Freedomain Radio - Free Philosophy Books

O Futuro da Liberdade é a Verdade do Passado

2011-11-11T00:43:00Z

Lições de Propaganda pela Educação Governamental

Por Stefan Molyneux, MA

Apresentador da Freedomain Radio, o maior e mais popular programa de filosofia no mundo.

http://www.freedomainradio.com

“Uma educação Estatal generalizada é uma mera invenção para moldar pessoas para serem exactamente iguais entre si; e como o molde em que são fundidas é aquele que agrada ao poder dominante no governo, seja um monarca, uma aristocracia, ou a maioria da geração existente; na proporção em que é eficiente e bem sucedida, estabelece um despotismo sobre a mente, que leva por tendência natural a um sobre o corpo.”

John Stuart Mill, “Sobre a Liberdade”, 1859

“A filosofia da sala de aula numa generação será a filosofia de governo na seguinte.”

Abraham Lincoln

Introdução

Tenta descobrir direcções através de um web site sem inserir um ponto de partida. A página web prontamente dirá que é impossível. Se estás perdido no oceano, não podes planear uma rota para o Tahiti.

Num famoso capítulo por George Orwell em “1984”, Winston Smith tenta perguntar a um velho como era a vida antes do socialismo, mas só consegue extrair migalhas e cenas desbotadas das recordações quebradas do ancião.

De forma a selar-te na escravatura, o teu governo tem de fingir que nunca foste livre. Tem de despedaçar a tua verdadeira história em propaganda fácil, em contos de fadas que repetem interminavelmente a fantasia de que os teus líderes políticos resgataram-te do assustador caos da liberdade.

O homicídio da memória é o primeiro crime do Estado – e a fonte e sustento de todos os seus outros crimes.

Porque acreditamos nesta propaganda, nestes contos de fada?

Submeto que é para evitarmos a compreensão da nossa própria escravização.

As convicções da maioria das pessoas são justificações ex post facto para as sequelas do poder bruto. Quase ninguém quer pagar impostos – de outra maneira, porque forçá-los? - mas somos compelidos a fazê-lo, encontramos consolo fingindo que os nossos impostos fazem grande e necessário bem na sociedade – e confortamo-nos com a mentira de que sem impostos, a caridade, a benevolência e a própria civilização colapsariam.

O argumento Estatista mata-história funciona assim:

· ‘X' é necessário

· Somos forçados a fazer ‘X'

· Sem força, ‘X' não existiria

Por exemplo:

· Os pobres precisam de ajuda

· Somos forçados a ajudar os pobres

· Se não fossemos forçados a ajudar os pobres, os pobres não seriam ajudados

Podes ligar todo o tipo de programas Estatistas a esta equação. Ajudar os pobres, os idosos, os doentes, combater o uso das drogas e a iliteracia, proteger o ambiente, entre outros – todos servem.

A verdadeira loucura desta equação é fácil de ver se ligarmos programas Estatistas defuntos como a escravatura:

· Precisamos de comida

· Os escravos tem de ser forçados a cultivar alimentos

· Sem escravatura, não haverá comida

Ou:

· Precisamos de famílias

· As pessoas têm de ser forçadas a casarem

· Sem casamentos forçados, não haveria famílias

Uma das utilizações mais destrutivas deste silogismo louco é este:

· As crianças precisam de educação

· Temos de forçar as crianças a frequentarem escolas governamentais, e forçar toda a gente a pagar

· Se não forçarmos toda a gente, as crianças – e em particular as crianças pobres – não serão educadas

Para sustentar este conto de fadas, o Estado tem de enterrar a verdadeira história da educação livre e voluntária – o que inevitavelmente leva ao seguinte silogismo:

· As crianças agora são forçadas a frequentarem escolas Estatais, e toda a gente é forçada a pagar por elas

· No passado, as crianças não eram forçadas a frequentarem escolas Estatais, e ninguém era forçado a pagar pela educação

· Portanto, a imposição de força no caso da educação deve ter ocorrido porque no passado, as crianças não estavam a ser educadas.

O falso corolário disto é:

· As crianças só podem ser educadas através de força governamental

· Portanto qualquer um que se oponha à força governamental opõem-se à educação das crianças

Trata-se da mesma lógica de:

· Os alimentos só podem ser cultivados por escravos

· Portanto qualquer um que se oponha à escravatura deve querer a fome universal

Esta falácia é mais que ridícula – por isso tem de ser tantas vezes repetida, porque afirmações absurdas só ganham credibilidade através da repetição – sendo fácil de ver assim que ligamos outros argumentos na equação:

· Os escravos são forçados a trabalhar

· No passado, os escravos não eram forçados a trabalhar

· Portanto, a escravatura existe porque os escravos não trabalhavam antes da escravatura

Ou, no caso de um guerreiro que forçosamente toma uma noiva:

· Eu forcei esta mulher a casar comigo

· Antes de a forçar a casar comigo, ela era solteira

· Portanto, se não a tivesse forçado, ela nunca teria casado

Se o Destista Está a Furar, Deve Ter Havido uma Cavidade!

No reino da educação, a fantasia geralmente aceite é que as escolas Estatais foram impostas para responderem a terríveis deficiências na instrução, particularmente entre os pobres. Esta convicção é tão tenaz que nenhuma quantidade de genuíno conhecimento parece ser capaz de a desalojar (como é frequentemente o caso com justificações de Síndroma de Estocolmo).

Por exemplo:

· Se disseres aos fãs da educação Estatal que a literacia era maior antes das escolas governamentais serem infligidas – e que tem declinado desde então – vão ignorar-te .

· Se lhes disseres que nem os pais nem as crianças expressaram qualquer insatisfação real com as escolas voluntárias antes dos governos tomarem conta da educação, vão ignorar-te.

· Se lhes disseres que o objectivo declarado da educação governamental era o controlo social, económico e político da população – particularmente de minorias religiosas como os Católicos – vão ignorar-te.

· Se lhes disseres que inimigos amargos da liberdade como Marx, Hitler e Estaline continuamente exigiram e alcançaram mais e mais controlo Estatal sobre a educação das crianças, vão ignorar-te.

· Se os relembrares que um dos maiores defensores de leis de frequência compulsiva foi o Ku Klux Klan, vão ignorar-te.

· Se os relembrares que uma sociedade de mercado livre não pode sobreviver durante muito tempo quando as crianças são indoutrinadas num sistema educacional socialista, vão ignorar-te.

A razão para esta cegueira é simples:

Quando força universal é usada para “resolver” um “problema”, o “problema” original – mesmo que inteiramente imaginário – cresce e cresce na imaginação das pessoas.

O “raciocínio” é algo como isto:

Se violência estatal universal foi a melhor e única solução possível, o problema original deve ter sido verdadeiramente terrível! Se foi necessária a nacionalização forçada de uma indústria inteira como a educação, imagina quão má teria que ser a educação para requerer um passo tão drástico!
Isto ignora completamente a possibilidade de que a tomada de controlo foi simplesmente um abuso expansionista do poder Estatal.

Se uma mulher é selvaticamente espancada pelo marido, diríamos que ela devia ter sido mesmo má para merecer tal castigo? Ou que os escravos eram incrivelmente preguiçosos, porque tinham que ser violentamente forçados a trabalhar? Ou que devia estar a passar-se alguma coisa estranha com todas aquelas bruxas em Salem, caso contrário porque teriam sido queimadas na fogueira?

Claro que não!

Este tipo de absurdo pode continuar para sempre, como é claro, e parece ridículo quanto passamos outros argumentos pela equação padrão – mas assim que compreendes a verdadeira história da educação Americana, a propaganda actual parece igualmente disparatada.

...E isto, meus amigos, é o que eles chamam de "solução"...

As escolas americanas foram forçosamente tomadas pelo Estado por volta de 1840 – antes, nas áreas populadas do Norte dos Estados Unidos – bem como em toda a Nova Inglaterra – os níveis de literacia eram entre 91 e 94%! (No Canadá, segundo relatos contemporâneos, “por volta de 1867, a maioria das pessoas... eram mais ou menos letradas,” e, “quase todas as cidades e vilas já teriam a sua Escola de Gramática.”)

Este grau de literacia tem firmemente caído desde então, apesar de aumentos espantosos no financiamento e tecnologia, e diminuição significativa no tamanho das turmas.

Como é que a educação Estatal “resolveu” ou “melhorou” esses historicamente altos graus de literacia?

No mundo do governo, estas são as chamadas "melhorias":

· 1 em cada 5 estudantes actualmente leva uma arma para a escola – 1 em 36 uma arma de fogo!

· Quase metade de todos os estudantes nas grandes cidades dos Estados Unidos abandonam a escola durante o secundário.

· Todos os dias uma média de 7.200 estudantes abandonam a escola – isto são 13 milhões de crianças que fogem das escolas Estatais todos os anos.

· No Canadá – muito semelhante aos EUA - 7% dos abandonos em Ontário eram estudantes de topo (classificados com “A”), enquanto que 46% eram estudantes com notas altas (classificados com “B”), e 45% explicam o abandono porque basicamente odeiam a escola.

· Mais de 32 milhões de adultos nos EUA - 14% da população – têm capacidades literárias muito baixas. Muitos não conseguem ler algo mais desafiante que um simples livro para crianças com gravuras. (Naturalmente, não há requisitos de literacia para votar.)

· 42 milhões de adultos Americanos nem sequer conseguem ler; 50 milhões só conseguem ler a um nível de quarto ou quinto ano. O número de adultos classificados como funcionalmente iletrados aumenta cerca de 2,25 milhões todos os anos.

· 20% de finalistas do secundário podem ser classificados como funcionalmente iletrados no dia da graduação – depois de mais de 15.000 horas de "educação" Estatal.

· 75% dos adultos desempregados tem dificuldades em ler e escrever a um nível básico. 7 em cada 10 adultos na prisão apresentam os níveis mais baixos de literacia. 85% de todos os delinquentes juvenis são funcionalmente ou marginalmente iletrados. Quase todos foram forçados a frequentar escolas governamentais durante muitos anos.

· A percentagem de crianças Americanas que conseguem ler correctamente não melhorou nos últimos 25 anos, apesar de uma quase triplicação do financiamento educacional e uma redução significativa no tamanho das turmas.

A não ser que as escolas do início do século XIX estivessem continuamente a arder, ou submersas, ou cheias de gases nocivos, é difícil conceber como é que o descrito pode alguma vez ser chamado de “melhoria”.

Quando Não Sabes o Que Não Sabes...

Algumas pessoas perguntam como é que as instituições financeiras conseguem escapar depois de terem enganado a população inteira através de empréstimos predatórios e incessantes resgates – a resposta reside na quase completa iliteracia financeira do Americano comum. De um artigo no “New Yorker”:

"A profundidade da nossa ignorância financeira é alarmante. Em anos recentes, Annamaria Lusardi, uma economista em Dartmouth e a presidente do Centro de Literacia Financeira (Financial Literacy Center, no original), conduziu estudos extensivos sobre o que os Americanos sabem de finança. É um trabalho depressivo. Quase metade dos inquiridos não conseguiam responder correctamente a duas perguntas sobre inflação e taxas de juro, e tópicos ligeiramente mais sofisticados desconcertavam a maioria. Muitas pessoas sabem as cláusulas das suas hipotecas ou a taxa de juro que estão a pagar. E, numa altura em que estamos a pedir mais empréstimos do que nunca, a maioria dos Americanos não conseguem explicar o que são juros compostos."

Ah, mas um país com 700 bases militares ultramarinas está cheio de gente com um bom conhecimento de geografia, certo?

Nem por isso. Onze por cento dos jovens Americanos não conseguem localizar os EUA num mapa. Quase um terço não tinha ideia onde era o Oceano Pacífico; 58% não conseguiam encontrar o Japão, 65% não conseguiam encontrar a França, e 69% não conseguiam localizar o Reino Unido. Menos de 15% conseguiam encontrar Israel ou o Iraque.

Quase um terço insistiu que a população dos Estados Unidos era entre um milhar e dois mil milhões, em vez de aproximadamente 300 milhões.

Além disso, apesar dos padrões educacionais terem declinado desde que foram criadas escolas governamentais, actualmente apenas um terço dos alunos do oitavo ano têm notas iguais ou superiores ao nível de proficiência na Avaliação Nacional de Progresso Educativo (no original National Assessment of Educational Progress – NAEP) em Leitura (32%), Matemática (34%) ou Ciência (29%). (Imagina dar-lhes um teste de gramática ou de matemática anterior a 1840!)

A Secretária da Educação Arne Duncan admitiu recentemente que 82% das escolas públicas podiam ser rotuladas como “a falhar” segundo especificações do “Nenhuma Criança Deixada Para Trás” (“No Child Left Behind”, no original). Qual é a solução? Acabar com o programa e devolver o dinheiro aos contribuintes, ou expandir o financiamento? Só podes adivinhar um.

O “Vantagem” (“Head Start”, no original) custou $166 mil milhões desde 1965, apesar de muitos estudos provarem que a maior parte do dinheiro foi desperdiçado, e não ajudou miúdos pobres a ganhar ou a manter quaisquer melhorias. Recentemente, o seu financiamento foi aumentado por mais de $2 mil milhões.

As pessoas respondem a incentivos – quando se paga às pessoas pelo fracasso, tende-se a ter mais fracasso.

A América gasta mais de $150.000 por estudante entre o primeiro e o 12º anos – quase 3 vezes mais do que gastava em 1970. Entre 1960 e 1985, a proporção de estudantes por professor nas escolas públicas diminuiu perto de 30%. Como é sempre o caso com programas governamentais, mais dinheiro, mais recursos e mais pessoas significa mais e mais resultados catastróficos.

O economista Thomas Sowell nota que os resultados do Teste de Sucesso Escolar (Scholastic Achievement Test, no original) são significativamente mais baixos hoje do que há 30 anos atrás, e que o vocabulário do estudante comum contem metade das palavras que continha em 1945.

Será porque os professores são mal pagos? Não no Canadá, onde os professores ganhavam 80% do salário de um operário em 1950, e agora ganham 50% mais que o salário básico de um operário.

Desemprego

Porque é que tanta gente está desempregada? Bem, o desemprego está estreitamente ligado à iliteracia. Mais de 40% dos Canadianos em idade activa têm falhas nas capacidades literárias básicas necessárias e requeridas para participarem com sucesso no mercado de trabalho.

Nos EUA:

· 43% das pessoas com as capacidades literárias mais baixas vivem na pobreza.

· 17% das pessoas com as capacidades literárias mais baixas recebem senhas de alimentação.

· 70% das pessoas com as capacidades literárias mais baixa não têm um trabalho a tempo inteiro ou parcial.

Os níveis de literacia também estagnaram ou caíram durante o período na história em que os requisitos de empregabilidade aumentaram. Uma das razões para o emprego industrial ter desaparecido dos EUA é que em 1950, 60% do emprego industrial era não qualificado – um número que mergulhou para 15% nas décadas subsequentes.

A Associação America de Gestão (American Management Association, no original) relatou que mais de 40% dos candidatos a emprego não têm as capacidades básicas de leitura, escrita e matemática necessárias para concretizarem o trabalho industrial que pretendem. Num inquérito recente, 90% dos fabricantes dos EUA relatou uma escassez de trabalhadores qualificados em pelo menos uma categoria de emprego.

Após mais de um século e meio de “educação” governamental controlada e obrigatória, a situação tornou-se completamente irrecuperável.

Como o autor vencedor do prémio Pulitzer Chris Hedges notou no seu livro “Império da Ilusão” (“Empire of Illusion”, no original):

“Um terço dos graduados do secundário nunca lêem outro livro no resto das suas vidas, nem o fazem 42% dos diplomados universitários. Em 2007, 80% das famílias nos Estados Unidos não comprou ou leu um livro... O Princeton Review analisou transcritos dos debates Gore-Bush de 2000, dos debates Clinton-Bush-Perot de 1992, do debate Kennedy-Nixon de 1960, e dos debates Lincoln-Douglas de 1858. Reviu estes transcritos usando um teste padrão de vocabulário que indica o nível educacional mínimo necessário para um leitor compreender o texto. Nos debates Lincoln-Douglas, Lincoln falou no nível educacional de um aluno do 11º ano, e Douglas dirigiu-se à multidão usando vocabulário adequado para um graduado do secundário. No debate Kennedy-Nixon, os candidatos falaram numa linguagem acessível a alunos do 10º ano. Nos debates de 1992, Clinton falou ao nível de um aluno do 7º ano, enquanto Bush falou ao nível do 6º ano, tal como fez Perot. Durante os debates de 2000, Bush falou ao nível do 6º ano e Gore a um nível avançado de 7º ano.”

Quanto tempo demorará até que os debates Presidenciais sejam feitos com marionetas, cantorias e bolas saltitantes?

Conclusão

O apodrecimento da mente e do espírito que surge da compulsão universal é verdadeiramente a maior tragédia do Estatismo. Não é tanto o facto dos nossos corpos serem tributados, mas o lentamente recusarmos a tributar as nossas mentes. À medida que os inevitavelmente terríveis resultados da compulsão surgem em primeiro plano para todos excepto os mais deliberadamente cegos verem, a juventude já não acredita nos ideais da sua sociedade, guardam desprezo pelos seus anciãos e as suas hipocrisias aduladoras, e vêem com cinismo insondável as regras sociais que se espera que sigam.

À medida que a educação, o rendimento e as oportunidades para a juventude desaparecem, o mais antigo pacto social entre gerações – obedece aos teus anciãos, e recebe benefícios – igualmente se desintegra. As gerações que se beneficiavam mutuamente – a vitalidade e criatividade da juventude combinada com as poupanças e a sabedoria dos idosos – agora olham-se fixamente com olhos cínicos e desconfiados. “Porque haveríamos de pagar a tua reforma?” “Porque haveríamos de pagar a tua pós-graduação?”

A maior tragédia do Estatismo é a destruição da confiança comunal, e a ruptura da cooperação entre os que têm diferenças benéficas, como os velhos e os novos, ricos e pobres, líderes e seguidores.

Quando encarceramos os nossos jovens ano após ano em perigosas prisões de indoutrinação Estatal, e os vendemos para servidão futura em troca do suborno político do momento, irão mesmo ouvir-nos quanto lhes dizemos para serem bons, para adiarem gratificações, para trabalharem arduamente, quando não restam recompensas para lhes oferecermos – nem financeiras nem espirituais?

Claro que não.

Temos de abandonar as nossas ilusões de benevolência Estatal– não para nos salvarmos do Estado, mas uns dos outros – dos ressentimentos e predações ulcerantes que inevitavelmente crescem entre cidadãos a arranhar e morder por migalhas da mesa política.

O futuro da liberdade é o futuro da juventude, e a liberdade da juventude depende dos idosos abandonarem as suas ilusões.

Deixo a última palavra ao grande poeta W.H. Auden, na esperança que a sua profecia sobre o século XX se prove falsa no século XXI:

We would rather be ruined than changed;

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.

(Preferiríamos ser arruinados a mudar

Preferiríamos morrer no nosso terror

Que trepar a cruz do momento

E deixar as nossas ilusões morrer.)

How Much Government Is Necessary? The Drexel University Debate

2011-10-14T20:22:00Z

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Hi everybody its Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. This is a debate that I had with Michael Badnarik the 2004 Libertarian Presidential candidate in Philadelphia on Sunday, July 5, 2009. I'm afraid there have been a few audio problems the first few minutes are fairly low quality but it does improve after that. Thank you for your patience as we have wrestled with the technical difficulties to stitch this “Frankenfile” together and thank you so much to Paul the expert sound engineer whose gentle spectrographic caresses has resurrected this file to a fairly high level of quality and thank you so much for your patience and to the organizers of the event at Drexel University and I hope that you enjoyed the debate. This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio and Michael Badnarik, constitutional scholar, debating the proposition or the question: How Much Government Is Necessary?

Michael Badnarik: I want to welcome everybody today and especially thank you for being here. I have been trying to light the fire for many years and introduce as I see things turn around and moving in another direction and I want to thank you especially for me here. I mean it…when this shows this much public interest and abstract and highly intellectual debate by anarchy versus minarchy, it's like…wow, I mean they’re not like watching Jerry Springer. They here are today. This is very good news and again, I want to thank you for participation. Any discussion or debate obviously will lead to defining terms and I'm sure that Stefan and I will be enhancing those definitions as we go on.

As a start, I would like to offer that an anarchy is basically is an absence of government, 0% as opposed to say perhaps a totalitarian dictatorship would be 100% government and so somewhere in the middle, I would like to propose…minarchy is at the low end, maybe 5-10% at maximum, I'm not sure what that percentage would be and that currently today we exist with…95% of an…we're a complete totalitarian dictatorship, but you know, I think that might be argued we’re moving in that direction. Well, anarchy and minarchy are very close to each other and most of you are familiar with what currently have which, you know, is a plethora of government. Far more than we need and so from the existing point of view, looking back down the scale towards 0% and 5%, anarchy and minarchy are going to look and feel to be very, very close to each other and Stefan and I will try to do our best differentiate the two one them.

And as kind of a metaphor, I was a chemist and as a high school chemist one of the things I found interesting was distilling ethanol. I don't know if anybody else had that interest, but…when you distil ethanol—alcohol, the maximum that you can get is 95.6% alcohol. That's the maximum and 4.4% water, because you just can’t distill anymore water out of the alcohol and, you know, so 191 proof is basically the maximum you can get. You know, we usually call it ever clear and as far as I'm concerned, anarchy is that theoretical absolute that we’re always trying for and we can try to distill as much of the government out of it as possible, but we’ll always have just a little bit of government and this is an issue that the founding fathers certainly addressed.

I consider myself the stepfather of the Constitution. James Madison was the father of the Constitution. He died in 1836. Since then the Constitution has been pretty much abandoned and orphaned and so I’ve adopted it, the Constitution, and will protect it as if it were my very own. So a father of the Constitution, James Madison wrote, “It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government, but what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing the government which his to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this, you must first enable the government to control the government and then in the next place oblige it to control itself. The dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government, but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

So as much as I would like to have…anarchy, I don't think that we can actually achieve it, because there are some things that are necessary for anarchy to…to exist and one would be widespread intelligence and adherence to a high ethical standard. One that I try to achieve myself. In the ’50s and ’60s, we have stories about people leaving their doors unlocked, you know, leaving keys in the car because neighbors were dependent each other and you just never expect anybody to walk into your home or go take your car. Today, you know, we have people putting bars on their windows and locking everything and even your laptop has to have cable in it these days. Another thing that anarchy requires is self-sufficiency and, you know, dependence on yourself. Currently less than 10% of the families in the United States living on farms and can produce their own food. The general population is completely oblivious as to where their utilities come from. They assume a gas station, where they pay for their gas and we have a black out. Suddenly we're in the dark and a woman came rushing in and said, I can’t pump any gas. I informed her that we’re in a black out. She goes, “But I have cash.” I said that had nothing to do with it.

Being completely and totally self-sufficient may be possible, but it means that you're standard of living is lower, because there'll yet be responsible for everything yet do you know your shelter, your own protection, your own food and your entire life becomes devoted to keeping yourself alive and so even if we have people arrive on a deserted island and the first thing that they do is they start to cooperate. You go to find firewood I'll build a hut and you go look for fish and you have this mutual cooperation that will improve everybody's standard of living.

You know you go catch the fish and we can cook the fish over the fire that I built the question that I suppose really that amounts to does mutual cooperation equal government. How formalized does that cooperation have to be before we give it the label of cooperation and finally in order to have anarchy we have to have mutual trust in each other and again maybe just human nature I don't believe that we do have trust in each other. Most of the laws that are created are created by our neighbors to control us and by us control our neighbors the general idea is well of course I can carry a gun because I'm adult and responsible but I'm worried about my next-door neighbor.

I want the government to have concealed carry permits to moderate my neighbors behavior because I don't trust my neighbor and the end result is the government creates a law for me against my neighbor and creates a law for my neighbor against me and we keep creating more and more laws against each other and we all basically lose. So we all struggle to stay alive knowing that eventually we're going to lose that struggle and we will all eventually perish but that doesn't stop us from struggling to prolong our lives. Liberty is something that we should always continuously strive for knowing that even if we were lucky enough to achieve it we would almost certainly start to lose it immediately and anarchy I would equate to a utopia yes I am definitely trying to move away from the massive government that we have too far far less in direction of anarchy and given human nature I'm not quite sure that we can achieve it thank you.

Stefan Molyneux: Well thank you very much for the chance to speak and thank you for the very kind introduction. I will be speaking about a different kind of anarchy than Mr. Badnarik was speaking about which seems to be similar to the Stone Age. I don't think that you need self-sufficiency to be and an anarchist - I can't find anything in the fridge without my wife pointing it out - so I think we will be talking about a little different kind of anarchy. I am what would be technically known as an anarcho capitalist and that I try to profit from anarchy it's that I believe in I think what everybody here would believe in witches property rights or absolute self ownership and property rights and the non-initiation of fought is a moral absolute. And I'm sure that most libertarians most minarchist would agree that property rights are double plus good and initiation of the use of force is very bad.

The question or the difference or the divergence between an anarchist and minarchist I think would be along these lines that an anarchist looks at the principal of property rights and the non-initiation of use of force and says those principles are inviolable. We are not willing take those principles over our knee and bend them backwards until they break in order to achieve some pragmatic objective. The men are just in general will say yes it would be great to have a utopia where everybody was perfect and they believe that anarchist do not recognize the reality of human corruption in human people and I would say the exact opposite is true.

I believe that an anarchist understands the reality of evil, the potential of evil and the human psychic and it is because an anarchist recognizes reality of evil that we oppose the creation of a monopoly of legal violence within society. It's like circuit will have a propensity for addiction to alcohol or drugs or whatever and an anarchist who recognizes that metaphorically says well we're not going to push a distillery in their living room because they are drunkards or they are alcoholics and human beings, many human beings, love to maximize their resources at the expense of others it's a mere net gain calculation. What can I do in my life that's going to gain me the most resources in an amoral situation?

Most people are in biological creatures that's what we do we maximize resources from the government is a terrible, powerful, ugly, and violate tool to maximize your resources at the expense of others and since that's what human beings like to do we can't have one. Power corrupts human beings like to get things for free and human beings like to have power over other human beings, we are a tribal society, Darwinian evolution is why we are here today. Which is gaining power over others and gaining things in the amount of effort because human beings have that tendency and the anarchist recognizes that we cannot have a government because that will immediately be inhabited by immoral people would use it to their advantage at the expense of the majority. It is my view that minarchism is very dangerous philosophy and not because I don't want that government of course I do I want that government two point at nothing in the same way that I don't if I'm sick I don't want less sickness I want no sickness that's my job. But I think minarchism is a very dangerous philosophy and I will tell you why.

Either the minarchist is going to succeed or either the minarchist is going to fail. If the minarchist fails then the philosophy means nothing and the government continues to grow which you can say it's what's been happening for the past say 10,000 years but if minarchist succeed and I believe that they did succeed in 1776 I don't think that you can come up with a better Laboratory experiment for the success or failure of minarchism than the creation of the American Republic. It is a beautiful theoretical laboratory proof of the possibility and practicality of minarchist and what has happened since then we are all aware of and that's why we are here because we went from the very smallest government which was about 1% or 2% or whatever it is, we went from the very smallest was government in 1776 to the very largest, most powerful, most terrible most destructive government the world has ever seen.

The government with the power to destroy the world many times over first time in history that has happened never had a government that big and powerful before. Is there a relationship between a small government at the beginning and a big government at the end and I would say that there is because a small government that respects to a large degree property rights and opposed initiation of course 381 it creates a free market once you have a free market you get staggering explosion and wealth once you get in a society a staggering explosion of wealth more money is available for taxation and more money is available for the military and more money is available for the endless or hoard the social programs and social engineering that bureaucrats and politicians love to do.

When you get the smallest possible government you create a free market which builds wealth, which builds wealth, which builds power which then government swells to take over it becomes a gold mine for those who want power over others. If a man makes $100 a year and you tax them at 50% he will revolt because he can't live on $50 a year but the man make $100,000 a year and you tax them at 50% you won't rebel which is why we are here and not in the streets because we can survive on what's left over because there is so much wealth in society so when you start with a very small government you create the conditions for a massive explosion in wealth that creates the greatest prize that politicians can get a hold of which is the productive energies in wealth of a free prospering industrious free-market society that's why I think monarchism is so dangerous.

Another way to look at it, if you don't mind stepping into metaphor land and hopefully I won't get too much of it on my shoe, it's a guy comes to a doctor, two doctors in a row. Dr. Minarchist and Dr. Anarchist and yes that would be a great super hero villain don't you think and the guy comes in he's got some honking tumor hanging off the side and he says Dr. Minarchist can you help me with this tumor he says it keeps growing and it keeps growing and I have to get it cut and I have to go to chemotherapy and my hair all fallout and it's just terrible what happens and Dr. Minarchist says well I can cut it down I can shave that thing down 80% maybe I can get it down and the guy is like but that has happened 20 times before. I got my tumor shrunk down 80% it just grows back and I get sick and I have to go to chemotherapy so what can you do it's nothing best I can do he says well can't you just cut the tumor out completely and he was like oh my God no, that's utopia. That's crazy if I cut out your tumor you are going to get spontaneous tattoos on your forehead, Mohawks, you're going to be riding around motorcycles with Mel Gibson and it's going to be chaos and anarchy and dogs living with cats and all kinds of horrible things.

Scare stories abound if I cut out your tumor completely. He says: “But if you cut it down it's going to grow back!” he says to Dr. Minarchist. Dr. Minarchist says, “Don't worry I have a plan.”

“What is your plan?”

“I'm going to cut your tumor down by 80% - but when I'm in there I'm going to take out a magic marker (magic being the operative word) - I'll lean over and I'm going to write on that tumor: don't grow - and I will call it “the Constitution” because we all know tumors respect constitutions, right? And then it just grows back.

Now this man goes to Dr. Anarchist and Dr. Anarchist says: “Out it comes! It's a tumor, it's always going to re-grow, it’s happened hundreds of times in the past, and it's going to happen again, so we are not failing to compromise, we are going to cut it out because I know it's going to re-grow!”

And that is the way that minarchism looks to an anarchist.

It is a tumor. There are about 230-odd countries in the world today, and not one of them has a government that is not growing or has not grown considerably since it was designed especially to stay small. There have been hundreds and hundreds more through our history from the ancient Egyptians to the ancient Romans to the ancient Greeks to Magna Carta – which was actually more rights to the nobles - and you ended up with feudalism for another 500 years. Every single culture, every single country, has designed a government to serve the people and to be small and to protect property to oppose violence every single time - we have 5-600 examples of this and never once has worked because it breaks principle. We say we oppose violations of property and personhood and in order to achieve that we are going to create an agency endowed with the special unique monopolistic ability to violate persons and property.

You cannot protect persons and property by creating an agency with the monopolistic power to violate persons and property. We all understand that when a parent leans over a child and says, “Don't hit your sister.” that that is a contradiction. It's the same thing you can create an agency with a monopoly of violence to oppose violence it never works, it tracks the principal right up front and I think the very, very important thing that I would suggest is that one of the most important virtues and pursuit of wisdom and knowledge is humility. I fully accept that the founding fathers were stone geniuses whose intellects that we can all hope to maybe someday emulate and some smallest manner and they genuinely were the cream of the crop of the Enlightenment and some of them are brilliant men of the age and well-versed in history and philosophy and political science and they did some amazing work to come up with the best conceivable balance and powers and ways to keep government small.

Separation of church and state, brilliant and it has been tried many times the British revolution of the 18th century was supposed to be there government small serving the people what happened? It grew just as the American Empire did into the British Empire which grew over the third of the globe. Subjugated hundreds and hundreds of millions of people. You may the government small and grows, the smaller the tumor starts the larger and more quickly it grows. Humility is very important I do not believe for one split second that I had any kind of capacity to create scribbles on a piece of paper that is going to stop evil forever it doesn't work. It can never work.

How many of you would get a copy of a law written on a piece of paper walking down an alley and some guy comes running at you with a knife and you’re like stop. What's he going to do? It doesn't work because the Constitution do nothing they are pieces of paper. Yeah but the Constitution restricts the government, no, the Constitution brings down a tree or two and uses up some ink. Nobody goes into a shooting match saying look I'm invulnerable right it's just a piece of paper. It's not a solution to the problem of violence and I do not imagine for a moment that I'm going to be smarter than the 500,000 geniuses who try to solve a problem of violence in society by creating a monopoly of violence.

You can give me 1000 years and 8000 helpers to try and come up with magic spells and magic words on a piece of paper that would stop violent people for ever from doing wrong with institutionalized violence I would never be able to do it that is called humility. Can't be done, recognizing what's impossible is the first step to wisdom. And the last thing that I would say, what's my time 1 min.? The last thing that I would say which I will say very quickly is that the belief is an constitutionality and Republicanism and limited government is that if you get the right words on a piece of paper that evil people will no longer do evil and they will come into government and go oh alright no evil okay no evil but if we can come in with magic words on a piece of paper that will stop evil people doing evil we don't need a government because the goat the Mafia and say here is a piece of paper that says don't do evil to go oh okay okay I will stop doing evil. Or we go to murder and we say okay you did kill but sign this piece of paper that says don't do evil and he goes okay I go free if I signed a piece of paper okay here you go.

We all understand that that will not stop the murder and it will not stop the thief from doing evil, the pieces of paper will not stop people from doing evil things if we can come up with such magic paper and such Harry Potter wonders we get everybody in society to sign it and there will be no more evil we don't need a government but we all understand that that is not how the world works that evil people will find anything you want in order to get away with it and that's what will happen in any on Minarchistic constitutional society. If we can do something wonderful with a piece of paper or stock you will permanently in its tracks we get everyone in society to sign it lo and behold there is no evil and be don't need a government but if we doubt that that will work and how was it going to work with politicians. It is not work with the Mafia then how was he going to work with an even more organized set of criminals called politicians you understand we don't stop the market in its tracks by getting them to sign a piece of paper with rules on it if it's not would work with the Mafia and it's not will work with the murder it is not going to work with politicians and recognizing that basically reality is where the creativity of coming out with a statement society but how a society works in the absence of government is all about. I don't like, you seen this cartoon you know someone has got this equation on the board and then he comes up with an answer and there is a cloud in the middle called then a miracle occurs and then somehow it comes to the answer here and then some guy who comes up and says you might want to slash that bit out of little because I'm not too clear on that well to me it's like we want a nonviolent society for a society that opposes violence and support property rights and to me the Constitution and monarchism is like then a miracle occurs and yes this be a wonderful society that part doesn't work and so we need to find another solution and of course my podcast if you're interested they're all free you can look into that there are lots of creative solutions about how we can have national defense police and all the things that we need because there are bad people in society. It's a lots of ways to do it that don't involve this magical Golden gun that's going to turn and make everyone good and is never going to attract that people trying to control it and I think it's that's where to spend our creative energies rather than the standard feedback that pieces of paper will stop bullets. Thank you.

Moderator: So, the second category is now beginning. Which society would build the roads most sufficiently or any public good for that matter, and Mr. Badnarik, if you would like to take the question first.

Michael Badnarik: I don't understand which society would build the road. I figured it would be pretty much the same there's no reason in having a Minarchist a small government implies that there are a lot of things that the government doesn't do so I think it will be pretty much the same if you don't allow the government to build the roads in a Minarchist environment it would turn out to be the same way in an anarchist, both ways it can be private and as I try to explain and express in the beginning from our current point of view from where we sit now with government monarchy and anarchy are going to be almost identical and it's going to be up to Stefan and I to really kind of distinguished how they are different.

Moderator: Are you all ready for a bad pun? Question of the road because I consider myself a bit of a road scholar. Hello is this thing on hello? Take a moment to enjoy that joke shall we. You know it's funny the environmentalist who have a lot of good things to say are strangely addicted to avoiding this topic of the fact that taxes pay for roads is one of the worst things for the environment because people don't have to pay their driving in that sense right I mean yeah they pay for gas taxes but you wouldn't be able to drive if the government hadn’t built all the roads. Roads are pretty simple I mean they existed prior to the government it wasn't like there were no roads before the government.

There were private policies in the 18th century in America which all worked fine until the government took them over. If you want to go build a housing development you're never going to sell the houses unless there is a road to it and the roads are pretty easy to solve and even if you don't accept the technology now where you can actually track where people drive and send them the bill. When I used to have a real job I went on a highway which was entirely private and I paid a toll and it was beautiful I mean it was like an airport landing strip it was fantastic where of course the public highway is stop and go choked up. So absolutely rules will be much more better much more efficient and those roads which are not supported by the traffic will fall into disuse and there'll be changes and people will drive less or work at home one. You end up with a much more efficient use of resources without all these crazy government subsidies and effect of course they don't charge you for peak usage is crazy so you know that way people all drive to work at nine o'clock and so much more efficient use of resources and I think you would agree that that should be a private function monarchy or not.

Moderator: This next question is from Michael Badnarik also remember that rebuttals are allowed after your allotted time. Michael, Is individual freedom compatible with government no matter how small it is?

Michael Badnarik: Is individual's freedom compatible with..

Moderator: Compatible with government no matter how small the government is.

Michael Badnarik: Yes it is compatible because we have individual rights. The basic premise of my book and my Constitution class is the difference between rights and privileges. We the people have unalienable and individual rights we don't have to ask for permission a privilege is something that someone allows you to do and they can revoke that privilege at any time and most of us are not really clear on the concept that we have individual rights and we give the government privileges, article 1 section 1 clause 1 says all legislative powers here in granted. Well when we are granted legislative powers it implies that they are privileges and we can take those privileges away from the government any time we are brave enough to do so and my supporting evidence would be the declaration of independence which says that when any form of government becomes destructive of your rights, the right of the people to alter or abolish it and I think we can all agree that it is time to alter the government and you know again we have the option if we want to to abolish it and to establish a new you know and to provide new guards for our future securities.

Moderator: I think it is important to remember that the disparity of power between citizens and government now is very different than it was in the 18th century and in the 18th century we had musket versus musket I mean it was a relatively similarly armed opposing groups. What's that old Bill Cosby thing where they loop the coin toss the British loop the coin toss and their handicap is that they all have to march in a row with big x’s on them and the revolutionary force can live in the woods dressed in tree branches and shoot from wherever they want but back then it was relatively equal right because there were no nuclear weapons, there were no spy satellites, there were no I don't know brain flying lasers from UFOs and stuff the amount of hardware and technology that is available to a state dominated citizens now not to mention the computer, deductions, the source of income tax, and so on it's now all how much you can be tracked and controlled because of the technology that was largely developed under free-market is what I'm saying.

Small government means free-market and free-market needs innovation and government takes over the innovation and uses it to control citizenry you're creating the weapons that are used to keep you down and so in the future not everyone is going to have a nuclear weapon obviously but the government will because usually Minarchist say government is for national defense. How are you supposed to conceivably no matter how many six shooters you have how you supposed to stand up to F-16s and M1 tanks and nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers and spy satellites is simply impossible that's why you can't have a government now because the disparity between average citizens strength of mite and the state is simply far too great citizen never can control the government and the government will always be that well armed that's why we have to get rid of it as an institution completely.

Moderator: Stefan in the efforts of government law how would you constitute that?

Stefan Molyneux: Hand to hand combat and that I think why this is going to go in about 3 min. not yet the conflict resolution of course it is essential I mean the reality is that people are going to disagree, people are going to cheat, people are going to steal, people are going to do bad things with good promises and that's the reality which of course why we can't have government because people will also warm to the government while they have monopoly of force. There's lots and lots of different ways of coming into it something that's really, really powerful in society is ostracism right it's a really, really powerful thing.

I think Michael is completely right interdependence is the key to wealth division of labor we all are so dependent on each other. I mean if I had to grow my own food I would end up eating my feet which would be crazy right and I'm not that flexible but we are so interconnected that if we are not allowed to participate in economic life it is a complete catastrophe for us and so I have a bunch of articles and podcasts and a book called practical anarchy which you think is an oxymoron but I don't which is available for free on the website which I have these dispute resolution organizations I don't know how it's all the work because I can't find the future down to the last detail and no one can but it's a way it could work. If Michael and I enter into an agreement to do stuff together right if he sells me an iPod I'm going to give him 100 bucks then we have insurance so than 2% of that goes to the insurance and if he doesn't ship me the iPod I get the hundred dollars from the insurance company and if I don't pay him and he ships me the iPod he gets 100 bucks. If we trust each other we don't have to have that and then we have no recourse and so on.

Any time you sign a contract we both nominate an objective third-party who's going to mediate the dispute and we agree to abide by that ruling and if we don't abide by that ruling we are no longer to allow to participate in contracts these dispute resolution organizations simply won't allow it to continue in contracts until we deal with the problem and then we face the problem ostracism and a society where to be ostracized is to go to the Stone Age caricature of anarchy Mr. Badnarik portrayed a little earlier. The interdependence of human beings means we have an enormous amount of power and influence over each other without using violence this by saying I'm not going to do business with you if you break a contract, that is a disaster for people and of course right now contract conflict can't resolve it all. Anyone here ever tried to use the court system to resolve a contract conflict? Anyone how did that go was it a productive and quality use of your time was it efficient, was it positive, was it useful. So right now we have the best of both worlds we don't actually have an effective conflict resolution but competition is band and if we can survive this we can sure as heck survive it where competition flourishes in the productive resolution of disputes to the benefit of the just party.

Michael Badnarik: I agree if we have contract dispute we can go to arbitration. There is a saying that in Texas he needed killing is about defense fortunately that's not necessarily true but that's what it all boils down to I don't know why and wish that it were not true but in human nature you get enough people together you're always going to find somebody who is crazy or somebody who is evil and that's what it all really boils down so I'm not worried about the 98% of the people that kind of go around and mind their own business we’re where we about the lunatics that are going out to hurt others. It is a necessary fact of life that at times you need to use violence to quell the violence, you fight fire with fire and the question ultimately revolves around where is that going to happen.

Now if you want to do anarchy and have everybody resolve these violent things themselves I mean I would be happy, let me wear my shoulder holster and I promise only to shoot the guilty people and you know even my friends are going to go oh wow we want to let Badnarik do that that would be a little bit extreme and so the purpose of having a government a monarchy is to have a dispassionate use of force. I am obviously emotionally involved in whatever the issue is and it's like you're guilty kill him and the idea is we go whoa Badnarik were going to calm this down we’re going to take it slow were going to have a jury of our peers to evaluate this and if we finally decide many years later that the person did commit murder then we can do a lethal injection or electric chair or something like that and so this is where there is no good answer. I would really like to never have to kill anybody you know it's like why can't we all just get along I don't know because people are strange that way and so I am content to have a very small government say okay were going to use force to protect your property because most people won't. John Wayne in the shootist said most people will flinch or hesitate before they pull the trigger he said I won't.

I went to front sight training and you have all these guys out there dressed in camouflage with all the extra ammunition hanging around there looking like little Junior rambos and I said okay you look really impressive but you're shooting at a paper target I mean do you really do you really have the courage to pull the trigger and take another human life and suddenly it got although quiet because they realize that in most cases they don't and certainly a vast majority of people won't do that and they need to be protected and they want an organization to do that. There is no piece of paper which is going to be perfect, we were discussing this last night how can we write the Constitution so that it is perfect, how can we write a piece of paper so that this won't happen any another 223 years and the answer is it's not possible. The cost of liberty is eternal vigilance it's up to us and again there is no good answer either I have to kill him or we have to have a government do it and we're going to keep on bouncing back and forth between who is going to have that power and ultimately I know the government will not protect me efficiently which is why I am a very strong second amendment supporter.

Moderator: My question is for both hypothesize what might the world look like if the U.S. Constitution had never been ratified? Would the number of deaths throughout the world be larger or smaller without the US government? We will start with Stefan first.

Stefan Molyneux: Good. Nice theoretical question. Well if the US Constitution had never been ratified there would want to go out on a limb and say that there would be little to no federal government. Would that would mean is that the competition among the states to keep their productive citizens would be very high because originally there was 13 sovereign nations right like Germany and England. So what would happen if the Constitution was not ratified there would be no federal government. There will be individual countries and those countries would compete to have people stay and not move and not leave because it's really hard to control the movement of people in the 18th century right and it wasn't even any passports until the first world war because people would sail away and come here and there was no electronic this that and the other and you could just go wherever you want it for the most part so it would be that aspect and that competition to keep people would mean that taxes would be slower to rise because the left centralized things are and the easier it is to move between things the more competition there is right because it's like a bunch of farmers with the cows can go wherever they want you have to provide them with some good gravy in order to slaughter them later and attack metaphorical sense right but there would be greater competition, oh now hungry, I will eat later. There will be greater competition for livestock which I think will help things there could have been a civil war that would have gone on but it really was nothing as bad and I doubt it would have actually happen because I think as we all know not having going with the Schoolhouse Rock version of history we know that the war was against the South in order to extract further tax concessions and had nothing to do but slavery that would have not occurred.

Slavery would have died out as it did because they would eventually figure out that the slaves were not only completely immoral but economically unproductive so slavery would have died out just as it did in the rest of the world simply by governments no longer cashing slaves. That's all you have to do to get rid of slavery you don't need a stupid Civil War as they did in Brazil the government just said okay they're not going to catch no slaves anymore because they sally became too expensive to run off you own slaves all a time so slavery just ends and the government stops enforcing it so it would have died out relatively quickly because you wouldn't have been able to compete with the slave free societies who have more agricultural productivity. You for sure wouldn't have the first world war because the first world war, America was involved in the first world war which is a very strong argument that American involvement in the first world war led directly to the second world war but Americans sent over huge numbers of troops it tip the balance of power against Germany so much that Germany had to had to agree to the Treaty of Versailles otherwise they were just fighting to a standstill and they would have going home and there would have been no Treaty of Versailles because Germany agreed to the Treaty of Versailles they had to pay off all their debts which meant they printed money that Germany would have originally been had been paying up into the 1980s from the first world war if the treaty had been honored. Because they had to print so much money they ended it with hyperinflation which destroyed the middle class radicalized the Germans who would then turn to Hitler for salvation.

There was hatred of the Jews because the Jews were perceived as the international bankers striving to hyperinflation so that hatred escalated and so if you didn't get a first world war without the federal government it's very unlikely you would have had the second world war or so I would say that the Constitution and a very obviously abstract theoretical way the blood of millions seeped into its imparchment and without that the history of the world I think would've been a much more peaceful and benevolent place that's not even to count the things like, do we really think that Delaware would have invaded Iraq on its own of course not of course not you have to have the federal government's and the reason you had the federal government it has the tax livestock which gives it the fee of currency power to fund wars through preying on future generations right.

So you would not have had the wars in Iraq, you would have had Korea, you would have had Vietnam, you wouldn't have had all the proxy wars around the world, you would have extraordinary renditions, you would have the torture camps of Guantanamo Bay, you wouldn't have Abdul Glade, there would be enormous amount of peace because the more you give people the power. What is the slogan of government free evil that's what it is. You get to do evil and other people will pay in cash and in blood and the more abstract that you are from those you rule the more you would you can commit and that's why if you're going to have a tyranny you want it right by your side not overhead in the sky dominating everything so I think it has a seriously negative effect on world peace. Sorry that is a real sprint to history and I'm not going to say you agreed with everything but that certainly is the perspective that I would take.

