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Jan. 19, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:43
The State of Your Enslavement
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So one of the most amazing, fantastical things about philosophy is every time you think you've climbed to a new rooftop of the world and you're at the highest place you can possibly be, because you're looking down and you're saying, man, man, man, have I climbed a long way.
Is it high up here?
The air is clear. I can see.
It feels through light years.
And then, there's a sound above you, you look up and you're like, oh...
Oh man, there's a long way still to go.
So I think I'm at a new peak.
It's almost 40 years in philosophy for me, from my mid-teens to my mid-50s.
And I've been thinking about this for the last couple of weeks.
And I think it's a really powerful heart muscle of the universe that we're going to be unpacking here.
So I hope you'll be patient.
I'm going to take this rather astoundingly powerful idea from a number of different directions, some personal, some political, some philosophical, some general.
Stay with me. This is really, really important.
Please stay with me during the course of this explication.
It's really, really important, and I think it will clarify and illuminate the world for you in ways I've not been able to achieve before, which is why I keep doing it, because there's always another mountain, a higher mountain.
As I was working through this idea yesterday, I was talking to my daughter, and I asked her, Kind of a simple question.
Ah, such deep implications.
I asked her quite a simple question.
And I said, Izzy, let me ask you something.
How tough is it to be good?
And she didn't even hesitate.
She said, that's pretty easy. And I said, well, what do you mean?
She said, well, I keep my word.
I don't steal. I don't use violence.
It's pretty easy. I said, well, do you have impulses to do those things during the day?
It was kind of a long pause. She was joking.
She's like, no, not really.
So how tough is it to be good?
How tough is it to be good?
How tough is it to be good?
Well, my thesis here is going to be that the harder people make it to be good, the more easy it is to control you.
The powers that be who instruct us in moral veracity when we're little, the more complicated and difficult they make it to be good, the easier we are to control.
Now, when I was four or five years old, I've been going to Sunday school.
I have very religious aunts I used to stay with.
On a kind of regular basis, I remember going through most of kindergarten with my cousin.
We'll call him Bob. And, again, I was very young.
And this is because my mother would be in and out of hospitals, or maybe she was pursuing some rich guy.
I remember the first time I ever saw push-button roll-up windows in a car, which was incomprehensibly cool and Star Trek-y.
My mom was dating some wealthy guy, I guess hoping to lock him down, Blanche DuBois style, but she didn't make it.
So my mom would kind of be Randomly absent from my life, probably for dating and mental health reasons.
But anyway, I was staying with my cousin.
They had a nice, big, creaky old house.
I actually used that as the basis of the description of the house at the opening of my novel, Almost, which you should really, really check out.
I'm telling you, it's a great, great, great book.
You can get it at freedomain.com forward slash almost.
It's free. So, I'm in the attic with my cousin.
And we're playing away.
And a Cliff Richard song comes on the radio that we've got up there.
Power to all our friends, to the music that never ends.
And it was a bouncy, poppy tune.
He's got a nice voice.
And I felt this giant fork in my heart, this divide.
In my heart, because the way that I had been raised and the religious instruction that I had received at the hands of my aunt in particular, Sunday school, the church, which was that the more you love the things of this world, the more distant you are from God.
Now, it wasn't entirely this world is run by Satan and it's a veil of tears and you must castigate and mutilate your flesh in order to achieve.
It wasn't that extreme, but It certainly was, the more you turn to things of this world, the further you are from God, grace, heaven, salvation, redemption.
And I liked this poppy little song.
And in that attic, at the age of four or five, I know it wasn't six, because at six I was in boarding school, and it was definitely before that.
Quite a bit before that. We were playing inside, I think, because it was winter.
So, in the rafters, kind of in the rafters but above the rafters of this attic that I was playing in, I felt there was a sense, there was a cold eye that was watching me and judging me.
And the voice, in a sense, the sentence, double meaning that I heard, was, if you love this song, you cannot love me.
It's one or the other. If you love this song, you cannot love me.
Said the eye in the rough is the eye in the sky.
Now at the time, of course, I thought this was God.
And there was a kind of stark choice.
Now you understand, I didn't Think through it in this language, obviously, when I was four or five years old.
This was just kind of an instinct that I had.
That to love a simple, silly song was to reject God.
