that, then you have a simple one, two, three. We should end the welfare state.
We should end government education.
Blank over the violence, dot, dot, dot, ellipses, massive negative consequences.
How are the poor going to be taken care of without government health care and welfare?
I don't know. I don't care because it's immoral.
People will figure it out.
And, star footnote, it'll be infinitely better.
Why? Because it's immoral.
Because it's voluntary. If you don't want the government assigning you a boyfriend or girlfriend that you have to have sex with, which would basically be political, institutional rape, If you want to be able to choose your own boyfriend and girlfriend, then you should be able to choose your own education, education for your kids.
You should be able to choose your own charities.
You should choose... Who to help and how to help people voluntarily when it comes to providing health care?
You should be able to choose.
My body. My choice.
That is the moral absolute that everyone tries to skate over.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
Freedomain.com. I hope that you will check out Philosophy.
Ooh! The power is unbridled.
And I thank you for your time today.
I wish you a very happy new year, new decade.
And hey, here's a thought.
Let's not continue the mistakes of the past.
Thanks, everyone. Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
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