Feb. 6, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hey everybody, Stephen Molyneux from Free Domain. | |
| How are you doing well? Just wanted to drop in and share my thoughts in I guess a fairly age-old philosophical question regarding property rights and self-ownership. | |
| Can you sell yourself into slavery? | |
| Of course the way that you do that now is by being born In a central banking system and into a million dollars of debt. | |
| But anyway, I guess another way to do it is to get a useless degree in self-loathing for forty thousand dollars through higher education. | |
| But in a free society, a stateless society, can you sell yourself into slavery? | |
| Now, it's a very interesting question. | |
| And I'll share a couple of thoughts and then tell you why it's not a relevant question because the more that we can make things irrelevant the more we can focus on things that we can actually change but again it's an interesting argument so Self-ownership is foundational to human life, human existence, to morality. | |
| You own yourself, and you own the effects of your actions. | |
| And if anyone disagrees with you about this, ask them how they've identified that it's you who's made an argument, right? | |
| Because if there's three people in a room, Bob, Jones, and Sally, and Bob says to Jones, you have self-ownership, then Jones will reply, To Bob, no, you don't. | |
| And then Bob can say, well, why didn't you reply to Sally? | |
| Well, because you made the argument. | |
| That's right. I am responsible for the effects of my actions, whether it's building a house or committing a crime or saying a bad word. | |
| I am responsible for the effects of my actions. | |
| And you can't argue against that without affirming it. | |
| It's one of these self-detonating statements that we can overleap to actually get productive things done in society rather than facing the mental circular firing squad of sophistry that passes for debate in most circles these days and probably throughout most of human history. | |
| So, we own ourselves. | |
| We own the effects of our actions. | |
| So, the fundamental question is, can I sell something That I do not own. | |
| Of course, the answer to that is, well, no. | |
| That's called fraud. | |
| If I sell, you know, there's the old story, you know, if you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you the idea that people just off the boat coming to America would be preyed upon by economic sophists and cheats and frauds saying, oh, I'm going to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and you're going to buy it. | |
| But of course, they didn't own the Brooklyn Bridge. | |
| I can't sell a house that you own. | |
| I can't sell a car that you own. | |
| And so you can't sell what you don't own. | |
| That's I mean, it's the foundational principle, right? | |
| so So when you're a slave, it's different than working cheap or working for free or being a volunteer, like the candy stripers in a hospital or people who volunteer at a food bank. | |
| You are selling your future self-ownership. | |
| In other words, you are now owned by someone else. | |
| So the question is, can you sell what you do not own or, to put it another way, can you sell what you cannot transfer? | |
| Can you sell what you cannot transfer? | |
| I mean, look, if you send me 500 bucks and say I'm going to send you an iPad and then I don't transfer it to you because it's buried in concrete at the foundations of my house, that's fraudulent because I can't transfer it to you, right? | |
| It's a really, really important question. | |
| Can we sell what we cannot transfer if the person expects that transfer? | |
| Now, the answer to that, of course, is no. | |
| We can't sell what we can't transfer if the sale is contingent upon that transfer. | |
| Can we sell self-ownership? | |
| Can we transfer to someone else the ownership of ourselves? | |
| And the answer to that, of course, is no. | |
| Because self-ownership arises from the direct connection between our brain, our nervous system, our body, and our actions, and it relies upon the will that we can create or focus on in our body, in our life, in our mind. | |
| So I cannot transfer my self-ownership to you. | |
| Now, you can force me to do something. | |
| You can stick a knife in my ribs and say, renounce the market, right? | |
| You can force me to do something, but you cannot transfer my Self-ownership from me to you. | |
| In other words, you can say, I'll give you five bucks to raise your hand, I could raise my hand, but you cannot raise my hand by plugging into my neural system directly. | |
| You can apply a shock that might make me jerk around and so on, but you cannot directly, through your mind, take over my nervous system and the self-ownership that I possess You can make me say something, but you cannot take over my vocal cords and have me speak against self-ownership. | |