To reject God, to reject the divine.
And there was a fork in the road.
And it was so...
Powerful for me. This problem.
It's a massive problem.
Which is this.
I can't help what I love.
I can't help what I love.
I just happened to really like this song.
I would say, I loved it. I really liked this song.
And I've always loved music.
Love music. I just like this song.
And if the natural, sensual, basic instinct of me was to like this song, but that put me in disfavor with God, then I had a huge problem ahead of me.
A huge problem ahead of me.
And I asked my daughter yesterday, in preparation for this conversation, I asked her and I said, what would it be like for you if someone had said to you that liking chocolate was evil?
Or liking chocolate was immoral, was bad.
She was like, whoa, dude.
That's crazy. And I said, yeah, because you can choose not to eat chocolate, but you can't choose whether you like chocolate, right?
You can't choose that. That's just your body.
It's your tongue, right?
It's your desire for sugar which draws you to fruit.
It's not like we evolved with chocolate.
And she's like, Yeah, that's nuts.
She said, if I was told that liking chocolate was bad, I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about chocolate.
Like, yeah, exactly.
Exactly. Exactly.
That's the problem. When I was growing up, the way that I was taught morality, and this was not just Christian, but morality as a whole, was morality was insanely complicated.
Insanely complicated. You see, you had to have enough respect for yourself, enough pride in yourself, that you would seek salvation.
Don't give up on yourself, because to give up on yourself is to commit the sin of despair.
It's bad, right?
So, If you commit the sin of despair, that's bad.
So you can't think badly of yourself.
You can't think too low of yourself.
But, you see, if you think too highly of yourself, that's the sin of pride.
It's also really, really bad.
So you've got to find this sweet spot, this Aristotelian 0.1% shifting goal mean, and then you're good.
Oh, no, you're not good anymore.
Because, you see, the moment that you say, oh, I have achieved a good balance.
I don't have too much pride.
Oh, that's too much pride. You've got to think down about that.
Lower that down. Dial that down.
Oh, you dialed it down too low.
Now you're thinking too lowly of yourself.
You're not going to pursue virtue. That could be the sin of despair, so dial it up again.
Oh, but don't be happy about the fact that you've dialed it up.
You can't win. It's trying to dance on the tip of a razor-thin pyramid in a high windstorm or earthquake.
You can't win. Whatever stability you find will be shifted the next moment.
How about this one? You've got to work hard, and you certainly have to provide for your family.
You have to take your responsibility seriously as a provider, as a man.
It's back in the day, obviously.
So you have to work hard.
Work diligently.
Idle hands are the devil's plaything.
Work hard. Oh, did you work too hard?
Oh, so you went from sloth to wealth.
Wealth is bad. Wealth is too material.
Wealth is too much plenty. You've got to give that away, right?
So you've got to work hard, otherwise you fall prey to the sin of sloth.
Oh, but if you work too hard, you fall prey to the sin of greed and materialism and over-focus on the things of this world.
You've got to find that right balance, you see.
It's a thin edge of the wedge.
It's a razor. Razor edge.
And the moment that you're proud, the fact that you did find the right balance, the right down to the right penny balance.
Oh, now that's a center pride.
You can't be proud of that. You've got to adjust that down.
Constant, constant maddening.
Self-management. Self-control.
Self-monitoring.
Self-monitoring.
Like somebody who's a hypochondriac checking their blood sugar every five minutes.
Monitor, monitor, monitor, control, control, control, balance, balance, balance.
Not too much, not too little. See, it's important to be inspired by other people, but you can't envy them.
The right amount of inspiration is good.
Too much inspiration, then you're envying them, that's bad.
So you've got to have the right balance.
You've got to keep all these infinite spinning plates, circling and floating it just the right way.
You've got to have a goal, but you can't ever take satisfaction in achieving that goal, because then that's pride.
Excessive humility is self-abasement.
Excessive pride is vanity and a sin.
You can't focus on the things of this world except you have to provide by focusing on the things of this world.
Charity is a good thing, but you've got to have charity begins at home and you've got to earn enough.
Thank you.
To give through charity, but you can't earn enough that you're then subject to the pride of materialism and ambition.
So in that attic, the age of four or five, I got mad.
Frustrated, probably is a better way to put it, but I got frustrated.