Michael Badnarik: I love a really good debate so I'm going to agree with Stefan [laughing] either that or agree with the truth and again anarchy and monarchy is going to be very, very close with one have to search hard to find some of the differences I mean I teach a class on the Constitution and the Constitution is far from perfect article 1 section 9 clause 1 you know allows slavery to exist until 1808 I mean there is definitely problems with it. The colonies were trying to repay the Revolutionary war debt. The 13 colonies were printing money like it was going out of style and with printing money you get hyper insulation and the economy stops and so the people in the colonies went wow we really love freedom but the economy sucks we want you to go to Philadelphia and modify the articles of Confederation and that's not what they did. They went they through the articles in the trash and they came out with a more perfect union more perfect then the articles of Confederation presumably and an established a more centralized government Alexander Hamilton was a Minarchist he didn't like King George the third but but he thought that King George Washington would be a really great idea and fortunately Washington rejected the idea.

Alexander Hamilton's followers were nationalist a one-to-one strong centralized government he knew they wouldn't go for that and so he labeled his team of supporters Federalist which is a lie and Thomas Jefferson's followers were Federalist they wanted a loosely distributed or loosely organized government but that label Federalist had already been taken and Hamilton said well we were Federalist and your the opposite of us you must be anti-Federalist which make it sounds like so basically what Hamilton did was switch the labels you know good guys and bad guys switch the labels in order to get the Constitution ratified not a surprise that our politicians lie to us the surprise really is that 200 some odd years later when we talk the strong centralized government in Washington DC we don't call it a national government which is what it is we go oh that's a federal government you know.

So Hamilton was such a good liar we’re still follow for the lie to centuries later so if we had stayed with the articles Confederation the articles required unanimous support the unanimous vote of all the existing states and try to imagine 50 states united together and getting a unanimous vote for 50 states how big you think the federal government will be? It would be a trivia question okay for four tickets to the local concert got to identify the city where the national government is and they will go oh gosh I used to know that. So we would be better off, we want to make that government small and again it is up to us to make sure that it stays small that's what eternal vigilance is all about.

You don't go out and cut the lawn and go wow I really got a well manicured lawn and this is the last time this summer I'm going to have to cut the grass you know you get a good rain and you know your neighbors are going to be complaining because the grass is a bit tall the government is the same way. Thomas Jefferson suggested that we need a little revolution about every 20 years and then kind of trim back the government that has grown up the problem is it's like earthquakes in California in California we like earthquakes about every six or 12 months because when you have earthquakes often everything vibrates you go wow did you feel that that was pretty cool and nothing bad happens you know it's after five or 10 years when you haven't had an earthquake and all that pressure has built up now you get 6.2 on the Richter scale and you know not down buildings and roads so I think we are at that place politically we haven't had enough revolution in a while and if we do in fact have one were going to be knocking down some buildings.

[Silence] [0:49:53]-[0:50:11]

Michael Badnarik: If what had been, if, oh socialism?

[Silence] [0:50:15]-[0:50:25]

Michael Badnarik: Short answer. No any questions

[Laughter]

Michael Badnarik: Most Americans imagine this huge political dichotomy between the Republicans and the Democrats either red or blue and that is a false dichotomy. You know the Democrats want to control your life and the Republicans want to control your life I me what the heck is the difference the real dichotomy is between individualism and collectivism and any decision about your life easy you can make a decision or the government can make the decision for you and anybody with half a brain pretty much agrees that I'm smart enough to make my own decisions without the government helping so. Socialism and Communism are inherently evil as Stefan pointed out private property very important it’s the number one answer in my Constitution class. You know every question about the Constitution openly derives you know the answer is property. Communism has 10 planks and the first thing is to abolish private property. You have no private property you have no rights and Socialism is just Communism is little sister Socialism is the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles. Communism is presumably the perfect implementation of those principles and I'm opposed to collectivism you know I defend everybody's individual life.

Stefan Molyneux: The roads of defense and I agree with what you are saying and it really is frustrating when you are a communicator about freedom and liberty and antiwar and anti-violence and anti-torture and anti-the great rooms of modern state is prison and so on and people say way yes there is the blood of millions and there is the enslavement of millions and there is the starvation of millions through statism but you know we can't be free because people need to drive places. It's such a strange perspective that because we have problems with how we going to defend the geographical area we must all be slaves and sheep and tax livestock and herded around indoctrinated at schools and dangle a few coins in our old age because these problems are so insoluble but they really not. I think national defense is something that comes up oh if there's no government is no such thing as national defense to quick answers and there's more and podcast and in books if you're interested. First the foremost national defense the weird thing about when you use violence and solve problems you freeze those solutions in time think of public education we almost was went to public schools right. In 1860 or 1870s they were nationalized they went from the free market to the state. In 1860 you had a classroom with a teacher who had a piece of chalk and a blackboard.

150 years later with the Internet with virtual reality with homeschooling with pen tablets with every kind of communications transformation that you can conceive of and a few that you can never conceive of what do we have 150 years later? We have a blackboard a piece of chalk and a teacher right. It freezes solutions in time when you wrap them in violence a freeze in time. The problem with state is fundamentally is that it's a solution that's old as human times it's fundamentally tribalism on a national scale. So it's at least 10,000 years old if you look back at 5000 years or 7000 years the ancient Egyptians had governments, they had national defense, they had taxation, they had inflation, they had currency, all of the staggering destructive sites that statism represent. We don't use medical technology from the ancient Egyptians, we don't use popirus from the ancient Egyptians, but still we supposed to use this concept called the government which is so old. National defense has been superseded by technological advances no country has owned even a single nuclear device has ever been invaded ever.

The four proxy wars right England and Argentina in the Falklands we have Russia and America and Vietnam and Korea and so on but no country that had a single nuclear weapon has been invaded why is Europe at peace for the first time in 10,000 years because they had weapons of mass instruction and the leaders, these brave political military leaders, silly seem to find a lot of restraint when they are in the crosshairs right when they had to send young people to be slaughtered but they themselves could get hit with a nuke suddenly they seem to find a lot of restraint and the capacity for peace.

So what you need to defend a geographical area a couple of nukes what is that going to cost you? Hundred million dollars a year it's a buck or two per person per year to guarantee that you're not going to be invaded. Anymore you are going to start causing trouble overseas which get people flying planes into your buildings so you don't want any more than that you want as minimal a possible defense completely easy in a free society. Second point which I will keep brief is that, let's use our moderators just very briefly, the guy in the suit is the status society and the guy without the suit who should really be unshaven is the anarchy society. So I'm the evil third-party dude who has a military and wants to invade right why is it that I want to invade another country is it to sightsee? Of course not. It's because I want to take over the tax structure of that society.

All right you could that society has tax livestock to produce consistent money which I can then spend. So if I go invade this guy then I can take over his tax structure which is of course what every conqueror does they go when they take over the government they continue to extract the taxes from the population. So I can go and invade this guy, this guy country out I would say, I go invade this guy country and I can take over the tax structure of his state. But this crazy anarchy dude right his country has no tax structure. There is no tax collection is the difference between time to take over a really well organized farm that's very productive and wondering into a swamp no disrespect. He actually smells great. I'm going back for just one more but that's the real difference if you have an anarchy society there's nothing to invade because there is nothing to take over there is no tax structure. There is no Fort Knox that you go and create there is no national Army.

Why did Hitler going to Western Czechoslovakia because of the Skoda ominent works which was created by the state so we can take those over to get the hundred thousand soldiers to get the 20,000 tanks to get the artillery unit that's why you went there. If it was a stately society those things, those fruits, those benefits would not be there to take. So you don't have to burst a couple nukes you don't have to worry about being invaded is your anarchistic society because there is nothing to take. You're not taken over a farm and getting the milk and the eggs and then just wondering into a forest where there is nothing to take. There is no sane person ever going to invade an anarchic society plus of course you don't know who has what weapons which is a little different any status society. Trying to invade a status society particularly in Europe there is a population that is disarmed. Even the greatest military in the world is having a tough time standing up to our Iraqis who are arming themselves because there is no disarmament of Iraqis because they are just bringing arms and from other country. So you simply going to not worry about national defense is going to be a couple of bucks a year and even that's going to pay the way. No one is going to want to invade you because there's nothing to take and they don't know who's armed and you just are not going to have to worry about it but we still think in the same old way as when that kind of statist solutions seems to be essential for everyone it's really not the case. Technology and events and weapons of mass destruction have overtaken that need.

Moderator: next question this is for both speakers. Imran once wrote in a capitalism unknown ideal that anarchy as a political concept is a naïve and distraction a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal that came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. Stefan and Michael please argue for or against Imran status society.

Stefan Molyneux: First of all I just wanted to mention I am a massive fan of Ian Ran [phonetic] [0:59:41] I think she is a stone genius describing liatus [phonetic] [0:59:45] and without her I probably still be some muttering Canadian socialist, Canadian anarchist isn't that weird? Is like the two words you would never expect to hear together like Finnish entrepreneur or military intelligence or Something like that right. It’s just weird. You’re an anarchist, you must be from Bolivia. No, Nicaragua, anyway. So I have huge, huge respect for Ian Ran, two things that I disagree with her approach on ethics though of course I agree with almost all of her conclusions. Not that that means anything. It doesn’t prove anything it just means that I do agree. So just the hugest respect for Ian Ran, as one of the greatest philosophers that ever lived. I think her stance on anarchy is irrational. I know she’s going to come and haunt my dreams but she says that some gang is going to take over society but what are, the question what are they going to take over? What are they going to take over? There’s no tax structure in place. There’s not this constant money spigot coming out of the government control of citizens and if there is this incredible desire for domination over other human begins, how does the existence of government solve that problem? It’s a huge plumb prize for every evil person to grab a hold of to control other human beings because it’s already in existence, its already self funding.

The military, the weapons, the control, the police, the prisons, the prison guards, the truncheons, the court system, everything, the indoctrination system through the children for the most part, although though I know she wouldn’t agree with that. It’s already in place you just have to step in and take the money but in a free society, a truly free society with no state, those the apparatus for control and profit simply do not exist. You can’t just go around creating them. I have a whole section in this book about say some defense agency, you pay so defense agency, how they wouldn’t they just become another government and it is complexly illogically impossible, economically impossible. I won’t go through the whole argument because I’ve got my guy here keeping me on time but have a look at it. It’s a really, really strong argument how of course there is a danger of human domination. That’s why we can’t have a free existing structure that is expressedly designed for human domination hold the state. If that’s not there, people will be bullies in their private lives but they’re not going to take over the whole society of hundreds of millions of people and take half their incomes at the point of a gun because that gun simply won’t be there and you can’t just snap your fingers and create it in a free society.

Michael Badnarik: I also want to say that I’m a huge fan of Ian Ran. I think that logical thought is the only way to come to any reasonable conclusion. In an early metaphor Stephen was talking about government as kind of this cancer and you suggested that you don’t go into the doctor and ask him to cut out 80% of the tumor, obviously you’d want to remove all of it. What that metaphor overlooks is that the tumor had to rise spontaneously the first time. It would be presumed that it had to come from somewhere and I believe that is true about government and again if we could eliminate all government and again we haven’t actually defined what government is. I mean I don’t know if we established that mutual cooperation with nothing written down is anarchy and then it’s only when you write stuff down that as soon as we start to have contracts, you know we write contracts on paper because we presume the papers not going to change.

If Stephen and I agree to something verbally and shake hands and are really good friends and we come back a year from now and I go you said, he goes no that’s not what I said and if we don’t have anything written down you know we can end up arm wrestling or getting into fist to fist to try to debate what was done. If we have it written down we can go ah here it is on paper, that’s what we agreed to so and even that is not a perfect cure because you know those contracts can also be misinterpreted or reinterpreted later. But again one of the factors that makes anarchy so wonderful but impossible is human nature.

Most of us, I’m going to just roughly estimate you know 98% of us just want to be left alone, you know I really, really like you but I have no desire to interfere in your life whatsoever. I mean I’m busy trying to run my life and I’m not doing that real well so I don’t have enough time to try to control yours but for whatever reason there are people in society who just think that they know how to run your life better than you do. All you go to do is and they’re more than happy to spend their part of the day doing things to control you and they can formalize it and put in paper and you’ve got government and if you don’t nip it in the bud there it’s going to grow bigger and bigger and eventually you will have a huge organized system of plunder that you know somebody else could come in and take over, at least you hope they can take over. If its impervious then were in trouble because we do have a very huge, powerful government right now that is euphemistically known as the United States and if we the people don’t stand up, it’s going, I mean it’s already out of control and it’s easy for it to get more out of control. In my constitution classes I ask my students hypothetically if Chinese people have a right to life and the answers obvious to me but they have to think about it awhile and go yeah well they do have a right to life but they don’t have a constitution, they don’t have a bill of rights and they also don’t have a government that respects their right to life. Not a piece of paper that gives you your rights you know and what would happen if that 1.5 billion Chinese people, that’s 1,500 million compared to our 300 million here. What would happen if overnight one and a half billion Chinese people just stood up and said, hey enough is enough you know, communistic dictatorship. We’re not going to do that anymore.”

It would end you know we are in an ideological war. It is a war of ideas and the socialists and the communists are currently winning, you know they have most of us convinced that they’re in charge and you know we need to follow orders. Why does communism work in China? Sadly because one and a half billion Chinese people think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. They accept it, they allow it to happen. The same argument can be used here in the United States. Three hundred million people allow this to happen. All we have to do is stand up tomorrow and go freedom. Enough is enough and we will be able to take back this government and have a lot more liberty and a lot more freedom.

Michael Badnarik: Three questions. This is basically what I’d been alluding to, one or two questions ago. It’s all about the unfortunate human condition that some people are evil. Violence is going to happen and in many cases the only way to stop that violence is with additional violence force. I mean if you can throw a tarp over somebody and subdue them without violence all the better, but somebody sadly, somebody is going to have to use force and/or violence to stop the bad stuff from happening and again if we want to have anarchy, just let me know. Ill strap on my .45 and you guys don’t have to worry about my property, I’m willing to take care of myself and anybody tries to take my property and I guarantee, that I will not hesitate when I pull the trigger. Most of the people in the world, specifically most of the people in the United States are not willing to do that. They are not willing to engage in violence, they are not willing to even use violence for self defense which is a concept that boggles my mind but that defense needs to happen, most people want to subcontract that out.

You know they want someone else to you know take care of them or want it done responsibly and again that’s this theoretical monarchy that which you know always protects, uses force to protect your rights and never uses force to violate your rights. I don’t know how we get there when it’s like flipping a coin and having it land edge on but that is the goal. I think that Stephen and I will agree that what we have now is way too much government, you know let’s start cutting back on government, minimizing it, making it smaller and smaller and smaller and when we get to the 5% monarchy mark we can reanalyze it and think well maybe we can go that last 5% and get anarchy. I’m willing to learn but we’re never going to get to anarchy if we don’t get to monarchy first. It is our responsibility; it is your responsibility to take control of your government.

Stephen: So 2% evil, we’re just trying figure out who in this room is. I mean, yeah there are evil people in the world as I said in the beginning. There’s no question of that. I have never heard a satisfactory answer because of his point, amount how if there are 2% of evil people and the evil people want two things; they want money for free and they want domination and power of others. That is the exact definition of what a government does. So if there are only 2% of evil people in society, let’s say that’s true where are they going to want to be? They’re going to want to be in the government. The government is a rocket propelled boost to evil. It’s like giving evil that nitro thing in the car movies you know. It just allows evil to go that much faster. You can’t keep evil people out of government, you can’t do.

Everybody thinks there’s evil people in the world so we need these shiny virtuous people to protect us from the evil people, but I don’t want power over others, I’m not that ambitious for money because I do this crazy thing for a living but I recognize that there are lots of people out there who are hungry for power over others, who are hungry for free money. You have a government; government is a monopoly of individuals with the legal right to initiate force, frankly at will because the constitutions’ got nothing. In fact constitutions are dangerous because you think that they will save you from evil people right. If you believe the lies of evil people you are at their mercy. A chamberlain goes to Unic in 1938, from Hitler look he said he’s not going to invade any more countries, they believed him and what happened? If you think that pieces of paper will control evil you are setting yourself up to be dominated by the very evil people who are the only people who want to have that kind of power over you and the government is a readymade place for them to go where they have that dominate capacity. Of course if there are no evil people in the society, we don’t need a government. If everyone’s evil no governments possible. If a majority of people are evil then you can’t have a democracy because they’ll just vote in evil people right. If a minority of evil people which I believe is the case, then you can have a government because that’s exactly where it will draw them like a black hole draws matter. That’s exactly where they will go. So this problem which, if you remember the question vauguely.

The problem of who will watch the watchers has never been solved and to me, saying how will arbitration and how will conflict resolution be performed in a free society is like saying who will determine the value of a good. Well the competition, optimization and the efficiency of the free market determines the price of the value of a good, no simple planning can do it. How do we find the best and most creative ways to solve problems without institutionalized violence which leads to war, inflation, eradiation and destruction? I don’t have all the answers, nobody does but I know the answer is not institutionalized violence. I know the creative intelligence of human beings which is compulsively restricted from solving these problems throughout history. We didn’t have a state created from us; we inherited state from the original species like we inherit superstition.

We don’t any long say I need rain; I’m going to do a rain dance because we understand I don’t have rhythm but we inherited a state from the primeval ignorance of the species the same way that we used to think that the moon was made of cheese and the sun was made of ping pong balls or something but we now understand that slowly and painfully we have gotten towards a more scientific and rational understanding of the world.

We have to give the superstition of statism, the fantasy that we can give a small group of people the power, monopolistic power of initiating violence to make the world a better place, the superstition that we inherited. Like slavery, we inherited slavery from the origin species and we outgrew it and we don’t sit there and sit there and say oh my god slavery’s about to come back right because we all understand that its immoral, it’s not coming back. So the same with statism, we inherited it from the origin species. It is a primitive, dumb, stupid, violent and ugly way to solve human problems because it doesn’t solve human problems, it just makes them worse. It rewards evil people at the expense of the virtuous and I can’t spend my life running around saying is the government getting any bigger?

What stand am I going to take today to make it smaller? I don’t want the life of eternal vigilance against the growing power of evil. I want to remove the apparatus which feeds it which is the monopoly of statism. The very fact is that people don’t want to spend their whole life caged with a rabid tiger saying what they’re doing today, how we’re going to make it smaller, how am I going to control it? No, get the tiger out of the cage and live free. You don’t have to circle around this thing called the state and try and control it and make sure it doesn’t get any bigger because we can’t. It’s never happened before it will never happen in the future. We just get rid of the whole thing as a concept because it is an erroneous concept. Calling people to government does not change their moral nature, putting a guy in a uniform does not mean its moral for him to kill. Putting a guy in a funny hat doesn’t mean that he can fly. Calling someone to government does not give them the moral right to initiate the use of force, it is a logical and moral error to talk about a government at all and so who will solve it? Free individuals voluntarily, not those with power and coercion.

Commentator: Next question. Michael, should an individual be able to succeed from the government without repercussion?

Michael Badnarik: Oh, I certainly hope so. Succession is a topic that comes up frequently with a lot of my 27 states doing 10th Amendment proclamations these days and we were discussion the war of northern aggression last night and there is a miss, wide spread misconception in the United States that only Texas has the right to succeed. I don’t know where that came from. Maybe because we’re just really stubbornly independent in Texas but anybody, any state has the right to succeed and again in our conversation recently, somebody tried to suggest that the Civil War proves that States cannot succeed and I was like so you don’t know or believe in or respect the declaration of independence.

They’ll go yeah that’s my favorite document. Well the Declaration of Independence was a succession document. We succeeded from England and basically the only difference is that presumably we won the American Revolution and the southern states lost the battle for southern independence. You know you can have an idea, again, this is an ideologic war and sometimes you have to stand tall and defend your ideas. You may or may not win those ideas but yes I do believe that philosophically an individual should, my parents are both alive, I love my parents, but at my age I don’t ask mom and dad for advice. I talk to them frequently, they don’t try to tell me what to do if fact mom bemoans the fact that Michael you’re just going to do whatever you want to do and I’m like yeah that’s pretty much true, stubborn and independent.

So if I’m not going to allow my parents to make decisions about my life, why on earth would I allow a government to make decisions about my life. So what we need is a lot more people standing up and being independent and for whatever method you want for declaring a succession from the federal government and you know we just need to have enough of us to make it stick. If I go up against the federal government by myself, I may be very valiant and I may be very courageous but I’m pretty much going to end up looking like a pepperoni pizza. We need to have a majority of people holding these same ideas and defending them. If Stefan and I are walking through the jungle, I’m guessing that Stefan and I both agree that cannibalism is bad but if Stefan and I encounter cannibals in the jungle, I don’t think it would be a really good procedure for us to stand on a soap box and go well you know guys, this cannibalism is really, really bad because were going to be the first ones in the pot. So you need to have enough people, you have to have a good idea to start with and you have to have enough people supporting your idea to be able to defend it and make it work. You know the constitution I think is a, you know a really good idea, better than most, not perfect but you know right now in the United States we don’t have enough people defending it and government is way out of control.

Stefan Molyneux: I haven’t eaten enough today because when you start talking about cannibalism, I just total Buggs Bunny moment. You know all I did was I just looked over and I saw a drum stick in a suit, you know with the aromatic 19:36 and I’m going up there. You see the fade in and fade out. But enough about me, well should an individual be able to succeed from the government? I think it’s very important for us to be precise and accurate in our own language. I’m on a libertarian forum with Consuela, and Block and a couple other people, quite a number of other people and we got into a very fierce fight and there’s a whole video on this because they couldn’t quite understand the concept because they’re trained in economics and their trained in political science they’re not trained in philosophy, so it’s a bit of an educational milestone because they’ve been saying the government this, the government that, the government the other.

Should the government be able to do this, should the government be able to do the other and that’s like asking should unicorns be allowed to play soccer and really that is very real way of looking at it because there is no such thing as a government. It is a concept that does not exist. Right, we all say okay there’s a crowd here. You all brought your invisible friends which is great. But there’s a crowd here right and if you all leave there’s no crowd and you can’t take a photograph of a family with nobody in the picture because it’s just a conceptual thing, it doesn’t exist in reality. There’s no such thing as government. What there is is stuff written on paper, some very well oiled and quick to be pulled guns, there are aircraft carriers, there are buildings, there are flags, those things all exist. There is no such thing as the government. There are people with guns, there are prisons, there are people who fear for their lives if they cross their government or do not pay its extractions, but there’s on such thing as the government. It doesn’t exist. So to me saying should I be able to succeed from the government is like should I be able to walk out of middle earth. It’s a meaningless question.

Do I have the right to live free of others initiating violence against me? Absolutely. Of course but do I have the right to succeed from the government is a meaningless question because it presumes that the government is a conceptual tag with any meaning what so ever when it’s not. It’s just a bunch of people with guns, that’s all they are. No such thing as a country, right. There’s Earth, there’s trees, there’s air, but there’s not such thing as a country. No such thing as a government. I can’t succeed from it because it doesn’t exist. I do reject divided by the people to initiate violence against me. That includes the people that call themselves the government but I can’t succeed from that which does not exist. As long as we continue to believe that it does exist, we think that we’re obeying something other than people with guns but that’s really all that’s three, is the people with guns. There’s no such thing and I cannot succeed from that which does not exist.

Moderator: Okay, so for the final question, the United States of America has been called an experiment. What would be the hypothesis and what would is your conclusion?

Michael Badnarik: That’s a good question. I like the way that’s raised. The experiment is self government for countless centuries. Governments across the world were all controlled by a king, an emperor, some monarch that and I don’t know how we got there, but everything was derived from the concept of the divine right of kings. You now without going into a lot of detail, God comes down with his magic wand, smacks some guy in the head and says you’re the king, you own everything. You have all the rights and you can distribute privileges to your subjects. They owe you their life; they owe you…I mean you’re…

Unless you can pick both feet up off the ground at the same time, you’re standing on my land and you know basically I own you and so we came to the North American continent and decided you know this is really not a pretty good way and the declaration of independence establishes the idea that we are going to be blessed with rights ordained by our creator and so instead of God hitting the king in the head and we get privileges second hand, now we are sovereign. We are kings and queens and my book is entitles Good to be king to express that idea. We have 300 million kings and queens in the United States and we have rights. We can own property, we don’t have to get our privileges from someone else and this idea was so unusual, so unorthodox, so what’s the word I’m looking for, revolutionary that you know most of the countries around the world goes my god this isn’t going to last you know.

Twenty years tops and it’s all going to fall apart and so okay we’ve got 223 years, it hasn’t been the best of times but it certainly hasn’t been the worst of times either and by distributing the power instead of having one person have that power, you know life has been pretty good. The standard of living in the United States ahs exponentially increased, but we lost sight of the concept. You know the concept is individual rights and personal responsibility. Everybody wants their rights. You watch the news and every other day you have somebody banging on the podium demanding their rights. Well if everybody wants their rights, how come were struggling? How come we don’t have wall to wall liberty? Well it’s because nobody wants the responsibility. You know you own your body, you’re responsible for feeding yourself, you know sheltering yourself and oh by the way, you are responsible for providing for your own retirement. Our parents and grandparents were lied to, you know the government said, were bigger and smarter than you, you give us your social security money and when you’re ready to retire, you’re going to have more money than you know what to do with. How many times have you heard the conversation, “yep, mom and I are going on vacation again, we just can’t spend that social security money fast enough.” Nobody on social security feels secure and that’s because we have given the responsibility of our retirement to the government which is a really, really sad thing so I think the experiment started out real well but because we didn’t understand that the cost of liberty is eternal vigilance, we didn’t realize that the founding fathers didn’t set it up to run in perpetual motion, it is our job, our responsibility to provide for ourselves and to protect each other’s rights and to keep the government small and because we’ve allowed it, you know we’ve allowed the tiger out of the cage and now we are in trouble. We’re trying to figure out how to get it back in the cage so at this point the experiment may be ready to go extinct which I think is very sad.

Stefan Molyneux: I think that the difference is you want to put the tiger back in the cage and I want the tiger skin head. I think that everybody recognize, sorry about that image everyone. Would you like to take a moment to put your lunch back? I think that every person who studies and thinks about these topics recognizes that America was on paper, a noble step but what a great experiment in attempting to create a government by and for the people to protect the rights of citizens, we create this government to secure our liberties and I think that I certainly believe that it was a great and noble experiment. I can’t imagine that the circumstances will be better. Maybe when we go and live on other worlds, you kind of need virgin territory to create a new society because unfortunately there are so many people indebted and depended upon state as large hand outs and teaches the postal workers to retirees to welfare recipients to military industrial complexes to executives to banks to now car companies you name it. But you simply can’t pry that power out of people using politics so maybe we can go to a new country or a new planet we can start something.

As a new land mass arises we can colonize it and start something new but I think there was a really unique set of circumstances that gave rise to the possibility. It was a conjunction of new land mass, tyrannical government in Europe and other places around the world that caused the best and the brightest to flee as they always do and you had the peak of the enlightenment philosophy, you had the printing press which allowed for the easy dissemination of amazing writers like Thomas Pain and other writers, John Lock and all of these great philosophers. So you had an incredible alignment of the planets to create the greatest possibility for statism and let’s remember that the American Revolution was still a statist revolution, it was not let’s get rid of government…for a small little bit that occurred. I think in Pennsylvania which Mary Rockba [phonetic] [01:29:26] writes about but it was a statist experiment. I doubt ever there will be a better set of circumstances to test the theory of statist but let’s look at where it started and where it ended because there is a bit of a myth. You know, did a lot of studying in history and one of the things that you learn if you study history, especially at the graduate school level is that the winners, sorry I’m going to walk in front of you, the winners write the history. The victors write the history. Obviously if Hitler and won there would be a whole different set of history about the Second World War and we do see the American Revolution and the American statist experiments through the lens of you know I hate to say it but rich white land owners. They wrote the constitution, they wrote the declaration of independence, they furthered the laws. I mean there weren’t a lot of black women who were on the federal court system in 1820. And we forget by just looking at this small group of incredibly privileged and brilliant and I think mostly honorable men that there’s a lot that’s missing from our conception of how America started. I’ll give you a small statistic. In the 16th century the population, the native population of the Americas, North and South America was estimated at about 24 million soles. By the late 18th century it was about 2 million.

All right that is a greater than 90% reduction. Can we call it genocide? I think at some levels we can because there were bounties put out by the federal government and the local governments that if you killed Indians you got paid. It was a professional mafia hit jobs of the native population. Was some of it somewhat accidental, small pox blanket? Well yeah you could argue that it is but it did start on the, America rests on the graves of those who were here and that aspect of things also started the slavery. I’ll do 30 more seconds if that’s alright, started the slavery and started certain aspects of the genocide. That’s where it started. No rights for women, no rights for children. Slavery, genocide where did it end? The largest most powerful futile government particularly oversees that the world has never seen the most powerful and brutal empire and I think we can do better. I don’t think we have to stay within that pyridine, that we start with genocide and end with empire, that there’s another way. So there’s no good answer of government but we need to start asking different questions which is not what kind of government we have but why do we need it at all now that we have the technology, the communication, the wisdom, the knowledge that we have now. We need to start asking smarter questions. Not how do we tame the tiger but why do we need the tiger?

Stefan Molyneux: No government. No I don’t, I mean I know…I’ve been preacherifying and I’ll not go on because I really do want to get the audience questions but there’s an old saying that if the powers that be can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don’t care about the answer, that you’re just completely in the wrong ballpark. I do believe that there’s two reasons why we do this fundamentally. There’s pragmatism and there’s idealism. So pragmatism is like I need to mow my lawn right, or do a thing. I could either get a nice lawn mower or I can get some toenail cutters and if I use toenail cutters to cut my lawn I’m not immoral, I’m not evil, I’m not, I’m just not very productive right.

So if we’re going to do things for pragmatic reasons, then were going to do things for pragmatic reasons than questions of morality and right and wrong, virtue and evil and good and bad, they don’t come into it at all because we’re just about getting things done. That’s, I believe that we want to do things partially in questions of institutionalized violence and organization of conflict resolution within society. Those are all fundamental moral questions. How do we live in a virtuous, free, noble, peaceful society? How do we eliminate war? How do we eliminate imprisonment? How do we eliminate torture? These are all essential moral questions. When your going to go from the realm of pragmatism into the realm of morality you can’t erase your principals. The whole reason your there is because of the principals. Mr. Badnarik and I, and minarchist and I would agree, cell phones, to property rights to non-initiation of force are the moral principles that are most sacred, the most important, the most vital. I would argue the most pragmatic principles to hold, we can’t have a moral goal while the improvement of mankind, reduction of violence and social war and murder and then say in our very first towards that were going to break those moral principles and were going to create an institution that has the right to do everything that we consider immoral. If we want to build a bridge towards virtuosity, we have to go in that direction.

We don’t say it’s so important, it’s so moral to go north the first thing I’m going to do is head south. You can’t break the principle in your very first step. Maybe toward the end when things are really hellish but not at the very beginning and if you want a peaceful society as we all do and you want a society that respects persons, property, then you stick to those principles and you don’t break them the very first time you step forward your solution and say yes, property rights are important so let’s create new institution with the perfect power to destroy them. Yes self ownership is so importation so let’s create an organization with the power to own people through taxation, through laws.

Yes the non-initiation of force is the most important principle so let’s immediately create an institution which its very definition is to break that principle. Let’s not sell out the first step. Okay maybe the hundredth step when were offered a lot of money, but not the first step and that’s the consistency that voluntarism or anarchism or a dedication to nonviolence and to self ownership give you. You stick with your principle. If you are going to abandon your principles, why even bother being in the moral arena to begin with and so let’s not look to a violent institution to solve the problems of violence.

Let’s not look to a monopoly of the initiation of aggression to solve the problem of human conflict. Let’s not give up on our principles, the very first time we utter our solution but let’s stick consistently with those principles because not only are they true and not only are they moral but damn it they work and this debate which is completely nonviolent and this audience who is a perfectly delightful is a perfect example of that. Everywhere you look you see spontaneous social organization without violence. You see it in the marriage market, you see it in the job market, you see it in the educational market. You see human begins coming together to solve problems and as long as they’re in a peaceful manner anarchy is what we live. Statism is the exception. People say well what’s proof of anarchy?

They say oh can you prove to me that anarchy works? Look in the mirror. When was the last time you used violence to get a job? I have never used violence to get a job. Postal workers accepted.. When was the last time you used violence to get a date? I’ve never used violence to get a date so you negotiated. You worked peacefully. Does that mean everyone’s like that? No, of course not but that’s why we can’t have a government. Do you think, people think it’s an argument for the government; it’s the exact argument against the government. We work volunteeristically [phonetic] [01:37:40], peacefully in every aspect of our lives. If you want to look at anarchism look at 99.999% of everything that you do as voluntary and peaceful and cooperative. Yeah you’ll get disagreements, yeah you may raise your voice, yeah you may get mad at people but you don’t pull out guns and shoot people.

That’s the vast majority of people and I’m not going to give up my freedom because there a few evil people in the world. I’m not going to allow the few of people who say you need a government to protect you from the evil people. I don’t want to give up my freedom, my daughter’s freedom, and my wife’s freedom. I don’t want to give yup that freedom because there are bad people in the world. Isn’t that surrendering something essential of importance because there are bad people in the world, I need to get into a cage called statism. Doesn’t that mean they win? That’s a shame. I don’t want that. I don’t think you want that either. We have to come up with more creative solutions than I hear something in the bushes let me get into a cage for the rest of my life. I’m not that scared of bad people. I’m really not, to the point where I’m going to huddle in a cage. You know like a frightened Chihuahua because there might be a beast out there in the bushes because every time I go out I don’t see a beast and I see that het people who are telling me there’s a beast are the ones who are the actual predators. Alright, say well you’ve got to get into the cage because the government is so, because there are predators out there but the only guns I see are the governments. They’re not protecting me from someone else. They are the people who are threatening me. I will take my chances that what’s in the bushes is a squirrel rather than hide in a cage because I’m afraid of bad people. I don’t want to surrender my liberties to the mere potentiality of evil and I don’t think you should either.

Michael Badnarik: Capitalism usually gets a bad rap. We look at the economy; we’ve had a trillion dollar bailout, a mutli-trillion dollar stimulus package being planned. You know we’ve got like a triple trillion dollar budget planned for next year as if anything with 12 zeros left of the decimal point can accurately be called a budget and you have to say see capitalism doesn’t work. Well we don’t have capitalism in the United States, not really. I mean we have an economy that is almost universally controlled by the government.

You know we just lose that interstate commerce clause and the general welfare clause and we have a population that doesn’t understand the constitution and they can pretty much get anything by it. It’s like you know we’ve got a president whose handsome and articulate and promises change and people are standing ovations, applause, applause and it’s like you wonder why were having problems. When I give my presentations I will ask for a show of hands, how many people are patriotic Americans? Not surprisingly it’s unanimous. Everybody’s a good patriotic American. Like okay, show of hands how many people know how many articles are in the constitution? Rarely, rarely does anybody have any clue and then my question is like, what constitutes a good patriotic American? You know how to dress yourself in the morning? That’s the criteria you know you got your shirt buttoned correctly so that makes you a good patriotic American. I think the standard needs to be a lot higher than that. You know we have a lot of criticism about the constitution but the constitution doesn’t work, well no not if you don’t use it.

Most people have no idea what the constitution says so they wouldn’t recognize unconstitutional government when it falls on them. Now if most of what my government does is unconstitutional, I find that unconscionable and totally unacceptable and with the last breath I ever take I’m going to do my best to restore a constitutional republic to protect your individual rights, to protect your private property and to limit the abuse that government has monopolized on it. It may not be the perfect answer but we have government because a wide vast majority of people really don’t want anarchy. I’ve already discussed one topic is the conscious abhorrence of violence.

You know like I don’t want to hurt anybody in fact a lot of people I know they don’t even like verbal confrontation. I mean I enjoy talking with Stefan and getting into all of this. You know my favorite thing is philosophical debate. I love it. You know arguing back and forth. You know examining the ideas. Most people, a lot of the people that I know don’t even like to do that. It’s like oh, oh your raising your voice, just can’t handle confrontation, I want everybody to just hug and love each other. Well you can want it but it’s not likely going to happen, not in the universe. So you know most of you will not accept anarchy because it’s going to require you in some circumstances to perform violence and most of you are not willing to pull the trigger to kill somebody that’s trying to kill you. The other thing is that we do, as Stefan said earlier, we like property and we like the easiest way to accumulate it and instead of working for it, if I can take yours, that’s just a whole lot better. I let you go out and work in the field and grow all the corn and I’ll just show up at the end and you know walk away with the wagon.

Most people do not understand the difference between rights and privileges and it boils down to you can do anything you want with your property. You can do nothing at all justifiably with my property. It’s my property. I was speaking to a college audience and one young lady raised her hand. I was the presidential candidate and she wanted to know what I was going to do about Medicare and Medicaid. I said there theft, they’re gone and she was like horrified. You know apparently I didn’t understand the situation, she had to let me know that her mother was elderly and ill and had all of these medications that she needed to buy and I said well do you love your mother? Well yes of course.

Would you help your mother buy her medications and she doesn’t say yes or no she immediately tries to divert the questions. She goes but what about that SOB up on the hill, yeah that guy, you know the guy with the big motor home in the driveway with more money than he knows what to do with and the first thing I did was question her, how do you know that he has more money than he knows what to do with? Apparently he knows exactly what to do with his money, that’s why he’s got the motor home in the driveway but ultimately I said okay your mother needs these prescription drugs which we all acknowledge are expensive. Are you going to take a gun and go up there and take that persons money? No I’m not going to do that. Why not? Because that would be theft. And I said oh I get it you want me to go up there and take that persons money and give it to you for your mother’s prescriptions so you don’t have to risk lead poisoning. You want the booty but you don’t want to take the risk.

You want other people’s property and you want the government to do it for you. I am opposed to theft of any kind. I am opposed to individual theft and I’m opposed to government sponsored theft. We have individual rights, their all based on private property and I think that liberty does have a chance because the basic idea is private property and even a two year old understands the importance of private property. What’s a two year olds favorite word? Mine. Mine, I want it to be mine so I can be in control. Well a two year old doesn’t understand the concept of yours, and we’ve got to convince them that no you’re not allowed to play with Tommy’s toys unless you get permission.

Our government is currently acting more like a two year old. They want to take your property and go mine. We call it eminent domain. You know in Texas we have the Trans-Texas corridor, Texas government was planning to steal 584 thousand acres of private land to build some monstrosity highway. Now I’m not a, you know, Luddite. I don’t want to like keep really low on technology. I travel in a real fast car. I like highways. I want them to be smooth and straight but I don’t want the government steal property and then allow a Spanish company to monopolize the profit from that. No, no that’s not going to happen. Not in Texas.

So anarchy is again, I believe anarchy is a wonderful ideal, kind of like you know absolute, 100% alcohol. Unfortunately the laws of physics don’t allow you to have 100% alcohol and I think that human nature prevents us from getting to anarchy. You know one you don’t want it because it puts too much responsibility on your plate and two because there’s always somebody sadly who thinks they know how to run your life better than you do and so I don’t think that we can avoid government.

You know you can’t make an omelet without breaking a couple of eggs. I don’t think you can have active society without somebody kind of putting down some formal rules and we just have to make user that those rules do not subjugate one part of the population for another. Again there are no easy answers but that’s our challenge. That is our challenge to be intelligent enough, to be moral enough, to find and identify what the ideal, what the perfection would be and move in that direction as often as we can and maybe, maybe we’ll get to it. Maybe we’ll achieve anarchy someday but at the moment I don’t think that anybody knows which direction anarchy is.

You know, if you’ve never memorized the Bill of Rights, you don’t know how many articles are in the Constitution and so I’m doing my part to educate the population, you know tell them, teach them the difference between right and privileges and hopefully and I believe it is true. I believe people are waking up and I believe that people are more and more prepared to take responsibility for their own life because you know frankly, the government is screwing it up so bad, you know nobody likes to get this style of government that we currently have and so I want to thank Stefan, I want to thank Drexel University and I want to thank the audience again for being so patient and being so intelligent to be here and listen to us discuss this high level intellectual concept. Thank you very much.

Commentator: Alright, were going to hand off the microphone back to Adam and were going to come around and get your questions and hopefully keep them in order going around the room. I’m going to give them the other microphone that they can…so they don’t have to pass back and forth. First of all I just wanted to remind everyone, we are accepting donations in the back of the room so please take what this event was wroth to you and please give that back if you could. Were paying for this out of pocket so we’d really appreciate that.

Audience Member: This question is for Stefan. I think one of the road blocks in trying to explain the conflict of anarchy and how it can sort of triumph over the limited government approach is dispute resolution and how you would get compensation if someone broke a contract and to use the extreme example, if someone murders your son or something and in your example you would say this person would be ostracized from the society, they would have a hard time having an economic transactions and just having a life style and I would contrast that approach with the Hoffa’s and you would say—

Stefan Molyneux: All right, what?

Audience Member: I’m sorry, Han Sunman Hoffa’s approach, I’m sure you’ve read.

Stefan Molyneux: I haven’t read a huge amount of Sunman Hoffa’s; I’ve just read some stuff on national defense so feel free to expand.

Audience Member: Well he basically says you have an insurance company and the insurance company can sort of seek compensation if it's justified and I think just taking the approach of this individual would be ostracized from society, it’s kind of difficult for people to grasp because if someone has this huge bank roll or whatever and they’re able to be ostracized and are okay with that, what’s to stop that person from breaking your contract or committing acts of violence and I’m wondering why you don’t take that approach on discussing how you would compensate people, I suppose for…

Stefan Molyneux: All right, an excellent question. The state of solutions to the problem of violence, if this kind of rape, of murder, or assault, the state of solution is very, very tempting of course because it seems like it’s a real solution right, but of course if theft is so bad then property rights are absolute then we can’t have taxation because it’s a violation of the principle of front so I’ve sort of reject that as a solution. It means that we then have to go to more creative places to solve that problem. I’m in no way, shape or form even remotely intelligent enough to attempt to reproduce the creative intelligence of millions of people to solve this problem so the solutions going to be infinitely better than anything I come up with as people compete to try and solve this. The first question if your thinking about an anarchic solution or a status solution to a problem like that is what would satisfy me. So let’s say, I’m really going to ask that question but what is it that if you were looking at someone to protect you from murder or protect those around you from murder, what would you want them to do if let’s say your wife or your girlfriend, let’s say your wife was killed, murdered by some dude, we’ll call him Bob because Bob is our usual guy. If Bob killed your guy what would you want as your ideal solution to that? If solution is the wrong word, restitution or how would it best be handled for you as a potential consumer of someone who would provide services in this area?

Audience Member: All right well my approach would be to try to prevent that from ever happening.

Stefan Molyneux: Agreed.

Audience Member: And the approach that I think needs to be taken is that the person knows that there is going to be extreme retribution or compensation in that event so just by taking that approach off the bat you would kind of avoid that situation. The situation could still occur and I don’t, you know I don’t personally know just like you said many millions of billions of people are going to have better solutions to this but I would definitely…

Stefan Molyneux: Sorry but what would, let’s say, sorry I’ll keep this short. Let’s say I’m a hero and I’m trying to sell you my protection services right so I’m doing a show and tell, dog and pony show. What of this would be the most appealing to you as the solution to violence committed against you or someone like you? Would you want that person killed? Would you want money from that person? Would you want them to be incarcerated or imprisoned for 30 years and pay you half the money they made at forced labor? I mean what is it that would be, nobody says this is great, but what would be the most beneficial thing that I could offer you to get your business as a dispute resolution company?

Audience Member: I would want, you know I would want everything back that was taken from me and if it was impossible…

Stefan Molyneux: Yeah that’s impossible because we're talking about murder right. I mean what is it that, like this is how it would work in a free society is that we would as a dispute resolution organization I would be going around saying how can I make this right for you? What it the best possible solution? So, I know it’s hard to talk about, let’s just talk about maybe she gets knocked on the head or something. Let’s not go with like…

Audience Member: No that’s fine.

Stefan Molyneux: Okay so you want to go with the murder.

Audience Member: Yeah because you’ve got to explore the extreme possibilities.

Stefan Molyneux: Go with the extremes, absolutely so your wife gets murdered. What would be the best, weird way to put it but what would be the best possible outcome of that for you as a potential consumer of protection service?

Audience Member: I would want some sort of monetary contribution but I think you know it would be different for everybody. Maybe I’d want the person committing the act of murder…

Stefan Molyneux: It is different for everybody and that’s why we need competition right. It is different for everybody.

Audience Member: Yeah and me personally I might want that person to conduct many hours of community service you know or something nonviolent that wouldn’t, I just don’t want them to go into a jail cell and rot, it’s not good for anybody.

Stefan Molyneux: Right, and then when they come out they’re crazy, right? I mean jail is a terrible solution right. Even for evil people, jail is a terrible solution right. Like jail is a terrible solution for drug addicts and it’s a terrible solution for people to do evil because they just come out and do more evil right and then the repetition rates for criminal in a status prison system is 80-90%. It’s ridiculous right so you want a better solution than that right. And you said that you want to, you said that the best thing you could do for your wife’s memory if she was killed was to get money to replace the income that would be lost in the support that would be lost and you know so your kids could get a good education and you can pay off your house. You’d want that kind of money right because it’s a significant loss of income to look at it at a coldly calculated economic level, forget the emotional stuff that can’t be fixed. You’d want money back and you’d also want to be damn sure that this wasn’t going to happen again.

Audience Member: Right.

Stefan Molyneux: Right. Now a status society is never going to provide you either of those things. You’re never going to get money from the criminal and 80-90% is going to be a re-commission of offence. Yeah.

Audience Member: So my original question was why, how come you opt to say that this person would be ostracized from society and not be able to conduct commerce…

Stefan Molyneux: Right.

Audience Member: instead of saying that…

Stefan Molyneux: Sorry, sorry. It’s not just that you can’t, were going to go to a complete abstract here. I’ll try and keep this short but there’s more about this in practical anarchy but very briefly, you can’t rent an apartment, you can’t buy food, you can’t travel on anyone’s property because everything’s privately owned. You can’t go to a restaurant, you can’t even use someone’s drinking fountain, and you can’t participate at all economically in the society. That is what I guarantee you; all of the protection agencies are going to work with.

So this guys either going to have to go out and live in the wilderness and gnaw on tree bark and rabbit legs and stuff that he’s not going to do right or he’s going to have to submit in order to regain his status as being able to participate in society, he’s going to have to submit some punishment, in order to regain his status as an economic actor in society. So he’s either going to go out and live in the wilderness and be nowhere near anyone in which case you don’t get any money but at least he’s not killing people or he’s going to have to submit to some sort of punishment and hopefully cure or whatever ails him and so he’s, the punishment is going to be you have to work at some job, you get half of his salary, 40% of his salary goes to imprison him and 10% goes to the profit of the DRO or whatever, he’s going to go through anger management, he’s going to go through psychological counseling, he’s gong to go through whatever it is to try and get the evil out of his heart so he doesn’t do it again, he’s never going to be released until people can figure out as best they can, give the inexactness of the science.

So it’s not just you know you can’t get a job, I mean you actually can’t function in society if people don’t want to do business with you. We have computers and the internet so you walk into a store and try even to use cash, they’re going to be like murderer, murderer, murderer and if they give you a meal and you’re a murderer they also, the restaurant will get pulled from the system right. So it’s the best, I mean is it the perfect solution? I don’t know but it certainly is a viable and potential one and it’s a lot better than what the state is going to do for you right now.