| Self-ownership cannot be transferred. | |
| What is slavery? Slavery is the transfer of Self-ownership to someone else. | |
| So I can't sell my self-ownership because it's a foundational aspect of the way that the human brain and the spine and the body and the neurological system is all wired together. | |
| So I have no capacity to sell that any more than I can pay someone else to digest my food, any more than I can pay someone else to go to the bathroom for me, any more than I can pay someone else To whatever it is that you do yourself, right? You can't pay someone else to do it. | |
| I can't transfer self-ownership to someone else any more than I can sell being a mammal, right? | |
| If you say, hey Steph, I'll give you 10 bucks to be a lizard. | |
| Well, back early on in the show, there was the occasional video tearing and, you know, 240p with all of its youth-enhancing glory, and people would be like, aha, lizard person! | |
| Right? But, no, being... | |
| Blue-eyed. I can't sell that, right? | |
| I can't transfer that to someone else's characteristic of my body, being a mammal, being bald, whatever it is, right? | |
| Being almost six foot tall, being 190 pounds, whatever. | |
| I can't transfer that to other people because of foundational characteristics of myself. | |
| I can't sell my race. | |
| I can't sell my gender. | |
| These are foundational aspects of myself. | |
| So, it really doesn't make any sense to say, can you sell your self-ownership to someone else? | |
| It doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't follow that it would do anything logical or helpful with regards to you, right? | |
| Can I sell myself into slavery? | |
| Can I sell myself ownership to someone else? | |
| Well, the interesting thing is, of course, if you sell yourself ownership to someone else, they take on all moral responsibility for what you do. | |
| So, to take an example, if you go and take someone hostage and then force them to do something illegal, that person is not considered responsible. | |
| You, by taking over, in a sense, by forcing them to do something, Coercing them into acting against their own self-interest in the moment, their own choices in the moment, you now become responsible for what it is that they do, right? So if you... | |
| Force someone to call someone and make a death threat, then you, as the coercive person, are responsible for the death threat, not the person you're forcing to do it, right? | |
| So when you take over someone else, and again, I'm not talking about directly wiring into their brain, but applying an external force, which of course happens all the time, it's the basis of taxation. | |
| But if you force someone to do something, then you are morally responsible for what it is That they do. | |
| And this can be even if you didn't intend it, right? | |
| It's a common law practice that if you initiate a course of action that results in someone's death, then you are responsible for murder, right? | |
| So if you go into a convenience store and you Rob. | |
| I mean, you pull out a gun and say, give me all the money that's in the cash. | |
| And the cashier shoots at you, misses, and hits the person behind you and kills them. | |
| The cashier is not responsible for the murder, legally. | |
| You are responsible for the murder, legally. | |
| Again, I'm not a lawyer. It's my understanding of how it goes. | |
| To sell yourself into future slavery would also be to give someone else moral responsibility for everything that you did. | |
| And that would probably be something that people wouldn't want to take on. | |
| So then the question is, okay, what's the relationship between having a contract, right, where you say, I'm going to go and work for you for a year, as opposed to selling yourself into slavery? | |
| Well, The contract is very defined. | |
| You get a benefit. There are clauses for cancellation. | |
| You can cancel and pay penalties at any time. | |
| There is not an in-perpetuity transfer of self-ownership to the other person. | |
| There's not even a temporary transfer of self-ownership to the other person, insofar as if you commit a crime while being employed by someone, you are responsible for that crime, not they, and it's a negotiated mutual advantage process. | |
| Resource where you can back out. | |
| There are cancellation clauses and so on. | |
| And so that's not the same as outright slavery, where you own the person in perpetuity. | |
| And this is one of the reasons why, you know, when you sort of go forward through the tunnel of time, it becomes very interesting to say, at what point can you sell off your future labor? | |
| And, you know, there are 99-year leases, but they tend to be corporations to corporations or corporations to government, not individuals to individuals. | |