And I got frustrated, I think, looking down through the tunnel of time and saying, the rest of my life could be a war between liking this song and liking virtue.
Liking this silly, material, fun song or being virtuous.
Because I can't help what I like, I just happen to like the song.
I like singing along with it, I like dancing to it, I just like the song.
But that was in opposition to the divine, to virtue, to goodness.
And the reason why I viewed it as a cold robot eye up there in the rafters of that long ago attic, it's probably bulldozed by now, the reason that It was a cold robot eye, like that red eye of Hal in 2001, a Space Odyssey the movie.
The reason why it was a robot eye to me was, imagine this.
Imagine you're a robot and I created you.
Pretty much summing up government education.
But imagine that you're a robot and I created you.
And I wake you up, and I say, I've programmed you to be happy that you're alive, but also that if you're happy that you're alive, you're sinful.
I've programmed you to enjoy sunlight because you're solar-powered, to need sunlight and to want sunlight because you're solar-powered, but if you enjoy sunlight, then you're sinful.
I have programmed you to want to work, but if you want to work too much, you're sinful.
I have created these desires within you, but I've set up moral standards in opposition to the desires I programmed within you.
Wouldn't you turn to me and say, you bastard, what are you doing?
What are you doing? That's not, what?
That makes no sense.
Why would you program these desires into me and then say that the ideal standard is to act in opposition to these desires?
You're setting me at war against myself.
Well, the only real answer is I've set you at war against yourself so you can never threaten my power because you'll be sitting there as a robot focusing on, oh, do I have too much desire for sunlight?
Do I have too much desire for work?
Do I have too much desire for energy or fuel?
That's now lack.
It's not virtue. You can't ever challenge.
You can't ever take over or free yourself if you're obsessed with your own potential failings and trying to balance all the spinning plates of contradictory desires and commandments.
That's I reject that.
I rejected that. I like this song.
I'm not going to be at war with myself over liking this song.
I won't do it.
You understand? If they can get you to fight yourself, you can't fight them.
If they get you to be at war with yourself, you can't free yourself from the powers that be.
The more complicated they can make being good, the more self-obsessed you become, the more delicate your maneuverings to achieve and maintain virtue become, and the less you can challenge them.
I choose the song.
Not the wildly contradictory robot maker.
I choose the song. I chose the song.
And one of the reasons why I've been pretty courageous in the public sphere is I'm not at war with myself.
I'm not at war with myself.
Now, it's always been a big question, a very, very big question, with regards to religious education.
Are good people in charge of the religious education of children?
I don't think very good people are in charge of the government education of children, but what about religious education?
In other words, the eye, the robot eye in the rafters when I was four or five, was that God or the devil?
I don't know. But I don't believe in a God who would create desires within me and then say it was immoral to experience those desires.
That would be an act of sadism.
That would be an act of sadism.
That would be to create chocolate that children love and then say that the children are evil for loving chocolate.
No. No, no, no, no, no, no.
And I think this is one of the things that bothers people so much about universally preferable behavior, which is not just my approach to ethics, the rational philosophical approach to ethics.
You can get it. I think the best place to get it, essentialphilosophy.com.
It's a free book. You can read the last half of it.
It's got a great explanation of UPB, universally preferable behavior.
It bans rape, theft, assault, and murder.
Okay. Pretty good, right?
If you haven't initiated force, if you haven't violated property, which fraud is a form of property violation, You're good.
You're done. You could be good sitting on a couch.
Now this is not about my religious education when I was a toddler.
This is really about the world as it stands and going forward.
So just so you understand, this is not about me in the past.
It's not even about religion fundamentally.
It's about the new religion of impossible virtue.
The woke fantasy of virtue that can be achieved.
So Let's talk about, can you be good?
Ask yourself that question, can you be good?
Now, in the old equation, in the medieval equation, being good was such a balance of competing forces that you could never achieve it, and even if you did achieve it, you couldn't be proud of it, which meant it was going to go off.
You could never be satisfied, never be done until you were in heaven or not.
And the answer as to the misfortunes of this world was sin.
Why do bad things happen?
Because sin. Because sin.
Why was town A hit worse from plague than town B? Because people were more sinful in town A. Why did this person have a seizure?
Because it was demonic possession.
Because they were sinful. Why was this child born with a defect?