Audience Member: All right, thank you.

Michael Badnarik: Can I respond to that? My name is Don Colion [phonetic] [01:59:05] and I’m so glad that there’s no government and I’d like to offer another solution to your problem.

Audience Member: That is where I was going to go…

Michael Badnarik: I will personally make sure that the family is wiped out. All you have to do is kiss my ring and promise me a favor in the future.

Audience Member: That was right where my question was going to go. If DRO, if I’m shopping around for DRO, this man just killed my wife. I want his family dead, I want his house, I want his bank accounts, and I want him dead. I want him dead; I want him buried upside down on a pike. Now if you the DRO won’t do that I’m going to look for a DRO that will. How did this jive with the non-initiation of force in an anachronistic society?

Stefan Molyneux: You are actually saying that you want his family dead. Not really, I bet that is what you just want, you think I would be just?

Audience Member: You are talking to somebody who just had his wife killed.

Stefan Molyneux: Sure. No, I mean…I understand. I'm just saying I don't think a DRO is going to be…I am going to take out the gene pool. Right, I am going to drop a bomb on the city where the guy…no, they are not going to do that right? They are going to say “Yes, that’s an extreme response and that is a shame, but we are not going to do that, sorry.”

Audience Member: So how do you feel go after somebody who might do something close to that, you know or whatever?

Stefan Molyneux: Right, okay, let us put things…yes, you can come up with some crazy guy wants to wipe out the whole family. How does the free-society handle that? Well, first of all by not making him a god damn president, right?

Stefan Molyneux: Right? Those guys do exist; maybe you’re one of them who wanted to nuke the gene pool right? But okay, let’s not give him the nuclear weapons, air craft carriers and B52s right? So, there is going to be a punishment for the evil people but let’s keep the problem in perspective, right? The murder rate in the Wild West when the government was very small and remote was absolutely tiny, you could go five, ten years in a town without a single murder. Some towns went as long as 20 or 30 years without a single murder. Okay, so yes, is there a challenge dealing with the problems of murder in a free-society? Absolutely.

Will murders be fewer in far between? Absolutely right, because there won’t be cops who would go nuts, they won’t be better in returning the battle stars and PTSD, right? And there won’t be that kind of violence in the home from those kinds of situation which leads to further violence down the road. There won’t be prison guards who become dehumanized in beating up and controlling the prisoners, there won’t be prisoners who are in jail who are getting beaten up and raped and shivved who are then released back out in the streets, because it will be a different society where we don’t use the initiation of force to try to solve these complex and psychological and difficult problem. So we are talking about in an average town, you know, where a murder or two every 5 years. Right? And will the society find some way to provide restitution for that? Absolutely. Will everybody want to wipe out the whole gene pool? No, of course not, they will be angry in the moment and the DROs will provide counseling and grief management would get them through that difficult time. But the alternative to this as solution is, that the state gets an army, the state gets prisoners and the state gets to use whatever force it wants at will against anybody, anytime, anyhow, anywhere. Right? So it is important to put these problems in perspective. Do we want maybe one out of ten people having excessive response to murder every 5 years, which means we face this problem in every town once in every 50 years or do we want the CIA and the FBI and the US military with 700 bases of receives to poke and sticks and perpetually causing the murders of 100’s of 1000’s of people? Right, so again will anarchy solve everything? Of course not. There are human problems which will be impractical, some people will go on a rampage and shoot the whole—absolutely. But given that potential exists, the last thing we is a centralized military and police force and prison system.

Audience Member: I would like to make a little…sorry, a little side note here. Essentially with the DRO as you mentioned, it wouldn’t be lucrative for them to go around and kill the whole family, you do that and well, then maybe you would get repercussions from maybe the family’s DRO and what no, but on a side note, what we actually want to talk about is that the two of you are very concerned with rights one from the objectivist’s moral point and the other from the constitution, where do you all think these rights come from?

Stefan Molyneux: I don’t believe in rights at all.

Audience Member: Good Man!

Stefan Molyneux: No I don’t believe in rights.

Audience Member: Alright!

Stefan Molyneux: To me these—you know what rights are? This is rights. Please don't hurt me. That is all it is. It is a quest for those in power, that’s all the right is. I too believe in the objective universal absolute morality and I have a crushingly boring book available for free called Universally Preferable Behavior which if you ever have trouble sleeping put it on the low murmur, a little Barry White in the background the trouble then is waking up not getting to sleep. No, I don’t believe in rights. I don’t believe that they are imbued within us, you know, I don’t believe that they are weak atomic forces that cling right to the inners that are, I think they are properties, we don’t have rights. We have properties like we are ambulatory for the most parts, we breathe oxygen, we are carbon based, we are the rational animals…sometimes. Right so we have properties and those properties biologically universal which is how we’re classified as homo-sapiens so we don’t get ourselves confused with sea anomies.

We have properties that are universal and I think those should be respected as biological and physical facts, but we do not have rights. No government can take away the fact that I have mass, no government can take away the fact that I have scalp, no government can take away the fact that I have breathe oxygen and am carbon based. Right? So those are just facts and properties of human beings, but the governments can take away the rights and the rights are just purely illusory, and of course begging people to leave you alone never works, because they are like, “Oh you want freedom? Great, then I’ll start taking it away so that you’ll give me stuff because that is what you really want.” It’s like saying thanks to a torturer, “You know, it really hurts when you do this.” Well, what does a torturer want to do? Bam, bam, bam! So I don’t believe in rights. I think that you have a different approach, certainly you do, but I don’t think they exist anymore than fairies do.

Michael Badnarik: A difference! We discovered a difference! When Stefan was down on his knees begging, he wasn’t begging for rights, he was begging for privileges, you know? Rights…..

Michael Badnarik: Rights are not, “Please don’t hurt me.” Rights are, “You will not hurt me.” Thomas Jefferson said, “You only have the rights you are willing to, you know, fight for.” I have the freedom of speech not because they wrote the…and ratified the first amendment in 1791; I have freedom of speech, because I have never met anybody big enough to shut me up. So we spoke at the Independence Hall yesterday and I mean of all the places in the United States, Independence Hall, 4th of July, I mean it was the best 4th of July, the best Independence Day I have ever had. You know, to be looking at Independence Hall, then I discovered that as I am speaking on this little podium, there is this little concrete square which was a free speech zone. We’re celebrating independence and the government is going to allow me my opinion on this concrete pad? Are you kidding? Anywhere I happened to be standing is a free speech zone. The government doesn’t tell me what I can or cannot say. The government doesn’t tell me where I can or cannot say it. So rights do exist! You cannot…you cannot take somebody’s rights away. You know, you can take their life, but you can’t take their right to life, and, you know, if rights don’t exist then I am not sure exactly what the philosophical discussion is about. What is it that we are trying to protect? You know, life, liberty and private property that are the whole point of having written the constitution at all. Imagine…imagine a hypothetical conversation between Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, the sky is shining—the sun is shining, the birds are flying and, you know, butterflies, the crops are growing, the children are laughing and giggling. I mean it is pretty much heaven on earth. Can you imagine a conversation that said, “You know, what we need is a government.

A government that is going to oppress us, raise our taxes; I mean everything is like too perfect, I mean we just get bored. If we at least had a government to oppress us then we’d have a reason to wake up in the morning. It would keep us like, you know…” I can’t even imagine that as a concept. More to my reality is that, you know, life is nearly perfect, almost heaven on earth, and they said, “You know, what we need? We need a system to protect it just the way it is so that we can maintain this type of perfection, this type of heaven on earth, to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” It’s a goal, a laudable goal, we may never achieve it. We certainly have, you know, gotten further from it today than we used to be but we really do, we need to continue working on it. It’s a constant process, you know, philosophy, you are constantly everyday learning new philosophy, honing it, making it, you know, better, eliminating any contradictions that you have. I think the same thing is true with governments, it may never be perfect, it may be okay today, but we have to keep monitoring it and constantly making it better and not letting it, you know, grow without supervision.

Audience Member: John, Thank you, pardon me. Stefan and Michael, great presentation today. Stefan, I want to direct a couple comments towards you and then ask you a quick question if I could. First one of your statements, I used the scare tactics to say that we do not have the ability to fight our governments, our large arsenal of bombs, arms, weapons and super-duper through down weapons to stop us, but at the same time you said, “Well we can’t even stop the insurgents overseas.” And I find that pretty fascinating that a bunch of people who live if you will in clay houses can stopped the most tyrannical governments in the world. So certainly we as a people have the ability to go ahead and change our destiny no matter how big our military force and this government is. And secondly the second comment that I want to bring up was an anarchy society that does not have the tax basis, not one that is going to be desirable from a tyrant’s point of view and I will argue that point by saying that if I were looking to take over at this organized society that did not have a tax base, that would be a no brainer because I would march right in there, take over their rights, probably tax them whether they have a proper tax base or not and then probably through them into servitude. So whether they have a tax base or not does not make them undesirable for a tyrant. Now, I will ask you one more thing on the DRO, and that is any time you give some one more responsibility or more power than the people have, they themselves will become tyrannical just as the government does. So the question I have for you is, is you giving these people to be judge, jury and hangman at the same time, how do you keep their powers to a minimum without—so they do not overstep your boundaries. That is the bottom line, pretty much instituted government at that point.

Stefan Molyneux: Yeah, I am not saying that I convince you, I am not saying that I closed the case. I am just saying that there is a possibility that it may not be as bad as you think and that’s as far as I can get. I want to be disrespectful to other people's questions.

Audience Member: Thank you very much! About the government

Stefan Molyneux: Thank you.

Audience Member: The wonderful topic of the day.

Audience Member: One thing that I haven’t seen come up yet, thank you everybody who is here cause it's great for people to have an open mind not matter what philosophy, we won’t know what we know until we hear it. So it's good to hear all different sides, whether we agree with or not, to find out whether we do agree with it, cause hearsay you don’t know what you are getting. I heard I needed garlic or something to come near you because you were a, you’re going to bite. You don’t really bite do you?

Stefan Molyneux: I don’t even chew.

Audience Member: Alright. One thing I haven’t heard come up yet is…is something to do with the world. The world is going to follow our anarchist form of non-government. What would happen if, I don’t know, South Korea decides they’re going to nuke Hawaii and we don’t—if I understanding right, we have no government. We have nobody in power, we have nobody to make the decision for our landmass. How does that work cause we are not going to lay down and roll over it and take it?

Stefan Molyneux: Yeah, that is a great question, I guess the first question I would have is why does South Korea want to nuke Hawaii now? Or why are they threatening to do so? Why are they threatening to nuke Hawaii and not Switzerland?

Audience Member: Yeah.

Stefan Molyneux: Yeah, it is not because of why they are threatening to nuke Hawaii rather than China or some other country local to the Far East where they can actually get their rockets?

Audience Member: Cause they can maybe?

Stefan Molyneux: No, the reason that they are threatening—the reason that Al-Qaeda, the reason that these are the countries threaten the United States is, and I am certainly not defending the retaliatory use of force in these situations which is going to be almost certainly against defenseless civilians, but the reason is that the American government is using—deploying massive amounts of force overseas. Right, that they are…they have black ops, they these 700 plot military bases overseas, they have funded—the US government the largest arms seller in the world, so it is like having a police protection agency that is actively taking your money to arm criminals who they claim to be defending you against. And so, because the United States is taking you tax money cause it's the government and going and doing all these terrible things overseas, funding dictatorships, arming dictatorships, funding oppressors, overthrowing governments, invading, conquering and undermining societies around the world, there is a hatred of America and they can’t strike at the American government.

They strike at the American people which I don’t agree with of course, but the reason that we don’t need a government to protect us from North Korea, North Korea is only threatening us because of our government and I use the word “our” to be Canadian. But you know what I mean right? The solution to statism is not more statism. The problems by statism should not be why we rely on statism, we should really try to solve the problems at the core, you know, rather than say, “Oh, Al Qaeda hates us because we were free.” Well, Americans were hell of a lot more free 100 years ago and Al Qaeda’s missiles didn’t touch us at all.

Audience Member: But if it happened.

Stefan Molyneux: But it’s not going to happen if you don’t have a government.

Audience Member: No one is ever going to aggress against us ever? What if it happens?

Stefan Molyneux: What do you mean what if it happens?

Audience Member: Could it happen?

Stefan Molyneux: No, it’s not going to happen because no country has ever—

Audience Member: We have force field around us now cause we’re anarchist?

Stefan Molyneux: No, because as I said earlier, you have the two part solution. One is that no one is going to want to nuke you for the hell of it, because you have nukes and can nuke them back. So it just…it’s the…it’s what—

Audience Member: Who is in charge of the nukes though—on our part to nuke them back?

Stefan Molyneux: Well, you would have defend agencies who would compete among people to provide them the cheapest and the most effective deterrents to invasion, but you would not have as you currently have massive forced, feared currency funding of aggression overseas, because nobody would want…I mean the people are for the Iraq war, well, it’s well, you take the bill, right? Don’t send me the bill if I am against it. So people would not be funding aggression overseas. They would be funding the cheapest and most effective form of deterrents to avoid an invasion and that could take many, many different forms, but I don’t believe that some madman would just suddenly up and want to come and nuke people. That just doesn’t happen in history. There are very specific circumstances that lead to that kind of anger and aggression toward the US government.

Audience Member: This question is for both Stefan and Michael. You both express approval of privatization of roads and other currently public or what I consider to be the commons…common territories. What would the effects be on the individual? Individual rights or step on of sorts privileges. Let’s look at a road for example, if a road were privatized, could there not be constrictions on the individual to say that you must have a license, you must have two headlights present on your car, and you must have a good moral account in your local town. I mean all of these different precautions so to speak or…liens could be put on the individual. How do we address that in the effect that, I mean take it one step further when…when entire towns are privatized, in order to live there you would have to relinquish your rights of free speech or your right to religion. These are real contradictions to a free society in which you have to deal with privatization; I…I…I would like to hear both the speakers' responses.

Michael Badnarik: Does everybody realize that Saddam Hussein started out as president of a Home Owners Association and kind of like worked his way up to tyrant?

[Laughter]

Michael Badnarik: I don’t deny that, you know, society needs rules. I mean we are social people, we all have, you know, different opinions, different values, different ethics and, you know, we need to figure out a methodology of co-existing in the same relatively, you know, small space without killing each other. You know, that's…and in the study of any philosophy that would be in the political level. You know, you have your personal ethics and you exist in a society with other people whose ethics are different from yours and again we need to co-exist. So there need to be certain accepted rules, there is no right reason that the government has to establish those rules. You know, speed limit, most people don’t follow the speed limit. You know, everybody kind of…I think the general rule is what? Ten miles per hour over, you can probably do that for a long time without getting a speeding ticket.

But, you know, there is another traffic rule that says you don’t drive on the left side of the yellow line, you know, and I don’t know many people that violate that rule, not because there is a squad car around every corner, but probably because if you drive on the left side of the yellow line, probably going to end your life here real soon. So…again, there’s not always going to be an easy answer, the answer is always property, but when you get to water and air, okay? We’ve agreed that I own this piece of land and has a stream going through my land. Okay, what water do I own? This is my water, its moving it’s moving oh gosh! Okay, so I own Stefan’s water and it’s moving, you know it’s a difficult process but just because it is difficult doesn’t mean that we don’t need to come up with the answer. As far as private roads, most roads were private. You know, I have some store or facility, I want customers to get there, I build the road to make it easier for you to, you know, get to my store. The government under the constitution is allowed to build post offices and post roads, the reason for the roads was to get the mail from one spot to another. Everything else was kind of like naked trail. There were all sorts of historical examples of private investments, you know, working.

The Eerie canal was supposed to connect…like New York city with the rest of the country west of the Appalachians and so they privatized it completely, you know, private investments, they dug this canal 100 miles or something like that and it was making a profit for the investors before it even opened. So, you know, we need to have some organization, we need to have some rules, it doesn’t have to be government and people say, “Well, yeah, that’s true, but we have to government in control of the police.” No you don’t. “Well, yeah, how would you do it?” How about Beverly Hills? You pay to have your own security guards. You know, I am sure that the Beverly Hills police drive around in their cars, but if you have got enough money; you pay to have your own security guard. My own personal police officer sitting there at the front gate, you know, to check people coming in and out of my property. You know, if you are poor, you can’t afford a security guard at the front gate so you go out and buy a Saturday night special. What’s a Saturday night special? Well, it was any gun that you could afford. You know, people who lived in the ghetto are the ones most likely to need self-defense and so the government basically says, “Well, okay, you can have any gun that you want except the one that you can’t afford.” Saturday night special is just some arbitrary label, you know, on inexpensive pistols that make it socially unacceptable for poor people to defend themselves. So, you know, there are lots of different solutions and again it’s your life, you have the responsibility of feeding yourself and protecting yourself…and we need to come up with other solutions other than big government.

Stefan Molyneux: I have a sort of unique experience to bring to bear in these kinds of political questions, I have had a pretty varied career, I've been an entrepreneur and when you are an entrepreneur and when you want to create business and almost all the business need investment, you go to investors and you have to…it is crazy. You have to prepare so much stuff and you have to do your market research and you have to talk to potential customers and figure out exactly what they want, you have to research the competition and you have to create all these really boring charts that say where you land on the X-Y of various competition and features Yes, we’re more expensive, but people really want these features and here’s the demographic we’re going to appeal to and that is how you get investors. And investors will see, right, let’s say that you’re going to build roads right? Investors will be specialized in investing in road companies and let’s say that we need to build a road from this podium to this podium, the investment community will literally have a dozen companies come through saying, “Give us $100 million to build this road.” And the investors will ask—oh it’s horrible, it really is, it’s like swinging light bulbs when they ask you every single conceivable question under the sun to figure out if you have really done your homework and your research to please your customers better than everyone else that is presenting to them, that day, that week, that month, that year. It’s a really grueling process. This is exactly how it will work in a free-society. Every rule that you apply to a road overhead that someone has to pay for.

So if you say that you have got to have both your headlights, then you have got to verify that, you have to have people checking it out, you have to have punishments, and you have to block people from coming on to your road or give them some DRO. There’s got to be overhead to it and so when you go to the investors and you say, “I want two lights on every car.” They are going to say, “How much is that going to cost.” Right? And you are going to say, “Well, it is going to cost me an extra $200,000 a year,” “Well why would people pay that?” They are going to say. “Well, because it cuts the accidents by 20% and we’ve done the market research, we’ve talked to 500 or 1000 potential clients and they’ve all said I will pay $5 more a month happily to get 20% reduction in my possibilities of accidents.” Alright, that’s how things work in a free-society. It’s hard for us to remember that, I mean for must—unless you have been in that situation you wouldn’t know much about it. I am sorry, that is knowingly contradicting, and I really do apologize but it was a shock to me when I first went through that whole process a couple of times. So every time you want to impose a rule on whatever it is that you are building in a free-society, everything from collective defense to roads to healthcare, you have to prove to incredibly annoying, hard bitten, skeptical investors why your solution is something that customers will want more than every other thing that they could conceivably invest in that year. So you have to do such a staggering amount of homework, you have to build your case, you have to have done all the research and so when the road finally comes into existence, the rules are never arbitrary, they are designed to be as effective as human possible based on the greatest value it will provide to consumers that you have verified by actually asking them. Right, so…that’s a long answer, but it is really, really important. Things just don’t pop onto existence in a free-society; they go through an incredibly grueling process of ensuring that the maximum value at the cheapest price has been created for every single consumer.

It will be the case with defense DROs, it will be the case with healthcare, insurance, property protection. Everyone has to go through this annoying, horrible; you know, it’s like it makes a frat initiation look like a tea party, but you have to go through to get people to invest in you in a free market. So I guarantee you through that process which you never get from the government you get quite the opposite, through that process you will end up with the roads and the hospitals and the schools, and everything will be incredibly tuned and re-tuned and re-tuned to meet exactly what gives people the most value at the cheapest price. And that is the inevitable process of trying to get funding and trying to get customers in a truly free and competitive market and it’s so hard for us to understand when we look at government monopolies what is possible in terms of tuning yourself your market, but there will be the exact right amount of rules and if people stop wanting two light then you will go to one light and you will drop their rate by $5 a month because that’s what they expressed a preference for. Does that make any sense at all?

[Pause]

Stefan Molyneux: Well, I am sorry, legal and moral code, I mean we were talking about roads right so the legal and moral code is a whole other issue and maybe we can talk about that afterwards cause I want to make sure we get to other questions if that is alright, but I was really talking about just two lights on a highway kind of thing. Another question? Who’s got the mic? Oh, mic? Yes, you had a question for a while?

Audience Member: Thank you. My question is actually for you Mr. Badnarik, earlier you mentioned that the reason that we needed government to protect people in issues of like disputes is because nobody wanted to initiate, force themselves, people cringe at the idea of initiating violence and I wonder if you disagree that part of that is actually a symptom of the collectivist society we have like there’s been social experiments to show that when someone collapse on a subway, if there is a bunch of people, nobody helps. If there is one person, you feel like they are more dependent upon you, you are more likely to help. So you think that’s possible as the reason people…don’t want to take on the…like you said you would be willing to, you know, arm yourself and defend your property, but most people wouldn’t. Do you think that it is a symptom of the fact that we have been ideologically or socially conditioned to believe that that’s not our responsibility, that’s the government or the police force?

Michael Badnarik: I do think that the collectivist tendency in the world is because people don’t want the responsibility themselves. You know, we want…and I think it stems fundamentally from our origins in family. When you are 5 years old, you don’t make your own decisions, mom and dad make those decisions for you. They feed you, they shelter you and, you know, life is really good because you are protected and you have no responsibilities. You know, the epitome of that is when you get to college, you know, gosh life is really good, you get to make your own decisions, you get to decide when to go to bed at night, you get to decide what you watch on TV, how much alcohol you drink, and wow, this is really great. But you know, car insurance is due and then you go, “Dad, I need a check for my car insurance, I need a check for my tuition.” So, you know, college is utopia, because you have all the benefits and none of the responsibilities, you know, and so I think that having done that, we, you know, mom and dad finally go, “Thanks, you’re out of college, our responsibility is done, you know, get your own apartment.”

You know, and, you know, we go, “Wow, life used to be a whole lot better when I had somebody taking care of me,” and I think we have the identity to want the government do that. I don’t know if it is true, but I’ve always believed that Winston Churchill–I’ve always heard the quote attributed to him; if it’s not him, I apologize, but the quote is that, “If you are 20 years old and you are not a socialist, you have no heart and if you are 40 years old and you are still a socialist, you have no brain.” And, you know, the back on that is that, you know, socialism has such great marketing. It’s like, everybody’s going to have everything. You’re going to have food, you’re going to have shelter, you’re going to have education, and you’re going to have health care. Life is going to be wonderful. You know, it’s just kind of like, you know – that the marketing is great. Who wouldn’t want that? It’s like, “Yeah”, I mean, that sounds like heaven on earth. I want that. But then you realize that, “Oh, wait a minute,” you’ve got a job and all of a sudden, the government is taking taxes out of your pay check that you work so hard for. And, you know, you can’t buy the stuff that you wanted because taxes are so high because you’re paying for other people’s health care – other people’s education – other people’s stuff. And you go, “Oh, wow!” I mean, that…you know. You reach maturity and you go, “Wow, this pretty much sucks.” It’s a redistribution of wealth. And so, you know, the – socialism is really wonderful, but the problem is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

Audience Member: Mr. Badnarik?

Michael Badnarik: Yes.

Audience Member: I appreciate you trying to inject liberty into a political process, as it seems to be against liberty. You mentioned “eternal vigilance” several times, to protect that liberty. The only option I see is to spend my life trying to convince one hundred and fifty million, plus one, to my way of thinking. That level of eternal vigilance isn’t free. It sounds like being enslaved to freedom. So, you did say I am free. If I’m free to do what I want with my property, I should be able to look through a brochure and decide what government serves my needs the best and who gets access to my property. I know that it is anarchy, but I do not want to spend my life creating or chasing after different government packages. Millions of people with good ideas routinely success, selling their products and services in the free market. You spoke of monarchism as a possible path to anarchy. I ask whether your ideal government would allow and work with competing institutions for what you define government functions to be.

Michael Badnarik: Well, I mean…the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I mean, I don’t like it anymore than you do. I mean, we’re supposed to be able to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And, you know, I mean, I’m happy to do it but that’s not my pursuit of happiness. I’m a sky diving instructor, you know. I want to jump out of perfectly good airplanes, you know, drink beer and chase attractive women – that’s the way I pursue happiness, you know. And I can’t do that, you know, because my government is taking…when I lived in California, my federal, state and FICA taxes, totaled 48 percent.

And I don’t know where you guys went to school but when I was growing up, that was half, and there was absolutely no way I am going to give half of my productive output to the government. No way! You’re going to have to come and take it. So, because, you know, previous generations have allowed the Government to get this far out of control. I mean, it’s not my fault, I didn’t allow, you know, the new deal. I didn’t, you know, encourage Vietnam, you know. It’s like, I just looked around it was like, this is the hand I’ve been dealt; this is the government that is here. And I can sit and, you know, complain about it a lot, but that’s not going to solve the problem. So, I’m destined to travel across the country, teaching people the difference between rights and privileges, and, you know, hopefully with my eight-hour class, motivate people.

You suggested that I have to, you know, convince one hundred and fifty million, plus one people, to my way of thinking. Yes, that’s what I mean when we say that this is an ideological war. This is a war of ideas and I am promoting the idea of individual rights and private property. And the sooner three-hundred million people in the United States adopt that idea, the sooner I can, you know, like pack my suitcase and go back to the airport and jump out of perfectly good airplanes. And right now, I am vastly – vastly out-numbered. Most of the people in the United States are socialists; they don’t know it but they like the government handout, you know.

Audience Member: Well, assuming you could get that one hundred and fifty-million and one, and then your ideal anarchist society, would you allow free competition against government services?

Michael Badnarik: Yes, absolutely. The–and we’ve already got a demonstration of that. The post office…I mean, most of you aren’t even old enough to know the post offices that I went to. It’s kind of like the witches house in Hansel and Gretel. I mean, they were dark and dirty and, you know, kind of like a scary place to go. Mom would say, you know, “Michael, I’d like you to go buy some stamps” it was like, “No, please,” you know. Now, post offices are pretty clean; they’re fairly modern. You’ve got the, you know, new blue logos. It didn’t always used to be like that. The post office had to literally clean up its act when Federal Express started being, you know – if you absolutely, positively, have to get it there overnight, use Federal Express and people did. It was expensive but it worked. True Story…went into a post office and there must have been forty people waiting ahead of me. And you got to take that little number like you’re at the meat counter, you know. And I sat down and I’m…they actually have park benches in the post office because they know you’re going to be there. I mean, you may as well take a book. And now, you know, when I get frustrated, I also get a little bit devilish and devious. And so, I was sitting on a bench next to some guy and we were just sitting there and I kind of looked at my little slip and I said, “Mine says Tuesday, what does your say?” And he looked at his slip; he thought he was going to have to come back tomorrow.

[Laughter]

Michael Badnarik: And the sad thing is the post office is the most efficient Federal agency we have.

Audience Member: Would the post office be a function of your ideal anarchist government?

Michael Badnarik: The post office is one of the things specifically listed in the constitution. That doesn’t mean we can’t get rid of it, you know. You want to come up with a privatized solution – hey, I’m all in favor of it. I mean, newspapers are going away. I mean, most of your newspapers are having trouble just, you know, staying funded because…like, who wants to, you know, pay for all that chopped up tree? Most of us…many, many more of us are now getting our information, you know, from the internet. You know, we’ve got…I thought I saw an iBook here. You know, everything is electronic; we’re going away from paper, you know. And the people who are newspaper editors, you know, may feel a little bit threatened by that. But, I’m sure that the people who operated the delivery stable for years and years, you know, for generations, felt a little bit threatened when, you know, Henry Ford came up with this like motorized little buggy, you know. Progress happens; deal with it.

Audience Member: Yeah, no, I have the mic up here. This question is for both. I’ve really enjoyed the back and forth of this…how much government is necessary. But I don’t think we’ve ever really defined what government is. I mean, it isn’t…

Stefan Molyneux: Government is that which is unnecessary. Sorry, just kidding.

[Laughter]

Audience Member: Well, in response…

Audience Member: In response to Karen’s question about Korea or any country nuking us, you said that the Defense agency would be responsible for any retaliation. If that’s not government, what is it?

Stefan Molyneux: The government, technically, and I think that we would agree on this – that the government is the conceptual label for a group of individuals for whatever time period, who have the legal right to initiate the use of force within a given geographical area.

AM Okay. Can I stop you there, and just ask you…?

Stefan Molyneux: You certainly can.

Audience Member: …a question? Okay. If I, as an individual, have the right to use force in defense of myself, when does it become a government, okay? Because I can use force to defend myself. If I group with one other person, we’re walking down the street and we see five people with their weapons drawn coming towards us. Obviously, we both, together, have the right to use force in order…

Stefan Molyneux: It depends.

Audience Member: …to protect ourselves.

Stefan Molyneux: Absolutely. I think…

Audience Member: So…

Stefan Molyneux: …I see where you’re going with this.

Audience Member: So, when does it become government? How many people are necessary…

Stefan Molyneux: Well, no…

Audience Member: …to join together…

Stefan Molyneux: …that story, there’s two functional characteristics of government, right.

Audience Member: But…

Stefan Molyneux: It’s just that it…fundamentally, that it initiates the use of force and it does that for two reasons – to prevent competition and to take money. I mean, there’s other things like regulations and so on. But, the fundamental thing is that you can set up a competing police agency in the current system. You can set up a – you can set up a competing post office if they let you, though I think that you still can’t charge less than the post of office, which is heavily subsidized. You don’t have the right to initiate the use of force as an individual or any number of groups. You have the right of self defense, which is universal to all people.

Audience Member: Well, you’re just answering the question under our basic current system, okay. You’re not answering it in a more general sense.

Stefan Molyneux: Okay, sorry, what am I not answering? I must have missed it…I apologize.

Audience Member: When does…how many people acting together does it require to become defined as government?

Stefan Molyneux: None.

Audience Member: Okay, so…

Stefan Molyneux: Anybody who claims the right to initiate force is wrong and a criminal if they act upon that premise. No matter how many people get together – they can call themselves the government – it is just the mafia, by another name. Because that which is moral or immoral for the individual, does not change depending on how many people get together, which I’m sure we all agree on.

Audience Member: It…

Stefan Molyneux: So, it never becomes valid. Now, the mafia that wins will call itself the government, will indoctrinate the children to worship it, will bribe all the people in the world, with all the productive people’s money to gain allegiance. We’ll start wars, we’ll do all of these terrible things and they’ll call themselves “the government” but that just means best mafia; mafia that won.

Audience Member: I would agree with that, okay. But still, we haven’t defined what government is, as far as…

Stefan Molyneux: Oh, we have.

Audience Member: Huh?

Stefan Molyneux: We have.

Audience Member: That was…the agency assigning the right…

Stefan Molyneux: We said it’s the legal right initiate use of force in a given geographical area.

Audience Member: Okay. Well, I had the – I didn’t make…I had the right to initiate force if I feel that someone…if somebody has a gun pointed to my head…

Audience Member: That’s not the initiation. That’s self defense.

Stefan Molyneux: Yes, I mean, they used to initiate force to prevent competition and to take money. Alright, that’s the definition of it, and they obviously claimed a legal or moral right to have to have all pomp and circumstances, because you can’t…I mean, they had to put the gun in velvet, right. Because you see the gun and you’re like, “Oh, I’m a slave,” right? And so they have to put all this nonsense and drape the flag and parades and blah-blah-blah, right. Because nobody wants to see this, right – because that makes you feel humiliated and you might want to change. But, so, yeah, there’s no group of people who would inevitably gain that moral right. But there is a group that claims and acts upon that moral right to initiate force, usually within a geographical area.

Michael Badnarik: Well, I said at the very beginning in my opening thing, we need to define, you know, establish definitions and those definitions may change as we go along. You know, my question was, does mutual cooperation, you know, constitute government? In your hypothetical, as I understood it, you know – you’re walking along all by yourself with a gun, for self defense. And I think your question was, “How many of you standing shoulder to shoulder in a row, constitute government. Well, if you’re all there independently, with your own gun for self defense…I mean, I don’t think that it does constitute government.

My premise earlier, is that it’s a hypothetical, you know. And I would certainly be happy to carry a gun to defend myself, but most people won’t. And so, you get a lot of people who say, you know, “I don’t want to carry a gun. I’m afraid of guns, I don’t know how to use guns. I want someone else to do my protection for me.” And so, we’re going to hire the security guard to stand out at the front gate, to presumably, shoot the bad guys. You know, the question is when – I mean, how big of a security force do you have to have. And I agree with Stefan, the initiation of force is never legitimate. I mean, bench – George Washington said that government is not reason. Government is not eloquence, it is force. And like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

We create this government to protect us, but we’ve got to kind of watch it so that it doesn’t, you know, outgrow, you know, the original purposes. You know, the government that is supposed to protect you, can grow big enough to threaten you and become, you know, a greater threat than, you know, the problems that you were worried about, originally. So…I mean, I’m curious as to what your definition of government is. If Stefan and I, you know, get a voluntary cooperation, I’ll help him protect his property; he helps me protect my property. Do we actually have to write something on paper for it to be a government? You know, if we create a one-page, you know, contract and we go, “Okay, this looks pretty good” and you know, “If I see anybody taking your stuff, I’ll shoot them” and we both sign the contract – does that constitute government? I mean, I don’t know what – and we would have…well, I don’t know how many people we have in the audience but I’m sure we can come up with, you know, probably a dozen or more different definitions of what constitutes government.

Audience Member: Okay. Well, I guess my question is what would those agencies be called if not government?

Stefan Molyneux: Well, it would be called a company, right. It would be a…

Audience Member: So, what’s the difference?

Stefan Molyneux: It would be a company. It would be a company with a tank.

Audience Member: Then what is the difference in its force?

Stefan Molyneux: It does not have the right to initiate or to abstract money from a disarmed population and it doesn’t have the ability to initiate costs to prevent competition. But the government, by definition…

Audience Member: You’re assuming that…I didn’t agree with that all.

Stefan Molyneux: Yes, of course it doesn’t actually have, if we use the word right – locally, it doesn’t have that right but it exercises that right as a…I’d say where as a DRO agency would not because free market, volunteerism and you would obviously, I mean a DRO would say, “Look, if I ever have one bullet more than I’m supposed to, I’ll pay every one of my subscribers ten thousand dollars, and they’ll be an independent audit,” and all the safeguards and checks and balances, which never worked with government really do work in the free market. I’m sorry we…let’s continue this if you want, after, but let’s make sure we get the other questions in because…no, not you, Jean. No, I’m just kidding, just kidding, go on.

[Laughter]

Audience Member: A tough question…is anyone after me? First, thank you both for coming. I’ve really enjoyed this discussion today. My question is for Michael, and I know we’re sort of struggling with the definition of government. And I think a lot of what we’re “disagreeing” about here, it maybe a matter of semantics. What I wanted to ask you, Michael, is if we – if you’re saying we need to have a government…a minimal government, what are those minimum government functions that are essential to have a government for, that could not be provided better under free market system? And I’m not talking about a collective defense because that’s not a government. I think the…when we say, you know, government, we are talking about initiation of force. So, in that context, what would be these essential government services be?

Michael Badnarik: Well, the purpose the constitution and the government we’re supposed to have, is to protect our life, liberty and property. That’s the goal – how we go about it is basically a procedure and you know, if this procedure is not working, you know, when any form of government becomes destructive of your rights, we can establish a new one. And again, I mean, I like the individual responsibility thing. I mean, I don’t want to have to pay for your education and I don’t need you to do my defense. I am perfectly happy doing it all by myself, but most people aren’t. And so, the things that are basically necessary are to provide services for the people who don’t want to provide them, themselves. I mean, I have a right to communicate with you. But Philadelphia is a little bit long distance from Dallas and I don’t want to have to get in the car and travel twenty-seven hours every time I want to hand you envelope, you know. So, there is a system available where I can, you know, scribble an address on the envelope, drop it into a box and somebody else will pick it up and, you know, do the traveling for me, you know. I would like that; it saves me a lot of time, having to come back and forth – I mean, I love Philadelphia, and I come back frequently. But, you know, it would just be inefficient in my life. And so, it’s partially, Division of Labor.

All of us have a higher standard of living. You don’t have to do everything for yourself. You know, you get really, really good at one thing and then you pay for other people’s services who are really better at – about those things than you are. There are certain things that we don’t want to do, and I give self defense as one of them. I mean, there are probably others. So, you know, if we had people who were smart enough and responsible enough to want to do everything for themselves and just do everything on a, you know, voluntary interactive basis, it would be like, “Wow, this is wonderful.” But, people are not that smart. People are not that ethical and people are not that responsible, you know. So, that’s the direction I want to move, you know. So, at this point and time, you know, the founding fathers did their best to say, okay, most of the government is going to be at the local level so that you can go down to the, you know, City Hall and, you know, like smack your representative upside the head. You know, the State government is going to handle most of the things. Murder is a state issue; it’s not a federal issue – and the Federal government is supposed to be really, really small, you know, to handle the things that are just not practical, you know, for each State to get into. You know, it’s a commodity of scale. We’re going to have one Army, you know, that will defend all fifty states.

We can have a really good Army and, you know, that way, we don’t have to have competition. Most of you are probably not old enough to remember ATT was the only company and it gave really great service. And then the government tried to help us and broke then down into smaller baby Bell companies. And, you know, it’s like it took a long while before we…but we still have people going, “Well, you know, Verizon and AT&T” and these different companies, you know, it is, you know, the free market. It…you know, some people have better service than others, depends on what area you live in. But, you know, and it may not have all the advantages that, like one phone system network might have had. So, I mean, I really don’t care; society will figure out those things. And, you know, as soon as everybody grows and be responsible enough to do their own thing – yeah, then we can probably get rid of government.

Stefan Molyneux: I don’t have anything to add to that.

Moderator: You guys have any, see any tired arms? You might have a better view than I do.

Stefan Molyneux: Oh yeah, there’s a gentleman and the lady in red…No, the guy here, right in front of you.

Moderator: Red?

Stefan Molyneux: Yeah.

Audience Member: Just a follow-up to that response from Michael. You mentioned that we wouldn’t be very productive as people if we all had to do everything that we needed, ourselves; and you mentioned the Division of Labor. My question is, how come we can’t just let other people fulfill our need for self defense in an open market? Why…it sounded like to answer his question, you wanted to give the government a monopoly on self defense.

Michael Badnarik: I don’t believe that’s what I said. If that’s what it sounded like, I certainly didn’t intend that. Again, I’m happy to do, you know, defense on the open market, and I gave an example of Beverly Hills is where people do that. It’s an open market – you’ve got the police. You’ve got the public Hollywood Police Department out there with their black and white cars. And, well, you know, for rich people, that’s not good enough and so they hire private security. If you’re really rich, you can hire a body guard that will follow you around and, you know, presumably beat up anybody that tries to hurt you. You know, I don’t need a body guard, don’t want a body guard, you know. I would really like – one of my issues is the second amendment, and I would like to be able to carry a gun. I mean, for the most part, nobody messes with me anyway, just because of the attitude that I carry.

Michael Badnarik: But, you know, my attitude would sure like to be backed up by, you know, a .45 underneath my shoulder, I’d be happy to do that. And, you know, people are really, really polite. There’s a saying that “an armed society is a polite society.” And if you’ve never gone to a gun show…I mean, you know, everybody at the gun show – I mean, you’re walking down the tables and you’re looking at the different things and you bump into somebody and it’s immediately, “Oh, excuse me, sorry.” You know, just trying to walk around; everybody’s like, you know, they don’t want you to think that I was, like, trying to violate your space or anything. You know, in my personal experience, the people that I really like – the people that I’d like to have around closest to me – not always – but usually turn out to be gun owners. It’s like they are the people who are, you know, calm and confident. They have nothing to prove, you know.

And on the other end of that spectrum, I have a personal friend – really good friend – I love this guy and we co-exist as friends because we’ve got a mutual agreement not to talk about politics. You know, we, that’s the one issue that we don’t talk about because, I mean, I can’t…my arm doesn’t reach far enough to the left. So, my car was in the shop, he picked me up for work about four days in a row, and during those four days, it’s like, you know, I think twice – three times he came, you know, picked me up and he’s just seething in the morning, you know. It’s like, “Good morning.” He goes, “Man, I almost called you last night.” “Really, what for?” He goes, “I was so pissed I wanted to come and borrow your gun and blow some son of a bitch away.” I go, “Oh, no wonder you’re afraid of everybody having a gun because you think everybody thinks the way you do.” You know, if you think that you want to go out and blow people away and you assume everybody else, then yeah, it would be pretty much a blood shed alley. Most gun owners are not like that. You know, I am not a violent guy. I’d much rather give you a hug, you know. Just, you know, don’t try to hurt me. And I want to put a real good guarantee on that by, you know, carrying my shoulder holster.

Audience Member: I have a question for Mr. Badnarik. We’ve talked about the constitution and, I guess, the original intent was to have an indirect tax to fund the government’s operations. Could you talk a little bit about how the government would fund its operations. What you’ve perceived in going in the future, of how this would work. And (b), would you be able to, as a citizen, opt out of funding a government?

Michael Badnarik: This is like one of the most common questions I heard when I was running for president of the United States. You know, it’s like, my statement as a libertarian was that we’re going to…I mean, we’re not going to lower taxes – we’re going to eliminate the IRS, you know. And when people like recover from the shock and, you know, like would catch their breath, and go, “Well, how are we going to pay for all this government if we get rid of the IRS?” And it’s a trick question. It presumes an answer, you know. If I ask you, “Do you still beat your wife?” The question presumes that, you know, either you did beat her and you’ve stopped, or you are continuing to beat her; but, either way, at one point in the past, you did beat her. Well, if you ask me that question, I’m sorry, I can’t answer the question because I’ve never been married. So, when you ask the question, “How are we going to pay for this government?” it presumes that this government is legitimate and should be paid for. The real question is, “What is it that we should be paying for in the first place?” We signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The IRS and income taxes didn’t happen until 1913, so by my arithmetic, that was well over one hundred years where we had no income tax, no IRS and the United States government had more money than it knew what to do with.

How did that happen? Well, at least for the beginning part of our country, government was limited by Article 1, Section 8, and congress wasn’t doing anything outside of that list. And so because the federal government was really small, there really wasn’t a whole lot to pay for, and so the founding fathers paid for that very limited government, using excises. And it wasn’t like, well we like your country, so you’re only going get five percent excised; but you know, this country over here doesn’t play ball with us, so we’re going to raise it to, you know, like a 50 percent import tax. You know, it was just kind of…I don’t know what the percentage was but just hypothetically, five percent for any country or foreign company that wanted to sell here – you know, you’re not collecting a lot of money, but you also don’t have a whole lot of federal government to pay for.

Audience Member: Okay, so what you’re saying is that there would be some kind of sales tax if products were being imported. But again, the question is, what if I don’t want to pay the sales tax?

Michael Badnarik: Well, the constitution identifies two types of taxes – direct taxes and indirect taxes. Direct tax is basically one that you cannot avoid, sometimes called a capitation tax. This is the tax and you can either mail it in or we’ll come and get it. The other type of tax is an indirect tax, which is very much like a tax on gasoline and your choice is, “I don’t want to pay the tax on gasoline.” Okay, ride a bicycle.

Audience Member: Okay, so, the capitation tax – are you going to collect it?

Michael Badnarik: The capitation tax? Again, there was…the way the constitution is supposed to work – Congress sits down and decides we’ve got Project X, you know, whatever it is. And again, hypothetically, we’ve got good, honest politicians representing us, you know. And we really need something – something that the people would actually want. And Project X is going to cost a million dollars. Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 says that representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned to the several states. So that…okay, how do we know how many representatives in the House, each state gets? Oh, my God, we’re going to have to count everybody in the country? So, California has ten percent of the people. So they get, you know, 10% of the representation in Congress and, you know, that would–we got 435 members, you know, 10% of that would be, you know, 43-1/2 and unfortunately they don’t let me cut a represent in half, so California gets 44, okay? What would prevent California from just like, you know, buggering up the census numbers and let’s say they manage to double the number of people who actually live in California? What would prevent them from doing that? Well, the founding fathers understood checks and balances and it says, “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned.” So when Congress, you know, approves project X for $1 million, Washington D.C. would then a send a bill for $100,000 or 10% of that to Sacramento and so Sacramento decides how they’re going to pay it. If they’ve got $100,000 in the treasury, they write a check, mail it to Washington D.C. and the people of California, you know, I don’t know, I don’t care. You know, Sacramento could also send out a postcard, you know, to the I think 30 million people in California and say, you know, “Write us a check for $0.25, you know, mail it in with a $0.45 stamp, you know, and we’ll pay it.”

Audience Member: I think…I think…I hear what you’re saying. The question I’m asking is once you decide what to tax is going to be, don’t you need an enforcement arm to collect the tax whether you call it the IRS or you call it whatever.

Michael Badnarik: Right.

Audience Member: Don’t you need an enforcement arm?

Michael Badnarik: Well, yeah.

Audience Member: …to force compliance?

Michael Badnarik: But…but presumably, again, this is a completely hypothetical situation, we have representatives that are only collecting taxes for things that we want. So there’s not going to be a real big problem with enforcement. Most people are going to be voluntary sending it in and…and yes, you–that would be a legitimate tax. Article 168 clause 1 says that Congress has the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, impose and excises for three reasons. It doesn’t give, you know, for like every April 15th or any damn thing they way. So, again, I mean I have no problem with people say, “Well, I don’t want…I don’t mind paying taxes, I just want to pay the lowest amount of tax that I can. I want to like make it real cheap.” And I say, “I don’t mind paying taxes either to a constitutionally justified government.” But that’s not what we’ve got. As soon as you get the government to start following the constitution, I’ll be, you know, a lot less upset about having to fill out at 1040 form.

Audience Member: [Indiscernible] [03:02:47 – 03:03:02]

Michael Badnarik: You know, again, whatever the project was for. I mean it would be probably pretty rare. I mean whatever the federal government is doing, they would be funding it using the…these excised taxes. So, you know, it’s kind of catch-22 question. You know, it’s like God can do everything. Really? Can God make a rock so big that even he can’t pick it up? It’s like I don’t know. I mean…and I’m happy to sit down and discuss these things, but, you know, whenever you get into the position like this, people are always, you know, creating questions that are like well, it’s hypothetical. I don’t know what would happen to be there, but…you know, if you want–if it’s a legitimate thing, the tax is going to be really low and I think that most people would, you know, voluntarily pay it and if, you know, you’re one of those hold outs that doesn’t want to give anything, eh, don’t arrest him, I’m pay it. You know, we’ve got a…a free…a free market, a capitalist society. I’m making so much money, I got you covered, don’t sweat it.

Stefan Molyneux: Next?

Speaker 5: Yeah, we have about twenty minutes left in our official schedule. So…you know, we’ll do that. You know, we’ll scheduled to end at 5:30, but…if our debaters would like to stick around, if you have the availability, I don’t want–

Stefan Molyneux: I view this an extremely pleasurable, brilliant questions, great audience. So I’m happy to stay as long as people want to stay. So…let’s get the next question.