| So, as far as the question, can you sell yourself into slavery, the answer, philosophically and morally, is no. | |
| Because that would be to transfer self-ownership to another person, which you cannot physically. | |
| It's an impossibility. | |
| You cannot physically transfer self-ownership to another person. | |
| Now, the last thing I wanted to mention about this is that When you think about whether you can sell yourself into slavery, the important thing is to remember, contracts Social relationships, social agreements. They're not physics. | |
| They don't just operate like the laws of physics. | |
| Contracts must be enforceable, and the enforceability of those contracts in a free society, in a stateless society, and when I say stateless, I mean without government, and you can understand that in the same way that you would say in a slaveless society, a society without slavery. | |
| So in a free society, Contracts which people find abhorrent in general will not be enforced. | |
| This is really, really important. | |
| Contracts which people find abhorrent would not be enforced. | |
| So in a free society, if you and I enter into a contract, I call them DROs. | |
| Some people refer to them as DROs. | |
| They're dispute resolution organizations. | |
| And they are organizations which are dedicated to resolving disputes between you and I. So let's say you and I get into a contract. | |
| We will pay a small percentage of that contract to a DRO, which we both mutually agree on, who would adjudicate any disputes that might arise out of our contract. | |
| If you say, hey, Steph, you didn't fulfill your part of the contract, and I say, I sure did, and we couldn't resolve it, just phone calls or meetings or whatever, we would go to this DRO, and we would all, ahead of time, agree to abide by the Decision of this DRO. And if we did not abide by the decision of that DRO, we would be uninsurable for future contracts and would be almost impossible for us to operate economically in a productive way. | |
| And so economic ostracism is the way that society should work because if you have economic ostracism... | |
| Then you don't need a state and so on, right? | |
| So we go to this dispute resolution organization and that is how we resolve these disputes. | |
| Now, contracts which most people would find to be morally abhorrent and would in fact be morally abhorrent. | |
| So for instance, I don't know, selling your children to sex traffickers or some godforsaken hellscape of moral degeneracy like that. | |
| So Any DRO, like assuming, as I would assume, that the vast, vast, vast majority of people in society would find such a contract morally abhorrent, they would not do business with any DRO, any dispute resolution organization, which would enforce such a contract. | |
| I mean, come on, you wouldn't do business with a company that enforced slavery and sex trafficking and whatever. | |
| You wouldn't want to have anything to do with that. | |
| Maybe there'd be a few people who would, but... | |
| Then they would also need other DROs to operate within society. | |
| So you have this kind of network of DROs. | |
| And if one ends up enforcing contracts that most people in society quite rightly find morally abhorrent, then they would simply be excluded from society as a whole. | |
| And the people who were part of that would not find a way to enforce contracts like, can you get electricity? | |
| Can you get a cell phone service? | |
| Can you get internet? Can you get... | |
| Maybe can you use people's roads and so on, right? | |
| So... This sort of self-reinforcing voluntary matrix of DROs is the way that you get social rules enforced as a whole. | |
| And the social rules would be generally accepted upon. | |
| And the social rules would be efficient and morally good, but not overly burdensome to the point where it became very hard to comply. | |
| You know, if you think of social media companies, everybody kind of has an instinct as to Who they de-platform and why you are shadow banned and so on, but it's not kind of spelled out, right? | |
| And so nobody would want to do business in a free society with a confusing, contradictory, complex document that nobody could penetrate, even with 12 lawyers and cocaine, right? | |
| So if you think of, can you sell yourself into slavery? | |
| So there's the abstract question, which is important, but then there's the concrete question of, in a free society, Would any such contract actually be enforced? | |
| In other words, would it be a great business plan if you had a successful dispute resolution organization? | |
| It was small. | |
| It was efficient. It was productive. | |
| It was helpful. It was fast. | |