Because the parents were sinful and this is God's punishment.
Why do bad things happen?
Why do things that we don't want to happen happen?
Because sin. Now, society, its powers, its resources, and its transfer of wealth was all set up, predicated on this basic issue.
Or this basic answer, superstitious answer.
Why do bad things happen?
Because sin. Scientific answers as to why things happen threatened the allocation of resources in society.
Massive amounts of government wealth went to religious institutions, went to the aristocracy, supported by the religious institutions, and in turn, of course, the aristocracy gave the religious institutions a monopoly on religion.
But all of that, all of that massive transfer of wealth within society, by massive I don't mean society was enormously wealthy, I just mean that massive amounts of the scarce resources that society did have went to this answer because we're all dying to know why bad things happen.
Why are some people wealthy?
Why are some people poor? Why are some kids born sick and some kids are born healthy?
Why are some people born beautiful and some people are born ugly?
Why are some people born smart and some people are born dumb?
Why? Why is there massive inequality between this group, this race, this gender, this ethnicity, this country?
Why is there inequality?
Inequality of outcome. Inequality of outcome.
Well, the answer in the past was, it's a trial.
Those who suffer the most are being polished the most, like a sword.
On a whetstone sparks heat to be sharpened.
Sin, the wages of sin is death, suffering.
Where did disease come from?
It comes from sin. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of sin.
New Orleans, not even that long ago.
There was an American religious leader who said that, I think it was New Orleans, was harmed Through weather, because of its sin, I believe lesbianism was the issue.
Why is there inequality? Why are some people tall, short, happy, sad?
Why are there melancholic dispositions?
Why is there such inequality?
The answer in the past, of course, was superstitious.
It was a superstitious answer.
That the physics of the universe and the genetics of biology bend around sin.
Now, there is of course some suffering that is founded upon a sin.
In the past, a birth defect might have been blamed upon the immorality of the parents.
They didn't go to church enough, they didn't pray enough, they didn't give enough, they weren't charitable enough, they weren't good enough.
And God sent them a deformed child as a punishment.
And that was the answer. Now, it certainly is possible that sin could produce deformity in a child.
Immorality could produce deformity in a child.
Such as, you know, the mom is smoking or drinking through pregnancy and this results in birth defects and so on, right?
Could happen. Certainly has happened.
But not all birth defects are based upon parental immorality, of course.
Sometimes it's just bad luck.
Someone who has epilepsy has epilepsy because of a particular genetic condition, I assume, or a medical condition for sure, right?
It's not the result of sin.
Now, in the past, an epileptic attack would be viewed upon often as a demonic possession.
Unfair, unjust, wrong, can't help if you have epilepsy.
It's not the result of you courting demons through bad behavior.
But when science came along and said, hmm, I'm only that comfortable with this whole demonic possession answer for everything or sin answer for everything.
Maybe there's other things.
Maybe it's a lack of soap that causes disease, like a hand-washing.
That, you know, the germ theory, what, 130 years old, 140 years old, something like that.
But as long as you had an answer, called sin is the cause of disease.
When you had a superstitious answer you couldn't get to the real answer and in fact the real answer threatened the allocation of resources and power particularly political power in society and so had to be opposed.
That the greatest sin was to question whether misfortune was the result of sin or there could be other factors involved.
You were doomed To a lack of progress in society as long as the greatest blasphemy was asking the question, is inequality simply the result of sin?
Is misfortune simply the result of sin?
Or are there other factors that we need to explore?
In other words, advocating for washing hands was blasphemy because it said that a lack of hygiene is more responsible for disease than personal immorality or sin.
You understand? It's not about the past.
This is about the present and the future.
I want you to think of, in the new woke ideology, it's not really that new, you understand, it's the same as in the past.
They have made being good ridiculously complicated.
And why? So they can control you.
So they can control you.
If you have a good conscience because you haven't violated the non-aggression principle, you kept your contract as best you could, you haven't stolen, then you're good.
You're done. Good.
It's not that complicated. Making morality simple is the biggest blow to authoritarianism that can be conceived of, which is why there's such opposition to universally preferable behavior.
Because if we make morality simple, we threaten existing power structures based upon the idea that inequalities of outcome are based on sin, inequality, misfortune, doing badly.
It's all based on sin.