Moderator: Great, fun. Sure. You guys? You want to point out the questions from now on.

Stefan Molyneux: Yeah, you had one. You…commi’s not cool, dude. There has to be at least one guy at every libertarian meeting who’s beard is longer than his hair. That is a fact of life and it’s good to see that you’ve filled that niche. Thank you.

Audience Member: My question is actually for Michael, I support you a lot. I got your book right here. Basically, like every question, I have a couple questions, but basically everything that’s been directed towards you, you’ve been no government, no government. Shouldn’t you be anarchist then? I mean everything you’ve been saying has been no government and…also…what exactly do you propose would be government and how exactly would you pay for it like? Like Pat Buchan says, “Oh, this country tear us not our country.” But aren’t they individuals? Shouldn’t they not be forced to pay things also? Aren’t…everyone’s an individual so just not our country, and also…our founding fathers, what gave them the right to write a document over me? Did I give them permission for that?

Michael Badnarik: Which document? The Declaration?

Audience Member: The Constitution. I didn’t give permission to anyone to write a document over me. Founding fathers or not.

Michael Badnarik: Well, nobody…nobody gave the founding fathers permission to write the Declaration of Independence. They just did it and I’ve already said that the Constitution, they didn’t have the authority to write the Constitution. They were sent to Philadelphia to modify the Articles of Confederation. They closed the doors and they basically shit canned the Articles of Confederation which I think would have been better in many cases. I mean not as good in others…and they came out, you know, I mean…everybody knows that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission, you know? And I don’t know exactly how it went, but it was probably, you know, Benjamin Franklin spilled his beer, you know, on the Articles Confederation, the ink smeared, we couldn’t read it, and you know, so we just kind of wrote down and, you know, set this…sat down and wrote this Constitution and we know it’s not what you asked us to do, but all you have to do is ratify the Constitution and all will be forgiven. You know, well, it wasn’t by the numbers, but, you know, eventually all thirteen states did ratify the constitution. One of the things that my students in my class usually stun…to discover is that, you know, if you want to burn the Constitution, if you want to shred the Bill of Rights. I don’t care. You go but the Constitution says. I said, “Well, I don’t care. Don’t tell me what the Constitution says.” Most of the time they’re telling me what some state statue says. You know, Michael, you’re telling me you got a right to keep and bear arms, but they’ve got these laws. They’ve got these 23,000 gun laws that say–I don’t care. I don’t care what it says. After Kilo…or not Kilo. Heller versus Washington D.C., a Supreme Court decision–first Supreme Court decision about the second amendment in I don’t know how many years…I got like a dozen phone calls that morning. Oh, Michael, Michael, I want to be the first one to tell you about Heller. You know, the Supreme Court voted five to four in favor of Heller. So? Well, we thought you would be excited. Why would I be excited? Well, because the Supreme Court identified the second amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, as an individual right. So, I didn’t know that before? Do I need a Supreme Court vote of five to four to let me know that I have a right to life?

Audience Member: Exactly, but why do you need government to tell you anything then? Why not let that be up to you and every example that’s come up to you, you have non-government solution to it. So why not just be non-government?

Michael Badnarik: Alright. Let me say this again. I would be happy with anarchy. You want to get all the government away and make it go away? I’m fine. I’m happy to mutually–but…but that’s not going to happen, because most of you out there don’t have the courage to pull the trigger and defend yourself. You won’t kill somebody else who’s trying to kill you. You want somebody to do the job for you. You don’t want to take the time to learn all that science, to learn all that math so that you can exercise your responsibility to teach your children. So you’re going to go–and I mean I’m not the one that’s been sending my kids to a government controlled schools for over fifty years. Parents…parents have the responsibility to teach their children all the skills and values that child needs to be a functioning adult. Parents will send their Johnny and Susie off to college, let the government and let the teachers do the reading, writing, arithmetic. Now a days–I mean in 1953, Americans were number one in math and science. We are now twenty-ninth in math and science. So even the department of education was constitutional, and it’s not, we should stop doing that because we’re going in the wrong direction and so parents, the children are graduating from high school, they are functionally illiterate, they can’t read the diploma that you just handed them and mommy and daddy have the audacity to complain that well, my child just hasn’t learned the values I wanted them to learn. Why the hell not? Because you gave that responsibility away to the government. So don’t blame me. I’m a skydiving instructor. Who do you think packs my parachute? I do.

Audience Member: But–but it’s also…it’s also a thing of principle. Just because…the war in the Middle East isn’t going to go away, do I have to support it just cause it’s not going away? No, if it’s government, I’m not going to support it regardless and I’m going…I’m going to speak on that. Just not because, oh, it’s not going away so I’m going to support why this should work. No. If…if…if the war in the Middle East isn’t going away, I’m not going to find a way to support it. I’m still going to be against it just like government. It’s…you can say it’s not going to go away, but you can still speak out against it.

Michael Badnarik: I am…I am trying to eliminate as much government as possible. I don’t know, you know, who else is running around talking about these things. I don’t know, you know, we have people here, you know, disagreeing on whether or not anybody has any rights. I’m pretty clear that I do and will physically defend those rights. You know, most people–when I teach my class, you know, I ask why do we have any government at all? Why not anarchy? Let’s just get rid of all…and they all go into seizure. It’s like…oh my God. We can’t do that. Like why not? Well, you know, and then they come up with all these reasons why they don’t want it. Well, okay, if we have to have government. Why did the founding fathers pick a constitutional republic? Why not socialism? Why not communism? And basically, again, the purpose of the government that they designed was to protect your life, your liberty and your property. Well, it’s not doing that anymore. Well, it’s not the constitution’s fault. You know, again, capitalism gets a bad name because we’ve got a really lousy economy. Well, we’ve got the really lousy economy because we’re not using capitalism. You know, the constitution is getting a bad rap, it’s like oh my God, look how terrible. We got all this, you know, evil, corrupt government, well, it’s not the constitution’s fault. Not the constitution’s job to protect you. It’s your job to protect the constitution.

You know, you only have the rights that you are willing to defend and, you know, most people are not willing to take the responsibility. You know, we were talking about moral decisions before. Well, you can only make a moral decision if you’re intelligent enough to know what is moral and, you know, excuse me, but those of you that are watching Dancing with Stars and Jerry Springer and, you know, American Idol and Lost and all these other “reality” television programs, it’s like excuse me, you know, like go to a museum, pick up a book. You know, I just cannot…I can’t feel a whole lot of sympathy for people that, you know, I mean I had people order…order copies of my book, copies of my DVD and I look at this stuff, the order blank and everything is in lower case. You know, it’s like you never learned grammar? You never learned how to spell? You know, no wonder you can’t read the constitution. So we need to…you know, we need to remove the government. You know, there is no education system. It’s an indoctrination system in this country, you know, and we’ve got like a whole lot of government to get rid of before we can talk about whether we can get rid of all of it.

Audience Member: I…this question is for Michael. This is obviously a debate on how much government is necessary. So I’m going to assume, even though I haven’t read your book, that you’re going to bring your most powerful point to bear today. Now, what I’ve heard is that…and country to Stefan, that we need people because people are not willing to…are not comfortable defending themselves. I will possibly bet that everyone here is more than willing to defend their family violently with extreme force if they have to right? Isn’t that–no one here would not defend their family right? Also…I am quite happy with the fact that everyone here would be uncomfortable using a gun. That makes anyone here who raises their hand and is happy killing somebody or is comfortable; I don’t want them by me. So I think that’s amazing that most people are not comfortable doing that. Now…with regards to, and the other point was that we’re not–that the vast majority of people are not intelligent enough…or not educated enough to…to have an anarchistic society based on the free market, but you are traveling the country trying to educate these stupid people. The thing is though, is that…are you trying to raise an army or are you trying to educate people to be happy? Do you want people to stand up against the government and die or do you want them to be happy in the here and now?

Michael Badnarik: I would love to have people happy. Most people aren’t, you know, most people don’t even know what they need or want in order to be happy. You know…having this free and open society is an ideal and there are just people…I mean…I don’t know how to answer the question without alienating certain groups. I mean…you need–I mean if you go into the ghettos, I mean there are people in the ghettos that they don’t have very much, you know, they’ve lived four generations with this welfare state, they have come to believe the sincere belief that, you know, we owe them a living. The government is obligated to…to give them food and…and, you know, education and all that stuff. Well, I mean you can want my property all you want, but you know, you’re not going to get it. Not if I can stop you and, you know, I’m happy that people think that they would be willing to defend themselves. If somebody comes up and starts choking you, I don’t think that anybody could just stand there and let it happen. People will claim that they’re like non-violent, but…you know, self preservation is going to kick and when you start gasping for air, you’re going to start at least squirming. You’re going to make it difficult for somebody to hold on to you. You know, maybe start scratching their eyes and just doing something to make the other person go away. It may be very, very bold and make everybody feel good to say that, “Oh, sure, I would use deadly force to protect myself.” Well, I was out at Front Sight gun training. These are the people who are, you know, just all Rambo, you know, these are the people who I think are most likely to physically defend themselves and I’m telling you, they won’t. You know, when it’s only a paper target, you know, they can be real macho and “Yeah, you know, I scored all these head shots.” But, you know, it’s really difficult to think that, you know, you’d have to take somebody’s life and I think that it would disturb you for a long time. Most people don’t like the reality the fact that in our society, that maybe necessary. I think the NRA reports that there are 2.5 million times a year that somebody uses a gun to defend themselves or their children. Fortunately, 90% of the time, they do that without pulling the trigger. You know, just merely displaying the gun makes the bad guy go away. Well, I’m not going to get into a great big long second amendment discussion, but…you know, if you think that you would defend yourself, oh, okay, I’m happy to let you think so, but it’s not as easy as you might think.

Audience Member: Okay. My question–

Stefan Molyneux: No, no. Sorry, I don’t know where you are all living, but you might want to move. This is like, you know, choking and people with guns. The most aggression I ever faced is politicians tell the media to say bad things about me. That’s…that’s all I face, but sorry. You had a question in the back?

Audience Member: Yeah. It seems like…we just woke up in this socialistic nightmare and we have twenty years before the only way out is going to be a collapse and I was just curious what your comments are on that idea. I know Louis Von Nevis [phonetic] [03:18:41] said that, actually mentioned it a lot, at the very end of his book on the book of socialism and I was just wondering, I heard some of Stef’s podcast where he makes the comment where, you know, you’re chains will magically dissolve and everything will go forward. It’s going to be dramatic, but blah, blah, blah.

Stefan Molyneux: I’m sorry, but what did I say? You changed the–?

Audience Member: Your chains–your chains will dissolve. You make this argument that philosophically if you present these ideas to people they will understand them and then we’ll no longer be tax slaves and it just doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen that way. It seems like…it seems like in this socialist nightmare that we’re a part of the only way out of this thing is to let the system collapse and then move forward from there, and I guess what I am asking is there anything you can do to…prepare yourself. Ron made an argument that the best defense is to surround yourself with like minds, she also makes arguments that that’s even more powerful than surrounding yourself with guns…and I guess, I’m just sort of opening up and asking…you know, suppose the scenario happens, the only way out of this collective socialist nightmare is a form of collapse. Let the system collapse, is there anything you guys are doing for yourselves personally beyond what you’re currently doing trying to make people aware to go through this stage of what’s probably going to be very dramatic?

Stefan Molyneux: Yeah, I mean the collapse is inevitable. I mean anything which mathematically cannot continue, will not continue. I mean that’s just the basic facts right? There’s no fuel in the plane, we don’t know when it’s going to hit the ground, but it’s not going to stay up. So…this is very, very crucial and critical time which is why…I mean for my, you know, like I can’t get that interested in another software release relative to I think trying to do some real good in the world in these kinds of topics. The collapse is going to happen and it’s too late. We hit the iceberg like two generations ago. The ship is going down, but I think that what we really want to do is to get people to understand why the collapse occurred. We want to get people to understand that the reason that the collapse is occurring is because of violence, because of institutionalized, organized, status predatory violence, ugly and evil coercion, because people are constantly told that volunteerism is calling all our problems. Greed of the bankers, right? It’s stupid. The bankers were as greedy fifty years ago as they are now. Why now? It’s like blaming a plane crash on gravity. So I think it’s really, really important to keep hammering on people and I know this sounds like an ugly way of doing it, but keep repeating to people as positively and emphatically as possible that the problems in the world stem from violence, right? Stem from the initiation of force and fraud and so on, and that way when things go wrong and Iran is…is…is getting a remarkable–well, not that remarkable resurgence in her popularity, because [indiscernible] [00:21:24] predicted all of this stuff with pretty eerie–well, not eerie, stunning accuracy like fifty plus years ago. So I think you want to be right. You know, that’s really, really important obviously and you want to make the reasonable predictions. You want to remind people that the world is going downhill rapidly, because of increases in violence and the violence occurs in many, many ways be it currency, income tax…debt. We all know it, right? Keep telling people there’s a gun in the room. There’s a gun in the room. There’s a gun in the room. Society is run on blood. Society is run violence. State-ism is forced. There is a gun in the room cause if people can’t see the gun in the room, then there’s people just falling over that don’t know why. Oh my God, it’s a microbe. Oh, they fainted, right? There’s a gun in the room that’s being pointed at the human race, at the human face and if we keep point it out and we keep–cause people are already accepted violence doesn’t solve problems because they don’t go for a job interview and take the guy hostage to get the job.

They already understand in their own lives that violence will not solve their problems. If we get them to understand that society runs on this kind of violence and they understand–they can make that connection, well, it doesn’t work in my life, it’s not going to work in society as a whole. We get them to make that connection then when things go bad, they’ll stop looking for the bankers and they’ll stop looking for the capitalist and they’ll stop looking for the multi-nationals and they’ll start to look at where the violence really is which is the initiation of force represented by the state. That’s the first place they’ll look. It’s not the only problem in the world of course, but when you look at societal collapse or societal problems, people have got to start seeing and drawing the conclusions between the violence that never works in their own lives and the violence that cannot work socially, but until they see that violence and have it repeatedly, patiently and positively pointed out to them there will be a great mystery and then bad people will say, “Freedom has failed.” But freedom never fails. Violence fails and we keep reminding people of that. Then when the crash occurs, they’ll know why and we can start to build something better out of what comes after.

Michael Badnarik: I agree that the economy is going to fail, the structure is going to collapse and it will always be replaced by something. Well, I said a number of times that we are in an ideological war and what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to win what we replace, you know, after the collapse. You know, I want people moving in the right direction. I want them moving in…in the direction of protecting private property and they can’t do that if they think that the government is the answer. You know, the government is not the answer, it’s the problem and so…I’m doing my best to…to change the way that people think and to get them to, you know, acknowledge the individual rights of everybody and take the personal responsibility that it’s going to require to make it happen.

Audience Member: Alright, my question is for Michael. As a former presidential candidate, obviously you wanted the job. So let’s just assume that you won.

Michael Badnarik: No, let’s not assume that I won.

Audience Member: Well, if you did win. What president–what services would you want the government to provide ideally in your utopian society? Would it be none? Would it be just defense? Would it be roads? What’s the base line?

Michael Badnarik: Article 1 Section 8, you know, when people were talking to me, it’s like well, you know, what was…you know, assuming you get elected, what’s the first thing that you would do? Well, I would eliminate the Federal Reserve, eliminate the IRS, you know, send executive orders to the IRS telling them to come to work, make a pot of coffee, start dusting off your resume, because you guys are going to be out there.

Send a letter–an executive order to the…alcohol…alcohol, tobacco and firearms, which really should be a convenient store and not a government agency. You know, and let them know that if they take a gun away from anybody that is not at that moment committing murder or robbing a bank, that I will personally, you know, see to it that they are prosecuted for violating somebody’s individual rights and I gave…I did an actual book signing at a book store. It was kind of impressive and I answered all these questions and, you know, one lady says, “You know, okay, so what are you going to do like after the second two weeks?” I said, “Well, play golf I guess.” It’s like, “Well what do you mean?” I said, “My job is to keep the government really small and after we get this list of things, there’s not really going to be a whole lot for me to do and I don’t know, probably go out and play golf. You know, do photo ops.”

You know, as president of the United States I don’t have the authority to go around and send troops to anywhere I want. So…and again, to address that first statement, no I didn’t want the job. The only question that I resented as a candidate, was well, you’re not going to win so who are you going to vote for? It’s like would you ask George Bush who he was going to vote for? You know, I’m not doing this because I want to be president. I’m doing this because I don’t want the democrats and republicans to be president. I don’t like their idea, you know, of that job. You know, I cannot vote for the democrats and republics and respect myself in the morning. So if you don’t like the way the other guy is doing the job, you just got to do it yourself. I’ve got time for about one more question. I think I have…I actually have to head back to Texas and…my ride is going to be leaving here very soon.

Moderator: Does anyone have a question specifically for Mr. Badnarik? Okay, great.

Audience Member: You’ve made it very clear you’re a minimalist and you don’t believe anarchy works realistically. So I guess my questions is that well, it goes throughout history it seems that people progressed and we’ve gotten less like totalitarian governments like…we’ve had like kings and emperors and dictators and it seems as we’ve considered life getting better, we’ve moved from absolute monarchies to constitutional to democracies and republics.

Michael Badnarik: We don’t have a constitutional democracy. You can’t find the work democracy in the Declaration, Constitution or the Bill of Rights. We are a republic and there’s a significant difference.

Audience Member: Alright, but…it appears though as we’ve moved to a…like people have more say in their government, life’s gotten better so what I’m saying is maybe it’s less government that’s made life better and made it possible to advance. So why not just shed government entirely and just argue for that rather than just trying to keep it minimal when it seems to be the problem?

Michael Badnarik: Anarchy is just not possible because most people don’t want it. People…my original metaphor was alcohol meaning you can only distil alcohol so far and you always get a little bit of water in it. You know, I think the standard of living goes down if you don’t have any government at all. I think that there…I mean it’s a necessary evil. You know, it…in…the convention in Atlanta, I said that, you know, fire’s a dangerous servant and a fearful master. We need fire to survive. We need it to warm the house. You need it to cook your food, but anytime the fire gets outside the fireplace, you know, it’s a bad fire cause it could burn the house down, and I suggest that the founding fathers understood that a little bit of government is necessary just to kind of, you know, keep everything, you know, organized rather than doing the mafia thing and let the mafia decide, you know, how to resolve the murder of your…your loved one. So…you know, the founding fathers understood that a little bit of government was necessary, but it’s got to be a place for it and they wrote the constitution.

Any government that is within the constitution is a good government. Any government that’s outside the constitution, you know, is a bad government and needs to be stomped down. So again, I’m trying to whittle the government down to the size of the constitution, specifically Article 1 Section 8. You know, once we get government, you know, actually controlled and the Constitution, the piece of paper is not going to do it, you know, I love Stefan’s metaphor. You know, I hold up that piece of paper like, you know, it’s only a piece of paper. You know, it’s only a collection of ideas and those ideas are only going to triumph if most of the people here share those ideas, but unfortunately most people think that they can just vote for the candidate that’s going to give them the most free benefits and when we operate as a republic or as a democracy instead of a republic and, you know, people don’t have the ideas. They’re ready…the girl who’s mother needed prescription drugs, you know, she was happy to have me become president and steal money from somebody else and, you know, give that money to her for her mom’s drugs. You know, people live in contradictions all the time. You know, I’m trying to, you know, protect my own life, liberty and property and in the process of doing that, you know, I’m accidently fighting for your life, liberty, and property too. You know, kind of a fringe benefit. I can’t help it.

Moderator: Okay, could we have a round of applause please. Michael Badnarik.

Michael Badnarik: I…I really want to thank everybody. I…I…I…I want to echo Stefan’s comments. I love this kind of stuff. I just eat it up. I could sit here. I tell my students that I can answer questions about the constitution longer than they can ask and they almost beat me to it last Saturday. We stayed up till about 1:30 in the morning talking about the constitution. My website is constitutionpreservation.org. My email address is there if you would like to send me a question about the constitution. It’s kind of like one of my favorite things to do out of my 200 email a day. Those are the ones I answer first. So again, thank you for your interest and actually being willing–whether you agree with me or with Stefan, just being here to listen to the debate. Thank you for giving me hope for the future that anybody even cares.

Stefan Molyneux: We’ll pick up one or two more if anybody…you know, you can stay or leave but we had one or two more questions that I will attempt and then we’ll stop talking all about Michael. Go ahead. You can leave. Sorry…and I’m sorry. I’ll try and imitate him if I can.

Audience Member: Okay.

Stefan Molyneux: I’ll sit over here.

Audience Member: Speaking about all of us being in this room caring today, actually caring about what happens with our life…what…what are things that we can do to combat apathy in so many people that we encounter every day?

Stefan Molyneux: Well, what people most want–and it’s an old argument, goes way back to Greek philosophy. What people really want is happiness. I mean it’s the one thing that we…we try to get for its own sake, right? Like we get on a bus to go somewhere, we’re buying a car to drive something, but happiness we don’t do for something else. We do it for itself. The most motivating thing in the world is joy. It’s happiness. It’s enthusiasm and that is infectious. Now, not everybody want to be happy. Some people look at a happy person and they get all kind of…you know, that bad Iran characters, you know, just they hate it or whatever, right? But for those people who really do like being happy and feel inspired at joy, I believe that the equation is something like this, right? Reason equals virtue equals happiness. Right, you have to think and you have to non-contradictory ideas. You have to have rational ideas. You have to put those into practice as best you can and nobody’s perfect, but you have to do that and what comes out the other end is happiness and the best way to get people I think interested in philosophy is to live your values as rationally, as consistently, as joyfully as possible and then people will see, dang, she’s happy, right? And if you’re happy, people want to know like if you live in a world of really overweight people and you’re relatively slender, some people will go…I hate those thin people, right? But some people will go, I like some of that and they’ll say how did she get–like if you want sell people a diet, and so if you want to get people interested in…in reason and evidence and philosophy and thinking, you have to live the values to the point where you’ve become really happy yourself and then people will be interested in how you get there and I think that’s how cause you know people don’t like the Fed, and we’ll get rid of the Fed and we’ll, you know, if you have currency and that’s stuff very interesting. It’s fascinating, right, but it’s not what people get up in the morning really wanting to do is to study the Fed or get up and read a book by Thomas Woods or Ron Paul or whatever. Great though they are and interesting though they are, what they want is to be happy, to be connected, to be in love, to be enthusiastic, to be joyful about their lives. The more you live your rational values, the happier you will become and then for those people who want to be happy, who still have that spark of enthusiasm to want to go out and get that joy in life, they’ll want to know how you did it and you’ll say, “Stef told me.” No, you’ll say…you’ll say, “I…I’ve been thinking. I’ve been really thinking and reading and I’ve lived my values and these are the values that I live and I consistently apply them and that results in happiness.” And that’s I think the best thing we can do is be happy and enthusiastic to show people empirically what the results of rational and happy values are and those who want to become happy will really want to do that. I know that’s a real hippy-dippy answer in a way, but does that make any sense at all?

Audience Member: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense actually.

Stefan Molyneux: And we can control that.

Audience Member: …advertisement.

Stefan Molyneux: Yeah, you know, I can’t…I can’t control whether there’s a Fed or not, but I can control whether I live my own values consistently and if I’m not happy, I should look back and say, “Okay, well, what did I do that…what part of my wife’s commandments did I disobey that I’ve ended up not happy? Why am I cold? I didn’t take a jacket when she tells me to.” Right, but you want to be happy and enthused–not fake, you know? You know, like some of those damn Christian pictures with the family that looks like…you know, but genuinely happy and people will really become interested and then if you talk about things like the Fed or the economy, Austrian stuff, this, that and the other, people will say, “Well, she’s happy and that’s good. So other things she say have credibility.” But a lot of libertarians are like…they’re like golem. you know, they are like…you know, evil, evil and so people are like, “Well, they might be right, but…but I don’t want to be that.” Right, so…so…so I think you want to try and be a person that people have…you have something of real value to offer called happiness and…and…and then they will be interested in how you got there and that’s I think the best way to…to…I certainly am doing a lot better since I really began to live my values which took entirely too long. Then before where I was right, but only in a really abstract way. You want to really personify I think rational happiness and then people will want to get there, because you can control that. You can’t control the Fed, right?

Stefan Molyneux: Oh, that makes me so happy. Now, I’m more right. You haven’t had your question yet. That was the other guy right?

Audience Member: Hi, Stef. I had a question for you I think…I had a question. I think somebody asked you about the American Experiment. You said it was a great stride philosophically for the founders to set up this republic or democracy or whatever. I know someone else also mentioned Han Copy [phonetic] [03:37:38] he also has another book called Democracy, The God that Failed. I don’t know if you read it or not. His basically–he points out that most people regard democracy as a procession up the ladder of civilization like a good thing, whereas you would argue that monarchy had meaning redeeming qualities over democracy such as…like in democracy there is every war is total war. People say we’re invading Iraq. We’re not. People are calling themselves [indiscernible] [03:38:06]. Monarchy doesn’t have a case. People would like go up to the castles walls and watch the people battling and have popcorn and things like that and…I was just wondering…what you thought about this.

Stefan Molyneux: The idea that a monarchy is they own the country right? So democracy nobody owns anything and everybody can prey on everyone now, but in a monarchy, the aristocratic families, they actually own the peasants, they own the land and so they have an investment in continuing that value which in democracy that you just don’t have and…and the other point, which in case you didn’t hear is that in a democracy, the war is total war, right? In the aristocracy it was like a couple hundred inbred idiots whacking each other with swords while everybody sat around and watched. War…wars were you’d never have more than a couple of thousand people, but it was the democracies that started the ten million plus genocide of the first world war and the forty million plus of the second world war. So I mean I think those are great arguments. The problem that I have with that, and I’m not claiming to be any expert on…on…his argument, but the problem I have with that is that it certainly is true that…war has become total, but I would argue it’s more a function of technology than democracy versus aristocracy. I mean if you had bombs and planes and machines guns and this, that and the other in the 15th century, they would have just borrowed and done that and killed more people that way. I think the other problem that that argument ahs is that when the aristocracy did not…almost inevitably did not raise the wealth of the average serf. I mean you look from, you know, the fall of Rome, sort of 400-500 AD till…you know, 1400 AD, you know, you got–that’s all aristocracy. No democracies in Europe at all there, and living standard are, you know, a complete catastrophe that whole time period. When you do start to get some of the liberalization of the economy which went to some degree hand in hand with democracy, what happened was you started to see a rise in living standards, because the serfs are affixed to the land like a tree, right? Whereas workers can move around and there’s some competition for them. So living standards under a democracy generally tend to go up and…living standards under a monarchy tend to be flat, if not declining. So is it the additional wealth of democracy that makes it possible to wage more total war? So is it the technology that comes out of the free market that comes from a democracy? I think that’s arguable, but I don’t think–obviously, he’s not saying that monarchy is the solution. He’s saying that there is a kind of private ownership, but I don’t it translates to any benefits for those in the middle or the bottom which in democracy it tends to if that makes any sense.

Audience Member: I think that just might be a function of there happens not to be any free markets under anarchy–not anarchy, but monarchy sorry, but…if there were free markets under monarchy, I could–I mean I think Hop would argue that we would be better off cause kings also have less incentives to tax, cause they don’t want to have rebellion cause it’s really easy to just kill a king, you know, and set a new one. Right, I mean if someone wanted to kill Obama they wouldn’t accomplish anything, because then Biden would just move right in and he doesn’t, you know, but…I also wanted to add–sorry, I also wanted to add that…even if they did have, you know, like…air jets and things like that and weapons of mass destruction, the kings had more of an incentive not to involve the populous, because the populous did according to Hop anyway, you know, they viewed the king as more something they had to tolerate and not some, you know, the king had his own business. He took care of his own affairs and things like that and they just kind of paid their due or whatever. I mean so I’m not sure what you have to say about that.

Stefan Molyneux: One of the beautiful things about being an anarchistic is you can’t answer questions like how should things be funded, right? With all due respect to Michael, it was not a clear answer right? Well, it is forced, but you don’t actually have to pay them because I’ll cover the guy who can’t right? So you don’t end up in that kind of muddy stuff. The other thing you don’t have to do as an anarchist, is you don’t have to say which of these lesser of two evils would you prefer, right? Democracy or monarchy. Which is better? It’s like, well, they both suck. They may suck in different ways to different degrees, but as an anarchist, you just have to say I don’t want to be shot either kneecap, thank you very much. If you make me chose, I guess I’ll chose one or the other based on whatever criteria I prefer. You know, do I want to live the life of a drudge, you know, like the Monty Python guy? You know, he must be a king, he hasn’t got shit all over him, right? You want to live the life of that drudgy slave but have a less of a chance of being killed in a war or do you maybe want to have a chance for a better life with an increased income, with a greater chance of being killed in a world war? Those are like…I’d love to have a society where neither of those choices exist and that really is the state of society in my opinion. So I think they are interesting questions, but you know, to me that’s like which shit pile do you want to wallow in? I say let’s go forward where we don’t have them and not worry about which one was better or worse under which circumstances, but I think they are very interesting theoretical arguments for sure.

Audience Member: Yes, hello, check, okay. Hi. My question has to do with for lack of a better term, international relations and how…an anarchist territory can’t be the world initially, it has to be part of some land mass and that there’s going to be disagreeing peoples at some kind of a porous border that disagree and they’re going to…like let’s just say it was the territory of America…that there would be some point where people said, “Oh, I’d rather be part of the nation of Canada or I’d rather be part of the nation of Mexico.” For whatever reason–

Stefan Molyneux: Sorry, in which country is anarchist in this?

Audience Member: America.

Stefan Molyneux: America is anarchistic. Okay, no, that’s fine. I’ll come there. I’ll come here if that’s the case. Okay.

Audience Member: So…my question is…also in relation to that like how the United Nations or other countries will sometimes they say don’t legitimately recognize a nation like if they have a new government and they say, “Oh, we don’t recognize that nation. We aren’t trading with them.” What I was wondering is, obviously there isn’t a government so if people were trying to trade internationally, they would be trading with private companies or individuals in that there wouldn’t be any governments trading–or would governments outside this territory trade with individuals or–

Stefan Molyneux: Well, remember governments–sorry, governments don’t trade with anyone just to be precise, right? It’s companies that trade with other companies and so–

Audience Member: Yeah, so would that dynamic and stuff like…how would an anarchist country…deal with like if governments that passed laws that said private companies can’t do business with an anarchist nation or like all these kind of questions. I’m new to this stuff so I have explored it.

Stefan Molyneux: Yeah, no, that’s a great question. There’s an old economic argument maybe you’ve heard of, maybe you haven’t which is to say America and Japan, right? It’s a question of do we, you know, you always see trade wars–tariff wars right? So you’re Japan and I’m America and you say, “You can’t import wheat.” I can’t export wheat to Japan and then I say, “Well, you can’t export rice to America.” Right, and we get into this escalating war. It’s completely ridiculous right? And I’ll give you an example. Let’s say, I as America, come up with a cure for cancer and you as Japan come up with a cure for AIDS, right? And you say, “America you can’t sell your cure for cancer in Japan.” And then would it be rational for me to say, “It’s better for my population who already have this access to this cure for cancer, if I block you from selling your cure for AIDs to my population.”

It would not be adventitious right? So the fact that one country is imposing trade barriers on another country in no way, shape or form implies that that country should then retaliate. It just means that unfortunately, the people who want to sell wheat to you are kind of out, they have to sell it somewhere else or switch crops or something and so if a foreign government says you can’t export your stuff–no government is going to say reasonably–they’re going to say to their own citizens, you can’t sell to the anarchy country, because how would they know in a way right? I mean there’s no border that we would take care of as an anarchy country and so…you would lose out to some degree not being able to trade into a status society, but you would still be way better off letting the status society trade with you and just trade internally for the things that you weren’t allowed to export. It would still be vastly beneficial to the anarchy society, but not reliant on the foreign government to allow us to trade outside. I mean we still get the advantage of them trading with us. If that makes any sense. The last question maybe or are we completely…did we completely run dry? Oh, does the camera person have a question? Why is your forehead so shiny?

Audience Member: I just have a…a general question I guess. In your definition, what is an anarchist?

Stefan Molyneux: A bad person, right. Evil. Again, I get the reptile head right? Well, an anarchist, obviously there’s many, many different definitions of it. That’s why I sort of said the anarchocapitalist variety. I certainly–and I think the basic requirements of an anarchist is to recognize the legitimatacy of the state and I think that most anarchists would not recognize the…the political or moral legitimaticy of the state. Anarchists certainly do…respect authority. As Buchan said and somebody has this on my forum, he said, “What does it mean to say I reject all authority when it comes to dealing with a shoemaker? I respect his authority with regard to the shoes.” So it’s not a rejection of authority, it is a rejection of the moral authority of organizational violence. Now, there’s a lot of complicated nonsense about anarchy like people say, “Well, we shouldn’t have property, and you know, we’re an anarchosocialist and so on.” I don’t like any of that stuff fundamentally, because it seems to me that if you want to be an anarchosocialist, an anarchocapitalist is your best friend, because you don’t have to exercise property rights. It’s optional, right? If somebody steals my car, I don’t even have to report it. I can just say, “Hey, it went to the collective good and who ever needs it can use it and fantastic.” In a free society, if you want to set up some hippy-dippy, flesh pit, bong smoking whatever house of infinite carnal knowledge, you can do all of that. You can all get together and have group hugs and spread whatever bacteria you want back and forth, but you can have that collective ownership. You cannot exercise property rights. You can collectively work the land. You can, you know, raise naked children, whatever you want, right? And there’s no way that free society, I mean maybe you should get involved with the protection of children maybe, but it is not going to say you have to exercise your property rights. An anarchosocialist society to me could only exist if it specifically opposes the exercise of property rights. Now, what agency is going to propose–is going to oppose the exercise of property rights? It would have to be an agency that has some sort of compulsion, right, i.e. I want to keep this, no, you can’t, because you’re not allowed to keep anything, right? And so you simply have a big contradiction there, right, because you have to have–you’re suppose to have no authority, but in order to enforce nobody exercising property rights, you have to have some authority.

So I think that whole system just doesn’t work at all. I think one of the reasons why anarchosocialists don’t like anarchocapitalism is that they know in a free society, very few people are going to end up in their hippy-dippy, you know, commune farm nonsense right? Cause people are going to go like, “Man, I got to get something done with my life. I got to go do something and be in society and maybe gather together some capital and air conditioning is nice and I like my food irradiated perhaps. I like fluoride, I like to be able to visit a dentist.” Like all those kinds of things right? Like the second generation Amish, you know, it thins out a little bit and I think they know that if they’re in a free society and they have to in a sense compete with a private property society, that they’re just not going to be able to sustain themselves and that’s why I think they want to create this…you know, the whole country is a hippy commune or whatever, and I’m being a little disrespectful to the views, but I think that’s the major differences. You have to reject the institutional authority of violence and after that, I would say you have to logically sustain property rights, but not everyone agrees. Alright. We can do two more.

Moderator: Okay. Two more, okay, two more questions. Coming all the way over here.

Stefan Molyneux: Oh, we said two. You can’t see behind can you? No, no, sorry. We’re going to take this lady’s. Just teasing you, go, okay, no go. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, not you. Look it’s chaos, it’s anarchy right now.

Audience Member: Just curious, in an anarchist society, how would you think to deal with child abuse? I mean a child obviously can’t go to an independent agency and say my, you know, my rights are being taken away from me by my parents.

Stefan Molyneux: Right. No, I mean that’s–I think that really is and we always wait to the end to be essential questions, right? Because you cannot have a peaceful and free society where a significant proportion of children are mistreated and unfortunately, a significant proportion of children are mistreated even in the current society and we have one of the more enlightened societies with regards to the protection of children. So you simply can’t have a free society if a lot of people are coming in are hyper aggressive, damaged, unable to concentrate and so on from difficult households. I think that…parents are going to want to have legal protections for their children’s actions. I think that’s going to be pretty basic right? Cause if your child goes and I don’t know, throws a rock through someone’s window, you’re going to want to have some kind of protection. You’re also going to need to have medical…insurance or some kind of medical protection for your child. If you send your child to school, which most people will in a free society cause school–I mean homeschooling is a desperate measure based on how bad the schools are, right? But in a free society, schools will be incredibly well tuned towards the maximum capacity of teaching children. So if you want to go to school, you’re going to need to have some sort of immuno protection for your child, immunizations, whatever it is it’s going to be. So children won’t make the contracts themselves, but children cannot escape–parents can’t escape the necessity of having their children in some kind of social net of…of…of contracts and obligations.

Now, DROs are going to want to minimize as much as possible, how expensive it’s going to be to insure children, right? Like everyone right? Like if you’re a nonsmoker, you get better rates from the insurance company and so DROs are going to say, “Look, if you want to save as much as humanly possible on your child’s insurance which you’re going to need to have your children function in society. We’ve done all the research, we’ve compared all the possible parenting methods, you know, pay us $200 for a parenting class or $2000 for a parenting class and you will save, you know, $300 a month on your child’s insurance, because we know that people who parent this, this, this, and this way and we’ve got the evidence and it’s empirical and it’s scientific and it’s proven, that this is the best way to parent children so that they’re peaceful, they’re nonviolent, they’re not, you know, poking other kids with sticks and so on and they’re less stressful, they’re less likely to get sick and so on.”

And so you have agency which is the state which has nothing but status, especially no interest in protecting the rights of children other than of course some dedicated individuals like the super heroes of the child service agency, but with DROs who want to…to…to make it as cheap as humanly possible to insure the health and safety of children, they’re going to do the research to figure out what kind of parenting best keeps children peaceful and best allows them to accelerate their education, gives them the best social schools, produces the fewest bullies and so on, and so they will offer huge incentives for parents to get involved in the styles of parenting that are most effective and they may be different for different cultures and different for different types of children and so on, but there will be very, very strong efforts minimize the cost–the destructive cost children have in society, because of course children who go wrong, I mean not only are very expensive when they’re young, but I mean the social cost is huge. Now, at the moment it’s borne by tax payers who can’t do anything about it, but you can also say as a DRO, you know, when your kid turns eighteen, if you followed this particular plan, we will also insure them at half price and so it’s a huge net savings. Is it going to be perfect? Of course not, there’s going to be people living the woods who beat their kids and that’s terrible, but you know, we’re trying to put a system in place where things can be as productive and positive as possible and I think–that’s a real rough sketch. There’s more about that in the book, but does that make any sense about how I think it could be more proactively handled?

Audience Member: Yeah, but are you saying then that you would force people to get insurance for their children?

Stefan Molyneux: No, no, no. It’s not forcing.

Audience Member: Okay.

Stefan Molyneux: It’s not forced, right? Like so for instance, I mean I know there’s debate about immunizations, but we got Isabella immunized and we want to send her to a private school because public schools suck and I’m not going to try to reinvent educating children. At least–I mean some people do and I just don’t think it’s right for me, and they have said, “You know, we want her immunization records in order to attend–when she comes to attend the school.” They’re not forcing me to get her immunized, but if I want to send her there, then I have to get her immunized and they have every right to request that, right? So, nobody’s forcing parents to do anything, right, but what they are saying is that if you want us to extend protection to your child for damage, for health care, for whatever, then you need to–then you can pay full price and you don’t have to take any parenting courses, right, but if you want to save half price or 75% then…take these parenting courses and it will be a good investment for you. It’s like, you know, go for your driver’s license, if you’ve taken particular courses, you can get reductions on your insurance and if you haven’t pay full price. So it’s not forcing anyone. There’s just valences of incentives if that makes sense. I think there was…there was a gentleman at the back and then maybe–he seemed quite eager. That was a great question though by the way. I’m sorry. Very important.

Audience Member: I have a…one big question to ask. I don’t quite understand how you would be able to maintain anarchy, because I kind of really think that you’d always have your…your getting back to Michael Corelone [phonetic] [03:56:40] idea that there will be groups that will pop up and they will try to control other groups of people violently and these groups can spread, they can get funding from other countries…they could take on–they can get…they can be self sufficient, have their own corporations and just expand and be a government that, you know, that minimalistic government that, you know, Michael was talking about.

Stefan Molyneux: Well…sorry, were you here? Cause this question came up once before. Was it that my answer sucked for you or you weren’t here? I mean either one is fine, I’m just wondering which one it was.

Audience Member: I may have missed it…but I may have not understood, you know, your answer. There was a question about, you know, what constitutes a government and I–maybe I didn’t quite get a clear answer to that…but I do–I totally can see how a group of people can come in and start a gang–a gang or just like how’s the government’s a gang itself. They would start their…their own gang and try to control people. You know, right now we have gangs because of, you know, drugs are illegal, but…but if drugs weren’t illegal, there would be no gangs, but there would still also be the…the trafficking of people in one way or the other making them work as serfs if you will. How do you prevent, you know, this from happening. You’re talking about these…these organizations, these insurance companies if you will…kind of…making you work in society in a particular way that’s constructive to everybody, but I also think that…at some point, if I do something bad and I get turned away from all these insurance companies, there’s always going to be another insurance company. You know, I don’t care what you did in the past, you know, come on in, you know, you can order food here.

Stefan Molyneux: Sure, now let me just take that last scenario. I did answer the first one earlier. You can look at the book and again you may not agree with everything I’m saying. I’m sure you won’t, right, cause you’re a thinking person and I’m certainly not going to say I’ve got everything right, but let me just deal with that last point and then if you’re not satisfied with what’s in Practical Anarchy just give me a shout or, you know, come by the Sunday show and we’ll talk more. So the issue and it’s a great, great, great point that you raise. The issue is some guy gets kicked out of a DRO because he’s a total jerk or something, right? He’s just a nasty guy that doesn’t keep his contract and so there’s going to be some other lower tier, you know, trailer park DRO who’s going to come forth and say, “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, right, I mean I’ll insure you no problem.” And there will be that aspect of things for sure, but remember DROs are only valuable to the degree with which other DROs will work with the, right? So I can print my own currency nobody cares right, because no…no store will accept it. Right, I could come up with a credit card that one model railroad store in Nunivak accepts and nobody’s going to…cause it’s only useful in one store, you might as well use cash, right? So…so…so it’s the interoperability of a cooperation of the DROs that makes it…that makes them valuable and so if I have some low rent DRO that sidles up to criminals and says, “I’ll represent you,” no other DRO was going to want to business with me, why? Cause there’s no point having the punishment called ostracism if you then cooperate with the DROs who pick the ostracized people. Then it’s not punishment at all and I would not be able to sell that to my customers saying, “Don’t worry ostracize people who…who don’t…fulfill their contracts and then now do it.” People would just stop using me as a DRO and I would go out of business. So I have to have some standards of behavior and interoperability and all DROs would have the same incentive and so if you have some DRO that will pick up criminals or whatever and try to insure them, the problem is no other DROs will deal with them and so they’re kind of useful and they would just have to be enormously expensive, because no other DROs–so they would have to duplicate everything that all the other DROs were doing. So I don’t see how that could practically work just because you have to have that interoperability for DROs to work. I have to be able to take my DRO money from…Philadelphia and go to Scranton or to Columbus or whatever and use it there too. If those DROs don’t recognize that DRO, it’s not really worth anything to me, right? So there has to be this interoperability for them to be a value at all and those criminals who…who…who are ostracized, the DROs who pick them up will themselves be ostracized and therefore won’t have any value to the people that they’re representing. Does that make any sense? It is a good answer. One, yay!

Stefan Molyneux: I did my personal best today. One good answer, beautiful. I should stop now. Oh, wait you had one more. Here, I’ll just give you the mic.

Speaker 1: Thank you…personally, I’d like to say your patience for our questions or sometimes not questions is awesome. So as an anarchist trying to live my principles…sometimes I find it overwhelm…I feel overwhelmed by the fact I’m living in a world that’s so embedded with bedizen and our economic and social realms and here…just turned college grad and trying to move out of the house and…having a trouble getting a job, the only job I could get was a for a company that has lots of government contracts and I mean I’m trying to switch so an environment that’s better suited for me, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes I feel a little guilty about this company that I work for. What advice do you offer for…how you draw the line or for what you find acceptable or what you resist? Thank you.

Speaker 1: That’s good. An easy question at the end. That’s great. Young anarchist. Oh, you’re so screwed. Wait until you can get a podcast and then come out as an anarchist. No, I’m kidding. No, that’s a great question. So the question is you graduated from school, look I took government contracts when I was an entrepreneur and I was already a staunch objectivitist and anarchist and this and that. So…you did not create the world that you live it. Right, obviously if you’d had the choice, you would not had the status creditations infesting and infecting the society that you live in. You have to make your way in the world as it is, right? We can’t live in the future, we can’t crawl into the books of an anarchic blueprint and live there. Fun though as it would be to try.

Right, so you have inherited the world from people who unfortunately just have not done the work necessary to clarify and work to eliminate the violence that is inherent in the society that we live in. That’s not your fault. Obviously, right, it’s not your fault that you have inherited this society where you can’t be a purist right? I can’t–I mean people come to me and they say you’re so…and you against the government and you have a podcast. No, you partnered with the Department of Defense in ’60s.

Yeah, okay, so what? I’m suppose to just like not breathe air because…you know, the government defined the standards for air conditioning or something? I’m not going to be that kind of purist, because that is to take on the sins of the whole world and say, “I’m completely responsible for them and I can’t breathe and I can’t live and I can’t eat food, because government farmers–or because farmers get government subsidies and I can’t drive on the road because the government has produced the road and the busses and stuff.” Like you can’t–you couldn’t do anything. Anything in life and that to me…that can’t be right.

You know, like I’m not sure exactly all the reasonings why, but just standing there not consuming oxygen until you die can’t be the only way to live morally in society. That’s self destruct–and what kind of world would that leave to people if we don’t have enough to eat and we don’t have a way of getting access to the internet or buying books, of learning, of reaching out to other people, of…of washing, you know? I’m an anarchist, you know, I haven’t bathed in four months because the government supplies the water. It’s like…you could be right, but I don’t want to find out right? No, you got to shave, you got to, you know, whatever right? I mean you’ve got to live in…in…in the society that you find yourself in. Like a, you know, if we’re born doctors and it’s a time of plaque, we just do what we can. I mean, yeah, we risk–we take risks and…and…and so on.

I would say very much this is what I found with my professional life, I made lots of mistakes this way and hopefully a few of my scars will give you some useful tips. I would not…I would not bring…political, voluntary anarchism into my conversations about government contracts at work. It’s just…you can do it, right, but…you know…it’s going to be really, really tough and I think that that’s not productive. Like I think you need to eat, you need to educate yourself, you need to live a happy life within the confines of the society that you live in.

I think that you need to dedicate yourself not to the sort of fruitless opposition of abstract thing that you can’t control, but really focusing on living as many of your values as possible within your own sphere of influence, right? Within your own personal relationships. Professional relationships, you’re not paid to be an anarchist at work, right? You are paid to be…alright, so you do help desk at work, fantastic. So they’re paying you for help desk. Anarchy not translated to help desk. So…it’s not like now that I’ve solved your software problem, let me tell you about the society that you live in–there’s another guy in the room. Like…but they’re paying you–that was my first podcast, I never published it.