| You know, because anybody who says, well, you need the government to adjudicate disputes in society has obviously never tried to use the government to adjudicate disputes in society. | |
| It's virtually impossible. So, if you have a successful dispute resolution organization, and then you say, hmm, you know what would be a great business plan? | |
| Let's enforce contracts for slavery and sex trafficking. | |
| Well, of course, you would have to advertise this. | |
| It would have to be part of your formal contracts. | |
| And every other DRO in the entire environment would seize upon this and say, oh my god. | |
| I'm not doing business with these people. | |
| They're monstrous. I'm not enforcing these contracts. | |
| I'm not associating with these companies. | |
| I'm not having anything to do with them. | |
| And they would also take care of their advertisements and say, hey, listen, if you're part of this DRO, do you know that they want to enforce sex trafficking and slavery? | |
| And you'd have a contract which says, in your contract with the DRO, you'd say, look, if you end up enforcing any of these contracts, which I find morally abhorrent, I'm out of my contract with you, no penalties. | |
| Or maybe you have to pay me a penalty. | |
| Because people don't want sex traffic and slavery in society, they would make sure when they signed up to the DRO to say, look, if you enforce these horrible things, these horrible things, organ harvesting from homeless people... | |
| Whatever horrible things could occur in society, when you signed up to a DRO, you would say, look, if you guys ever end up enforcing this stuff, not only am I out of the contract, but you've got to pay me $10,000 as well. | |
| Or whatever it is, right? It's some incentive that people would make sure that this wasn't happening. | |
| Now, Of course, as far as, you know, well, you have one DRO, I have another DRO, it doesn't matter, right? | |
| You just work together in the same way that cell phone companies transfer each other's data all the time. | |
| You can go to Australia and use your Canadian cell phone, as I found out a couple of years ago. | |
| So, as far as the practicality, right, there's a theory, can you transfer self-ownership? | |
| Well, no, of course you can't. But if you look at the practical matter, a moral society, a free society, the vast majority of people, Would want to have nothing to do with any enforcement of things like organ harvesting, sex trafficking, pedophilia, slavery, these morally abhorrent things. | |
| And so they simply would make sure that any company they dealt with wouldn't have anything to do with this stuff and would pay a substantial penalty if it ever did. | |
| And that would just never come up as an issue. | |
| No sane CEO. I mean, you've got to work 20 years to become a CEO of some company, and you've got to work 80 hours a week for 20 years. | |
| You don't just get up there in order to self-detonate and destroy the entire thing. | |
| It's just not how it works. | |
| And if you tried to, the shareholders would revolt, the board would vote you out, and it just wouldn't ever fly. | |
| And so, theoretically, no, you can't sell yourself. | |
| Into future slavery because you cannot sell what you cannot transfer and you cannot transfer self-ownership. | |
| You can't sell self-ownership anymore than you can sell being a mammal. | |
| And even if there were some theoretical justification out there, society would find this morally abhorrent to the point where no entity in a free society would ever enforce such a contract. | |
| Because you've got to remember, slavery was a government program, right? | |
| I mean, slavery was enforced by the state. | |
| People who, in America, in the South... | |
| Your ordinary yeoman, you know, the sort of semi-serfs of the southern agrarian economy, they were actually forced to be slave catchers. | |
| They hated slavery. The common people hated slavery because it drove down wages and they were forced to become slave catchers under penalty of fines or jail or both. | |
| And so slavery is a big giant government program. | |
| It doesn't manifest in the free market because, of course, if you own someone rather than Pay someone on an hourly wage. | |
| They lose their incentive. They become about as productive as your average Soviet factory worker. | |
| The old joke, they pretend to pay us. | |
| We pretend to work. So economically inefficient. | |
| It's morally abhorrent. It's philosophically impossible to transfer of self-ownership. | |
| Nobody would want it. | |
| There'd be contracts against it. | |
| It would never be enforced. So in a free society, man, it's just not an issue. | |
| Thank you so much for listening and watching. | |
| I look forward to your comments. Freedomain.com forward slash donate. | |
| Lots of love. Stay free, my friends. |
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