Now, in the religious worldview, sin, which causes misfortune, It's based upon a rejection of God.
In the new religion, which is really a cult, in the new cult of modernity, well, what causes inequality?
What causes misfortune?
What causes some people, some groups to do better than others?
Ah, it's not sin.
Or rather it is sin, but it's not general sin.
It is a specific sin called exploitation.
That's the answer, you see, to everything.
Why do women make less than men?
Because men exploit women. Why does one ethnic group make less than another ethnic group?
Because, as long as that second ethnic group is white people, because exploitation.
Exploitation. It's a superstitious answer to everything.
And in the past, when you said, I don't think that epilepsy always results from sin, maybe there's some other explanation, you threatened the whole existing political structure,
power structure. If you say that group outcomes that are different in a free market May not all be to do with exploitation, but maybe there are other answers.
Maybe there are other complementary explanations, scientific, factual, that go against the narrative that the modern original sin of exploitation answers everything about wealth and poverty in the world.
Is there exploitation? Certainly.
Is there exploitation which produces inequality?
Certainly. Just as there is sin, such as drinking or smoking through pregnancy, immorality that produces birth defects.
Does that mean all birth defects are due to immorality?
Of course not. Is there exploitation in the world?
Of course. Does that explain everything?
Of course not. To say that one thing explains everything is the fundamental superstition of the primitive mind.
Of the ancient mind. Of the mind that rushes to a conclusion in order to avoid the anxiety of actually asking questions and thinking for yourself.
The more complicated you can make morality, the more contradictory commandments you can put in place, the more impossible you can make the achievement of virtue, the more subjugated the people are who believe in such convoluted garbage Go to the average, woke, leftist social justice warrior and say, how easy is it to be good?
When will virtue be achieved?
When are you good?
When can you be satisfied that you're virtuous?
Well, if you go to many fundamentalist religious people, they will say, well, there is, you can't.
You'll never be good enough.
Good is impossible.
Oh, there was some old, one of those dun-dun shows, TV shows about cops.
I remember this quite vividly some years ago, watching one of those shows.
And one of the Christians was said, well, Jesus wouldn't do this.
And the Christian said, well, Jesus is perfect.
I'm not. Can't be perfect.
Can't ever be good enough.
Can't ever be satisfied that you're virtuous.
Because being satisfied that you're virtuous is a sin of pride and therefore you are no longer virtuous.
So you get constantly toppled over and set back at war against yourself.
Can't disturb the powers that be.
So much of political, economic power in this world is predicated on the basic facts that you can't ever feel good enough.
You can't ever feel satisfied.
Your moral goal will never be achieved.
So you'll always feel like you're falling short.
You're not good enough. You're always at doubt with yourself.
You're always at war with yourself.
Subjugated by the electric fence of impossible standards.
Now, in the modern world, the new impossible standard is egalitarianism.
That's When everything and everyone is perfectly equal in the outcomes of life, then, and only then, will we be good enough.
Which is like saying, in the medieval context, only when nothing bad happens in the world will that be an indication that we're virtuous enough.
And of course, there will always be bad things happening in the world, so you can never be virtuous enough, and there will, shocker, always be inequality in the world, inequality of outcome.
So you will never be good enough.
You will never, ever be good enough.
Now, of course, the fundamental lie about inequality is that they say, oh, well, you know, see, inequality is really bad.
Economic inequality is really bad.
So what we need to do is have massive political inequality in order to try and remediate economic inequality.
In other words, we feel some people are underpaid, so we're going to use giant, massive, gun-enforced political power to attempt to close this income gap, to close this wage gap, to close this wealth gap, which means massive political inequality is put in place of mild economic inequality and somehow people feel that they've solved the problem of inequality.
No. No, no, no.
It's like saying, well, you know, some people really choose badly when it comes to marriage.
They get divorced. It's a bit of divorce.
It doesn't work out. So the best thing we can do is have the government tell you who you're going to marry and enforce that at the point of a gun.
Okay. Okay.
That's a bad idea. Can't solve the problem.
of economic inequality with government laws because the government is the most unequal institution on the face of God's green planet.
Trying to solve economic inequality with massive increases in political inequality, some people can force others to do things at gunpoint, is like trying to solve a headache with a guillotine.
But that's the lie, you see, it's impossible.