But they’re paying you for your help desk right? So you provide the help desk service and they’re not paying you for anarchism. If you can find a job per tell that’s advertising about anarchism, fantastic, go to town. Right? It’s a hard road, but it’s well worth it if you can work towards that, but be professional in your job and do that which you’re paid for, right? I mean if my doctor was against the healthcare system, I’d still want them to write me a prescription, right? I don’t want them to lecture me about the healthcare system and send me out with my infection intact right? I want them to do their job and their job is not to talk to me about anarchism and neither is your job at work…yeah, some of your paycheck is going to come from government, but there’s no way to escape that unless you want to go live buried out in the woods.

In which case we abandon the world to the bad people, right? If all the good people say, well, I have to be so pure that I can’t function in society, we just leave the future, the children and the world to the worst people in the world who don’t give a crap about integrity and virtue, right? So we fight the tough, ambiguous fight.

There’s a certain amount of what you can live with that no one can tell you right? I mean there maybe some government contract that comes up where you’re just like oh, man, I can’t do it and no one can tell you whether or when that occurs and I don’t think there’s any objective line, I really don’t. Okay, maybe…front line culture…I don’t know, right? But…but…you just have to be sensitive to how your processing stuff. Right, there’s only a certain amount of stuff we can watch before we just go…you know, you just can’t do it anymore, right? But I would certainly not create some abstract rule that says I can’t do any job whether it’s government money ever involved cause then you can’t have any job at all, right? If you’re a whaler, some guy might be an IRS agent, but you don’t know. You then become paranoid, right?

So I wouldn’t…I would say it’s more of a guy sense and a gut feel, but I think the thing–the thing as I was saying to the lady before…who didn’t leave, but nats? Was that right? No, I’m just kidding. Sorry, just looked like you were, “Huh?” But so as I was saying before, you know, don’t…don’t let the evils of the world and institutionalized violence of society bring down your spirit, right? Because it is in the indomitable will and joy of our spirit that we are going to lead human beings to a higher place.

You know, if we’re going to be those kind of lighthouse leaders who like help people in from the far seas of state-ism, we have to have that kind of joyful, happy integrity. Don’t let the evils that have accumulated through history, that you’re not all responsible for, crack and break down your joyful spirit and your pursuit of a better world and an elevated species, right? That stuff doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that bad people made shitty decisions in the past, right? That doesn’t cling to us. That doesn’t cling to our souls. We stand as tall and as firm and as proud as we can without taking responsibility for the sins of the past, right? State-ism is Catholicism, right? You just have to reject it. There’s no original sin that way, right?

We struggle to do the very best that we can for the sake of joy not for the sake of changing the world, because you can’t change the world without joy. You aim at changing the world, you get frustrated and miserable and don’t change anything except your own level of happiness for the worst, right? So I would stand tall with the joy and integrity of…of the true and the virtue that you have. Don’t let the slings and crap of state-ism that you didn’t event and not responsible for stick to you. Be sensitive to what you can take emotionally and be aware of where it just becomes too unpleasant and, you know, work to figure out that within yourself and change what you need to be, but the whole purpose of…of evil is to make good people feel guilty for breathing, right, and I just don’t think we have to feel that way at all. We have an incredible gift to bring to the world, the gift of truth and of reason and of evidence and of virtue and of happiness and of peace, right? And we have the key that unlocks a really golden and beautiful future and if we feel stained by the sins of the past to the point where we become ashamed of being the most reasonable and I believe the most virtuous people around, we’re just surrendering to the darkness a light that we just don’t have to. So I hope that gives you some…sense of at least how I approach it and that was a great, great question.

Speaker 2: Alright, thank you very much, Stefan, for coming out here to Philadelphia. We greatly appreciate it.

Stefan Molyneux: Thank you.

Speaker 2: Just another reminder, thank you everyone for coming and also, just please, please if you can donate I really ask that you would…I appreciate it and thanks for coming.

Thank You from the Future! Stefan Molyneux speaks at the 2011 Porcupine Freedom Festival

2011-07-05T17:39:00Z

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Do you guys want a short speech? I mean I know it's kind of late, I can either do it tonight or I can do it for the closing ceremony...

[crowd: "speech, speech”]

Speech? Speech? OK, all right... I feel loose, babies!

All right - so one of the things that I’ve felt my whole life is that - gratitude from the culture that we live in can sometimes be a little – short, you know, and one of the things that I think is that we are all philosophers. Everybody who works from first principles, everyone who talks about nonviolence, we all are philosophers - and the one thing that's very true about philosophers is that they don’t get a lot of 'sugar,' they don't get a lot of love in their own time. [woman yells] It’s true - well OK, except for you, absolutely – you’re handing it out like candy and that's nice!

But we don't get a lot of that juice, don't get a lot of that love. Socrates got some hemlock, Spinoza was kicked out of his – everywhere… I mean - Ayn Rand, even now after being right for sixty years in a row, she still gets spat on by the main culture, so it is hard! Wouldn’t you say? I mean look, we've all faced it, you’ve all had difficulties at work, you’ve had difficulties in your relationships because of your commitment to ideals. That’s a hard thing to live with.

So – the one place that I go, when I sort of need to feel replenished and strengthened – I mean we have each other, for those of you who have people around (this is the beautiful thing about what's happening here) - but I kind of go into the future in my mind, because I think the world are trying to build, the world that we want to create, the world that we’re laying the foundations for that we may never live to see… I mean, I don't think that we’ll live to see it, maybe those of you who had great sex last night, there’s an egg and a sperm in there who may live to see it - maybe - but I don't think we’re going to live to see exactly the kind of world that we want - a world of statelessness, a world without war, a world without incarceration, a world without violence… I don't think we’re going to live to see it – but that's all the more heroic I think for us to try to build it even though we’re not going to live to see it.

So I go to the future. I think - I am so happy to live in a world without slavery in the way that it used to exist – I’m so happy to live in that world - and the first people who started talking about there being no slavery, were like us… And the first people who started talking about “women should be equal to men” were kind of like us, and they faced a lot of opposition, they faced a lot of skepticism – I mean the first guy who came up and said, “Blacks should be equal to whites,” was not a popular man or woman, and he faced a lot of opposition from everyone around him and the general culture spat on him a lot, and people thought he was crazy or mad or evil or bad - but we all take that stuff for granted now, and it's so impossible - you know - like moral change in the world, you stand below it and it looks like a cliff, it’s so high, a mountain so high that you can't get over it, you can get through it, you feel like you’re going to beat your head against the wall for the rest of your life and never make a dent…

But then a weird thing happens when the change occurs – when people get over that wall or they walk through that wall and then they look back, and it’s like there’s nothing there! It’s really strange…

Before the end of slavery, people said (and we’ve all heard these arguments before, right?) - people said: “You know, there’s never been a society without slavery, so… You point to me a society without slavery - you can't do it! You point to me a society where there’s equality for women, you can do it! You point to me a society where there is no government, and you can’t do it!” That’s all we hear!

[cheers, applause]

Well because we can see it, it will be here! It will be here!

[cheers, applause]

Because the vision is everything!

Without the vision there is no moral growth. We can't get over that mountain unless we see it so passionately and so powerfully that we can walk through that wall as if it is not even there – and then people will see that it isn’t there – that the barrier is only in the mind!

So if you go to the future - which is where I go to - I think of the people, 100 years, 150 years from now, and they’re going to look back at this gathering… Can you imagine how they’re going to look back at this gathering?

“So those crazy motherf*ckers, what the hell were they thinking? I mean - they have couple of hundred people and a microphone… Some drinks… And what are they looking at? They’re looking at nuclear weapons and prison systems and aircraft carriers and police and military… What are they thinking? What are they thinking, those crazy brave motherf*ckers – what are they thinking? How can they imagine taking it on? How could they imagine taking it on?”

[cheers, applause]

But the imagination is everything…

And they look back to us, and they're gonna say - and this is what you need to hear, and this is what you need to remember, coming down from the future:

“THANK YOU!”

[cheers, applause]

This is what we need to remember every morning when it gets hard, when we get tired, when we read the newspaper, and it’s like: nothing is f*cking changing… We need to remember that rolling down from the future, from the people who will live in the world that we’re only beginning to build - they are saying (as we say to everyone who came before us who built the world that we love to live in):

“THANK YOU, EVERYBODY!”

[cheers, applause]

[interruption from host]

You want me to keep going, or should I stop?

[cheers, applause]

All right. So I’m going to tell you what I think they’re going to thank you for – and you need to remember this, because this is what I see... They’re going to thank you - the future is going to thank you - for your courage! Your courage – it is hard, hard, hard work – raising the moral standards of mankind is a hard f*cking slog, and it takes a lot of courage! It takes a lot of courage, because there's a lot of criticism, there's a lot of misunderstanding, there's a lot of fear that we face in those around us. When we shake the foundations of the moral universe that people live in, they freak out! They get frightened, they attack - and it takes a lot of courage, you know – we are all wired for social approval. We all want social approval, because if you didn't have social approval in the Stone Age, you couldn't even survive.

Studies have shown, you know, that people who experience social disapproval, it's almost indistinguishable from physical pain, within the brain.

That's what I mean by courage: that we have to fight against the natural conformity of our biological natures, to go against the tribe, against our immediate short-term interests for the sake of a beautiful world to come. That takes courage, and people are going to say, looking down through the lens of time, to this few, we few, we happy f*cking few:

“THANK YOU FOR YOUR COURAGE! EVERYBODY WHO STANDS WITH US! THANK YOU FOR BUILDING THIS WORLD THAT WE LOVE!!"

[cheers, applause]

They're gonna say - I think, they're gonna say, "Thank you, for your love. For your love."

Because, you know, there's a cheap kind of love in the world... And the cheap kind of love is like - welfare from the government. "Oh, there's poor people! Let's shovel some money at them", "Oh, there's some people we think should be better educated, let's shovel some schools at them." That's cheap love. That is pseudo-love. That is fake love.

The REAL love, is to stand for principles of non-violence, voluntary cooperation, and to love humanity enough, to KNOW, that if we set humanity free, the world can be BEAUTIFUL, the world can be a paradise, the world can be utopia!

WE DON'T NEED THE F*CKING GUNS TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE! THE GUNS WILL MAKE IT WORSE, ALWAYS!

[cheers, applause]

People think that if you stop pointing guns at people, everything gets worse. But we know; we have a love of humanity, a trust in the soul and nature of man, that if we put down the guns, humanity… rises.

People think you put down the guns, humanity attacks. No! You put down the guns, people are liberated. They come up. They flower! Into beautiful, peaceful, wonderful communities.

Like this – like this!

So, they will say, "Thank you, for your true love of humanity enough to trust that if you put down the weapons, everybody will be beautiful."

It's true! They will thank us for our integrity. They will thank you for your integrity. That even though it's hard, that even though you face criticisms, even though people will REJECT you for what it is you're doing, that you're still holding true to the ideals of the north star... of non-aggression!

So simple! So simple! Stop using violence to get things done. It's so simple and so hard! They will thank us for our integrity!

[cheers, applause]

Because - what we're doing, is brick by brick. So like brick by brick, we're just puttin' down these bricks. And the bricks are every time we have a conversation, every time we send someone to material that is valuable, every time we stand up to a bully, every time we stand up to an abuser, every time we help somebody who's been ground down - help them rediscover their humanity.

These are little “brick-by-bricks.” It's hard to see the whole cathedral of the future, that we're building. But it is a beautiful place that we are building. And, I would love - wouldn't you love - to just go forward 150 years, or a 100 years, and just SEE; SEE this world?

I see it in my mind's eye, it's so clear, I really do. I really do. A world - ah, dammit! A world without WAR! The eternal dream of humanity! Without WAR! Because we KNOW - we KNOW FOR A FACT - those of us who understand all of this (and everybody in this room is in that number) – we know that when you have no state, you have no war.

[cheers, applause]

A world without prisons. A world without prisons! A world where people can interact in a peaceful way without fear of jail. A world where you can just walk up to a f*ckin' plane... and get on it! A plane!

[cheers, applause]

A world where the money in your pocket today, is gonna be the money in your pocket tomorrow, and not some f*ckin' toilet paper you're embarrassed about!

[cheers, applause]

So, I just wanted to point that out. This is something that I use. Because people sort of say to me, "Well, how can you remain so optimistic?" And, it's because I don't view the world around me as the standard of value that I'm bringing to the world. Because people, they don't want to be confronted with this stuff. Even if society slides into an ultimate shit-hole, they still don't want to be reminded of this stuff. It's like everyone would rather just go into that shit-hole, rather than wake up and see the basic reality of the society that they live in!

But I go - and I hope that you'll think about doing it too - I go to the future. And I think of everyone that I look back at, and admire, who has helped to build a world where what we're doing is even POSSIBLE! That's an incredible advancement, that what we're doing is even possible!

And so, think about the people in the future. The people whose peaceful, sunlit, happy, STATELESS, GUNLESS WORLD - and I mean "gunless" in terms of the STATIST guns - the world that we're building for these people, which we won't get to LIVE in, but is gonna be the most beautiful thing in the world, and it will never, ever go back! It will NEVER go back! We're not gonna have slavery back in the way that it used to be! Women are never gonna be subjugated in the way that they used to be, and once we get rid of the STATE, IT'S DONE!! FOREVER!!

[cheers, applause]

This shit is not going to regrow! It is not going to come back! That's how IMPORTANT what it is we're doing! We're putting a NAIL in the COFFIN, a STAKE in the HEART of the greatest vampiric predator the world has ever known! That TAKES GUTS, AND WE'VE GOT IT!!!

[cheers, applause]

And, this fight has been fought for thousands of years. But it is not gonna be thousands of years to come, because we're all together, we all know each other, we can all communicate with each other, the information can go out in a way that has never occurred before.

It took thousands of years to get here, but it's only dozens more to go. I genuinely believe that. And, for those of us who have kids, we know how important it is that we build a world that they can live in without the fears that we all grew up with; the fears of nuclear war, the fears of environmental depredations, so funded and driven by the state.

And this has been going on for a long time, this battle. We have an incredible propulsion mechanism in the communities, and the communications technology that we have at the moment, which is an incredible gift for us, as liberty activists.

I'm just gonna finish up by reminding you to visit the future, and to get the accolades that roll down from the future to us. They will! They will! Everybody in this room is gonna have a f*ckin' FREE PRIVATE SCHOOL NAMED AFTER THEM IN THE FUTURE!

[cheers, applause]

So, I'm going to just end up by saying that - yeah, this battle's been going on for a long time. And it is a battle of good versus evil, there's no doubt about it. And - I'm going to close with a line from one of my favorite speeches in a movie - Morpheus:

"It has been a long time coming, but we are going to win. Because WE ARE STILL HERE!!!!”

[cheers, applause]

Against the Gods?

2011-06-30T02:32:00Z

Against the Gods?

By Stefan Molyneux, MA

Host, Freedomain Radio

Introduction

While strolling through the sunny woods one day, you spy a man slithering through the undergrowth, heavily camouflaged and gripping a bow and arrow.

“What are you hunting?” you ask.

“Dragons!” hisses the man proudly.

You frown. “Dragons? But dragons don’t exist!”

The man nods emphatically. “I completely agree with you! There ain’t no such thing as dragons. And I’m a-gonna shoot me one!” He raises his bow and arrow, narrows his eyes and glares through the trees, hungry to target the non-existent.

At this point, you would surely take a series of slow and steady steps backwards, aiming to put some safer distance between you and a deranged man wielding a bow and arrow.

This is one of the many, many challenges of atheism.

“Atheism” is a terrible word on many levels.

The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, defines atheism as:

“Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a god.”

To any modern, rational thinker, this is an entirely unsatisfactory definition – which is exactly what you expect from a word originally defined by theists.

First of all, the OED definition implies that there is something personal in the rational rejection of a god. “Denial” is a word associated with defensive rejections of reality, such as Holocaust denier, climate change denier – or the generic avoidance of unpalatable emotional truths: “He’s in denial about her drinking.”

Compare the above definition to this one:

“Atheism: The acceptance of the non-existence of imaginary entities such as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Bronze Age sky ghosts.”

The difference should be clear.

Also, why is the phrase “a god” used? If I say that supernatural beings such as leprechauns do not exist, why would anyone imagine that I only disbelieved in a single leprechaun named “Bob”?

Rational thinkers have nothing against any particular deity – any more than a mathematician dislikes in particular the proposition that two and two make five. If such a mathematician existed, and loudly proclaimed his opposition to that particular equation, and founded a society called “against two and two making five,” he would be considered beyond eccentric, and it would be generally understood that he had utterly failed to grasp the most basic principles of mathematics.

A thinker cannot logically differentiate the nonexistence of a deity from the nonexistence of any other thing which does not exist. Principles by definition apply in general, rather than in particular, just as a method of long division cannot only apply to one particular combination of numbers.

The criteria for existence versus nonexistence is a general standard, which applies equally to rocks, electricity, electrons, ghosts, dreams, square circles, concepts and unicorns. It cannot rationally focus its energies on only one entity – or even one category – otherwise it becomes mere prejudice, rather than the dispassionate application of a general principle.

Defining “atheism” as being “against the gods” is thus a misnomer, since it takes a merely accidental subset of a larger set of principles and turns it into an arbitrary principle itself. There is no such thing as being “against the existence of gods,” any more than there is such a thing as being “anti-leprechaun.” In fact, to say that you are against one leprechaun in particular is to imply that you believe in leprechauns overall, but find one of them in particular somehow offensive.

We cannot rationally be “against gods,” just as we cannot be “against” square circles, or hostile to the idea of gravity in the absence of mass, or offended by the idea that human beings can live unaided on the surface of the sun. These propositions are simply false, according to reason and evidence, and to create a second category of particular offense “against the gods” is irrational – and, fittingly enough, offensive, due to the implied prejudice.

Rational thinkers accept standards of existence that at least involve logical consistency – and with any luck, empirical evidence. It is the first standard that beliefs in gods fail and – as a result, there is little point looking for the second.

The word “atheist” also indicates that belief in gods is the standard, and atheism is the exception – just as “sane” is the standard, and “insane” is the exception. This is a mere scrap of sophistic propaganda, since all theists are almost complete atheists, in that they do not believe in the vast majority of man’s gods. The rejection of gods is the default position; the acceptance of a deity remains extremely rare, though not as rare as atheists would like.

The Existence of Gods

Two main errors are generally made when examining the existence of gods.

The first is to ignore the basic fact that gods cannot logically exist, and the second is to accept such logical impossibilities, but to create some imaginary realm where gods may exist. Broadly speaking, the first error is made by theists, who argue that gods do exist, and the second by agnostics, who argue that they may exist.

In the first instance, gods are viewed as similar to unicorns. If we define a unicorn as a horse with a horn on its head, we cannot logically say that such a creature can never exist. There may be such a being on some other planet, or in some undiscovered place in this world, or perhaps a mutation may arise at some point in the future which pushes a horn out of the forehead of a standard-issue horse.

The concept of a horse with a horn on its head is not logically self-contradictory – and thus such a being may exist, and it would be foolish to state otherwise.

In the same way, life forms based on silicon rather than carbon may exist somewhere in the universe – such beings are not logically self-contradictory, and so their existence cannot be rationally eliminated.

However, if I define a unicorn as a horse with a horn on its head that can fly through interstellar space, go backwards through time powered by its magical rainbow tail, and which existed prior to the universe – well, then we have moved into another category of assertion entirely.

A horse cannot live in space, since there is no oxygen, or air pressure, or water – and about a thousand other reasons. The properties and necessities of carbon-based life forms completely eliminate such a possibility.

A being which does not contradict the properties of existence may exist – a proposed being which does, may not.

Bertrand Russell argued for agnosticism by saying that there may be a little teapot orbiting somewhere in the solar system, but he considered it highly unlikely. This argument – with all due respect to Dr. Russell's genius – is incorrect. A teapot is not a self-contradictory entity. If I could communicate with Dr. Russell in his current state of nonexistence, I would ask him whether he would consider it possible that an eternal living horse was floating somewhere in deep space – and I respect his knowledge of biology enough to be sure that he would answer in the negative.

Gods are not like little teapots, or horses with horns, or very small Irishman with pots of gold – gods are entirely self-contradictory entities, the supernatural equivalent of square circles.

We do not have to hunt the entire universe to know that a square circle cannot exist, because it is a self-contradictory concept. We do not have to examine every rock on every planet to know that a rock cannot fall up and down at the same time. We do not have to count every object in the universe to know that two and two make four, not five. There is no possibility that self-contradictory entities can exist anywhere in the universe. We know that an object cannot be a teacup and an armchair and a horse with a horn at the same time. The Aristotelian laws of identity and non-contradiction deny us the luxury of believing that self-contradictory entities exist anywhere except in our own unreliable imaginations.

Why Are Gods Self-Contradictory?

At the very minimum, a god is defined as an eternal being which exists independent of material form and detectable energy, and which usually possesses the rather enviable attributes of omniscience and omnipotence.

First of all, we know from biology that even if an eternal being could exist, it would be the simplest being conceivable. An eternal being could never have evolved, since it does not die and reproduce, and therefore biological evolution could never have layered levels of increasing complexity over its initial simplicity. We all understand that the human eye did not pop into existence without any prior development; and the human eye is infinitely less complex than an omniscient and omnipotent god. Since gods are portrayed as the most complex beings imaginable, they may well be many things, but eternal cannot be one of them.

Secondly, we also know that consciousness is an effect of matter – specifically biological matter, in the form of a brain. Believing that consciousness can exist in the absence of matter is like believing that gravity can be present in the absence of mass, or that light can exist in the absence of a light source, or that electricity can exist in the absence of energy. Consciousness is an effect of matter, and thus to postulate the existence of consciousness without matter is to create an insurmountable paradox, which only proves the nonexistence of what is being proposed.

If you doubt this, try telling your friends that that no woman can bear your company – and that you have a girlfriend. Having a girlfriend is an effect of female company, just as consciousness is an effect of brain matter. Alternatively, try speaking to someone without making a sound or a movement. Speaking is an effect of movement, either in the vocal chords or somewhere else, and therefore it cannot exist in the absence of motion. (If someone insists that consciousness can exist without a brain, ask them to demonstrate the proposition without using his brain.)

Thirdly, omniscience cannot coexist with omnipotence, since if a god knows what will happen tomorrow, said god will be unable to change it without invalidating its knowledge. If this god retains the power to change what will happen tomorrow, then it cannot know with exact certainty what will happen tomorrow.

The usual response from theists – it is impossible to use the word ‘answer’ – is to place their god “outside of time,” but this is pure nonsense. When an entity is proven to be self-contradictory, creating a realm wherein self-contradictions are valid does not solve the problem. If you tell me that a square circle cannot exist, and I then create an imaginary realm called “square circles can exist,” we are not at an impasse; I have just abandoned reality, rationality and quite possibly my sanity.

Theists who try this particular con should at least be consistent, and not pay their taxes, and then, when said taxes are demanded, say to the tax collector that they have created a universe called “I paid my taxes,” and slam the door in his face. (Alternatively, if theists make a mistake on a history test, and claim that the American Revolution was in 1676, they should fight the resulting bad mark by claiming that their answer exists “outside of time.”)

The fourth objection to the existence of deities is that an object can only rationally be defined as existing when it can be detected in some manner, either directly, in the form of matter and/or energy, or indirectly, based upon its effects on the objects around it, such as a black hole.

That which can be detected is that which exists, as anyone who has tried walking through a glass door can painfully tell you. Such a door is deemed to be open – or nonexistent – when we can walk through it without detecting the glass with our soon-to-be-bloody nose. It would be epistemological madness to argue that an open door is synonymous with a closed door. If someone argues that existence is equal to nonexistence, challenge them to walk through a wall rather than an archway. (The fact that the wall might be an archway in another dimension will scarcely help their passage in this one.)

Differentiating between existence and nonexistence was something that my daughter was able to manage before she was 6 months old; we can only hope that modern philosophical thinkers are able to circle back and someday achieve her prodigious feats of knowledge.

A god – or at least any god that has been historically proposed or accepted – is that which cannot be detected by any material means, either directly or indirectly.

Ah, but what about the future? Might we find gods orbiting Betelgeuse in the 25^th century? Well, while it is true that at some point we may come across some seemingly magical being somewhere in the universe that may appear somewhat godlike to us, no one who has proposed the existence of gods in the past has ever met such a being, which we can tell because no test for existence has ever been proposed or accepted.

Since “god” means “that which is undetectable, either directly or indirectly,” then the statement “gods exist” rationally breaks down to:

“That which does not exist, exists.”

Thus not only is the concept of gods entirely self-contradictory, but even the proposition that they exist is self-contradictory.

Other Dimensions

Theists claim that gods exist, atheists accept that they do not; agnostics say that gods are unlikely, but not impossible.

How do they manage this?

Many agnostics understand that gods do not – and cannot – exist in physical reality, so they create “Dimension X,” and place the possibility of gods existing somewhere “out there.” Inevitably, when a rational thinker points out that this does not solve the problem, the agnostic replies with grating haughtiness that the rational thinker is being closed-minded, and sniffs that to claim the nonexistence of any particular entity is short-sighted and unimaginative. “Surely,” he says, “if you were to tell a medieval man that human beings would one day be able to talk instantaneously around the world, he would say that such a feat was utterly impossible – but he would be only exposing the limitations of his more primitive mind, not making any objective truth statement.”

In other words, any and all certainty is primitive superstition.

This wonderful piece of sophistry is a patently ridiculous form of ad hominem, which goes something like this:

“Just as Newtonian physics gave way to Einsteinian physics, and Einsteinian physics was in some ways surpassed by quantum mechanics, making absolute truth statements about all forms of future knowledge shows a deep ignorance of the flexible and progressive nature of the scientific method, and the endless potential for human thought.”

This is a very strange notion, in which the scientific method is used to pave the way not away from ghosts, demons and a generally haunted universe, but rather towards it. The science of medicine has attempted to escape the primitive foolishness of witch doctors and the superstitions of demonic possession – to say that true medicine leads us towards such primitive fantasies, rather than helping us escape them, entirely misunderstands the purpose of science, reason and medicine.

Of course it is true that Newtonian physics gave way to Einsteinian physics, and Einsteinian physics may well be surpassed by some other approach – to say so is boringly obvious. However, reason and evidence is a process, it is not any specific content. Science is a method, not a specific theory or proposition. It is only reason and evidence that reveals the superiority of more accurate and comprehensive theories. The scientific method rejects self-contradictory theories as either erroneous or inconclusive, just as mathematics rejects the results of any equation that starts with the proposition that two and two make five. Science has been man's most successful attempt to flee what Carl Sagan called “the demon haunted world” – science cannot be used to pave the way back to such primitive madness.

I suppose we can accept it as a compliment to science that agnostics and theists are using it to attempt to resurrect the primitive fantasies inherited from the infancy of our species, but the powerful electricity of modern thought cannot be used to resurrect the Frankenstein of superstitious falsehoods.

Let’s look at the “Dimension X” argument in more detail.

Concepts and Instances

A central tenet of rational thinking is to recognize that an instance is not a concept. A mathematical process such as multiplication is a concept that applies to any general arrangement of numbers; it cannot be called a concept if it only applies to one particular calculation. You need an “x” to have an equation; 16/4=4 is not an equation, but an instance, a particular application of a general process called division.

In the same way, alternate dimensions cannot be invented that only contain gods, but rather must be a general concept that encompasses everything. The true argument put forward by agnosticism is not that “Dimension X may contain gods,” but rather that “nothing true can be said about our reality, because another reality may exist where truth equals falsehood.” In other words, the agnostic position is that any positive statement must be instantly negated by the possibility of an “opposite dimension.”

This proposition falls apart at every conceivable level – and even at some that cannot be conceived!

First of all, saying that we cannot make any absolute positive claims about truth is itself an absolute positive claim about truth – i.e. that truth is impossible. If we say that certainty is impossible, then we have to instantly retract that statement, since we are making a certain statement. It very quickly becomes obvious that nothing of any merit or weight can ever be said if the truth is impossible.

In other words, when the agnostic says that we cannot make any absolute claims because the opposite might be true in another universe, the agnostic cannot put forward this claim, because the opposite might be true in another universe.

All con artists operate by affirming a general rule, and then creating an exception for themselves. A thief wants everyone to respect property rights except him; a counterfeiter wants everyone to accept the value of money except him – and a philosophical con man wants everyone to reject truth except for his own propositions.

Don't fall for it, not for a minute!

The moment an agnostic says, "Gods may exist in another dimension,” immediately identify the principle behind his statement, which is that no truth can be stated, and apply it to his own statement, thus rendering it invalid.

The Second Self-Contradiction

The moment that we say, “gods may exist in another universe,” we are instantly contradicting ourselves, because the word “gods” contains specific knowledge claims – intelligence, omnipotence, immateriality etc. – which cannot be applied to a dimension about which we know nothing! To analogize this, imagine that I tell you that I'm going to play you a video of incomprehensible static – and then I insist that I can clearly see the lyrics to “Woolly Bully” scrolling across the screen.

Only one of these claims can be true – if the video is incomprehensible static, then lyrics cannot scroll across the screen – if the lyrics are scrolling across the screen, the video cannot be incomprehensible.

In the same way, if I create Dimension X, and say that we can know nothing about its contents, I then cannot say that gods may exist there, because I am then saying that I know something about the unknowable contents of Dimension X.

I cannot say that I know nothing about a particular entity, but that I also know it is green and furry – only one of these statements can be true.

The moment that I say “gods may exist in another dimension,” I am making specific knowledge claims about the contents and processes of this other dimension – i.e. that certain entities with specific characteristics may meet the criteria of existence in another dimension of which I admit I know absolutely nothing at all.

The truth of the matter is that we can say absolutely nothing about this other dimension; even if we accept that it may exist, which is problematic enough. We cannot claim to have any knowledge about what may or may not constitute existence in this other realm, or what entities may be possible, or what laws of physics may operate, or anything of the sort. Even the existence of this other realm, let alone its contents, cannot be spoken of – all we can propose is that existence may be the same as nonexistence, and invent an imaginary place where this may be possible.

However, even this argument runs into insurmountable logical contradictions.

It would be ridiculous for me to mail you a letter arguing that mail never gets delivered. If I genuinely believe that mail never gets delivered, it would be illogical for me to write you a letter. If I do write you a letter, my argument that mail never gets delivered is instantly invalidated the moment that you receive it.

In the same way, all human communication relies on physical matter of some kind, either text on paper or on a screen, or sound waves in the ear, or touch for Braille, or some other form of physical manipulation. Silence is the absence of sound waves – or at least of a medium such as air or water to carry them. I cannot deny the existence of a medium while using that medium to carry my argument. I cannot rationally yell in your ear that sound does not exist, because I'm relying on the existence of sound to carry my argument.

In the same way, I cannot rationally put forward the argument that all language is meaningless, because I must use language to communicate my argument. If my proposition that language is meaningless is true, then using language to communicate that proposition would be ridiculous – if my argument that language has no meaning is heard and understood – to any degree – then it is automatically invalidated.

To rely on existence to communicate the possibility that existence equals nonexistence is equally foolish. The objective existence of air and air pressure and ears and life and minds is required to speak and hear the argument that existence may equal nonexistence. Furthermore, the rational and predictable properties of all that exists in order to communicate an argument are presumed to be objective, since any communication between human beings requires an acceptance of the objective properties of matter.

For example, if you tell me that gods exist, and I reply, “Yes, I agree that gods do not exist,” you will doubtless correct my erroneous feedback on your position. This is only possible if the words have at least some objective meaning, and sound waves do not magically mutate from voice to ears, and so on. For words to be formed, spoken and heard, both existence and nonexistence must be accepted, since all sound waves have peaks and valleys. Text as well must have the presence and absence of somewhat contrasting colours, otherwise only one colour is seen, which is not an argument.

All human communication thus relies on the difference between existence and nonexistence, presence and absence, and accepts as axiomatic the objective behavior of matter and energy, and at least tolerable objectivity in language.

When we understand all this, we understand that using strict and objective differences between existence and nonexistence – as well as accepting the objective behavior of matter and energy – to argue that there may be no differences between existence and nonexistence, and that matter and energy may exhibit no objective behavior, is exactly the same as sending a letter claiming that letters are never delivered.

Ah, but perhaps I have misunderstood something! Perhaps I am sending a letter telling you that letters are only sometimes not delivered, in which case my argument may be somewhat weakened, but it is not entirely self-contradictory. The agnostic, after all, does not claim that gods do exist in another universe, but rather only that they may exist.

However, this is looking at the wrong side of the agnostic argument. The agnostic is making the absolute claim that absolute claims are invalid. “You cannot say that gods do not exist, because they may exist in another dimension.” This is not a relativistic or sliding scale, but rather an absolute negation. “You cannot say,” is the equivalent of “mail is never delivered.” It is not the possibility of error that the agnostic is affirming, but rather the impossibility of absolute knowledge claims of any kind. This is an absolute statement that rejects absolutism, which of course renders it invalid.

Agnosticism is one of the rare examples of a truly cosmic fail.

Agnosticism and Principles

Let's look at another argument against agnosticism.

Perhaps you think I am overstating the case – but the agnostic argument is so pervasive, and so ridiculous, that I do not think we can drive enough stakes into its hollow heart.

The agnostic claim that no truth statement can be valid because of a possible opposite universe cannot only apply to gods, but rather must apply to every object in the universe – and every argument as well! Thus, when the agnostic says “gods may exist in another dimension,” the “opposite possibility principle” applies even to his own words, which can then be rationally reinterpreted, according to his own principles, as the exact opposite of what he is saying, i.e. “there can be no other dimensions, and gods cannot exist.” If the agnostic protests that this was not his meaning, he can be told that he cannot affirm his meaning in any way, because in this other dimension, his words may have the exact opposite meaning. It is the same principle that he is applying to the atheist, and so he cannot reasonably complain when it boomerangs back and knocks over the foolish house of cards he is pretending to build.

The moment that the agnostic asserts that it is impossible to state with certainty that gods cannot exist, due to this possible alternate dimension, then his statement is automatically invalidated as well, since in this alternate dimension, gods may not exist either, or his words may mean the opposite of what he thinks they mean in this dimension, and so on. No sane person can use this other dimension to affirm or deny any truth statement in this dimension – and so the agnostic merely takes himself out of the bounds of civilized and rational debate.

The moment an agnostic hears this argument, he will doubtless say, “But...”

However, I merely interrupt him to reply, “You cannot use the word ‘but,’ since the word ‘but’ might have the exact opposite meaning in some alternate dimension.”

I would continue this process with every word he spoke after that, until he either dropped his position, or my company, which would be a relief either way.

This is what I mean when I say that all con artists wish to create a general rule, with a magical exception for themselves – the agnostic wishes to cast universal doubt on truth statements, except all the ones that he happens to make.

Agnosticism and Consistency

Since agnosticism is fundamentally an epistemological position, it cannot be confined to the existence of gods, but rather must be fundamental to all forms of human knowledge.

However, I have yet to hear an agnostic argue that we must abolish prisons, since a criminal’s guilt can never be established with certainty, since in another dimension, he might not have committed the crime. In Western legal systems, crimes must be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but in the agnostic formulation of truth, no such standard can ever be achieved.

This kind of exceptionalism is dully inevitable when dealing with religion. It never applies anywhere else.

To take another example, it is illegal to sell bogus cures for real illnesses – however, not only is Christianity’s “cure” utterly unproven, but even the “illness” itself – sin – is completely invented. Can we imagine a priest being hauled before a court for fraud, for selling a nonsense cure to an invented disease? If not, why not?

We also have laws against hate speech, or the incitement of hatred against particular groups. However, the Bible commands believers to kill gays, atheists, sorcerers, heretics, disobedient children and witches and just about everyone else who draws breath. A comic in Canada was recently hauled before the human rights commission for making a joke about homosexuals – can we imagine the printers and distributors of the Bible being charged in such a manner? If not, why not?

Gods and Non-Existence?

Even if we accept the opposite-planet Bizarro world of the agnostic position – and even if we accept that knowledge claims can be made about an unknowable realm, the agnostic position still falls flat.

There are only two possibilities for our future relationship with Dimension X – either we will never interact with it in any way, or we will find some way to penetrate its mysteries. In the first case, Dimension X will never be discovered, in which case it is merely “nonexistence” with a silly alias, and cannot be used to reject any knowledge claims. Since it remains a mere synonym for nonexistence, it cannot be used to reject nonexistence. In this case, an agnostic cannot say, “I reject that gods cannot exist by defining nonexistence as synonymous with existence – just calling it ‘Dimension X’ for funsies.”

Ah, but perhaps someday we will find a way to send a probe into Dimension X, and record some of its properties. In this case, we will be translating Dimension X into something that exists here, in our universe, just as a spectrograph translates light into waves. In other words, Dimension X will have to show up somewhere, somehow in our universe to confirm its existence, and can no longer be used as a synonym for nonexistence.

Alternatively, if Zeus is currently doing cartwheels in Dimension X, he might trip and stick his finger through the time-space continuum and poke a hole in our moon. In this case, we would have objective and empirical evidence for this event, which would constitute proof that something rather extraordinary had occurred.

In other words, the properties and characteristics of Dimension X will have to be translated into something that exists in this universe in order to confirm its existence and record its properties. If Dimension X never has any impact on our universe, then it is completely synonymous with nonexistence, and can never be used to reject nonexistence. Using the standard of nonexistence to reject nonexistence is entirely self-contradictory, the equivalent of saying “I reject the nonexistence of X by accepting that it does not exist, but using a different word.” If a surgeon said that a dead patient still lived because he used the word “gool” to mean “dead,” we would not accept his argument as particularly rational. The agnostic claim that gods cannot be said to not exist because one can use the phrase “dimension x” as a synonym for nonexistence is equally foolish and irrational.

Gods and the Supernatural

That which is self-contradictory cannot exist. Gods are self-contradictory entities. Therefore gods cannot exist.

What if a god is invented which does not possess self-contradictory characteristics?

Ah, then it is not a god.

We can imagine that 21st century man would appear godlike to our Stone Age ancestors – however, the sane among us do not believe that we have become gods due to our advanced technology.

In the same way, we may meet among the stars fantastically advanced beings – however they will not be gods, but rather just highly evolved life forms. We may meet telepathic beings who can travel through time and have made themselves immortal, but we will never meet carbon-based lifeforms that can live on the surface of the sun, or Oompa-Loompas who live in a square circle, are composed of both fire and ice, and can go North and South at the same time.

Thus it is axiomatic that gods cannot exist – if they are gods, then they cannot exist; if they exist, then they are not gods.

Accidental Knowledge?

Imagine that archaeologists come across some squiggly prehistoric cave painting that, when viewed at a certain angle, has vague similarities to the equation “E=mc²”.

Would this overthrow our entire sense of causality and the evolution of knowledge? Would we imagine that a primitive caveman largely incapable of language or mathematics had somehow discovered one of the most complex and challenging equations of modern physics?

Of course not.

We would smile at the strange coincidence, but would no more imagine a Stone Age genius physicist then we would grant a doctorate to the wind, should it happen to blow a series of sand dunes into a similar equation.

In other words, the effects of knowledge cannot exist prior to that knowledge. I could probably teach my infant daughter to scratch out “E=mc²,” but I would not imagine that she understood any of its reasoning, evidence or contents. A sick animal might break into a pharmacy and eat the pills that coincidently happened to treat its illness, but we would not call such an animal a pharmacist or a doctor.

Almost all of our conceptions of deities have come down to us from the past – and generally the pre-scientific past. When we consider the 10,000 or so gods that human beings have believed in at one time or another, we clearly understand that the development and depiction of these gods was not based on any scientific or rational understanding of the universe. Even if the impossible actually occurred, and some being were found somewhere in the universe that closely matched the description of some ancient deity, this would not be proof that such a god existed in the past, and was the source of that knowledge. Either this would be mere coincidence, or we would have to accept the reality that such a being visited our ancestors, who recorded his actual presence, which is not proof of the existence of a god, but rather a tourist.

Any historical knowledge claim about deities existed prior to any empirical evidence or proof, and thus remains in the realm of pure fantasy. Even if evidence were to accumulate at some point in the future, this does not grant prescience to the accidental imaginings of past ages. In other words, the hope that some theists and agnostics have that proofs for gods will be found in the future does not validate any existing claims about the natures and properties of deities. All prior and existing claims of knowledge about gods are false, regardless of what shows up in the future, in this or any other dimension.

Deities Before Time?

Some theists – and even agnostics – use the same “Dimension X” argument examined above, but place the alternate universe in a time before our own, rather than parallel to it in some manner.

This does not fundamentally change any of the arguments – either this universe before our own will never have any impact on us, in which case it is just another word for nonexistence, or it will, in which case it will be empirically measurable within our own universe, and subject to all the same laws of physics as everything else we examine. In other words, once it enters into our universe, it cannot contain self-contradictory properties, and therefore cannot be a god.

Quantum Physics

Quantum physics is the latest in a long line of scientific bags that people like to dump their crazy, pseudo-scientific ideas in to. The admitted strangeness and apparent self-contradictory behavior of subatomic particles is sometimes enlisted as yet another “alternate realm” wherein gods might exist.

The frank reality of quantum effects is that they have no impact whatsoever upon sense perception, since any and all quantum effects cancel each other out long before the aggregation of particles is perceptible by our unaided senses. This is why an electron may seem to be in two places at the same time, but a table never is.

Clearly, life cannot exist at a subatomic level, which is why we never think of a proton as alive, even if it is contained within a living being. Since a deity must be alive – at least in some sense of the word – it cannot exist at the subatomic level, since even the simplest form of life is a highly complex aggregation of cells and energy.

Furthermore, since the individual subatomic particles examined by quantum physics can never have any effect on objects perceivable by our senses, this invalidates all historical – i.e. prior to quantum physics – conceptions of deities. Finding ex post facto homes for gods in quantum physics, when all concepts of deities evolved prior to any knowledge of quantum physics – is a ridiculous and desperate attempt to rescue the irrational through an appeal to the scientific.

Harm to Children?

It has long been accepted by rational thinkers that religion occupies a magically aggressive place in the pantheon of human thought, remaining strangely impervious to the rational standards that have long since felled other superstitions.

As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, every religious person is virtually a complete atheist, in that he rejects the existence of every other God but the one he worships.

To understand this more clearly, imagine a mathematics tutor named Bob who refused to teach any strict methodology for solving problems.

If you were to hire Bob, and your child were to correctly answer the problem of 3x3, Bob would have to reply that it was impossible to say that three times three make nine, because in an alternate universe they might make the opposite of nine. Bob would further instruct your child not to answer any question with any certainty, and always to include this caveat with regards to any and all forms of knowledge. Bob would also say that none of his instructions – even that one – can be accepted as true, because they might be false in another universe.

Thus, when responding to a roll call at school, your son cannot say that he is present, because in another universe, he might be absent. Furthermore, he cannot actually go to school, because in another universe, the school might be located in the opposite direction from his house. He cannot go to bed, because in another universe, it might be an alligator. He cannot eat vegetables, because in another universe, they might be poison – and so on…

Surely we would view such a tutor as a sworn enemy to the mental health of our child, and would be horrified at the inevitable results of his bizarre philosophy, and would have to spend a good deal of time unravelling the Gordian knot of impossible contradictions he had tied our child’s mind into.

Principles which claim universality, but which cannot conceivably be universalized, are self-contradictory and false by definition.

Agnosticism and Religion

While agnosticism generally refrains from attacking specific positive claims about the nature of deities (other than to say that they may exist in another dimension defined as synonymous with nonexistence), religions are entirely founded on making positive and universal claims about the nature, intentions, personalities, morals and properties of deities.

An agnostic will say that an invisible man might live in the boarded-up house next door; a priest will tell you everything that the invisible man thinks and wants and is capable of.

Agnosticism and religion both require the substitution of socially-acceptable synonyms for falsehood in order to affirm their invalid positions.

Agnostics substitute “other dimensions” for “nonexistence,” while theists substitute “faith” for “falsehood.”

Why is faith false?

Well, as the Latin phrase has it – Credo quia absurdum (“I believe because it is absurd”). A square circle is an impossible entity, and therefore cannot exist. We do not have to hunt the entire universe from edge to edge to know that a square circle does not exist; it is not an act of will to accept that a square circle does not exist, it is simply a recognition of reality and the nature of existence.

A square circle is an absurd concept – or rather, to be more accurate, it is an anti-concept, in that it takes two valid but incompatible concepts and crashes them together to create a crazy mishmash of impossibility.

Take any property or ethic of the Christian God – to just pick on one absurd anti-concept – and the contradictory nature is clear.

- “That which exists must have been created, but God, who exists, was never created.”

- “God is all-knowing and all-powerful, which are both impossible.”

- “God punishes a man for actions which are predetermined.”

- “God punishes rebellious angels, although their rebellion was completely predetermined.”

- “God claims to be morally perfect, although God fails the test of most of his 10 Commandments.”

- Etc.

For any religion that involves prayer or supplication to be valid, the following steps must all be rationally validated and empirically proven:

1. A deity must exist (call him “Jeb”).

2. Jeb must have the interest and power to interfere in the universe.

3. Jeb must have the interest and willingness to interfere in human affairs.

4. Jeb must listen to prayers, rather than just read minds.

5. Jeb must only listen to prayers from the members of a particular sect.

6. Jeb must monitor and record good and bad behavior.

7. Ideally, Jeb must punish the members of alternate sects, or those who pray in an incorrect or inconsistent fashion.

8. Jeb must also not reward those who do not give money to his priests – and ideally, punish said folks.

As we can see, since even the existence of a deity is conceptually ridiculous, not even the first domino in this increasingly absurd row falls down.

In other words, the propositions of religion do not “require faith,” but rather are simply false – and as a result, since they command obedience and money, they are exploitative, abusive and destructive.

Religion as Child Abuse?

In his recent book “God Is Not Great,” Christopher Hitchens asked whether religion was child abuse, but in my view did not provide a very satisfactory answer. The question can be easily resolved through the philosophical approach of universalization.

It is generally accepted in society that children are mentally deficient – and in some ways, of course, they are, in language acquisition and the processing of consequences to actions and so on.

It is generally considered acceptable in a religious society to teach children that God will reward them for obedience to their elders, and punish them for disobedience.

However, we cannot put only children into the category of “mentally deficient,” since there are those with impaired mental faculties either due to a physical brain problem or injury, or due to age- or illness-related deterioration.

Let us take the example of mentally challenged individuals with Down’s syndrome.

Imagine that a home for such individuals existed, run by a man named Bob. Every morning, Bob reminds his bewildered and mentally challenged wards that the air is full of invisible demons who will attack their brains, eyes, teeth and tongues if they ever disobey one of Bob’s Commandments. Even if they are slow to obey, these demons will attack them in their dreams, and suck out their life essence, and spit it into a lake of fire, where it will burn for eternity. Every morning, they must get on their knees and plead for Bob's good opinion, otherwise he might butcher all of them by drowning them in toilets, as he did once before when he was offended…

We could go on and on, but I think that we all understand that this would be verbal and emotional abuse of the very worst and most destructive kind. The traumatized mentally challenged victims of such a nightmare environment would not be able to differentiate Bob's terrifying tales from actual reality, and would live in abject terror, and we would consider it a staggeringly evil abuse of power for Bob to verbally attack and mentally infect his victims in such a manner.