To achieve inequality.
On so many different grounds.
Some biological, some genetic.
Look, pretty people make more money than ugly people.
And pretty versus ugly is to a significant degree, it's just a matter of genetics.
Were you born with even features?
Were you born with a good hip to waist ratio?
If you're female, were you born with a V-shaped, narrow hips, wide-shouldered body if you're a male?
You can't choose your skeletal structure.
You can't choose your bone structure of your face.
You can't choose whether you have a lustrous mane of hair or become a solar-powered sex machine.
You can't choose that. You can't choose your eyes.
Tall people make more money than short people.
Since the advent of television, even though only about 10% of men retain their hair into their old age, since the advent of television, not one single bald guy has become president.
Nixon was not voted, sorry, Nixon had hair.
Gerald Ford was not voted in. So we're only choosing from 10% of potential candidates anyway.
We can't choose that. So what are you going to do?
How smart you are is to a significant degree, I mean, assuming that IQ is related to general intelligence, which it seems to be how smart you are, is significantly genetic.
Looks, height, intelligence.
You don't choose these things, for the most part.
I mean, you can work with what you've got, right?
If you're short, maybe you can work out more.
If you're not physically attractive, there's things you can do.
If you're short, you can Tom Cruise it up with lifts and soap boxes.
But you can't make people equal.
Everyone can take singing lessons, but not everyone can be a good singer.
Not everyone can be a great singer.
It's just the way things are.
Some people pick up a guitar, like Eric Clapton gets a guitar at the age of 12, picks it up, plays it till his fingers bled as the old Brian Adams songs go, and just tried to play everything on the radio and just became obsessed with it, played it like hours and hours and hours and hours a day.
Just like I happen to like this particular song that put me in the crossroads or the fork in the road with my relationship to contradictory morality, unattainable morality, which is abuse.
Morality that is unattainable is just about the worst abuse that there is.
And everybody knows that's what abusers do.
Abusive people will give you contradictory instructions so they can punish you either way.
My mom used to do this.
All the time. She'd give me some complicated, convoluted set of instructions on what to do.
Now, if I went back to ask for clarification because I was confused, she'd say, well, I already told you, weren't you listening?
Whereas if I just kind of soldier on and did it wrong, which inevitably there would be something wrong with what I did, she said, oh, I'll give you simple instructions.
You can't even follow those. You can't win.
You can't win. So in the past, bad things were explained by sin.
In the present, bad things are explained by inequality, exploitation.
In the past, it was impossible to become personally or socially virtuous.
It was a mirage.
Have you chasing yourself, exhausting yourself through the desert, you never turn and face the powers that be and ask them why they had so much power.
Surrender your liberties and we will make you good.
Surrender your property rights and we will reallocate your resources to make exploitation go away.
Largely voluntary economic exploitation will be solved by us taking half your shit, keeping most of it for ourselves and dribbling down the rest to buy votes from the increasingly dependent.
You cannot solve the problem of inequality.
You can't do it.
It's a mirage any more than you can be perfectly virtuous in contradictory religious instructions or contexts.
You can't solve the problem of inequality because if you say we'll take from the rich and give to the poor you end up with fewer rich and more poor and it's a cycle that goes until everyone's poor.
And then the only people who aren't poor are those who have massive and unequal political power.
You can't solve the problem of inequality.
It's a mirage designed to exhaust you and to create in you the category called wrong-think.
The greatest sin in the past was to question whether bad things happen as the result of sin.
The blasphemy now is to question whether all inequality is to question two things.
A does all inequality arise from exploitation and B Are massive inequalities in political power the way to solve relatively minor inequalities in economic outcomes?
That's the blasphemy, you understand?
Maybe hair lips are not the result of parents not going to church enough.
Maybe hair lips and a baby.
Maybe co-joined twins aren't an indication of parental immorality.
Maybe, right, as the old, I think it's Christian, they say that if you look at another woman with lust in your heart, in other words, if you look at another woman and find her sexually attractive and you're married, that's the same.
That's the same, you see, as having slept with her for real.
It's a thought crime. It's a thought crime.
You're bad for having the lusts that God put in you Even if you stay perfectly physically faithful to your wife, if you ever look at another woman with lust in your heart, well, you just cheated on her.
An impossible standard.