It's hard to imagine that we would judge the situation any differently if Bob ran a home for elderly adults with dementia, and terrified old ladies in the same manner. In either case, we would view Bob as a deranged sadist, lacking any shred of human compassion for his victims, and our hearts would go out to the suffering that he was inflicting through the vengeful power of his demonic language.

(As a minor tangent, this argument is exactly the same for spanking – would we accept it as morally valid to spank the elderly for their forgetfulness?)

Is religion child abuse?

Yes, if it is false. As it is.

Mentally challenged individuals with Down's Syndrome – as well as most elderly people – are nowhere near as vulnerable as children, since most of them have adults taking a significant interest in their long-term well-being.

However, when parents inflict demonic and terrifying tales of religious superstition on the tender, trusting and dependent minds of their children, who will intervene to save them?

Sadly, only real philosophers, for the rest of the intellectual classes are too busy inventing hiding places for the gods to intervene and save the children.

Power or Virtue? A Love Story

Almost all deities are objects of worship, but it is hard to know with any certainty exactly what is being worshiped. Certainly gods are very powerful – infinitely powerful, in most formulations – but I have never met a religious person who worships only the power of his God. No, it is always the virtue of God that is worshiped; the power is merely incidental.

However, the virtue of a deity is problematic on many levels.

If human beings only ever wanted to eat the food that was best for them, we would have no need for the science of nutrition. Our desire for fats and sugars drives the need for nutritional information and discipline, just as our desire for energy conservation drives the need for information about exercise. If we could all automatically do any mathematical calculation in our heads, we would not need to be taught mathematics, and so on.

All human disciplines thus arise to counter desires which run against our best long-term interests. The balancing of long and short-term interests is the very essence of wisdom – the short-term hit of a cigarette versus the long-term risk of lung cancer, the short-term emotional relief of verbal abuse versus the long-term harm to our relationships, to name just two examples.

The discipline of ethics is no different.

The need for virtue in humanity arises out of mortality, and weakness, and temptation, and relative powerlessness – none of which concerns God in any way. Would God need to be courageous, if He was all-powerful? It’s hard to see how. Would He need to remind himself to be honest, if He could suffer no negative consequences for his honesty? Would He find it challenging to resist the temptations of peer pressure? He is peerless, of course!

In many video games, there is a secret “god mode,” which allows players to stroll through the game without taking any damage from enemies, usually with infinite ammunition and pixel-shredding weapons. I can't imagine thinking that a player was really good if he completed a game in “God mode” – in fact, I can't imagine why he would bother. In the same vein, if Mike Tyson in his prime were to jump into a boxing ring with a five-year-old girl, and beat her senseless, it would be hard to admire his athletic prowess.

Can we admire the virtue of a being who has no need for virtue? That would be like admiring someone for not smoking, though he had never been exposed to cigarettes, or praising the sensible fish-based diet followed by a man marooned on a desert island.

Worshiping a God for His virtue is like admiring a man in a coma for refraining from alcoholism.

God and Virtue?

Even if we put all of this aside, the question still remains: how do we know that God is virtuous?

If we are at all interested in efficiency – and as mortal beings it must have some interest to us – the first place we look for virtue is consistency with stated principles. This does not automatically prove virtue, since those stated principles might be immoral – but it does mean that we can at least check for hypocrisy before venturing further.

Thus integrity is a necessary – but not sufficient – criterion for virtue.

If we want to lose weight, and go to a bookstore, and see 50 diet books on the shelf, how likely are we to choose the diet book written by a fat author? Would such a book not more properly belong in the comedy section? “Ah,” you may say, “but the fact that an author is fat does not automatically invalidate his diet.” That is certainly true, but so what? Life is short, decisions are endless, and we cannot investigate every conceivable claim. It is enough to know that a fat dietitian either is following his own diet, in which case it will be unlikely to help us lose weight, or he is promoting a diet that he himself does not follow, which calls his judgment into question, to say the least. Either way, we move on.

The same principle applies to ethics.

If a man constantly preaches the virtue of helping others in need, and then steps over a man bleeding to death in a gutter, we cannot reasonably praise his integrity. While we may agree with him that helping others in need is morally good, his actions inform us that he does not agree with his own moral arguments.

Most religions explicitly state that helping others in need is morally good – think of the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament. However, since gods do not exist, and so cannot intervene, religions have the rather challenging task of explaining why their “moral” God does not help those in need. If it is immoral for travelers on the road to ignore a bleeding man, when it will cost them both time and resources to help him, is it not infinitely more immoral for God to refrain from helping, when it will cost God neither time nor resources, since He has an infinity of both?

We could go on ad nauseum with these examples, such as the genocidal habits of the Old Testament deity, contrasted with His commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” but I'm sure you get the general point.

If we are wise, we do not take a man’s claim that he is virtuous at face value, but will ask first about the contents of his moral beliefs, and then about his practical consistency with those values. A man can only be considered virtuous when he has good values, and strives for and achieves reasonable consistency with those values. If he has bad values, clearly he cannot be virtuous, just as if he has good values but does not act on them.

Gods command men to fight evil, but gods allow evil in the world. Gods prohibit killing, but gods kill. Gods command their followers not to judge others, but gods judge. Gods punish the predetermined actions of people, which shows about as much maturity and wisdom as jailing a cell phone. Gods continually act in direct contradiction to their own stated moral values, which is a hallmark of great immorality.

A man raised by wolves who has no conception of ethics may be forgiven for stealing; a man who preaches respect for property is fully responsible if he steals, because he has already displayed his knowledge of ethics. We would not fault a waiter for failing to perform an emergency tracheotomy; a doctor would far more responsible, since he possesses the necessary knowledge to help.

Thus it is hard to understand exactly what is being worshiped when a God is being praised. Is it power? But power is morally neutral at best, and while it may elicit awe or deference, it cannot be morally worshiped in and of itself. Is it virtue? But we have only the God's word that He is virtuous, which is exactly what would we would expect from a hypocritical con artist bent on praising himself only to arouse admiration and obedience in us.

The whole question of virtue gets buried under the contradictory kaleidoscope of justifications for religion. Theists are faced with the impossible task of attempting to justify primitive and brutal superstitions according to modern moral and scientific sensibilities. The more intelligent among them know that this is impossible, so they create a bewildering miasma of contradictions, foggy stall tactics, bizarre combinations of moral relativism for adults (“this passage is metaphorical”) and abusive absolutism for children (“Jesus died for your sins!”).

The Costs of False Ethics

Our acceptance of these tactics – which would be laughed out of the room in any other human discipline – has come at a truly catastrophic cost to our moral development and understanding as a species.

Over the past 2,500 years, we have advanced in almost every human discipline – except ethics.

Despite our staggering advances in technology, medicine, physics, biology, engineering – and almost any other field you would care to name – our progress in moral philosophy has not changed since the days – and death – of Socrates.

We still have wars, and torture, and child abuse, and national debts, and the forced indoctrination of the young – and we cannot come to any moral standards that can be generally accepted by reasonably intelligent people the world over. We despise theft, and then accept taxes – we despise murder, and praise soldiers – we tell our children not to use force, and then we use government force to ‘educate’ them.

The original formulation of ethics was to create a set of rules, to encourage people to follow those rules – even if they did not understand them – and to punish transgressors with imprisonment and fines in the here and now, and eternal damnation in the hereafter.

The threat of secular retribution from the state, combined with the hope for internal guilt and self attack from religion, was the best that could be achieved when humanity was still convinced that the Earth was flat, trees had souls and the world rested on an infinity of giant turtles.

Nothing has changed in any fundamental way since the dawn of thought. We still encourage people to be “good” by following social standards and mostly arbitrary laws, and then violently attack them when they break the obviously arbitrary rules that have been invented.

To take a simple example, to kill a man in the street is a great moral crime; to kill a man on a battlefield is a great moral virtue. “No green costume” equals moral evil – “green costume” equals moral heroism. If one man tells you to murder, you get a jail cell – if another man tells you to murder, you get medals and a pension.

Alternatively, the initiation of force against a peaceful individual for the purpose of removing his property is clearly theft when done in a dark alley; the taxation policies of a great nation are, as the saying goes, “the price we pay to live in a civilized society.”

I cannot lock my neighbor in my basement for making too much noise, but I can call the police to lock him in jail if he grows certain vegetables in his basement, which has far less effect on me.

If I am poor, and I steal food, I go to jail – however, if I vote for politicians to forcibly transfer other people's wealth to me through the welfare state, I am an engaged citizen.

These are all paradoxes that every reasonably intelligent person has mulled over at one time or another, but they have remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years, and I would argue that this is largely due to religion.

A false answer – particularly when it is highly profitable to liars – is the ultimate barrier to progress in human thought. Religion is the worst possible answer to the question of ethics, since it is not an answer at all, but merely a threat based on falsehoods.

One of the reasons that medieval economics remained so primitive and unproductive was the Guild system, which required many years of poorly paid labor to learn even the most simple and menial of tasks. Those who had already passed through the system made more money individually than they would have if the system had been suddenly abandoned, and free competition had opened up. The older and wealthier members of society thus continued to block free competition from the young, and while they may have maintained their own income in the short run, they killed economic growth in the long run, which was to their own detriment, and the detriment of their children of course.

The threat was punishment from the state, the lie was that seven years of apprenticeship were necessary to become, say, a bricklayer – and so society stagnated at near starvation levels for almost a thousand years, until the shortage of labor that arose from the Black Death began to unravel the Guild system.

In the same way, the “moral teaching” of religion is only a threat – secular punishment from the state, eternal punishment from God – based on a series of lies, i.e. that gods exist, are moral, and must be obeyed.

The institutionalization and profitable exploitation of this system has effectively barred philosophers from examining morality from a rational and secular standpoint. Either philosophers are religious (or afraid of the religious), in which case they tend to avoid attacking fundamental moral problems, for fear of arousing attack – or philosophers are statists (or afraid of the government), in which case they tend to avoid attacking fundamental moral problems, for fear of arousing attack.

Those who work for churches would view any rational system of secular ethics as a direct threat to their income and position, the same goes for those who work for the state.

Thus “right-wingers” tend to be more in favor of a smaller state, but are very religious; “left-wingers” tend to be more skeptical of religion and secular in nature, but tend to be more in favor of a larger state.

“Choose your poison” seems to be our only approach to solving moral problems.

Any society which relies on false and contradictory morality – and all societies currently fall into this category – must substitute aggression for argument in the instruction of children. A child who asks why a soldier gets a medal for killing in a war, when he would be thrown in jail in peacetime, can receive no sane and rational answer, for none exists. Parents, priests and teachers seem to be fundamentally averse to saying that they do not know the answer to this question, or any of the other hundreds of ethical questions posed by children.

Because we do not know the answer to these questions, we must threaten children in order to throw them off the scent, so to speak. This may be overt, or more subtle, through exasperated sighs, rolling one's eyes, and rolling out the tired old bromide that the child will understand when he gets older.

False moral principles are the foundation for the greatest edifices of human society – the state, the military, the police, the church, public schools and so on. Since these enormous and powerful institutions rest on ridiculous and indefensible moral contradictions, to persist in questioning these principles is to take an axe to the base of the tree of the world. The entire profit and sense of human society sits like an enormous inverted pyramid on a few shaky and trembling – and false – ethical axioms.

Our lack of progress in solving moral problems without using aggression is entirely attributable to the confusing infections of religiosity. Just as it took a secular mind to solve the problem of biological evolution, it will take a secular mind to solve the problem of secular, rational and scientific ethics. However, any theory that defers to religion must inevitably create a central vortex of wild irrationality that it must skip around, distorting and ruining the theory as a whole.

In the same way, any theory that defers to statism, taxation and war creates exactly the same vortex, since it cannot ban the initiation of force to solve social problems, yet it must ban the initiation of force to solve personal problems, and so mealy-mouthed madness can only follow from such dismal and initial compromises. “The initiation of force through taxation is moral, but the initiation of force through theft is immoral…” “The initiation of force in war is moral, the initiation of force without war is immoral…” “Public violence is good, private violence is bad…” etc.

This is why the modern coterie of secular atheists will never be able to solve the problem of ethics, since they remain wedded to the state – to the initiation of force – as a central moral axiom within society. Thus Sam Harris says that we need to solve the problem of war by creating a world government, while Richard Dawkins remains fundamentally unable to criticize the state, since he is fundamentally an employee of the state, while Christopher Hitchens is still recovering from his totalitarian Marxist impulses, and continues to praise the obviously unjust and immoral Iraq war (though in charity we can safely assume that results more from his family military history than any objective judgement).

It seems enormously difficult to overcome our own prejudices, and the historical errors that seem almost to have been embedded into our very DNA. It may be too much to ask for true originality in solving these problems, but we should at the very least ask for an avoidance of the false answers that have so repetitively failed for the past 2,500 years.

We may not yet know the right way to go, but we should at least stop going in the wrong direction.

Why Gods?

It is helpful, but not essential, for atheism to explain why the concept of gods is so widespread and prevalent among mankind. The 10,000 or so gods that lie scattered across the past and present cultures of our species must represent some form of universal content or meaning for this fantasy to be so widespread.

In general, religion has gone through four major phases – the first was animism, or the idea that every rock and leaf and tree was imbued with a spiritual force. In this approach, a farmer would profusely apologize to a rock before moving it out of the way of his plow. It is fairly easy to understand that this arose from a fundamental confusion between what is living and what is not, or what has consciousness, and what does not. A man who thinks that a rock deserves an apology lives in an extremely primitive state of mind, wherein the division between his own consciousness and inanimate matter has not yet been established. My 18 month old daughter is losing the habit of saying hello to the toilet, and her bath, and her toes, which gives you a sense of how primitive this phase is.

In the second phase of religion, the distinction between living and not living becomes established, and a multiplicity of deities that are specifically and thoroughly anthropomorphic take refuge somewhere above the clouds, or on the peak of a mountain, sucking up in their wake all of the projected consciousness that formerly resided in rocks and trees and rivers. This is a vast improvement in accuracy – not to mention sanity – in that the differentiation between conscious and unconscious becomes established in a much wider sphere.

In the third phase, the warring multiplicity of gods is in a sense hunted down, rounded up and herded into one big squirming bag of pseudo-monotheism. The former glorious ribaldry of the ancient Greek religions becomes diluted and caged into a tyrannical hierarchy of a single, inhuman and utterly abstract God. This phase contains a variety of insurmountable tensions, which inevitably fragment the new monotheism into an even more bizarre version of the older polytheism, such as the Holy Trinity and the thousands of saints.

In the fourth phase, religion becomes a set of more or less convincing fairy tales, wherein obedience to a complete text is not required, but followers can pick and choose what they like, according to their own personal preferences and tastes, and God is turned into a sort of ideological lapdog, which trails after the prejudices of the believer, imbuing his own personal bigotries with a vague glow of eternal approval.

In all these phases, there is a deep and consistent sense of a vast and powerful consciousness that lies outside the range of our conscious ego, which contains deep and mysterious elements of eternity; which existed before us, and will continue to exist after us, which informs and guides many if not most of our decisions, reveals its purposes and intentions through visions and dreams, frustrates our vices and supports our virtues, and responds indirectly and metaphorically to abasement and supplication.

It is scarcely a novel insight to point out that our minds are divided between our conscious ego and our subconscious. Our conscious ego needs little explanation; it is the self aware part of us that responds to willpower, focus, attention, and has direct access to the memories that we have accumulated in our lifetimes. It is a precise and astoundingly powerful tool that in a very real sense can be called the most mortal part of ourselves, since it grows and develops with us, and will certainly die with us, as will all of our personal memories.

However, there exists below consciousness, or surrounding consciousness, the subconscious, whose processing power dwarfs the puny efforts of our conscious mind, and which also contains an element of eternity within itself. Our conscious memories are specific to our own lives, as are our more conscious choices and plans. I may dream at night of something I experienced that day, but the capacity for the experience of dreaming is not something that I have chosen, but rather something that my subconscious mind has developed and inherited and refined over millions of years.

The subconscious mind, which controls everything from our heart rate to our breathing to the increasing uneasiness we experience when in a dangerous situation we have not yet noticed consciously, is like an eternal guardian angel – or avenging devil if we have done evil – which is constantly prodding us with interfering emotions and sensations, discouraging us with fear and guilt, spurring us on with desire and pleasure, lecturing us about our choices in nightly dreams, whipping us on with short-term lust while simultaneously cautioning us with fears about the long-term stability of our sexual partners – to name just a few.

When we think of religion, we think of a puny consciousness – that of man – embedded in an eternal, infinite and seemingly omniscient consciousness which never shows itself directly, but which takes an enormous interest in us, and evaluates our choices and preferences, and rewards us and punishes us, and responds in maddeningly oblique ways to our direct and painful supplications.

Gods are also experienced as existing before us, and living on after us, which directly relates to the quasi-eternal nature of the subconscious, which existed prior to our conscious mind and memories even in the individual, and which is the ancient foundation upon which the temple of our ego was built.

The mind of God is also considered to be vastly superior to that of man – is this not also an exact description of the subconscious, whose processing power has been estimated as 7,000 times that of the conscious mind?

Man is considered to be a creation of God, and God is a deep and eternal consciousness that has existed forever – is this not an exact description of the relationship between the conscious ego and the subconscious? As a species, and in our own lives, our ego evolves out of our subconscious, which is why we cannot remember our very early years. I have an arm which I can call my arm in a sense, but it is not really my arm, because it existed before I experienced an “I.” My arm preceded me, since it developed in the womb – and my ego had no part in its planning or creation, but rather my ego grew out of my body, many years later. My arm, my body and my subconscious existed before me, and certainly my body will exist after me, though my ego will not be around to watch it decompose.

Thus when we say that man is created by God, what we really mean is that the ego is created by the body, which precedes the ego both individually and collectively. My arm preceded my consciousness by years, and human arms in general preceded my particular arm by millions of years. It is in this sense that we are in fact created by an eternal pattern that precedes us, however primitively we may have anthropomorphized this basic truth.

The subconscious – like monotheism – also resists the imposition of a singular identity, no matter how fervently desired. The subconscious contains a vast multiplicity of alter egos, various aspects of the conscious mind designed to fit into whatever hierarchy wraps around us in the moment – as well as the multiple alter egos of those around us, those who raised us and taught us and, perhaps, harmed and abused us.

To take an obvious example, when I was a child I had a teacher who was a bully, and this teacher would immediately become servile when the principal came into the classroom – I have within my subconscious not only this teacher as an individual, but this teacher as a personality with multiple alter egos. I have my own alter egos, as well at the alter egos of thousands of other people I have met over the course of my life, which is why, since religion is merely a superstitious description of our subconscious, monotheism can never hold.

Things which do not work generally do not last, which is why few of us indulge in rain dances anymore when we really want a downpour. There is something in religion, though, which does work, despite its obvious falsehoods, and my argument is that what works is the act of asking a superior intelligence for guidance and wisdom. The simple fact is that people who pray often do experience a response, and the obvious and empirical answer is that they are asking for wisdom from their own subconscious, which responds in its usual oblique yet amazingly accurate fashion. A man who asks God for an answer is asking his subconscious for advice, and anyone who has spent any significant time on the couch of a good therapist, examining his dreams and his feelings and his impulses, sooner or later understands the power, fertility and objectivity of the subconscious – and once this is understood, the accuracy and utility of religion is revealed. The clarity and precision of the conscious mind requires no explanation, since we experience it countless times every day – the wisdom and astounding parallel processing power of the subconscious is largely only available to those who approach it on bended knee, with humility and patience and bottomless curiosity.

This is not to say, however, that religion is a form of self-knowledge, or that grandiose superstitions are somehow equivalent to humble introspection. It is certainly true that among those already predisposed to gentleness, virtue and courage, the impulses returned from the subconscious can truly aid them in achieving and maintaining these admirable virtues – but as we all know, these are not the only kinds of people in the world. I get many messages from religious people who tell me that although I am not a believer, their God loves me. While I certainly do appreciate these warm sentiments, I cannot afford to take them very seriously, because what would I say if they wrote to tell me that their God hated me for my unbelief, as the Bible says? If I accept irrational love, I cannot very well reject irrational hatred. There is an enormous difference between humbly consulting wise but hard to access aspects of myself, and believing that I am receiving divine commandments from a perfect and all-powerful intelligence outside myself.

The essence of self-knowledge is negotiation, the recognition that every aspect of the self has a valid seat at the table, and deserves to be heard, but that none shall rule. Some people think of this as a democracy of the self, but I think that is a tragically inaccurate and destructive way to look at it, because in a democracy, the government always has the final say, and enforces its will through the force of law. It is infinitely more accurate and healthy to say that what is required is a stateless state of mind, or the anarchy of the self, where all is negotiation, and no final arbiter can enforce decisions. The discomfort generated by refusing to promote an inner dictator – even temporarily – to a position of final authority can be extreme, particularly since we are raised in such horribly authoritarian structures – school, church, so often the family – yet it is necessary for us to progress as a species to a more peaceful world.

The closest current analogy to the anarchy of self is the voluntarism of free-market, without government, where wealth and authority may ebb and flow, but all is negotiation and peaceful interaction.

Religion supports the promotion of the subconscious to a position of ultimate and final authority, since it worships the subconscious as a God, which is extremely dangerous, since no aspect of the self should ever be a tyrant in the mind of a healthy man, just as no single muscle in the body should dominate all other muscles. We require a highly complex interplay of hundreds of muscles even to walk – when one muscle becomes dominant, we call that a cramp, and consider it an extremely uncomfortable situation that needs to be alleviated at once.

In more extreme cases, a man who prays to an imaginary being will hear voices in his head telling him what to do, and religion supports the idea that these voices come from a god, not a horribly damaged part of his own psyche, with all the resulting disasters that can occur from such a tragic misapprehension. It is true that the more gentle among the religious reject the theological validity of those who claim to hear voices coming from God, yet they are on a slippery slope when they take such a noble stand, since if they perceive their contemporaries to be mentally ill for hearing voices and believing in gods, what are they to make of those who wrote their holy texts? Few modern Christians would kneel before a man claiming to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, but rather would suggest that he would benefit from the services of a mental health practitioner – would they say the same to Jesus himself? Most Christians would say that Jesus performed miracles, but there is no evidence for this of course, other than the hearsay of other people who were doubtless equally mentally ill. If I said that Christians should worship a friend of mine because he performed miracles that only I could see, would they agree? It is impossible to imagine that they would.

The religious also believe that gods watch and judge us, and this seems entirely in accordance with the subconscious reality of a conscience. A conscience is nothing terribly complex; it is simply the extrapolation of our stated principles into universals, followed by the comparison of our actions to these universals. If I hit my daughter while telling her not to hit others, this basic contradiction – or perhaps more accurately revolting hypocrisy – is instantly noted and retained by my subconscious. I will as a result distinctly feel that there is something wrong with what I am doing, which will either propel me to examine my own hypocrisy, or redouble my attacks upon my daughter for her imagined transgressions.

If I act on impulse, and then invent endless ex post facto justifications for my actions, with reference to universal principles, then I become a bewildering, dangerous and annoying hypocrite to those around me. I cannot act with any integrity, because I have erected high and thorny walls between the various aspects of myself that need to come together so that I can act with reasonable consistency.

Unfortunately, philosophy emerged from religion in much the same way that mankind evolved from fetid swamp dwellers, with the result that principles were invented to excuse evil and elevate hypocrisy to the status of virtue. For instance, the Bible commands believers to refrain from murder, but the god considered to be all virtuous kills virtually the entire world in a fit of rage. This kind of staggering hypocrisy requires a vast amount of verbal fencing and befogging to avoid. Rationalizing the irrational was the original basis of philosophy, which is why to create a philosophy based on reason and evidence is such a radical project.

Agnosticism and Cowardice

I have often argued that agnostics are cowards, and I would like to make that case here.

First of all, I do not consider the position itself to be cowardly, but rather if superior and irrefutable strong atheist arguments are consistently rejected in favor of the mental fog of agnosticism, I consider that cowardly and enormously destructive.

We cannot be reasonably criticized for not adhering to knowledge we have yet to learn. Was an 18th-century physician negligent for failing to prescribe a cure that had not yet been invented? Of course not – but we would condemn a 21st-century physician for such malpractice. I would not criticize my 18 month old daughter for deliberately pouring juice on the carpet, an act I would consider wilfully aggressive on the part of an adult guest.

Thus if you are an agnostic, but have not yet heard the arguments in this book, please do not think that I am calling you a coward – if that even means anything to you – but after you have heard these arguments, if you cannot refute them, and still cling to your irrational position, then that is certainly the label I will apply to you, since you will have earned it.

The basic tenet of agnosticism is that no positive statements about truth can be made because some contradictory evidence may exist in this or some other universe. There is so much that is wrong with this position that it is hard to know even where to start, so let's start with something quite simple, and then work up to the more complex objections.

First of all, agnosticism is always and forever specific only to the existence of deities. I have never once heard an agnostic argue that we cannot call rape wrong because it might be right in some other universe. I recently had a debate on agnosticism with a staunch antigovernment libertarian, who argued that we could not say there were no gods because gods might exist in some other universe. I then asked him how he could assert that governments were immoral, because they might be moral in some other universe? He replied that governments have specific properties, which I did not particularly understand, and I replied that gods also have specific properties, which is why we use the word “gods” rather than “spoon,” or “aglet,” or “spork,” or “tine.” He did not respond to this, but I think the point is very clear. If the possible existence of alternate universes where truth equals falsehood invalidates any positive declaration of truth, then this applies universally, and not specifically only to gods. I have never heard an agnostic argue for the potential existence of Santa Claus in some other universe, or leprechauns, or square circles, or two and two making five. I have never seen a scientist rejecting the claim that the world is round because in another universe, it might be shaped like a banana.

We can all imagine how offensive it would be for a man to argue that we cannot call rape immoral, or attempt to prevent and punish it, because it might be virtuous in some other dimension – such a man would be obviously attempting to deal with his own psychological problems by creating some nonsensical and fogging philosophical junkyard of confusion. Have you ever heard an agnostic argue that child molesting priests should not be punished, or morally criticized, because child rape might be beneficial to kids in some other universe? We would view such ghastly equivocation as the sign of a bad conscience, and quite possibly a mental illness.

Agnosticism also faces the problem of the “null comparison.” In computer languages, variables can be created called “variants,” which can contain any type of data, from pictures to videos to numbers – the memory clipboard on your computer, used for copying and pasting just about anything, is an example of this. If you ask a computer to tell you whether the number two is equivalent to a “variant,” the computer will tell you that this cannot be done, because you cannot be sure that the variant is in fact a number. If I ask you whether the number two is equal to “X,” where “X” can be anything in the universe – or nothing at all – you will tell me that this fundamentally does not compute, and might wonder what kind of bizarre game I was up to.

“Is Susie an ‘X’?” There is no way to know – if “X” equals “female” then yes. If X. equals “asteroid” then the answer is quite likely no. The question as it stands cannot be answered. This does not mean that Susie can be anything – this does not mean that Susie might be an asteroid as well as a female human being as well as a magical unicorn, a square circle and the pot of gold at the end of a leprechaun’s rainbow.

You cannot compare anything to an unknown “X” – particularly something with known properties. The concept “deity” has specific properties, and cannot rationally be compared to some unknown alternate universe, about which we know nothing at all – the ultimate “X.”

Thus the statement that gods might exist in an alternate universe is completely invalid, and entirely self-contradictory, since we are claiming to have some knowledge of existence and the specific properties of gods in some alternate universe about which we fully admit we know absolutely nothing, not even whether it exists. (Even the statement “an alternate universe may exist” is completely invalid, because existence is a property of our universe, and since we know nothing about an alternate universe, we cannot use the term “existence” to refer to anything about it.)

Closing the Open Door

Imagine that you drive over to a friend’s house to pick him up to go to a movie. You knock on the door, and he opens it.

“Let's go,” you say.

He hesitates. “I can't go through that door,” he says.

“Why not?”

He purses his lips and shakes his head. “Because it might be closed in some alternate universe...”

Would you accept this as a rational and healthy statement on the part of your friend?

Of course not. You would try to get him some professional help. You would be particularly concerned that he opened the door in the first place – thus indicating specific knowledge about its status – and only then got all foggy about whether it was opened or closed.

But this is exactly the position of agnostics! They open the door of reason and evidence in order to nullify reason and evidence. They use a rational argument to say that reason is invalid. They create evidence out of thin air which is the opposite of existence and essentially say that no conclusions can be made because existence might equal the opposite of existence.

Why is this so cowardly?

If the agnostic position is valid, and if agnostics genuinely believe that no positive conclusions can ever be achieved and maintained, then surely they have far more important things to achieve in this world, relative to their values, then haggling over possible sky ghosts in another universe.

Surely agnostics should be virulently opposed to the existing justice system, which puts a man in jail for life based on a videotape of him stabbing his wife to death. This is a far more immediate reality than whether Zeus might exist in Dimension X – yet I have never heard an agnostic say that we should never send anyone to jail, because even if this man undoubtedly murdered his wife in this dimension, he might not have murdered her in another dimension, and so we cannot say for sure that he is guilty.

I have never heard an agnostic refuse to go to a funeral, arguing that the deceased might still be alive in another universe.

I have never heard an agnostic refuse medical treatment, on the grounds that he might be perfectly healthy in Dimension X, or that what cures him here might kill him “over there.”

I have never borrowed money from an agnostic, and have him accept my argument that I do not have to pay him back in this universe, since I might have already paid him back in another universe, and so he cannot say for sure that he has not been repaid.

I have never heard an agnostic tell a victim of abuse that she has no right to be upset, because in another universe, she might not have been abused, or abuse might be the opposite of abuse.

No, agnostics never ever advocate these or a hundred million other absurd, offensive and insane positions.

Why not?

Why would agnostics only apply this kaleidoscopic and fogging “alternate universe” theory to the most distant and incomprehensible of human conceptions – that of a deity – and not to the far more egregious, immediate and important concerns of human society?

The answer is obvious – because agnosticism would be revealed as absurd, offensive and ridiculous if it were applied even remotely consistently.

So the question still remains – why is the door left open only for gods, and nothing else?

The answer is equally obvious – because agnostics are cowards.

Agnosticism and Fear

The magic fog machine of agnosticism only pumps its noxious gases into the religious realm – it’s like a cloud that miraculously wraps itself only around priestly garments. The reason, of course, for the astounding specificity of the “alternate universe” argument is that religious people tend to get upset, offended, ostracizing and angry when told that God does not exist.

This has little to do with the non-existence of God, but rather triggers all the volatile emotions surrounding family, culture and community.

When a religious person is told that there is no God, what he hears is, “My parents lied to me.”

A man who is told that there is no God no longer sees in the mirror a being with a glowing soul, but a cramped sub-species of superstitiously (and surreptitiously) indoctrinated livestock – lied to, bullied and controlled for the sake of material money in the here and now. He is revealed not as a free man, basking in the glory of the divine, but a mere slave to the lies of the priests, fed crippling falsehoods and fattened for the feast.

People do not really believe in gods, that is a basic reality of life – they say that they believe in gods because they are afraid of being attacked by others for expressing doubt, or thought. Religions are the ultimate case of the emperor's new clothes, an old fairy tale where thieving weavers pretend to make a suit for the King, claiming that anyone who is unfit to his position will be unable to see it. Naturally, everyone pretends to see the suit, and marvels at its fine colors, until a boy on the street innocently asks why the King is walking around naked.

If you walk up to a man and tell him that his parents lied to him about everything that is true and good and right in the world, and sold his hide to thieving priests because they were afraid to stand up for truth and virtue, naturally he will be very, very upset.

Clearly, this is why agnostics do their n-dimensional somersaults – to avoid the anger, offense and potential retaliation from the religious.

I have no particular issue with people who do not want to step into the boxing ring of philosophy – not everyone is suited for these kinds of conflicts, and certainly battling superstition is not a strict moral requirement. It can be extraordinarily uncomfortable to experience the disorientation, bitter anger and caustic ostracism shooting up from the deep well of discontent when you shine down the light of reason and evidence. It is not for everyone, it is not necessary, and one can live a virtuous and happy life without taking on this kind of combat.

The world is filled with countless wrongs that I do nothing to prevent or avenge – I do nothing to feed starving children in North Korea, and while I am unhappy that they are starving, I recognize that I have chosen not to help them. I think that I am doing my own part to advance the cause of truth, reason, virtue, evidence and philosophy in the world, and I am very proud of my achievements in these areas, but of course there are millions of wrongs I do nothing about, and I recognize the reality of that, and do not seek to make excuses about my choices.

Imagine that immediately after I said that I was doing nothing to help the starving children of North Korea, I immediately said, “But there is no reason to believe that they are actually starving, because in some alternate universe, they might not be hungry at all!”

Would this not be a rather bewildering statement for me to make? Why on earth would I need to create an alternate universe in which North Korean children were not starving?

Again, the answer is blatantly obvious – I need to create an alternate universe where North Korean children are not starving because I am extremely uncomfortable with not feeding them.

If I were at peace with my decision, I would not need to create an alternate universe wherein that decision would be unnecessary. It does not require a high level of psychological sophistication to understand that if I am unfaithful to my wife, and then I obsess over an alternate universe wherein I remain faithful to my wife, that my obsession is driven by guilt and shame and a tortured desire to have chosen differently in the past. It also is not the summit of psychological insight to understand that I have a need to create an alternate universe wherein I am faithful to my wife because I am fairly sure that I will be unfaithful to her again in the future, and am preparing the way for another transgression.

I do not have conclusive empirical evidence for this, but I have certainly experienced it during my many years of debating these issues, with friends and strangers alike, but my strong belief is that agnostics are secular-minded people who come from religious parents. Deep down, they fear – and I would imagine not unreasonably – that their parents will choose God over them, if faced with such a choice. This is a truly tragic situation, which I have not had to face directly myself, and my heart goes out to people caught in this supernatural trap. Agnostics and theists are caught in the endless and stagnant merry-go-round of “let's agree to disagree.” Agnosticism is a way of fencing off a topic emotionally with a big cloudy fog bank upon which is inscribed the blurry letters, “Don't go there!”

The fact that agnostics only invoke alternate universes for gods indicates not that I think that agnostics are cowardly, but rather that they themselves are of this opinion.

I wish to reiterate that I do not think that it is cowardly to avoid confrontation with the religious – I can perfectly well understand why someone who has a reasonably good relationship with religious parents might wish to avoid confrontations about the nonexistence of gods. However, honesty is the first virtue, and the most important honesty is honesty with the self – if that is absent, everything that follows is false. The true reality for agnostics is that they do not wish to anger or upset religious people – I can understand that, but that needs to be admitted. Failing that admission, agnostics need to apply their “alternate universe” theories to everything, since it is a principle of epistemology, or fundamental knowledge.

To create a singular exception to a universal rule for that which makes you uncomfortable, rather than just admitting your discomfort, is dishonest and cowardly.

If an agnostic can honestly admit that he is afraid of confronting religious people, then he does not need to continue slithering through the foggy gymnastics of alternate universes and the certain knowledge of the uncertainty of knowledge.

Cowardice is the avoidance of honesty, not danger. A man who says he did not join an army because he was afraid of dying is being honest. A man who claims an imaginary illness – even to himself – is a liar, who is obviously uncomfortable with his own choices, and chooses to bewilder and confuse others rather than be honest at least with himself.

Agnosticism and Religion

Many agnostics will claim courage because they ridicule and attack organized religion. The fact that we cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, they say, has profound implications for human theology, rendering any specifics about gods or their properties utterly imaginary and foolish.

This, however, does not hold logically. The alternate universe theory, as discussed above, cannot be specific only to gods, but is a universal principle that applies to everything. When the agnostic says, “We cannot disprove the existence of gods,” he is really saying, “We cannot disprove the validity of any statement.”

This is the fundamental crux of the matter. Agnosticism cannot be a principle if it only applies to gods, and there is no logical reason why it should only apply to gods, and so no human statement or belief or perspective or prejudice or bigotry can ever be proven or disproven, according to agnosticism.

For an agnostic to say that organized religion is foolish runs entirely against the basic principles of agnosticism. If I believe that my God is an invisible spider that squats in my eardrum and whispers the truths of the universe only to me, how can this possibly be contradicted according to agnosticism? In an alternate universe, this could be exactly the case. The agnostic cannot say that this is definitively false, for the moment that definitive falsehoods can be identified, the alternate universe theory collapses.

This is what is so tragic about agnosticism: agnostics often think that they are undermining religious certainty, but the exact opposite is true. By saying that every conceivable human perspective could be valid in some alternate universe, agnostics raise rank subjectivism to the status of scientific objectivity, and madness to rational skepticism. An agnostic cannot say to a racist that he is wrong, because in some other universe, the despised race might in fact be inferior! This failure to identify and apply objective and consistent principles – the very essence of philosophy – not only drops any and all rational defenses against subjective bigotries, but rather spurs them on, and elevates them to the very heights of philosophical wisdom.

Finally, agnosticism is a snake that eats itself. If we say that no human statement of truth can ever be proven or disproven, what are we to make of that statement itself? Isn’t this just another example of one of the oldest philosophical piles of sophist nonsense, the statement: “Nothing is true.” Of course, if nothing is true, the statement that nothing is true is false, which is a self-detonating position.

In the same way that agnosticism creates this magical exception for the existence of gods, it must also by the very logic of its principles create a magic exception for its own arguments. The moment that we hear the word “except” in a philosophical statement, we know that we are in the presence of Grade A nonsense. “Nothing is true – except this statement!” Meh, that isn't even philosophy, that is just a Mobius strip fortune cookie.

In the same way, when agnostics affirm that no statement can be proven or disproven, are they creating a magical exception for that statement? If so, on what basis do they create this magical exception? If not, then do they recognize the ridiculousness of their position?

The Misuses of History

When you are inventing a new idea, using the word that describes its exact opposite is a very bad idea. If I want to sell a dessert, I do not describe it as an appetizer, a mountain or a virus. If I want to sell a map, I do not describe it as a mystery novel, or switch North with South, East with West.

A man who wants to sell you something new, while describing it as something very old, is very likely a con man, looking to pass off a new table as an antique, or a cheap replica as the original.

Agnosticism is a relatively modern phenomenon; avoiding the question of God's existence is nothing new, of course, but agnosticism attempts to hook into a lot of science, particularly quantum physics, string theory and other multidimensional theoretical models.

This is little more than a transparent and obvious con.

Historically, the word “God” has never meant, “things that may exist in other dimensions of the multiverse, as described by modern physics.” “God” has never referred to some unknowable X factor, Schrödinger's cat, the unified field theory, the cosmic craps player so derided by Einstein, or any of the other trappings of modern science.

No, let's not empty the word “God” of its true and original meaning, which was a cosmic and spiritual father who created the universe, breathed life into mankind, burns the wicked and saves the innocent, and so on. This meaty and monstrous superman, this thunderbolt-hurling patriarch of our dim and brutal histories, this frustrated and enraged slaughterer of rebels and sceptics – this fearful and omnipotent beast should not be reduced to some pale and conceptual ghost hiding out in the dim theoretical alleys between the atoms.

Using the word “God” to refer to some theoretical possibility of mind-bending modern physics is to take a word steeped in the superstitious blood of our earliest collective histories, and attempt to propel it like some time-bending slingshot forward into the future – an exercise in futility, since this old and very brittle word cracks and collapses in the face of such insane velocity.

When it was first discovered that the world was round and not flat, the word “flat” was not enlisted to describe the newly discovered roundness. When ancient mathematicians first invented the concept “zero,” they did not attempt to reuse the number one to describe it – for the simple and obvious reason that if you attempt to use the same word to describe something very different, you will spend the rest of your life trying to slice and dice peoples comprehension of your meaning. “Wait, do you mean the word ‘one’ to mean the old number one, or the new symbol for zero?”

It is so obviously inefficient to use the same word for opposite things – or even different things – that we should be immediately suspicious when this problem arises. A man who proposes calling his wife his mother, and his mother his wife, is complicating not only his relationships, but also his psyche. A cab driver who tries to start using the word “uptown” to mean “downtown” will simply annoy his customers and lose his job.

The passionate, visceral, crazed and dangerous deities of the ancient world were called “gods.” The word refers to Stone Age superstitions, not modern theoretical definitions of physics. “God” refers to not only a pre-scientific period, but an anti-scientific and anti-rationalist stage of our development, if development is even the right word. To the Egyptians of 6,000 years ago, the gods were living beings that you prayed to, feared, obeyed, and slaughtered virgins for. They joined you in war, contemplated healing you in sickness, cursed your enemies and strengthened your offspring. They did not hide in some possible alternate universe, waiting for almost 6,000 years for some scribbles on a mathematicians paper to reveal their potential hiding place.

We do not see agnostics attempting to rehabilitate the phrase “human sacrifice” by referring to it as a synonym for benevolence, because the strangeness, irrationality and quite frankly psychological problems that would be revealed by such a goal would be far too obvious.

Agnostics do not strenuously advocate for the legalization of rape, arguing that it might be moral in some other universe – yet they strenuously oppose atheists who deny the existence of God. This is a most strange position to see – surely if evil might equal good in some other universe, then violently banning evil in this universe is utterly unjust! If certainty is impossible in this universe, then surely we should start by opposing violently enforced certainties – such as physical self-defense – rather than merely strongly worded opinions, such as the fact that gods do not exist.

Yet oddly enough agnostics slither right past violently enforced views such as the evils of rape, murder, theft, parking in a handicapped zone, the non-payment of property taxes, failing to come to a proper stop at a stop sign, speeding and everything else. All these legally enforced perspectives are utterly ignored, although they are inflicted with infinitely greater absolutism than a mere philosophical argument – and the agnostic reaches with open fingers for the throat of the mere atheist!

In other words, the violent enforcement of certain perspectives is perfectly acceptable to the agnostic, but mere arguments for other perspectives must be aggressively and endlessly opposed.

This is why I call agnosticism cowardice.

And if you are still an agnostic, after reading and failing to rebut these arguments, you have well earned the label.

Conclusion

The first virtue is always honesty, and the first honesty is always with the self.

I do not for a moment imagine that agnostics have reached their conclusions by dispassionately looking at the available arguments and evidence. Agnosticism – like determinism and other forms of self-detonating superstition, arises from a fear of social attack, and a staunch denial of self-knowledge.

If you do not have the stomach to encourage the potentially rational, expose the irrational and condemn the anti-rational, you have nothing to be ashamed of. I feel queasy at the sight of blood; I’d make a terrible surgeon – but I know and accept this fact, so I don’t need to recast my queasiness as other-dimensional courage.

If you are afraid of sticking your neck out in this highly unprofitable realm, that’s completely fine. If you’re scared of how others may react to the truth, that’s natural, normal and healthy. Just – accept that. We don’t all have to be good at everything. Leave this heavy lifting to others. I don’t drill my own cavities, and you can leave the perilous advancement of reason to the philosophers.

All that we ask is that you get out of the way.

The Handbook of Human Ownership: A Manual for New Tax Farmers

2011-06-13T08:05:00Z

The Handbook of Human Ownership

A Manual for New Tax Farmers

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Hey - seriously - congratulations on your new political post!

If you are reading this, it means that you have ascended to the highest levels of government, so it's really, really important that you don't do or say anything stupid, and screw things up for the rest of us.

The first thing to remember is that you are a figurehead, about as relevant to the direction of the state as a hood ornament is to the direction of a car - but you are a very important distraction, the "smiling face" of the fist of power. So hold your nose, kiss the babies, and just think how good you would look on a stamp. A stamp, for mail... No, not email, mail. Never mind, we'll explain later.

Now, before we go into your media responsibilities, you must understand the true history of political power, so you don't accidentally act on the naïve idealism you are required to project to the general public.

Human Livestock - A History of Tax Farming

The reality of political power is very simple: bad farmers own crops and livestock - good farmers own human beings.

This is not nearly as simple as it sounds, hence the need for this manual.

The very first thing to remember is that you are a mammal, an animal, and like all animals, you want to maximize consumption while minimizing effort. By far the most effective way to do this is to take from other people, just as a farmer takes milk and meat from cows.

In the dawn of history, this predation occurred in the most base manner, through brute cannibalism. While this may have proven effective in the short run, it fell prey to the problem of consuming your seed crop, in that it provided only a few meals, whilst re-growing more human livestock took over a decade.

And, it was pretty gross. Sometimes, even after you washed your food, it was too smelly to eat. (Interesting fact: deodorant was first invented as marinade.)

The husbandry of human ownership took a giant leap forward with the invention of slavery, which was a step up from cannibalism because instead of using people as food, it used people to grow food, which was a much more sustainable model, to say the least. And far less smelly.

Slavery was an improvement to be sure, but it limited the growth of the ruling class because it could not solve the problem of motivation. Turns out, if you treat people like a machine, they end up with the motivation of a machine, which is to break two days after the warranty ends, haha.

Anyhoo, the basic reality of human ownership is this:

1.       First, you must first subdue the masses through force

2.       Then, you maintain that subjugation through the psychological power of ethics.

People think that ethics were invented to make people good, but that's like saying that chastity belts were invented to spread STDs. No, no - ethics were invented to bind the minds of the slaves, and to create the only true shackles we rulers need: guilt, self-attack and a fear of the tyranny of ethics. Whoever teaches ethics rules the herd, because everyone is afraid of bad opinions, mostly from themselves. If you do it right, no judgment will be as evil or endless as the one coming from the mirror.

This is all fairly straightforward - however, the ethics required to control slaves requires the creation of a paradise after death that they can look forward to, if only they continue to obey their masters. This harvests the muscles of the slaves, but not their minds, which remain depressed and alienated and otherworldly and, well, economically fairly useless. Basically, you're saying "Hey, let's double down, shall we? I'll trade you pretty much everything in this life for everything in the afterlife, mmmkay?" It really only takes a moment's thought to realize that anyone making that deal has no belief in the afterlife - I mean, look at the gold palaces of the Pope, for heaven's sake! - but frankly, a moment's thought appears to be a moment too long for most people.

Tragically, slavery had its limits. Slaves have to be treated as apes that can be verbally commanded, which provides the ruling classes sophisticated control over their muscles, but permanently breaks the most valuable resource of the human crop - their minds.

The Roman Empire perfected the slave-owning model, but inevitably ended up creating too many dependent slaves, which triggered the slow economic collapse of the entire system. (For more on this, see the section on current conditions below.)

After the Dark Ages, when the ruling classes had to suffer the indignity of retreating into the dank attics of the Church, the feudal model emerged.

The feudal approach improved on the direct slave-owning model by granting the human livestock ("serfs") nominal ownership over land, while taking a portion of their productivity through taxes, military conscription, user fees for grinding grain and so on. So instead of owning folks directly, we just let them sweat themselves into puddles on their little ancestral plots, then took whatever we wanted from the proceeds -- all the while telling them, of course, that God Himself appointed us as masters over them, and that their highest virtue was meek subservience to their anointed masters, blah blah. Again, you might be thinking that, historically, God seems to have had a very soft spot for the most violent, entitled and warlike of His flock - and if meek submission was a virtue, why was it not practiced by the rulers, and so on, but don't worry; you need to just put these entirely natural thoughts right out of your head, because once the people become enslaved, basic reasoning just short-circuits in their tiny minds, so that they do not see the cramped horrors of their little lives.

Anyway, the evolution of medieval serfdom split society into four basic groups:

1.       The ruling class (aristocracy);

2.       The church (propaganda);

3.       The army (enforcement) - and;

4.       The serfs (livestock).

The aristocracy - of which you are now a proud member - reaped the rewards; the Church controlled the slaves through ethics; the Army attacked those not subjugated through ethics, and the Serfs paid for the whole show. (The modern equivalents are: the political masters, the media, the police and the taxpayers.)

Since they had partial custodianship of the land, medieval serfs had at least some incentive to optimize their agricultural productivity, and so starting from about the 12th century, significant increases in farm production created the excess food required for the development of cities, the natural home of the ruling classes.

The economic development of cities remained dependent upon the rediscovered Roman law, which was not a free market/private property legal system, and so economic productivity remained relatively stagnant, at least compared to the 18th century to the present.

Medieval guilds were ridiculously inefficient, forcing father-to-son transmission of livelihoods, requiring ridiculously lengthy apprenticeships designed to raise barriers to entry, denying advertising and marketing opportunities, and so on.

Furthermore, the Catholic Church had banned usury, or the lending of money for interest, which prevented investment in economic improvements. (This was largely due to the fact that the Church, and the Aristocracy it served, did not want to pay interest on its debts.)

(All of these early economic inefficiencies hindered the development of democracy, which requires enormous reserves of capital, used as collateral to bribe voters in the present with the money of the future.)

The splintering of Christendom into warring factions during the Reformation created new opportunities for capital accumulation and loans, and the economic warfare that resulted was really a conflict between medieval capital inefficiencies and the new investment efficiencies available under Protestantism - and Judaism to some degree. Naturally, the religion that was able to borrow the most won, and lending money for interest became an established practice throughout society, thus paving the way for the Industrial Revolution.

Also, after hundreds of years of bloody religious warfare where priests were effectively trying to gain control of the military might of the state, in order to impose their doctrines on everyone else, the separation of church and state became a matter of base survival. Prying religious doctrines away from government policies meant that some vaguely rational approaches to property rights and trade could be achieved, which gave rise to arguments for free trade, notably by Ricardo and Adam Smith.

When you stop trading in God, you can start trading in goods.

Starting in the 17th century, the agricultural productivity that the cities depended on began to falter. Serf landholdings were willed to sons, which created increasing fragmentation of properties, and inevitable inefficiencies in sowing and plowing. The ruling classes, eager to remain in the cities rather than go back to the damp and dirty countryside, forced the enclosure movement on the peasants, consolidating landholdings and driving hundreds of thousands of serfs off their ancestral lands. This almost immediately increased agricultural productivity, saving the cities - while creating a massive army of cheap labor which, having no land to farm anymore, inevitably ended up looking for work in towns.

The conditions were thus ripe for the Industrial Revolution - capital freedom, a mass of cheap labor, some free trade, excess food, and the growing religious skepticism which resulted from the wonderful advances of the scientific method, followed since the 16^th century.

It was at some point during this period that the greatest leap forward in human ownership came to pass, which was the simple genius of allowing the livestock to choose their own occupations.

At one fell swoop, the problem of livestock motivation was largely solved - at least until the present. Rather than eat the human livestock, or own them directly, or force them into specific occupations, a free market was created for the source of wealth, while the enslavement aspect was shifted to the effects of wealth, i.e. wages and capital.

Labor was free, wages were taxed - this was the greatest leap forward in human farming history! All prior ruling classes were revealed as incompetent parasites, compared to the brilliant manipulations of the modern human harvester!

The economic predations of the ruling classes still remained, but became largely invisible. Tariffs and duties were buried in the prices paid by consumers, who had no comparison prices to see their effects. The softening of the visible whip to a kind of leeching fog gave the livestock the perception of freedom - and they all stampeded to work, to wealth, and to fatten our tables in a way we had never dreamed possible!

The trapped entrepreneurial energies of the human herd were thus unleashed for the first time in history, producing a staggering superabundance of wealth and products and services, portions of which were hoovered up to the ruling classes to a degree never before experienced!

The benefits were clear, the productivity increases astounding - but the complications of managing this semi-free horde of human livestock rose exponentially as well.

The first and greatest danger was the shift from aristocracy to meritocracy, or the reality that greater wealth could be accumulated through trade and creativity rather than tax pillaging and the control of state violence. (This was same danger faced by the Church in the shift from superstition to science.)

The rising entrepreneurial class created an uncomfortable split within society, in which the benefits of the aristocracy began to be openly questioned. Societies like America were founded without any aristocracy at all - and aristocracies across Europe faced mounting rebellions, and sometimes outright extinction.

The aristocracy did not want to crush the entrepreneurial class - since it was so wonderfully productive - but it could not allow itself to be eclipsed by these entrepreneurs, and so another unnamed genius came up with a delightfully playful solution called incorporation.

The entrepreneurial classes wanted to maximize their profits, of course, and sometimes this came at the expense of the workers. In the early 19th century, citizens had access to a common law legal system that allowed them to bring suit against their employers for death, mutilation, pollution and so on. The capitalists wanted to avoid these legal attacks of course, but no one wanted to explicitly strip the workers of these rights, otherwise they would become aware of their enslavement, and would lose their motivation, and we would be right back to the Middle Ages again, which no one wanted at all!

Across the Western world, government after government introduced the concept of incorporation, a brilliant stroke in the annals of human ownership! Incorporation created a legal fiction called a corporation which shielded entrepreneurs, capitalists, managers and owners from most legal repercussions for their misdeeds - and even losses within their businesses!

Entrepreneurs could now take money out of this "corporation" and keep it for themselves, while if any legal action succeeded against them, or their businesses lost money or went into debt, it was now the "corporation" and "shareholders" and employees that paid the price, and no one could ever come after their personal assets. It was like a casino where you kept your winnings, and strangers paid your losses.

In return for extending this legal shield to the capitalists, our political class took a cut in the form of corporate taxes - most of which came from dividends and wages of course. This effectively trapped the entrepreneurs in the service of the state, ensuring that they would never seek to eclipse or make redundant the political class, since they were now dependent upon State power for the maintenance of their legal shield and one-way economic privileges.

The 19th Century

The 19th Century was a wildly creative time in the history of human livestock ownership. The amazing productivity unleashed by the privatization of labor, and the partial socialization of wages, created such prosperity that the necessity of the ruling classes itself was called into question.

Furthermore, the increased education and economic initiatives of the working classes threatened the economic value of the managerial classes. The workers achieved almost complete literacy, and possessed excellent work ethics, legal knowledge and social networks, including the so-called Friendly Societies, which shielded the poor from destitution through any of life's many accidents.

The supply of those able to manage thus increased, which drove down the price of management - which was not exactly welcomed by the existing capitalists.

The traditional solution to increased competition from the poor was to ban books and education, inflict religious guilt about materialism, or start a war - none of which were politically or economically advantageous at the time. Openly banning education for the children of the poor would have reintroduced the "OMG I'm a total slave!" demotivation problem; religious belief was waning, while war would have destroyed all the new capital that the ruling and entrepreneurial classes were enjoying.

In a brilliant stroke, the ruling classes and the Church conspired to create a false educational "emergency." In conjunction with a large number of resentful and underperforming teachers, public school education was introduced with the stated goal of improving the skills, abilities and intelligence of the poor.

Naturally, the true goal was the exact opposite. Rather than focusing on practical, economic and entrepreneurial knowledge, government schools quickly shifted the educational focus towards patriotic history, rote memorization and recitation, Latin and Greek, and an endless plethora of other useless and boring trivia. This was the sports equivalent of forcing your competition to take naps instead of training, resulting in a truly delightful absence of competition for medals. Government schools created dull, resentful drones only fit for taking orders, so the threat to the managerial class was averted. (All this started in Prussia, which was medieval, mystical and militaristic, which should have been something of a clue for everyone, but again, thought hurts, apparently.)

One of the four pillars of the human farm, the Church, faced mounting challenges in the 19th century, as the increased secularism of the Industrial Revolution and the growth in the empirical value of the scientific method undermined the superstitious terrors of the Middle Ages.

Sensing that the power of their God was on the decline, the clergy began casting about for a new home. Their expertise was in sophistic ethics, remember, rather than political power, and so they came up with a wonderful idea that allowed them to bring their brilliant historical lies into politics, but without having to enter into the sordid knuckle fights of base democratic electioneering.

In a word: socialism.

Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god. It has its good and evil, its creation myths, its eventual heaven where the State withers away, its ruling class of ethical liars, and so on. Priest as Plato, you get the picture...

Suddenly, instead of heaven existing in the afterlife, it was promised in this life, as soon as government programs succeeded. (The afterlife is far more likely!) The new Socialist clergy promised an end to poverty, injustice, illiteracy, shortness, baldness - any word they could get their grubby hands on - and of course anyone who disagreed with these fantasies was immediately portrayed as pro poverty, injustice, illiteracy etc. Of course, just as the moral guilt of religion can never create virtue, government programs can never create paradise, and so a perpetual motion machine of social control was started, where the supposed "solutions" just created more of the same problems.

Religion and Kiddies

Religion has always been used to support and extend the power of the State, through a number of powerful psychological mechanisms, always inflicted on children.

First of all, in religion, success is guilt, and failure is legitimate need. Creating guilt among economically successful people plants a seed that flowers into a guilty parting with their property for the sake of "helping the poor." (Notably, priests never seem to get round to attacking their own successful head priests, or the successful political systems they support and enrich.)

Secondly, religion excels at creating nonexistent entities, and then promoting a class of specialized liars who claim to speak for those entities. Thus you have a "god," and a priest who speaks "for that god." In socialism, you have the poor, and you have those who speak "for the poor." (Notably, it doesn't really matter that socialists almost never come from "the poor," such as Marx and Engels, two unemployed rich kids who claimed to have earthshaking insights into the poverty-stricken working classes, who were actually getting richer.)

Thirdly priests, like politicians, promote arbitrary but universal ethics, while excluding themselves from the moral rules they impose, which is the most fundamental attribute of any ruling class, as we will see below.

Fourthly religion - again, like the State - promotes wonderful traps in the form of false dichotomies. For example, if you don't want to the State to steal your income in order to "help the poor," then according to religion you must hate the poor. This is like saying that if you object to getting raped, you must hate lovemaking.

We could go on with this, but since religion has been so thoroughly absorbed into the State in the form of socialism, there's little point in examining its medieval corpse.

The Modern World

In the past, society was so poor that the aristocracy had to be hereditary in order to maintain its economic wealth - this is no longer the case, due to the massive productivity increases of the relatively free market. Now, a successful politician can easily gather enough wealth to last several generations - or forever if handled wisely - in just a few terms. This has allowed for the development of the illusion that the tax livestock control something we call "democracy."

Because we can steal so much wealth in such a short amount of time, the ruling classes have agreed to rotate in and out of power, in order to maintain the illusion that there is no ruling class. This rotation is essential to maintaining the optimism of the livestock by giving them the belief - almost always false - that they too can join the ruling class. This means that the ruling class is no longer directly exclusive, but rather somewhat permeable, at least at the fringes.

(The modern democratic system has the advantage of transferring literally trillions of dollars from the workers to the rulers - a plunder unprecedented in human history - but the logic of our system is inherently self-destructive, which is why it is important for you, as a new political leader, to make sure that you extract as much money as possible before the whole house of cards comes crashing down. We will tell you how to do this later.)

The democratic system only really came into its own with the abandonment of the gold standard, and the introduction of merely paper currency. Governments in the 19th century - and before - were limited in the amount they could bribe supporters and dependents by the amount of gold they had in their vaults. Gold cannot be created by printing presses, and so abandoning the gold standard (the capacity for citizens to redeem paper money for gold) allowed the printing presses of government bribery to work overtime, creating a good deal of the so-called "wealth" of the post Second World War period.

Democratic governments - like all governments - are all about the forced transfer of wealth from the productive to the unproductive. When the creation of money was limited by actual gold, it was more or less a zero-sum game. When you stole from one group to give to another - always taking your cut - it was a direct reduction and increase of wealth in the present, which was not only highly evident, but also gave the group being stolen from a good deal of incentive to fight the theft.

With the introduction of fiat currency, this all changed. The unimaginative ascribed this to the advent of Keynesianism, but the truth is that fiat currencies predated Keynesianism, and Keynesianism was merely the intellectual cover for the greatest intergenerational theft in history.

When governments can print their own money, politicians can sell future generations off to bribe supporters in the present - and shaft the poor at the same time! If the government adds 5% to the currency in circulation, those closest to the government get to spend that money first - at the prior valuation, before inflation hits - and then, as the additional money spreads through the economy, the price of everything rises, since you have more money relative to goods than you had before, and those at the bottom and the outskirts of the economy - generally the poor, and those on fixed incomes - get hit the hardest.

Thus printing money serves two major purposes - first, it gives free cash to politicians to bribe their supporters; second, it creates and exacerbates poverty on the outskirts of the economy, thus giving an excuse for politicians to raise taxes, create more government programs (and thus more supporters and dependents) and print more money, thus closing the circle.

Fiat currency also allows for luxurious indulgences in social engineering - you can create "wars" on everything (since war is the health of the State, just as the State is the health of war) - drugs, poverty, prostitution, gambling, illiteracy, sickness - whatever. This creates more and more people dependent on State payouts, and scares everyone through terrifying attacks on ordinary human vices. It also changes the kinds of people who want to become enforcers - sorry, "cops" - but again, more on that later.

Unfortunately, the relationship between increases in the money supply and inflation has been too well established and understood to be of much use anymore. Capital markets are always on the lookout for the overprinting of money, and punish governments by increasing the price of their bonds, or downgrading their credit ratings. This is just another reason why we are approaching the end of the current cycle of human ownership.

The second trick that governments can use to bribe those around them is to refrain from pumping money directly into the economy, but rather to create imaginary money, and use it to buy their own government bonds. All this does is push the liability of the repayment of bonds - both interest and principal - into the future. It is a mere accounting trick, like just about everything else the government does, but fools more than enough people to keep the game going just a little bit longer.

Democracy and Bribery - But I Repeat Myself...

Every politician must promise, say, three dollars in benefits for every dollar taken in taxes. This is utterly impossible, of course, since the government has no money of its own, and is ridiculously inefficient at everything it tries - so it is only through borrowing or printing money that politicians are able to bribe voters into imagining that the government produces wealth. The introduction of fiat currency, and the modern banking system, protected by government-controlled cartels - as well as the legal shield called the "corporation" - has been a godsend to modern politicians, since it allows the costs of present day bribery to be pushed off decades or even generations into the future. This has been a complete no-brainer for everyone involved - free bribe money, paid for by strangers who haven't even been born yet, is a temptation too lucrative and consequence-free to even imagine resisting.

Technically, democracy is a money-drug addiction that wages war on drugs far less addictive and destructive.

This is the End...

Unfortunately - and you will see this as an inevitable pattern of the ruling classes' use of violence - this unsustainable system is nearing the end of its current cycle.

The problem is that the consequences of these inevitable national debts are producing medieval conditions once again. First of all, the economic engine of the productive classes - access to capital - is failing, because governments are stealing all the capital in order to bribe voters. It's true that voters then often buy stuff, but that's not quite the same as driving new entrepreneurial development, since voters don't invest in new businesses, but rather buy products from existing businesses - which is yet another reason why existing businesses are big fans of the government!

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the issue of livestock de-motivation is raising its ugly head once more. Young people now instinctively grasp the economic catastrophes ahead, and this blunts their ambition and creativity to the point where fewer and fewer new entrepreneurs are creating wealth for the ruling classes.

Birthrates

To rulers, the most fundamental capital is not money, but people (or, more accurately, children, but we will get to that below.)

Reasonably intelligent human beings do not breed well in captivity, which is why the birthrates of modern Western nations have crashed so catastrophically. Those of us in the ruling class obviously want human livestock intelligent enough to create wealth for us - but unfortunately that kind of intelligence is also easily high enough to do a rational calculation on the benefits and costs of modern parenthood.

In the current system, most parents have to work outside the home in order to sustain even a middle-class existence, because of enormously high taxation, regulation, inflation, debt and economic controls. So parents don't get to spend days with their children, but instead get them for the evenings, night times and mornings, which are in general the least enjoyable times for parenting, particularly when you have to rush kids out of the house to daycare or school. Parents work a full day, get stuck on the terrible roads we built for them, stressed out because they don't want to be late picking up their kids, then bring their kids home, and cook and feed and bathe them, and then try and get them to bed - with precious little playtime. Mom and dad then fall into an exhausted, sexless bed, praying that their children don't wake up at night - and then have to rouse them at an artificial time, get them fed and clothed and out the door on a strict schedule - all of which is anathema to children - and then pay a significant amount of their after-tax income for strangers to take care of the children they so rarely see!

It doesn't take a genius to realize that this is a pretty raw deal for parents, and this is the most fundamental reason why birthrates among our tax cattle are so low - except among the poor, who we pay to breed, so that we can use them to guilt the better-off into surrendering their money to us.

Thus we have de-motivated young people, who spend forever draining wealth - their own and others' - in school and university; fewer babies and children, and a massive bulge of baby boomers heading into retirement, where a completely empty cupboard awaits them.

Citizens can easily understand how impossible this all is, but they shy away from confronting it, or demanding that we change it - or even admitting it - because they're all so guilty at having accepted bribes their whole life, and because parents so rarely want to admit to their kids that they have royally screwed them out of a future, and sold them off to strangers for cut-rate park admissions. These aging citizens need the next generation to pay for their own retirement, but are leaving them with a cratered economy, growing state power and massive national debts, and so to admit guilt would mean - at any reasonable moral level - withdrawing their demands for retirement funding. If a man steals a woman's car, any real apology requires that he give it back - but this is never going to happen with the national debt, or the trillions in unfunded liabilities, and so no one with any real influence is ever going to demand that we deal with this impossible situation.

Democracy is all about the guilty and shameful pillaging of the helpless and unborn; it corrupts moral responsibility to the point where almost everyone is far too guilty and entitled to take a moral stand for accountability.

Get a man to take stolen goods, and he will never complain about theft. This is the essence of democracy.

So - no worries there.

The Dependent Classes

A key foundation of livestock management is bribery, which has an obvious benefit - and a subtle one. The obvious benefit is that, say, artists and intellectuals who receive government money will never be fundamentally critical of government taxes and redistribution, for reasons too obvious to mention here. The more subtle benefit is that when you create an entire class of people dependent on government handouts, you divide the livestock into warring factions. Those whose money is being stolen have a strong incentive to reduce State theft, while those who receive stolen money have a strong incentive to increase State theft.

It is absolutely, absolutely essential that you create and maintain conditions which foster slave on slave aggression. If rulers smack down the slaves directly, the livestock immediately become aware of their enslavement, which reintroduces the motivation problem. Efficient human masters thus ensure that the slaves attack each other - the benefits of this are almost too numerous to count, but a few will be mentioned below.

Human beings, as interdependent tribal mammals, have evolved to be terrified of horizontal social attack, ostracism and rejection. This is a core emotional vulnerability which can never be eliminated, and will always serve you well.

Prehistoric man could not live without the support of the tribe, and so the need for social acceptance was programmed into the very base of his brain, as a core survival mechanism. The philosophers who serve power - mostly priests and academics - have layered onto this basic mechanism the additional power of ethics.

Ethics is a claim to a universal principle of preferred behavior, which has the enormous benefit of being easily internalized by the slave classes. If you can get slaves to attack themselves for daring to question the existing social structure, you will not have to lift a finger to keep them in their chains - they will in fact attack anyone holding a key!

As a backup, you must always have a group of slaves willing to attack anyone who mentally frees himself from your false ethics. This enforcement will always come from two main areas: the family and the media.

The Slave Family

Deep down, slaves always know that they're slaves, and their only real enslavement is resisting this knowledge. Prior ruling classes did not trust this basic mechanism, and so were hesitant to substitute horizontal social control for vertical political violence.

Now, we know better.

All commonly accepted cultural myths are created by the ruling class, are essential lubricants for the wheels of power.

The most common cultural myth is that your family is everything, the most important relationship, the most essential intimacy, the most fundamental social unit.

This helps the ruling class in countless ways - not least of which is that it establishes and extends the principle that an accident of birth creates a fundamental and eternal moral obligation; "family" thus equals "country." (Also: "sports team," which is one reason why we fund them.)

Once you have enslaved one generation, most parents will almost inevitably resist the freedom of the next generation, out of guilt and shame about their own surrender.

We tell people to stay close to their families, because their families will so often attack them for even thinking about leaving the cages of collective history.

Let's look at the sequence.

A man surrenders his liberty for petty cash and the illusion of security. He then becomes a father. His son questions his father's moral courage and integrity, and the father then attacks the son, chaining them in a cage they both rot in.

For this cycle to be maintained, we must forever tell the son that his family is the most important thing in the world - more important than reason, evidence, truth, integrity, morality - you name it! If he believes us, and if his family is not committed to his freedom, we (and they) will own him forever.

This is the basic deal we offer to parents, just like priests: give us your kids, and we'll teach them to honor and obey you no matter what, so you don't actually have to be a good person and earn their respect.

(True, not all parents take this unholy deal, but we just get the media to mock the homeschooled kids and all is well.)

Furthermore, given the billions of people ensnared in the dependent classes the world over, it is a near-certainty that at least one or more close family members will be dependent upon the existing system, and will then violently attack anyone who questions the morality and practicality of predatory democracy. Want to privatize education? Say hi to your teacher Aunt Mamie, and let the fun begin!

The Media

A few people, however, will retain the strength to emerge from the slave class, and - particularly given the communications opportunities of the Internet - may start broadcasting their message to a wider audience - in which case, it's important to pull the emergency backup attack switch called the "mainstream media."

How do you create slave on slave violence through the mainstream media?

Again, subtlety and trust in the inevitability of human psychology is the key.

First of all, you must never directly censor and control the media, or its inhabitants may rebel against your authority, and reveal your naked aggression. Once the knowledge of slavery becomes inescapable, society inevitably and immediately changes - and hiding this knowledge is the entire art and science of human ownership.

Thus you need to create a slow and increasing economic dependence in the media, rather than arresting and imprisoning its members.

You do this by making reporters more and more dependent upon information from the government. It is much, much cheaper to simply rewrite a governmental press release than it is to spend weeks or months going undercover, interviewing subjects, verifying sources, and exposing yourself to legal complications in order to break a story outside the normal channels of communication.

Furthermore, as State power grows, more and more people become more and more interested in what the government says and does, since they are investors or business people whose fortunes rise and fall on the whims of the ruling class.

This process can be a little risky at first, but you only need a decade or two in order for it to become almost universal and irreversible.

Remember - it takes a pretty empty person to rewrite government press releases for a living, and fairly delusionary managers to pretend that they are not the mere amplifiers of the whispers of power. Once these managers assume their positions, they will inevitably reject any energetic truth seekers, and instinctively seek out and employ other empty rewriters of State edicts. The collective delusion that they're still producing "news" becomes progressively stronger, to the point where they will rail against and attack anyone who actually tries to publish something that is true, particularly if it threatens the government contacts who supply their disinformation.

Access to government thus becomes the foundation of any media organization - therefore no fundamental criticisms of government can be produced. You can criticize a tax, but not taxation itself. You can criticize a party, but not the State. You can criticize a vote, but not voting.

As usual, it is both depressing and exciting to see the tiny price that people are willing to sell themselves for - their name in print, a meager expense account, a few parties, and they are yours.

The physical abuse required to keep the sheep in line is doled out by the police - the verbal abuse is doled out by the media.

The media has been trained to attack anyone who questions the foundations of violent power. The equation is really very simple - so simple that it is always overlooked. If a man says that coercive wealth transfers - theft, in the vernacular - are wrong, then the media instantly attacks him for not caring about whoever is receiving the stolen money.

For instance, if a man questions the morality and practicality of the welfare state, he will be immediately attacked for not caring about the poor. If he argues against government schools, then he clearly hates the fact that children get educated. If he defends free-trade, he is an immoral advocate for bloodsucking corporations; if he criticizes military budgets, he is a cowardly appeaser who wishes to surrender Fort Knox to Al Qaeda; if he holds people morally accountable for their actions, he is punishing them for their past mistakes and "playing the blame game"; if he refuses to forgive unrepentant wrongdoers, he is nursing a grudge and so on.

If he argues that adult relationships are voluntary, then he is viciously anti-community; if he says that abuse should not be tolerated in relationships, then he is an intolerant absolutist bent on destroying all relationships...

This list can go on and on and on - and Lord knows it does, every day - but you get the point.

The wonderful thing is that you won't ever have to tell the media to do this - it just happens of its own accord, because people who are expert verbal abusers always rise to the top of the media pyramid, because they are so useful to those of us in power, so we always give them access and exclusivity.

You only need a few verbal abusers in charge, and everyone else will fall in line, because anyone who tries to stand up against them will be immediately smacked down, and will face the horrifying spectacle of watching all of their colleagues either take cowardly steps back, or joining in the verbal assaults.

(I should probably have mentioned that priests - the best verbal abusers in history - left the church for socialism and the media, which is why the media tends to be so left-wing.)

The reason the media performs this service for us is very simple - we own their livelihoods through licensing, legal regulation and access to information. If we decide to cut anyone off, his career is over. If anyone displeases us, we can threaten to pull the license of the entire organization, because the rules are so Byzantine that we can nail someone for something at any time - much like tax code, it is a form of soft totalitarianism that we have perfected over the generations.

The purpose of regulation is to control through rational anxiety rather than dictatorial terror. Prior dictatorships would shoot people, arrest and imprison them arbitrarily - this controlled people's bodies very effectively, but destroyed their entrepreneurial energies and motivations.

It is far more effective to regulate and license and tax - and this is true for all industries - because potential dissidents then face their own foggy walls of vague anxiety - in which they will not face arrest and imprisonment, but rather lengthy legal complications, which they may eventually win, but which drain much of the joy out of living while they go on, month after month, year after year.

This is true for public-sector unions as well - we don't make it illegal for a manager to fire a unionized employee, because that would expose the system for the economic joke that it is - we just make it really, really lengthy and complicated and emotionally draining and confrontational and exhausting - that is the true perfection of soft totalitarianism. People will surrender to anxiety and still vaguely feel free - if you terrorize them directly, they tend to just collapse intellectually and emotionally.

If the media were directly owned by the government, the propaganda would be clear; the indirect "ownership" of licensing and access to information is far more effective and powerful, because it maintains the veneer of independence and critical thinking.

This form of indirect ownership is the essence of modern democratic tax farming.

It is a central truism of human nature that people always attack what they avoid - if a reporter imagines that he is some sort of freethinking iconoclast, he is in complete denial about the reality of his enslavement. This denial always manifests itself in hysterical attacks against anyone who dares to point it out, or who is actually a freethinker.

To sum up - if we attack the slaves, we lose - if the slaves attack each other, which is so easy to orchestrate - we win, at least for a time.

Children: The Greatest Resource

When we say that human beings are the greatest resource, it's important to be precise about what we mean.

Human beings are naturally born with two characteristics - the first is a resistance to arbitrary authority, and the second is a natural susceptibility to obeying universal ethics.

Anyone who doubts the first characteristic has never tried to parent a two-year-old, and anyone who doubts the second has never triggered or experienced moral guilt.

Domesticating the human animal does not mean that everyone needs to turn out the same - in fact, it would be quite a disaster for us if they did.

To most efficiently control the human farm, you need a majority of broken, self-attacking, insecure, shallow, vain and ambitious sheep, forever consumed by inconsequentialities like weight, abs and celebrities - and a minority of volatile, angry and dominant sheepdogs, which you can dress up in either a green or a blue costume, and use to threaten and manage the herd.

Ruling classes have always had to separate children from their parents, otherwise it is almost impossible to substitute weird abstractions like "the state" or "a god" for the parent-child bond. Human children, like ducklings, will bond with whatever person or institution raises them, which is why we always need to get children - hopefully as young as possible - to bond with the State through government daycare and... "education" I guess is the closest word.

In the distant past, rulers made the error of forcibly removing children from their parents, which exposed their enslavement, and so destroyed their motivation. In the late Middle Ages, children were farmed out to wet-nurses, destroying the parent-child bond. In more recent times, the boarding school system separated children from their parents, destroying empathy and creating wonderfully brutal administrators and enforcers for a variety of European empires. (See: George Orwell.)

In our constant quest to perfect human ownership, we have found a far better way to break these family bonds, and substitute allegiance to ourselves, in the form of patriotism and/or religiosity.

It's one of those beautiful win-win situations that come along so rarely - first, we raised taxes to the point where it became very difficult to maintain a reasonable lifestyle if one parent stayed home with the children. We also funded feminist groups to the tune of billions of dollars - one of the greatest investments we ever made - to encourage women to abandon their children and enter the workforce.

Not only did this help break the parent-child bond, but it also moved women's labor from nontaxable to taxable - a delightful coincidence of self-interest and practicality for us!

With both parents working, all we had to do was create a few scares about the quality of child care, allowing us to move in to control and regulate that industry, remaking it to serve us best.

In some countries, like the United States, children are effectively removed from parental care by the state within a few weeks or months after birth - in other countries, parents receive direct subsidies to stay at home, which is quite funny when you think about it (and there is precious little room for humor in much of this). We take money by force from the parents, keep a large portion for ourselves, use another portion to run up debts that their children will somehow have to pay off - and then dribble a few pennies down to the mother, who then feels that we are somehow doing her a great favor by allowing her to stay at home!

It is a delicious irony that everyone remains so totally blind to reality that they run to us to protect their children from all kinds of harm, while we are the ones selling off their children's future through national debts! It really is like hiring a thief to guard your property, and the amazing thing is that this is all so completely obvious, and never, ever spoken about!

Sometimes, it would be tempting to feel bad about ruling people, but really, they are so very stupid that it seems almost helpful.

Parenting has generally improved over the centuries, which also poses a grave threat to us, because if children are raised without aggression, they will both immediately see, and never accept, the reality of human ownership.

As parenting has improved, it has become more important for us to intervene earlier and earlier. In the 19th century, it was okay to wait until the tax kittens were five or six before we started propagandizing them in government schools. However, as parenting has improved - particularly in the post-Second World War period, we have had to start intervening earlier and earlier, which is why we try and get at kids so soon after birth now.

When kids were raised fairly well in the post-war period, it produced the disasters of the rebellious 1960s, which almost finished us, and so we began funding radical feminism, controlling teachers more and snatching the kids earlier and earlier to fix all that.

So - we need some parents to create the sheep, and other parents to create the wolves, or the sociopaths who can be relied upon to attack whoever we point to. These sociopaths can be divided into those who guard the ruling class (the police and soldiers and prison guards and so on) - and the criminals that we always wave around to frighten people into running back to our "protection."

Again, the amount of doublethink required to maintain the delusion that the ruling class is not invested in crime - when even by our rules, we are all criminals - is really quite astounding! Governments control almost the entire environment of the poor, from public housing to food stamps to welfare checks to public schools - and it is this environment that produces the majority of criminals! For instance, governments require that children spend about 15,000 hours being educated in state schools, and yet when they emerge from this massive investment as illiterate and violent criminals, no one ever takes us to task!

Never, ever underestimate the degree to which people will scatter themselves into a deep fog in order to avoid seeing the basic realities of their own cages.

The strongest lock on the prison is always avoidance, not force.

Never-Never Land

Imagine a world in which almost all children were raised peacefully - there would be no criminals, no police, no soldiers, no politicians (or others with a bottomless lust for power) - no bullying in the workplace, no white-collar predations on the general wealth, no assault, no rape, no murder, no theft, no drug abuse, no smoking, no alcoholism, no eating disorders, no pedophilia, far fewer mental and physical health issues, very little divorce, promiscuity or infidelity - since all of these dysfunctions can be directly traced back to early childhood traumas.

What need would such a world have for rulers?

That is the world we can never allow to come into existence.

Anything we can do to traumatize children serves the hierarchical violence of our power.

Getting kids into daycare is a great start, since daycare makes children continually ill, exposes them to the wild aggressions of dozens of other children, destroys the one-on-one time that children need for bonding and emotional maturity. Daycare kids remain insecure, unbonded with a consistent caregiver (since teacher turnover is so high), and end up inevitably placing more emphasis on peer relationships than they do on adult caregiver relationships - including their parents.

These peer relationships among kids inevitably devolve to the lowest common denominator, with bullies and manipulators and the physically attractive rising to the top, and the sensitive and intelligent and empathetic hiding under tables. Children quickly perceive that adult attention is almost always negative - in other words that they themselves are negative - serving only to increase the stress of their caregivers. Due to the shortage of time and resources, conflicts between children are rarely resolved in a just manner, but merely with separation and mutual punishment, which breaks the child's natural desire for integrity and virtue, and places all the power in the fists of those empty and dangerous children who do not fear retribution.

When the stressed-out parent comes to pick up the child from daycare, the child feels further devalued, knowing that he is just another source of aggravation for his parent ("Just get in the car!"). The practical necessities of child raising are then compressed into a very short and taxing time, which no one really enjoys. Parents are short-tempered and impatient, children are stressed and unhappy, and then the whole thing starts all over again when the alarm bells go off the next morning.

Children have to feel herded and controlled by impatient adult caregivers long before we get a hold of them in schools, otherwise our whole system will fall apart.

Children have to feel that they are inconvenient impositions on all-powerful authorities long before they become adults - or even schoolchildren - otherwise we will have no control over them.

Children have to feel grateful for whatever crumbs of attention and consideration fall their way, and learn to live on very little, otherwise they will never grow up with the desperate hunger that can only be filled by conformity, patriotism, sports addictions, religions and other superstitions.

We plant children; we grow power.

Rule by Adjective

The violence of the government can create nothing, so all we can do is manipulate language. This is called the "rule by adjective," or RBA.

RBA essentially consists of the creation of noble sounding phrases that completely disintegrate under the slightest rational or empirical examination. The goal is to use wording that sounds like the tagline of a B-grade action movie, but with flags.

A few examples we are particularly proud of:

·         "Building a bridge to the 21st century."

·         "[Insert country here] has a date with destiny."

·         "No dream is beyond our reach."

·         "We're one people bound together by a common set of ideas."

·         "Let's celebrate our diversity."

In crafting political language, it's essential to play upon personal relationships, and pretend that the farmers and the sheep are all one big happy family, and that anyone who expresses skepticism or disagreements is not a "team player," and does not want to achieve anything noble or great or good or unselfish. For example:

·         "There may be naysayers among us who say that we cannot achieve these great things together, but I say that history will prove them wrong, that the spirit of creativity and unity still lives within our people, and that the final chapter of our civilization has yet to be written!" etc etc.

Notice that no substantial criticism is ever addressed - rather, sly slander is continually layered over the objection until whoever objects is just kind of disliked. (This trick is continually reinforced in movies, where all the bad guys are unlikable, and all the good guys likable, which as anyone who has ever read Socrates knows, is almost always the complete opposite of the truth.)

Now that you have achieved the summit of political power, it is also essential that you project calm, confidence, serenity, and all the other characteristics that are completely inappropriate to the imminent disasters awaiting the tax cattle.

The way that you do this is very easy - know that you will now be taken care of for the rest of your life, and your children will never have to work, and their children will never have to work, and you will never face any significant legal problems or disciplinary action or face arrest for anything you have done, even if it means starting unjust wars, murdering people by the hundreds of thousands, imprisoning non-criminals by the millions, running up trillions in debt, authorizing torture, you name it, it's OK.

Consequences are for sheep, not farmers. A citizen cannot be caught speeding without consequences - but you are above all that now, no matter what hells you unleash on the world.

People want political power because they want something for nothing, and they want to escape the consequences of their evil actions - we want to assure you that you have now fully achieved these goals. You will never have to worry about losing your house, your job, your money, your freedom - and with this kind of immunity from political, legal and economic reality, you can project all the serene confidence of a sea captain being helicoptered to safety while his ship slowly sinks.

We can also guarantee you that you will never face any tough questions from the media. Anyone who gets to interview you will be so thrilled at the opportunity, and so excited to be advancing his career, that he will only lob you softball setups. It's true that a single question might be asked, such as, "do you think that X was a mistake?" but we can assure you with perfect equanimity that whatever you answer will be accepted, and no follow-up questions will be asked. You will always have the final say, and if anyone does dare to ask you a follow-up question, all you have to do is act mildly irritated, and insist that you have already answered that question.

If anyone persists, not to worry, his career will be over, because about 10,000 empty-headed pundits will take to the airwaves claiming to be shocked and appalled at the way that you were browbeaten and harangued, and demanding to know what your problem is, and who you think you are, and so on.

We know, we know - it sounds impossible, but it's a guaranteed fix, every single time. It's as predictable as hungry dogs chasing a dead rabbit on a string.

Ethics

There are two kinds of ethics that you need to be aware of - it is very likely that you are already aware of them, since you are where you are, but it's worth going over them one more time.

When slaves evaluate masters, relativism and deference and working together and respecting differences of opinion are key.

When masters evaluate other masters, bipartisanship and putting aside differences and working together and respecting differences of opinion are also key.

This falls into the old category of "turn the other cheek."

When masters evaluate slaves, however, it's total "eye for an eye" time!

For instance, if you propose health care legislation that will force people to do stuff, it's very important that you respect the other parties' right to disagree with your proposal. However, once it becomes law, no mere citizen is ever allowed to act on his or her disagreement with you!

Debates are for the masters, enforcement is for the slaves.

You are allowed to debate whether or not to go to war, citizens are not allowed to choose whether or not they fund the war, or are drafted to get killed in it. You are allowed to debate whether to subsidize some group, citizens are never allowed to choose whether they subsidize that group.

Free will is for the masters - slaves get the determinism of their masters' whims.

In case you have any concern that someone will point out the ridiculousness of all this, do not fear! The moment that anyone argues that we don't need violent masters - that such masters are in fact hellishly destructive - all the slaves in the world will gang up on such an exposed truth-teller, saying, in effect, "We are not slaves if you don't point out our masters!"

This reaction is all based on propaganda that is carefully layered in throughout government education - and all education is government education, because we regulate and control private schools and universities as well.

The propaganda is, like all propaganda, completely insane, but through calm repetition and attacking dissenters, it quickly gets accepted as an obvious truth.

The propaganda is this:

1.       The government provides service X.

2.       If the government does not provide service X, service X will never be provided.

3.       Therefore, anyone arguing against the government providing service X is arguing against the necessity or value of service X.

It seems almost embarrassing to point out the foolishness of these arguments, but in the highly unlikely event you ever get a question on this, it's good to have an "answer."

According to the democratic model, governments only do what the majority of citizens want them to do. "The will of the majority," is one of our central gods, which cannot speak for itself, of course, and therefore kindly allows us to, um, speak for it.

Democratic governments only help the poor, then, because the majority of citizens want them to. If governments reflect the will of the people, then whatever governments do is entirely unnecessary, because the majority want to do it anyway.

The more that people get attacked for not caring about the poor, the less the government needs to do anything about the poor, because the attacks reflect a general preference to help the poor. The only practical argument for the continuance of a government program would be if everybody had a strong desire to get rid of it, because then, it could be argued, they did not care about its recipients. If someone said, "Let's get rid of the welfare state," and everyone cheered and joined in, we might very well have some concern about the fate of the poor - the fact that everyone defends the welfare state means that the poor will be perfectly well taken care of in a free society.

Ah, the weariness of these ridiculous arguments! We do sometimes wish that people would become just a little bit smarter, so we could all eventually become free, but we are as trapped by the livestock's illusions as they are.

Exploitation

There are two classes of parasites on the productive classes - the poor and the political. In the old days, Marxists used to blather on about the exploitation of the poor by capitalists, which was utter nonsense. When the capitalists were "exploiting" the workers in the mid 19^th century, their real wages doubled - we democratic masters have had our real claws on them for the past 40 years, and real wages have not only stagnated and fallen, but educational standards have collapsed, incarceration rates have skyrocketed, living conditions have deteriorated - and the remaining social services we provide (bribes) are all going to collapse because we have sold everyone off piecemeal under the guise of "national debt" (because the real term - serfdom - is just too accurate to be accepted).

The old-style capitalists "exploited" the poor by paying them ever-higher wages - we exploit them by selling both them and their kids off to whoever will shove a thin dime in our direction - dropping a penny in the hollow plates of the poor, keeping eight cents for ourselves, and using the last penny as collateral to borrow ten more.

But the merchant class is very useful to us, in more ways than as tax cattle, tax collectors, and productive livestock - they also shield us from popular anger at the inevitable results of our predations. When we pay ourselves with the monopoly money (literally) of their futures, prices go up. Who does the public get angry at? Us? Ha ha, get real, we don't teach them a damn thing about real economics - no, they get angry at the checkout girl at the local convenience store for high prices - and of course we always promise to "investigate" the source of such shocking inflation. It's pretty easy to pretend to investigate a mirror.

The strange thing as well is that we educate their kids, and then they expect these lost souls to be somehow objective about us! Imagine if a kid went to a school run by a government Post Office - would you expect him to learn any form of critical thinking about the Post Office? Of course not - he would get endless lessons on how wonderful, benevolent and friendly Post Office workers were, and how before the Post Office became a government monopoly, private mail carriers stole checks from starving widows, abused their workers and overcharged their helpless customers. You wouldn't expect even a sliver of truth to fall through the cracks of propaganda, but all this - and more, since the Post Office can't start wars - is inflicted on the helpless kids held prisoner in state "schools." So people arrive at adulthood worshipping the State that stole from their parents, crushed their minds under forced indoctrination, sold them into serfdom for the rest of their lives, and programmed them for endless obedience.

Imagine if we said that Goldman Sachs should run all the government schools - just picture the howls of indignation that would arise, shrill shrieks of the dangers of bias, indoctrination and programming! Ah, but give the children to the State, and everyone smiles benignly, certain that objectivity, reason and a well-tempered love of children and learning will reign supreme.

Ahhh, it does turn the stomach so at times! Everyone knows that teachers don't give even half a rat's ass about the kids - and the test is so pitifully easy that everyone knows what it is. Just remind the teachers that kids don't benefit from having over two months off in the summer - and it's hell for parents as well of course - and cite the statistics about how well kids do when they're in school year round, and don't forget everything over the summer. How will the teachers react? Meh, to ask the question is to answer it.

Childhood <> Personhood

The key to tyranny is to treat kids as somewhere between pets and hobos. If a child never thinks of himself as a full person, he will never aspire to be more than a "citizen" - i.e. to be owned, and sold, and ordered around. (People take pride in being ‘citizens,' which is completely mad, since ‘citizenship' means that they have been granted the ‘right' to work, travel and live, which are all supposed to be ‘inalienable' anyway...)

For example - imagine, as Murray Rothbard once wrote, that the government should take over magazines and books, and limit readership by local geography, and hire, fire and control all writers, editors and reporters, and force people to pay for them even if they never read them - what an unholy outcry would arise! Cries of ‘censorship' and ‘tyranny' would echo in tinny indignation from bosom to heaving bosom! Ah, but inflict far worse controls on children - force them into local schools, control all the teachers and curriculum (even for ‘private' schools) and not only are the voices of protest silent, but are only raised against anyone who dares to suggest that the free minds of helpless children are far more important than the recreational reading tastes of adults...

You'll get a kick out of this one too - ok - use government power to force everyone to pay for the indoctrination of children, force the kids to sit in dusty, still rows, barely allowed to blink - and then drug the living crap out of them if they get bored and restless - and keep them trapped there, year after year - and then tell them that their masters won the war that set them free, against National Socialism and communism! Can you imagine telling children in an entirely communist environment - public schools - that communism is the enemy? Of course, they'll just write it down and regurgitate it whenever you want, because they're terrified of being drugged - and then you have to tell them, of course, that communist dictatorships used the lie called "mental illness" to drug anyone who didn't fit in and obey the rulers!

Freedom is for the adults - communism is for the children.

Science

We have a complicated relationship with science - we need it, for weapons and tax livestock management (imagine how hard it would be to collect taxes without computers) - so we need science to flourish, but we also need to control it. The way we do this is to continually program the population to view science as a productive but dangerous force that will destroy the world if not tightly controlled. This is utterly absurd, of course, since it was our control of science through the Manhattan Project that created weapons that actually could destroy the world, but then we just tell the sheeple that, yanno, worse things would have happened if we didn't make nukes, and they all baa and agree and eat the leftover grass we shovel into their troughs.

So we do this sort of "Sorcerer's Apprentice" thing, where science is great to begin with, but then grows and grows and gets out of control and needs to be shut down in an extremity of CGI adventure. Naturally, we're really talking about ourselves, the government itself, but no one wants to think about that, so they imagine that it's all about robots and computers and carbon footprints and machines that make hot dogs in the sky...

People will always choose a thousand fairy tales over one basic fact.

Except us, perhaps. Our understanding of - and immunity to - sentimentality is our greatest power. We are the lions who hunt with sentimental pictures of little kittens.

From Here...

At this point, it does pain me to tell you that you will soon have the rather unenviable task of informing the livestock that they are pretty much screwed.

There is no way in god's green earth that our system will last even another few years, which means that you will have dust off and start playing the good old ‘sacrifice violin.'

Now this traditional instrument may sound screechy and ridiculous to your ears but trust us, just keep playing and everyone will dance in a line for you.

Just tell them that biiiig hardships are coming, that we as a nation are being ‘tested,' and that we all need to ‘pull together' and shoulder our common burdens, and look out for the most vulnerable among us, and that to achieve a new dawn, sacrifices need to be made, and hint strongly that bad forces outside your control - or before your time - have robbed the people, and will be held accountable, but that we all need to look to the future, and remember that we as a people can do anything we set our minds and wills to, and we defeated the prior tyrannies etc etc etc.

For some reason, people always take a dark masochistic delight in struggling through trying times where they all have to "pull together" and "make sacrifices" and strive to achieve the best in tragic times and so on. Probably boredom and self-contempt for their own hypocrisy, but who knows, and who cares? The important thing is that government schools and all the endless lies about past wars and depressions - that the best in people comes out in the worst of times and so on - have all programmed citizens to react with dark and lascivious glee when we demand that they spend a generation eating shit for our mistakes.

Of course, people love to punish themselves for their own hypocrisies and various other sins, and Lord knows the average state-sucking slut voter has more than enough to feel guilty about, trying to wheedle something for nothing out of the government, the future, their own children for heaven's sake! So when sacrifice is called for, most people feel secretly relieved, since all these trials, tribulations and common burdens effectively squelch any substantial social, economic or political criticisms.

"Pull together" unleashes the most savage social censorship imaginable. During the coming time of crisis, if the young people justly point fingers at the greed and hypocrisy of their elders, they will be sternly told that we all have to pull together, and there's no point playing the "blame game" now. If the young point out that they were never allowed such a mealy-mouthed avoidance strategy when they were growing up, they will be told that they are quibbling and refusing to let go of the past and so on. Ha ha, imagine a teenager trying those strategies about failing to take out the garbage, and you will instantly see how much these cowardly redirects stink!

So - self-flagellation for past crimes and avoidance of just accusations from past victims - these motives will trigger such hellish attacks on freethinkers that only the truly crazed will continue to raise these issues... (If you want to know more about this phenomenon, just remember how few Europeans criticized the ruling classes for two World Wars in two generations, but rather took pride in ‘winning' a bloodbath that cost over 50 million lives - and contrast that with how they treat a waiter who forgets their food order.)

So the plan is always the same - we pillage, plunder and bribe - then demand sacrifices from our victims. To get the general idea, picture a rapist demanding a drive home from his victim.