As a friend of mine used to say, I'm married, not dead.
You can't ask whether economic differences in economic outcomes are due to factors other than exploitation alone and even if we accept that even if they were the result of exploitation is creating massive centralized political coercive power the way to solve it because that's the most unequal thing of all being paid less than someone else is a difference of degree whether you're allowed to initiate the use of force to transfer property versus the government that's a difference in kind it's an opposite Not making as much money as someone else is a gradation difference.
Whether you have the right to initiate the use of force or not is a moral difference and you cannot solve gradation differences with moral differences.
You cannot. Political inequality, inequality of political power between citizens and government is far worse, infinitely worse than any differences in outcome of income or success.
But the more they can create in you an unachievable morality, the more you focus on, oh my gosh, there's still this inequality, there's still that inequality, we've got to fix it, we've got to hand over more power to the state to fix this inequality.
Well, the government's very thrilled with that.
Oh yeah, yeah, no, the inequality's really bad.
Inequality's really bad, so give us more of your property, give us more power, subjugate yourself even more, and we'll go solve that pesky inequality thing.
Hey, the inequality's getting worse.
Well, that's because...
You're not dedicated enough.
You're not good enough.
There's still bad thinkers, wrong thinkers, bad people out there.
Oh, yeah, no, if you simply obey this religious institution, your lives will get better.
Wait, we're doing that and our lives are getting worse.
Oh, well, you see, that's because you're not obeying enough.
Just obey more. Subjugate more.
Hand over more of your property. You can't bring science and facts to bear on a superstition without threatening.
The resource allocation The resource theft that occurs on the basis of superstition.
And, of course, in the past, people were content to some degree to let the punishment occur after death.
That's not the case anymore with the secular cult, right?
The secular cult, the punishment has to happen in the here and now.
You've got to be deplatformed, you've got to be attacked, you've got to have your reputation destroyed, your career destroyed, source of income destroyed, Because you're going against superstition.
The cult of egalitarianism.
The cult of economic equality, which fuels the totalitarianism of political inequality.
Can't do it. It can't be allowed to happen.
The moment you try and take from the rich and give to the poor, more people will just pretend to be poor.
Can't solve the problem.
Can't solve it. And as soon as you can set up a problem that can't be solved, and you set people at war with themselves for a moral ideal that can never be achieved, well, you own them.
You control them. They're yours.
And they will almost inevitably respond to all of the disasters of trying to obey impossible moral standards by simply redoubling their dedication to those impossible moral standards.
It's like an old joke in computer programming.
I want to process it so fast that it can finish an infinite loop quicker.
An infinite loop is line 20.
No, line 10, go to line 20.
Line 20, go to line 10.
just loops around.
Doesn't matter how fast the computer is, of course.
So that is the updated superstition of the olden days.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Inequality results from sin, said the people in the past.
No, no, no, now.
Inequality results from exploitation.
In the past, human failings were sanctioned by proximity to the divine.
In the present, human failings are sanctified by proximity to the state.
Power corrupts unless you're in the state.
All human beings are fallible.
Well, except if you're this close to the religious authority, in which case you're good to go.
Power corrupts except for the power of the aristocrats blessed by the Pope, by the priests.
You can't achieve the goal of inequality.
It's a mirage. Well, it's worse than a mirage.
Well, a mirage will get you killed, you understand, because you'll go out into the desert and die of thirst thinking you're getting close to water, which will never materialize.
Literally, in this case, never materialize.
Can you imagine? Just imagine.
Imagine what it would be like to live in the world.
To live in a world where you woke up in the morning, you stretched, you looked in the mirror, and you said to yourself, in your reflection, you said, I'm good.
I've done it. I've achieved it.
I've achieved it sleeping.
I've achieved it waking up.
I've achieved it brushing my teeth.
Assuming you didn't steal your toothbrush.
I'm good. That question is behind me.
Am I good? Yeah. Done.
Kept my contracts.
Didn't violate persons of property.
I'm good. Now, you may not be out there promoting virtue.
That's the job of crazy people like me.
You may not be out there promoting good and virtue.
So what? Not everyone can do that.
It's fine. Not everyone should do that.
It's fine if you don't.
In the same way, not everyone has to be a nutritionist in order to eat well.
Not everyone has to be a personal trainer in order to exercise.
What if, what if it was easy to be good enough?
And listen, I'm perfectly fine.
Hey, if I have a world where people aren't either actively doing or advocating for violations of my persons and property all the bloody time, I'm good.
I've got peace with the world.
I'm a happy camper. I'm contented.
I'm a hippo in mud, just sloshing around.
Happy. What if virtue wasn't complicated at all?
What if being good was simple?
Achievable by just about everyone.
And you were certain in the contented knowledge of your own virtue from dawn till dusk.
Don't initiate force.
Don't steal. Keep your contracts.
You understand? We're set against ourselves.
We're given wrong think, thought crimes, attacking others.
Because once you get people personally wed to an impossible moral standard, they're like addicts.
Well, they're not like addicts.
They are addicts. You get the dopamine rush of feeling like you've achieved something good, followed by the crash of you failed to achieve it.
We passed legislation making it illegal to pay women less than men.
Oh, dopamine rush. Oh, it's great.
Yay, we solved the problem of inequality.
Oh, wait, no. Women are still being paid less than men.
Oh, okay, we're going to go and try and get more legislation passed, and then we're going to nag people, we're going to promote all these movies where women are competent and forceful and powerful and economically superior to men.
Oh, so good dopamine. Oh, wait, they're still not being paid the same as men, right?
The rush, the crash, the rush, the crash.
Classic addictive behavior, right?
It never ends until there's a massive crash, general crash.
I mean, here's an example, right?
So right now the US government is poised to execute the first woman it's executed by lethal injection in 70 years.
70 years!
Now imagine if America was half black and half white and yet today was the day when the first white person in 70 years was to be electrocuted.
Lethal injection was to be executed, right?
America, half black, half white.
But it took 70 years from the execution of one white criminal to another white criminal.
People would say, oh my God, this is systemic racism, institutionalized racism.
Oh, this is terrible, terrible.
How can it be? Whites are half the population.
Hundreds of blacks get executed, but only one white person every 70 years.
Right? Nobody's saying that.
America's half male, half female, right?
Why are so few women executed?
Surely that is massive evidence of systemic racism, systemic sexism against men.
You can't talk about that, right?
The government can't stand up for men.
It needs them as draft cannon fodder for wars.
Can't stand up for men. It needs them as tax livestock so it can hand money to women.
Sorry, I shouldn't laugh. It's not particularly funny, but when you see these things over and over again, they do get a certain black comedy to them.
What if good was easy and simple?
You understand? Once you're wed to complex unattainable goodness and that's what you base your self-worth on, your virtue on, your dopamine hit of I'm a good person on, somebody comes along and questions that, they must be destroyed.
In the same way that anyone, if you're a die-hard addict who cuts off the supply of your drug, is doing a direct physical harm to you as it feels and certainly is the case in the short run, they're doing direct physical harm to you like a predator.
Like someone who's attacking you.
They must be destroyed.
Because you're addicted. Not to virtue.
Not to virtue. But to the pursuit of virtue.
Which is like saying, I'm buff because I drove to the gym.
Not, I actually went to exercise.
I'm thin because I read a diet book, not because I changed my diet.
People get addicted to the illusion of virtue.
And when the real thing comes along, oh boy, do they ever...
This is the story of Socrates and the story of Jesus, of course.
People get addicted to the illusion of virtue.
The real thing comes along.
Oof. They're about as friendly, right?
The purveyors and consumers of fake virtue, virtue which can never be achieved in any stable way, in any satisfying way.
The buffeters and consumers of fake, impossible virtues react about as well to real virtue as a counterfeiting ring of criminals reacts to a surefire way to detect counterfeit currency.
You just put them out of business.
You just destroyed their theft.
Real virtue, like real money, drives out bad virtue, false virtue, fake virtue.
Which fights back hard.
And there is so much profit and power in selling people impossible virtue that when the real thing comes along, it's a deep foundational shock to society, to the addicts.
Now, you're listening to this, you're more interested in the truth than the drug, the facts over the feels, the reals over the fantasies.
We know what we're talking about, but the more complicated and impossible they can make your virtues, the more they own and control you because all you'll do is self-attack and attack others who bring simple virtues to the fore.
Don't steal. Don't initiate force.
Keep your contracts. You're good to go.
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