Anyone who does not play along with this insanity will just be branded a malcontent, not a "team player" - and mocked and ostracized. Fortunately, we have bred our livestock to be so dependent on social approval that most everyone will find this unbearable, and slink back into the single file line to the graveyard, pushing their bewildered and resentful children ahead of them...

Conclusion

So remember - you're going to be taken care of, that's the first thing to really understand. You can't go broke, you can't go hungry, you can't lose your house, you can't really be fired, and people will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to hear you speak every day for the rest of your life. You will get libraries named after you, receive multimillion dollar book deals, and a guaranteed gold-plated pension with free health care for the rest of your life.

You have absolutely nothing to worry about. You have the softest seat on the biggest lifeboat.

This is, to a large degree, the source of your weird confidence, which separates you from the herd, and which they imagine is why you are their leader.

The reality is that they have endless worries that you don't have, and so you can just join us, floating above the petty fears of the masses, serene and secure like the ancient gods we have always been.

So go out among the crowds and make pretty noises with your velvet throat. Distract these fools with your eloquence while we finish pillaging their pockets. Empty out the remainder of your soul driving the sheeple off a cliff - it may haunt the remnants of your integrity, but don't worry: we do still have that stamp just waiting for your smiling face.

The Story of Your Enslavement - Freedomain Radio

2010-04-16T03:15:00Z

This is the story of your enslavement; how it came to be, and you can finally be free.

Like all animals, human beings want to dominate and exploit the resources around them.

At first, we mostly hunted and fished and ate off the land - but then something magical and terrible happened to our minds.

We became, alone among the animals, afraid of death, and of future loss.

And this was the start of a great tragedy, and an even greater possibility...

You see, when we became afraid of death, of injury, and imprisonment, we became controllable -- and so valuable -- in a way that no other resource could ever be.

The greatest resource for any human being to control is not natural resources, or tools, or animals or land -- but other human beings.

You can frighten an animal, because animals are afraid of pain in the moment, but you cannot frighten an animal with a loss of liberty, or with torture or imprisonment in the future, because animals have very little sense of tomorrow.

You cannot threaten a cow with torture, or a sheep with death. You cannot swing a sword at a tree and scream at it to produce more fruit, or hold a burning torch to a field and demand more wheat.

You cannot get more eggs by threatening a hen - but you can get a man to give you his eggs by threatening him.

Human farming has been the most profitable -- and destructive -- occupation throughout history, and it is now reaching its destructive climax.

Human society cannot be rationally understood until it is seen for what it is: a series of farms where human farmers own human livestock.

Some people get confused because governments provide healthcare and water and education and roads, and thus imagine that there is some benevolence at work.

Nothing could be further from reality.

Farmers provide healthcare and irrigation and training to their livestock.

Some people get confused because we are allowed certain liberties, and thus imagine that our government protects our freedoms.

But farmers plant their crops a certain distance apart to increase their yields -- and will allow certain animals larger stalls or fields if it means they will produce more meat and milk.

In your country, your tax farm, your farmer grants you certain freedoms not because he cares about your liberties, but because he wants to increase his profits.

Are you beginning to see the nature of the cage you were born into?

There have been four major phases of human farming.

The first phase, in ancient Egypt, was direct and brutal human compulsion. Human bodies were controlled, but the creative productivity of the human mind remained outside the reach of the whip and the brand and the shackles. Slaves remained woefully underproductive, and required enormous resources to control.

The second phase was the Roman model, wherein slaves were granted some capacity for freedom, ingenuity and creativity, which raised their productivity. This increased the wealth of Rome, and thus the tax income of the Roman government - and with this additional wealth, Rome became an empire, destroying the economic freedoms that fed its power, and collapsed.

I'm sure that this does not seem entirely unfamiliar.

After the collapse of Rome, the feudal model introduced the concept of livestock ownership and taxation. Instead of being directly owned, peasants farmed land that they could retain as long as they paid off the local warlords. This model broke down due to the continual subdivision of productive land, and was destroyed during the Enclosure movement, when land was consolidated, and hundreds of thousands of peasants were kicked off their ancestral lands, because new farming techniques made larger farms more productive with fewer people.

The increased productivity of the late Middle Ages created the excess food required for the expansion of towns and cities, which in turn gave rise to the modern Democratic model of human ownership.

As displaced peasants flooded into the cities, a huge stock of cheap human capital became available to the rising industrialists - and the ruling class of human farmers quickly realized that they could make more money by letting their livestock choose their own occupations.

Under the Democratic model, direct slave ownership has been replaced by the Mafia model. The Mafia rarely owns businesses directly, but rather sends thugs around once a month to steal from the business "owners."

You are now allowed to choose your own occupation, which raises your productivity - and thus the taxes you can pay to your masters.

Your few freedoms are preserved because they are profitable to your owners.

The great challenge of the Democratic model is that increases in wealth and freedom threaten the farmers. The ruling classes initially profit from a relatively free market in capital and labor, but as their livestock become more used to their freedoms and growing wealth, they begin to question why they need rulers at all.

Ah well. Nobody ever said that human farming was easy.

Keeping the tax livestock securely in the compounds of the ruling classes is a three phase process.

The first is to indoctrinate the young through government "education." As the wealth of democratic countries grew, government schools were universally inflicted in order to control the thoughts and souls of the livestock.

The second is to turn citizens against each other through the creation of dependent livestock.

It is very difficult to rule human beings directly through force -- and where it can be achieved, it remains cripplingly underproductive, as can be seen in North Korea. Human beings do not breed well or produce efficiently in direct captivity.

If human beings believe that they are free, then they will produce much more for their farmers. The best way to maintain this illusion of freedom is to put some of the livestock on the payroll of the farmer. Those cows that become dependent on the existing hierarchy will then attack any other cows who point out the violence, hypocrisy and immorality of human ownership.

Freedom is slavery, and slavery is freedom.

If you can get the cows to attack each other whenever anybody brings up the reality of their situation, then you don't have to spend nearly as much controlling them directly.

Those cows who become dependent upon the stolen largess of the farmer will violently oppose any questioning of the virtue of human ownership -- and the intellectual and artistic classes, always and forever dependent upon the farmers -- will say, to anyone who demands freedom from ownership: "You will harm your fellow cows."

The livestock are kept enclosed by shifting the moral responsibility for the destructiveness of a violent system to those who demand real freedom.

The third phase is to invent continual external threats, so that the frightened livestock cling to the "protection" of the farmers.

This system of human farming is now nearing its end.

The terrible tragedy of the modern American system has occurred not in spite of, but because of past economic freedoms.

The massive increases in American wealth throughout the 19th century resulted from economic freedom -- and it was this very increase in wealth that fed the size and power of the state.

Whenever the livestock become exponentially more productive, you get a corresponding increase in the number of farmers and their dependents.

The growth of the state is always proportional to the preceding economic freedoms.

Economic freedoms create wealth, and the wealth attracts more thieves and political parasites, whose greed then destroys the economic freedoms.

In other words, freedom metastasizes the cancer of the state.

The government that starts off the smallest will always end up the largest.

This is why there can be no viable and sustainable alternative to a truly free and peaceful society.

A society without political rulers, without human ownership, without the violence of taxation and statism...

To be truly free is both very easy, and very hard.

We avoid the horror of our enslavement because it is painful to see it directly.

We dance around the violence of our dying system because we fear the attacks of our fellow livestock.

But we can only be kept in the cages we refuse to see.

Wake up...

To see the farm is to leave it.

True News 15 : Statism is Dead - Part 5 - Terrorism

2008-12-09T21:27:00Z

The word terrorism is notoriously hard to define, for reasons which will become clear in a few minutes.

The term "terrorism" comes from Latin terrere, "to frighten." A dictionary definition is:

the act of terrorizing; use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate, and subjugate, esp. such use as a political weapon or policy
the demoralization and intimidation produced in this way

Terrorism Law Definition

"The threat or actual use of violence in order to intimidate or create panic, especially when utilized as a means of attempting to influence political conduct."

Chapter 113B of Part I of Title 18 of the United States Code defines terrorism and lists the crimes associated with terrorism.[24] In Section 2331 of Chapter 113b, terrorism is defined as:

"…activities that involve violent… or life-threatening acts… that… appear to be intended... to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;"

International Terrorism

Edward Peck, former U.S. Chief of Mission in Iraq under Jimmy Carter:

"In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, they asked us... to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities. […] After the task force concluded its work, Congress got into it, and you can Google into U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2331, and read the US definition of terrorism. And one of them in here says — one of the terms, 'international terrorism,' means 'activities that,' I quote, 'appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.' […] Yes, well, certainly, you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in such activities. Ours is one of them. Israel is another. And so, the terrorist, of course, is in the eye of the beholder."

For instance, in 2000 Hans Von Sponeck, the head UNICEF official in Iraq from 1998 to 2000, placed the death toll from the 1990s US-led Iraq sanctions at 1.26 million, including 500,000 children under the age of five.

That would be the equivalent of almost 13 million American deaths, including 5 million helpless children.

Imagine how hard it would be for Tony Soprano to create universal and objective moral definitions condemning racketeering, blackmail, extortion and intimidation that did not include his own activities...

Most skeptics, particularly on the left, are deeply aware of the violence and intimidation that the US government has used throughout its history...

The death count for US imperialism has been conservatively estimated at almost 30,000,000 souls.

Three times the body count of World War I. 10,000 times 9/11. Imagine a 9/11 attack every single day, somewhere in the US, for over 25 years straight...

However, all this almost completely misses the point and true definition of terrorism.

the act of terrorizing; use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate, and subjugate, esp. such use as a political weapon or policy
the demoralization and intimidation produced in this way

The use or threat of violence against foreigners is only possible and profitable because of the use or threat of violence against domestic citizens.

Against – you.

Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney -- and all of the war profiteers -- do not pay for the wars they start.

If they did, there would be no wars.

You pay for these wars.

The blood is on their hands.

The bill is in yours, and your children's.

Why do you pay for the wars?

Well, for the same reason that you would pay off Tony Soprano.

Because the government "uses force or threats to demoralize, intimidate, and subjugate" you.

If you do not pay your taxes – your extortion - you will get a letter, and then another letter, and then a court date, and then an extortion notice for back taxes, interest and penalties.

If you do not pay off this extortion, armed thugs in costume will come to your house and drag you off to jail.

If you resist, you will be brutally subdued – if you raise a gun to defend yourself against this home invasion, you will be slaughtered like livestock in a hail of bullets.

In jail, you will be brutalized, tortured, raped, for months and years. You may be released, eventually, like Winston Smith, a broken and shattered soul.

This is the reality of human farming.

Violence, kidnapping, torture and institutionalized "rape rooms" – these are all threats designed to "demoralize, intimidate and subjugate" for the political goals of regime change.

War is an effect of taxation.

Taxation is terrorism.

And that is only the beginning.

Domestic Terrorism

It is always hard to truly see the terrorism involved in advancing causes we believe are good.

Do you like the idea of giving money to the poor, of reducing addiction to hard drugs, of providing healthcare to the needy sick, and sustenance to the aged?

I think that these are all goals that we would accept as good.

How are these goals pursued in a statist society?

The War on Drugs

First, terrorism is used to extract money from the general population.

Next, some of that money is used to pay for additional terrorism against people suspected or accused of drug use.

Next, more money is used to pay for kidnapping and imprisonment. The torture is shared between the guards and the fellow prisoners.

Remember: terrorism is:

"The act of terrorizing; use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate, and subjugate, esp. such use as a political weapon or policy."

Every policy the government has is a political policy.

The only fundamental weapon any government has is the legal initiation of the use of force.

The initiation of violence in order to achieve a political policy is terrorism.

The war on drugs is a political policy which is entirely dependent upon the initiation of violence.

Public school education is a political policy which is entirely dependent upon the initiation of violence.

The welfare state is a political policy which is entirely dependent upon the initiation of violence.

Every goal the government pursues is a political policy which is entirely dependent upon the initiation of violence.

This is why terrorism is so impossible to define.

Statism is terrorism.

We are educated by terrorists.

We are controlled, kidnapped, imprisoned and bribed by terrorists.

And when we see it, and feel it, and speak it clearly, it will end.

List of US imperialist deaths: http://tinyurl.com/statism-6

Freedom, Reason and Cults - the transcript...

2008-12-07T00:29:00Z

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Friedrich Nietzsche -
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

The word "cult" has always been used as an empty ad hominem attack against unsettling truths. Let us take a look at this word "cult," and use it with real precision about existing social institutions.

For authoritative British usage, the Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English defines "cult" and "sect" as:

Cult:

1 a system of religious worship directed towards a particular figure or object.

2 a small religious group regarded as strange or as imposing excessive control over members.

Sect:

1 a group of people with different religious beliefs (typically regarded as heretical) from those of a larger group to which they belong.

2 a group with extreme or dangerous philosophical or political ideas.

Studies of religious, political, and other cults have identified a number of key steps in a type of coercive persuasion:[23] 1. People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations; 2. their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized; 3. they receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from the leader; 4. they get a new identity based on the group; 5. they are subject to entrapment and their access to information is severely controlled.[24]

Ovid once said:

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

If a man successfully overthrows the King, no one calls him treasonous, because he now has the power to execute others.

We could equally say:

"Cults never prosper: what's the reason? Why if they prosper, none dare call them cults."

Let's look at a few institutions that truly fit the definition of a cult.

The Army

Funded through violence against citizens, commits murder/genocide.

1. People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations (boot camp, combat)

2. Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized (obey orders)

3. They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from the leader ("You are heroes!")

4. They get a new identity based on the group (uniforms, medals, rank)

5. They are subject to entrapment and their access to information is severely controlled. (Stop-loss, unilateral contract changes, lies about joining up, military censorship)

A cult or sect is "A group with extreme or dangerous philosophical or political ideas."

"It is heroic and highly moral to rob citizens in order to pay people in costume to murder by the thousands any group you point at..."

Would you consider that a dangerous philosophical or political idea?

Religion

Prospers by lying to and bullying utterly dependent children, commits emotional and verbal abuse against the helpless - and all too often pedophilia - denies condoms to AIDS-ridden countries, justifies and supports wars and so on.

1. People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations (hellfire, damnation, social ostracism, circumcision, original sin...)

2. Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized (Obey the priest, give money)

3. They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from the leader ("God loves you!")

4. They get a new identity based on the group ("Muslim! Christian! Jew! Born-again!")

5. They are subject to entrapment and their access to information is severely controlled. (How many people have read the entire Bible? What happens to a family if the father begins to doubt the existence of gods and the virtue of superstition?)

State Schools

Funded through threats of violence against parents, denies choice, traps children for years, makes kids slothful, resentful, frightened, bored, aggressive -- and significantly impairs their cognitive development. A truly coercive form of kidnapping.

1. Children are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations (confinement, fear, boredom, rote repetition, mockery, humiliation, punishment...)

2. Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized (obey the teacher, get good marks, the state solves all problems)

3. They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from the leader (praise for obedience and dumb regurgitation, punishment for disobedience and original thinking)

4. They get a new identity based on the group ("Patriotism is a virtue! You are a citizen!")

5. They are subject to entrapment and their access to information is severely controlled. (parents cannot choose state schools, children are not allowed to leave, must complete assigned reading and regurgitate statist propaganda, and their parents will be violently aggressed against if they do not pay for this brutal indoctrination of their children.)

Cults never prosper, you see – because if they do prosper, they become governments, and armies, and religions - they become "culture."

Friedrich Nietzsche
"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."

Think of the absurd cultural beliefs that people somehow think are really true...

The Military

"Hit men who murder for money are stone evil, unless they put on a green costume, and then they become moral heroes..."

The Government

"The government must use the threat of violence to steal half your income, in order to protect you from violence and theft."

Christianity

"The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree..."

"Gases expand when heated" – this is not a statement of culture, but of science.

Mathematics is not cultural, but rational.

Einstein's theory of relativity is not cultural, but factual.

Logic and science are not local cultural customs, but objective and rational methodologies.

My goal is to move philosophy from culture to truth, by reasoning from first principles, with reference to empirical evidence.

Culture is that which is not true, but is believed to be true. Religion, patriotism, militarism, political allegiance, all the supposed virtues of accidental geography.

Reasoning from first principles is dangerous to "culture," since culture is always revealed by philosophy as irrational prejudice, indoctrinated through propaganda and the threat of violence.

Culture is the opposite of philosophy, and truth, just as superstition is the opposite of science, and proof.

Culture is only the first syllable.

Cult.

True News 13: Statism is Dead - Part 3 - The Matrix

2008-11-26T17:35:00Z

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The Matrix is one of the greatest metaphors ever. Machines invented to make human life easier end up enslaving humanity - this is the most common theme in dystopian science fiction.

Why is this fear so universal - so compelling? Is it because we really believe that our toaster and our notebook will end up as our mechanical overlords?

Of course not.

This is not a future that we fear, but a past that we are already living.

Supposedly, governments were invented to make human life easier and safer, but governments always end up enslaving humanity.

That which we create to "serve" us ends up ruling us.

The US government "by and for the people" now imprisons millions, takes half the national income by force, over-regulates, punishes, tortures, slaughters foreigners, invades countries, overthrows governments, imposes 700 imperialistic bases overseas, inflates the currency, and crushes future generations with massive debts.

That which we create to "serve" us ends up ruling us.

The problem with the "state as servant" thesis is that it is historically completely false, both empirically and logically.

The idea that states were voluntarily invented by citizens to enhance their own security is utterly untrue.

Before governments, in tribal times, human beings could only produce what they consumed -- there was no excess production of food or other resources. Thus, there was no point owning slaves, because the slave could not produce any excess that could be stolen by the master.

If a horse pulling a plow can only produce enough additional food to feed the horse, there is no point hunting, capturing and breaking in a horse.

However, when agricultural improvements allowed for the creation of excess crops, suddenly it became highly advantageous to own human beings.

When cows began to provide excess milk and meat, owning cows became worthwhile.

The earliest governments and empires were in fact a ruling class of slave hunters, who understood that because human beings could produce more than they consumed, they were worth hunting, capturing, breaking in - and owning.

The earliest Egyptian and Chinese empires were in reality human farms, where people were hunted, captured, domesticated and owned like any other form of livestock. Due to technological and methodological improvements, the slaves produced enough excess that the labor involved in capturing and keeping them represented only a small subset of their total productivity. The ruling class - the farmers - kept a large portion of that excess, while handing out gifts and payments to the brutalizing class - the police, slave hunters, and general sadists - and the propagandizing class - the priests, intellectuals, and artists.

This situation continued for thousands of years, until the 16-17th centuries, when again massive improvements in agricultural organization and technology created the second wave of excess productivity. The enclosure movement re-organized and consolidated farmland, resulting in 5-10 times more crops, creating a new class of industrial workers, displaced from the country and huddling in the new cities.

This enormous agricultural excess was the basis of the capital that drove the industrial revolution.

The Industrial Revolution did not arise because the ruling class wanted to free their serfs, but rather because they realized how additional "liberties" could make their livestock astoundingly more productive.

When cows are placed in very confining stalls, they beat their heads against the walls, resulting in injuries and infections. Thus farmers now give them more room -- not because they want to set their cows free, but rather because they want greater productivity and lower costs.

The next stop after "free range" is not "freedom."

The rise of state capitalism in the 19^th century was actually the rise of "free range serfdom."

Additional liberties were granted to the human livestock not with the goal of setting them free, but rather with the goal of increasing their productivity.

Of course, intellectuals, artists and priests were - and are - well paid to conceal this reality.

The great problem of modern human livestock ownership is the challenge of "enthusiasm."

State capitalism only works when the entrepreneurial spirit drives creativity and productivity in the economy.

However, excess productivity always creates a larger state, and swells the ruling classes and their dependents, which eats into the motivation for additional productivity. Taxes and regulations rise, state debt (future farming) increases, and living standards slow and decay.

Depression and despair began to spread, as the reality of being owned sets in for the general population.

The solution to this is additional propaganda, antidepressant medications, superstition, wars, moral campaigns of every kind, the creation of "enemies," the inculcation of patriotism, collective fears, paranoia about "outsiders" and "immigrants," and so on.

It is essential to understand the reality of the world.

When you look at a map of the world, you are not looking at countries, but farms.

You are allowed certain liberties - limited property ownership, movement rights, freedom of association and occupation - not because your government approves of these rights in principle - since it constantly violates them - but rather because "free range livestock" is so much cheaper to own and so more productive.

It is important to understand the reality of ideologies.

State capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, democracy - these are all livestock management approaches.

Some work well for long periods - state capitalism - and some work very badly - communism.

They all fail eventually, because it is immoral and irrational to treat human beings as livestock.

The recent growth of "freedom" in China, India and Asia is occurring because the local state farmers have upgraded their livestock management practices. They have recognized that putting the cows in a larger stall provides the rulers more milk and meat.

Rulers have also recognized that if they prevent you from fleeing the farm, you will become depressed, inert and unproductive. A serf is the most productive when he imagines he is free. Thus your rulers must provide you the illusion of freedom in order to harvest you most effectively.

Thus you are "allowed" to leave - but never to real freedom, only to another farm, because the whole world is a farm. They will prevent you from taking a lot of money, they will bury you in endless paperwork, they will restrict your right to work -- but you are "free" to leave. Due to these difficulties, very few people do leave, but the illusion of mobility is maintained. If only 1 out of 1,000 cows escapes, but the illusion of escaping significantly raises the productivity of the remaining 999, it remains a net gain for the farmer.

You are also kept on the farm through licensing. The most productive livestock are the professionals, so the rulers fit them with an electronic dog collar called a "license," which only allows them to practice their trade on their own farm.

To further create the illusion of freedom, in certain farms, the livestock are allowed to choose between a few farmers that the investors present. At best, they are given minor choices in how they are managed. They are never given the choice to shut down the farm, and be truly free.

Government schools are indoctrination pens for livestock. They train children to "love" the farm, and to fear true freedom and independence, and to attack anyone who questions the brutal reality of human ownership. Furthermore, they create jobs for the intellectuals that state propaganda so relies on.

The ridiculous contradictions of statism -- like religion -- can only be sustained through endless propaganda inflicted upon helpless children.

The idea that democracy and some sort of "social contract" justifies the brutal exercise of violent power over billions is patently ridiculous.

If you say to a slave that his ancestors "chose" slavery, and therefore he is bound by their decisions, he will simply say:

"If slavery is a choice, then I choose not to be a slave."

This is the most frightening statement for the ruling classes, which is why they train their slaves to attack anyone who dares speak it.

Statism is not a philosophy.

Statism does not originate from historical evidence or rational principles.

Statism is an ex post facto justification for human ownership.

Statism is an excuse for violence.

Statism is an ideology, and all ideologies are variations on human livestock management practices.

Religion is pimped-out superstition, designed to drug children with fears that they will endlessly pay to have "alleviated."

Nationalism is pimped-out bigotry, designed to provoke a Stockholm Syndrome in the livestock.

The opposite of superstition is not another superstition, but the truth.

The opposite of ideology is not a different ideology, but clear evidence and rational principles.

The opposite of superstition and ideology - of statism - is philosophy.

Reason and courage will set us free.

You do not have to be livestock.

Take the red pill.

Wake up.

Real-Time Relationships - The Book

2008-11-14T13:34:00Z

This book is available at http://www.freedomainradio.com/free in print, PDF and audiobook versions.

Real-Time Relationships:
The Logic of Love

ome of the greatest movies of the past ten years explored what it is like to live in an illusion. “The Sixth Sense,” “Fight Club” – and, greatest of all, “The Matrix.”

Let’s start with a spoiler or two, shall we?

In “The Matrix,” a young man is awakened from a computer-generated imaginary world to find that he is enslaved by robots who are paralyzing him with the illusion of life in order to harvest his electrical energy.

This is a wonderful metaphor on many levels, and tells us an enormous amount about our “relationship” with truth and reality.

In the movie, the robots that were originally invented to serve mankind end up ruling mankind and spinning an illusory “reality” which keeps their former masters entombed in the mere appearance of a life.

My take on this metaphor is that it is really describing propaganda.

For instance, the government is an institution that was originally designed to serve citizens – “government by and for the people.”

However, as we have seen countless times, what we create to serve us ends up ruling us.

Governments that were supposedly created to keep our property safe from thieves now steal upwards of 50% of our income under the guise of “taxation.”

Governments were supposedly created to give us participation in the “democratic process” – yet if we do not agree with whatever those in the government decree, we are threatened with violence and imprisonment.

Through the endless infliction of pro-state propaganda in government schools, we grow up believing in mad illusions such as “countries,” “virtuous violence,” “participative democracy,” “voluntary taxation,” “moral murder” in the form of “armies” and so on.

In our churches, we are taught as children to believe that deranged fairy tales represent objective and absolute truth. We are expected to believe with all seriousness that we are evil because a woman made from the rib of a man listened to a talking snake. We are asked to swallow the proposition that an invisible being who drowned almost everyone in the world is the very paragon of virtue.

In our families, we are taught that our relations are virtuous and have value simply because they share some of our DNA – while at the same time being told that racism is evil.

In our relationships, we are taught that “love” can be willed, that others owe us affection, obedience and respect, and that bullying is the same as being assertive.

Standing at the border of a country, we see that the land does not change color, as indicated on maps. Gravity does not change as we step across this imaginary line; reason, physics and morality remain utterly constant.

We believe – or rather, the belief is inflicted upon us – that we owe allegiance to imaginary lines, imaginary gods, and the imaginary virtue of our tribe.

Awakening from these mad dreams is a disorienting, frightening and wonderful experience.

Philosophy is the tool that we use to undo our illusions.

Philosophy reveals to us the simple truths that are self-evident to toddlers, yearned for by teenagers – and attacked and dismissed by most adults.

Philosophy is in its essence about relationships – the relationship between a statement and its truth-value; the relationship between logic and empiricism, “self” and “other,” choice and virtue, integrity and happiness – the mind and reality.

However, most importantly, philosophy is about our relationships with each other.

Philosophy – like all knowledge – is a communal endeavour, since it cannot exist without the collective and accumulated values of language, prior thought – and our shared capacity to process sensory reality.

A man born alone on a desert island cannot practice medicine, or science – or philosophy.

Philosophy reveals the truth to us about our relations with each other, with reality, and with truth itself.

If we are free, philosophy will strengthen our wings.

If we are enslaved, philosophy will weaken our chains.

Culture

ost books about relationships will talk about your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your friends, your children and so on.

We will address all these in this book, but I have also included an analysis of your relationship to your society in terms of religion, politics and culture.

I don’t believe that it’s possible to effectively analyze and improve our interactions with others without taking into account the larger social or philosophical context that we inhabit. If we are to achieve our goals of honesty, integrity and true personal freedom, the values that were inflicted upon us as children by culture must be rigorously examined.

The directions that a passerby gives us will do us little good if our overall map is wrong.

Thus, this book will touch on your social, cultural and political relationships and the impact they have on your personal relationships. Since your emotional reactions to these issues can be as strong as anything you feel about your personal relationships, excluding them from a book designed to give you happiness and peace of mind would leave the world at best half unexamined.

Philosophy and Intimacy

s I discussed in my two previous books – “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion,” and “Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics,” mythology is the opposite of truth, since it provides the illusion of truth and so prevents further exploration.

In this book I will argue that truth is a necessary prerequisite for intimacy.

“On Truth” was primarily about our relationship with our parents in the past. “Universally Preferable Behaviour” was primarily about our relationship with truth, reality and virtue in the present.

This book is primarily about our relationship with ourselves and others in the future.

It is a book about honesty of the most challenging and rewarding kind: honesty with – and about – yourself.

Most times in life, we do not even know that we are lying. We do not know that we are failing to process reality – both inner and outer – correctly because we are addicted to mythology, or making up stories which drug us with the illusion of truth, rather than humbly pursuing truth in reality.

In our collective past, mythology dominated our thinking – particularly in the realms of ethics, society and reality. In the realm of ethics, we constructed vast imaginary entities such as gods, nations, states, classes and so on, all of which inevitably caused us to surrender our autonomy and sense of personal control to the tall tales of madmen.

With regards to society – particularly family – we substituted blood and accidental proximity for virtue. We were – and are – trained by those who accidentally rule us biologically to submit to those who accidentally rule us geographically.

With regards to reality, we imagined that lurid, corrupt and insane tales about gods, devils and talking snakes could provide us some sort of truth about the material world.

The humility required to subject our wild and narcissistic imaginings to the twin disciplines of logic and evidence has been sorely lacking throughout human history, and it is not hard to see the effects of this lack of humility in the realms of science in the past and ethics in the present.

In the realm of our relationships, however, we remain positively medieval.

In the Middle Ages, when an eclipse was observed a myth was invented to “explain” the event. God was angry, a witch is among us, sinners abound and so on. Some senseless and brutal sacrifice was made, some hellish amalgam of torture and murder was inflicted on some hapless epileptic or imbecile, and “order” was restored – and anxiety reduced – to the temporary relief of all.

In the same way, in our personal relationships, when discomforts arise, we create stories to “explain away” our emotions.

If a man causes us anxiety, then he is “aggressive.” If a woman rejects us, then she is “cold.” If our child criticizes us, then he is “ungrateful.” If we get fired, our boss is “vindictive.” If our wife leaves us, women are “selfish.”

Religious “Reality”

n the religious approach to “truth,” the priest makes a prediction – “worship my God and your harvest will be good” – and then invents “sinners” to take the blame if his prediction fails to materialize. In this way, the possibility of disproof – of personal responsibility for the priest – is eliminated.

All too often this is our default position in relationships as well.

We enter into relationships based on our predictions of how they will turn out. Who but a masochist would continue dating a woman if he knew for certain she would break his heart within six months? Would you marry a woman and have children with her if you knew that she would divorce you and take you for everything you had?

Of course not.

We make predictions about relationships – and then, when those predictions fail to come true, we invent “sinners” to take the blame.

We embark upon our relationships with the highest hopes and ambitions and then, when they crash in flames or peter out into nothing, we begin mythologizing the reasons why.

Compared to medieval priests, we are often more sophisticated in our defences nowadays. We provide quasi-enlightened reasons as to why our relationships fail, which on the surface seem to contain some aspects of personal responsibility, but which are really the same old mythologies dressed up in new psychological garb.

For instance, if my marriage fails because I work too hard and ignore my wife and children, I may openly confess that I worked too hard – but then, inevitably, self-pitying justifications will creep into my explanation…

“My wife left me because I worked most Saturdays and spent two or three days a week on the road. I definitely should have spent more time at home, but then of course she really liked the vacations on the French Riviera, and the children apparently really needed their ski lessons, and she did install that kiln in our basement for her pottery. I should have put my foot down earlier and forced her to make a decision, and not just let her desire for more and more stuff keep driving me back to the office!”

Implicit in this kind of mealy-mouthed “explanation” is the basic premise that, “My wife is a greedy materialist who wanted to have her cake and eat it too. She wanted all this great stuff, she wanted all the status that came with the big house and a nice car, but she also wanted me to be home to take care of her as well!”

You often hear the same complaint with regards to sex. For instance, a man may say:

“I’m not allowed to have an affair, because I am married – yet my wife refuses to have sex with me, so I’m totally stuck. She holds a monopoly veto on our sex life, which she uses constantly – yet I am not allowed to look outside the marriage for sex!”

Wives have similar complaints about their husbands:

“He says that he wants to help me around the house, but then he does everything so badly that I am forced to run around fixing everything up after him, so that it turns out to be more work than it’s worth!”

Or:

“He always complains that I nag him too much, but I wouldn’t have to repeat myself if he only listened to me in the first place! If he just took the garbage out when I asked him to, I wouldn’t have to keep asking him!”

Or:

“He thinks that having sex will make us close. I keep telling him that I can only have sex with him if I feel close already. That just makes him angry – and then he expects me to want to have sex with him because he’ll get pouty if I don’t!”

Positioning

As we can see, conflicts in relationships so often escalate into subtle put-down exercises, wherein a frantic and insistent kind of positioning occurs: “I am right and you are wrong” – or, more accurately: “I am good and you are bad.”

How many times do we hear people complain about their relationships, basically saying, “If my partner only did the right thing, everything would be great!”

This is a mad kind of mythological fantasy – not to mention completely paralyzing.

When things go wrong we have a great tendency to avoid the pain of responsibility by making up stories that blame others, or circumstances, or fate, or God and so on.

Responsibility can be very painful, and mythology provides an instant relief for this pain. In particular, blame is a very addictive form of self-medication which helps us avoid the pain of responsibility – but also traps us in negative, difficult or even dangerous situations.

The Arc of a Relationship

typical dysfunctional romantic relationship tends to have distinct phases.

Caution

When two people meet and are romantically interested in each other, there tends to be a phase of initial caution in which they examine each other for potential compatibility.

We will call this man “Bruce,” and this woman “Sheila.”

The more functional the individuals, the longer this phase lasts. If an insecure woman is looking for an insecure man, this phase tends to be very short. When they first meet, she looks for “markers” indicating low levels of self-esteem. These can include a lack of eye contact, a nervous laugh, tattoos, drug use, compulsive joke-telling, underachievement, pomposity, or a kind of baseless arrogance.

Once Sheila establishes that Bruce’s self-esteem is either genuinely low or artificially “high,” she immediately feels more comfortable with him.

Sheila has low self-esteem because she believes things that are not true about herself and others. She remains insecure because she is actively preferring short-term gains to long-term gains. For instance, if she has an abusive father, but stays in touch with him, then she is choosing continued abuse (long-term pain) in order to avoid the anxiety of confrontation (short-term pain).

Since Sheila has developed an “avoidance mechanism” for dealing with her anxiety, inviting a man of true moral courage and integrity into her life would be a disaster for her illusions. Such a man would immediately see that she was being abused by her father and would care enough about her to encourage her to either improve her relationship with her father or get him out of her life. (A wiser and more experienced man would know that she cannot improve her “relationship” with her abusive father, which would be even more anxiety provoking for her.)

If Sheila chose to continue her relationship with her father, a moral man would realize that she is habitually sacrificing ethics, virtue, integrity and self-esteem for the sake of immediate anxiety avoidance. This means that throughout her life, abusive people will forever control her behaviour, and she will continually sacrifice the good people around her for the sake of appeasing the evil or corrupt people.

None of us can sustain any moral decision in the absence of at least the appearance of an ethical justification. If a man of self-esteem confronts a woman who enables abusers, she will be inevitably drawn to defend her appeasement on “moral” grounds. “Family is an innate value.” “I think it’s important to be a good daughter.” “Forgiveness is a virtue.”

In other words, the woman is not just amoral, but rather anti-moral, because she just makes up “moral” justifications for her cowardly actions.

No man of genuine self-esteem could stay in a relationship with such a corrupt woman, since she uses virtuous definitions to enable her own subjugation to evil. In particular, no moral man would ever have children with such a woman, who would inevitably raise them as frightened and obedient or rebellious slaves.

Since all of this is well-known unconsciously, a woman of low self-esteem is inevitably bound to end up dating a man of low self-esteem. We can think of this relationship as essentially a mutual covenant to maintain corrupt falsehoods. “Let me believe my lies, and I’ll let you believe yours.”

Of course, like all corrupt falsehoods, it cannot last.

Sex

After the self-esteem issue has been established, the dating aspect of the relationship can begin.

In the case of insecure individuals, sexuality always makes a premature entrance. Since a woman of low self-esteem does not have any genuine virtues to offer a man, such as courage, integrity, nobility and so on, she must create value in some other manner.

Typically, the “value” that this type of woman brings to the early part of a relationship is sexual availability.

The Love Bomb

In many cults, such as Christianity, potential recruits are subjected to what is often called a “love bomb,” wherein massive amounts of artificial affection are injected into a mostly-empty soul. This tends to wash away any lingering sense of personal boundaries and judgment, triggering what psychologists call “fusion,” or the uncritical elevation of an individual to a status of near-deific perfection.

The introduction of a highly-sexualized interaction produces a biochemical form of euphoria, which typically lasts from three to six months. During this time, ego boundaries tend to dissolve, there are few if any difficult decisions to be made, there tends to be an isolation from both friends and family – and the cycle of sexual tension, desire and release tends to consume the mind and body.

The Plateau

At the highest point of this interaction, the couple tends to make decisions about their long-term futures.

This is akin to deciding whether or not you can fly while high on PCP.

This is when couples decide to commit in some significant manner, such as moving in together, or getting engaged, or simply planning a permanent future.

The Hiccup

Shortly after the commitment is made, the couple begins to re-enter the world, and the sexual euphoria begins to wear off. At the same time, they begin to deal with the mundane practicalities of negotiating their living arrangements and/or potential nuptials, as well as entering as a couple into a more complex social world.

As they begin to re-enter the world, interactions with friends and family begin to influence the couple. Bruce begins to see what Sheila is really like around her mother. Sheila begins to notice that Bruce’s brother drinks to excess, and Bruce says nothing. He sees how shrill she becomes around her friends; she sees how susceptible he is to peer pressure.

The Descent

As Sheila and Bruce begin to make decisions about their lives together, they notice that their lack of boundaries is beginning to cause real friction in their negotiations. Also, since they have spent so much time having sex instead of learning how to actually communicate with each other, they find that their level of commitment is far ahead of their ability to negotiate. They have bonded out of euphoria, neediness, relief and hyper-sexuality, rather than mutual respect and regard for one another.

At this point, the woman generally becomes less sexually available.

The reason for this is the underlying low self-esteem that caused the hyper-sexuality in the first place.

Since she had little intrinsic value to offer Bruce initially, Sheila substituted sex for self-worth.

As their relationship progresses, however, and the sexual euphoria wears off, she begins to feel resentment towards sex.

One way to understand this transition is to picture a rich and insecure man who dazzles his dates with extravagant outings. He flies them to Paris, takes them out on his yacht, buys them jewellery, and drapes them in fur. Naturally, they respond with “devotion” and “ardour.”

As the relationship develops, however, he begins to resent the need for constant extravagance. “Would she really love me if I didn’t buy her things?” he wonders. In order to find this out, he becomes increasingly irritable towards her desire for gifts. When she suggests a weekend away on the French Riviera, he rolls his eyes and snaps at her.

The same insecurity about his own intrinsic value that caused him to lavish gifts on her now causes him to withdraw his “generosity.” The same insecurity that prevented him from offering himself to her without “extras” now causes him to withdraw those extras, in the mad hope that she will find him valuable without gifts.

In other words, after buying her, he hopes that she is not in it for the money.

This is how it works with female sexuality after the initial phase of euphoria.

Lots of sex in the beginning means a whole lot less sex later on.

Lying

As negotiations about mutual living arrangements, sexuality and social life become more and more difficult, it also becomes more and more difficult for Sheila and Bruce to retrace their steps and figure out where they went wrong at the beginning.

For instance, as Sheila’s resentment towards sex begins to rise, she will tend to make up excuses as to why she doesn’t want sex – and those excuses are not designed to fool Bruce, but rather to fool herself.

She will claim that she is tired, or that she has to get up early. She will snap that he is only ever interested in “one thing,” or that she doesn’t feel “close enough” to have sex, or that he is doing a million and one things wrong, which is killing her sexual desire, and so on.

The truth of the matter is that she is making up stories – inventing “sinners” – in order to avoid the truth about her own growing repugnance towards sex.

If Sheila were to speak with total honesty, she would say something like this:

“Bruce, I had a lot of sex with you early on because I don’t feel like I’m worth much of anything. The fact that you were willing to have sex with me despite the fact that I was manipulating you tells me everything that I need to know about your level of integrity, and capacity to love. If you really loved me, you would not pressure me to have sex when I feel depressed. If I were really lovable, I would not have used sex to create artificial value.”

The end result of this kind of conversation, of course, is the termination of the relationship – which is why it is so studiously avoided, and a million distractions are invented in order to avoid that core reality.

Entombment

As conflicts begin to rise, Bruce and Sheila enter the phase of “slow entombment.”

In this phase, conflicts which cannot be resolved generally start to be avoided. If Bruce does not like Sheila’s parents, and it upsets her when he talks about them, the “solution” becomes to simply not talk about her parents.

Similarly, if Sheila dislikes Bruce’s drinking, and it upsets him when she brings it up, they “solve” the problem either by her refraining from bringing it up, or by him beginning to drink in secret.

This process continues unabated. Bit by bit, unresolved conflicts create localized minefields that prohibit free movement and spontaneity. “Don’t go there” becomes a near-constant mantra.

Since the solution to anxiety is to control the other person’s behaviour which “causes” the anxiety, the relationship turns into a kind of “soft tyranny.” Since it is considered “wrong” to cause the other person anxiety, any behaviour which results in anxiety must be banned as immoral.

Over the next few months or years a creeping paralysis enters into the relationship, as more and more topics become “off limits.”

As spontaneity and authenticity become less and less possible and the endless regulations of behaviour pile up, inevitable resentments begin to creep in. Both Sheila and Bruce feel over-controlled, and their interactions become more and more rigid and empty. The cowardice that lies at the root of controlling each other in order to manage their own anxiety becomes more and more evident as time goes on.

Generally, there are two possibilities for this kind of endless increase in the bureaucratic hyper-regulation of the relationship. If neither party takes a “stand,” then the abusive “rules” continue to pile up until one or both parties wake up one day completely unable to breathe. An overwhelming rush of frustration – or perhaps a full-fledged panic attack – takes hold, and there is a sudden and savage breakup.

The second possibility is for the “fronts” in this subterranean war to harden. This is analogous to a guerrilla conflict turning into the frozen hell of First World War trench warfare.

In this second scenario, each party picks one or a few fixed positions and just continues to pound their partner on the basis of those. For Bruce, it might be the lack of sex. For Sheila, it might be the lack of emotional participation in the relationship, or help around the house, or some such topic.

Unconsciously, this represents a desperate attempt to stop the endless proliferation of petty rules, since both Sheila and Bruce instinctively understand the inevitable result of that process. Rather than moving on from each prior conflict, thus generating new conflicts which must be avoided by the creation of new “rules,” Sheila and Bruce start to repetitively attack each other on the grounds of just a few particular issues. This prevents the creation of new rules – thus staving off the end of the relationship – at the price of remaining trapped in endless circling conflicts.

In fact, Sheila and Bruce remain drawn to these few particular conflicts and cannot leave them alone. An unconscious “contract” is created, wherein any frustration about new problems is channeled into a replay of some agreed-upon existing conflict. This is just another way of avoiding the inevitable end of the relationship that would result from “dealing” with new problems.

This second scenario is the route most often taken by couples with children. Since the stakes of ending a relationship are far higher for parents, they tend to revert to this “broken record” form of problem avoidance rather than allow the escalation of new problems to destroy their relationship.

The Aftermath

Earlier, we talked about how the religious approach to “truth” is to make predictions, and then invent “sinners” to take the blame when those predictions fail to come true.

After Bruce and Sheila break up, they will invariably begin the process of inventing scapegoats or “sinners” to take the blame for the failure of their relationship.

This failure was not primarily the relationship itself, but rather their own predictions about the relationship.

They entered into a relationship with each other based on the prediction that they would stay together and be happy. Early on, they openly praised each other to the skies, to themselves and their friends and family.

How, then, can they explain the dismal failure of the relationship and eventual distaste for each other?

Well, there is really only one way to explain it – see if this seems familiar.

Sheila will say: “He just ended up being a real bastard – and there was no way to predict that at the beginning.”

Bruce will say: “She seemed like a really nice girl, at first – but as it turns out, she had some real issues that she wasn’t willing to address.”

This is the “one-two” punch that is designed to bring down the truth. “I was correct when I praised her early on, and I am now also correct when I condemn her at the end.”

This mythology provides relief from anxiety in the short-term (“How could I have been so careless with my heart?”) while creating far greater anxiety in the long-term.

If a group of villagers live at the base of a volcano, and they ascribe the eruption of the volcano to the anger of the fire god, they will inevitably end up performing various rituals to “appease” this anger. Since these rituals have in fact nothing to do with the eruptions, the villagers end up staying near the mountain, imagining that they are creating some form of safety or predictability.

Imaginary answers create perpetual danger.

The moment that the villagers accept that they cannot predict or control the eruption of the volcano, they will move, thus creating real safety and predictability.

When our predictions fail to come true, we can either attempt to determine why we made such a mistake, or we can make up an imaginary answer – thus guaranteeing a repetition of the mistake.

When a relationship fails, we can either attempt to understand the dangerous clues that were embedded in our interactions from the very beginning – which doubtless existed – or we can just blame the other person for mysteriously “changing.”

If we take the route of blaming the other person, we certainly let ourselves off the hook – but we also guarantee that we will remain blind to cues that we really need to see in the future. By blaming the other person, all we do essentially is say that there is no way to predict the outcome of a relationship based on early interactions. In other words, when it comes to relationships, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope for the best.

This is why it keeps happening.

Win/Lose

Why do these conflicts continually escalate in this manner?

One central tragedy of our lives is that we are so often raised in win/lose relationships. If our parents get offended, we are punished. If our teacher gets angry, we get detention. If we want something, someone else must give up something.

This same pattern repeats itself in all of our adult relationships.

Most lovers only know how to “get their way” through either overt aggression, or passive aggression (in general, the male and female tools, respectively).

Men say: “If I don’t get what I want, I will be angry.”

Women say: “If I don’t get what I want, I will be sad.”

These strategies generally result from a fundamentally narcissistic approach to the world. The possibility of a win-win negotiation is never considered, because it has never been taught or demonstrated.

Let’s take a more concrete example.

My wife Christina really enjoys watching a television show called “Dancing with the Stars.” I do like watching the dance routines, but have a tough time making it through all the filler and commercials. Last night, I went upstairs to get a DVD for us to watch and then when I came downstairs saw that Christina had found the show on TV and was settling in to watch it.

I would have preferred it if she had not found the show – so that we could watch the DVD – but that was sort of out of my hands at this point.

Many couples would look upon this as a win/lose situation – that Christina would watch the show and I would suffer through the filler and commercials, or that Christina would not get to watch her show, and watch the DVD I chose instead. Or, perhaps, that Christina would tape the show and watch it on her own, or some other solution.

However, although I would have preferred to watch the DVD, I sat down and happily watched the dancing show.

How is that possible?

Well, quite simply it is possible because I take an enormous amount of pleasure in my wife’s pleasure. (Shoe shopping excepted, of course – I am only a mortal man!)

I love watching the play of delight on my wife’s face and the intensity of her enjoyment. To take pleasure in the pleasure of another human being is foundational to a loving relationship. It certainly is true that I would have received 100% pleasure from watching the DVD, and 90% pleasure from watching my wife’s enjoyment of the dancing show, but I can scarcely claim to be hard done by because I had to choose between 100% pleasure and 90% pleasure!

If you cannot take pleasure in your partner’s pleasure, then win-win negotiations become impossible. If I got +100% pleasure from watching my DVD, and -100% pleasure from watching the dancing show – and if my wife faced the reverse proposition – then one of us would have to win, and the other would have to lose.

This concept of the “minor sacrifice” is something that every couple should openly discuss and work on. I very much want my wife to be happy in our marriage, because if she is not happy then I cannot be happy either. If I get exactly what I want every single time, no matter what her preferences, then it is impossible – according to the principles of Universally Preferable Behaviour – for her to remain happy.

Since my happiness depends on remaining married to her, my happiness can never in general exceed hers in the long run.

Trust

ur resistance to this kind of openhearted generosity arises out of our fear of exploitation.

We say to ourselves: “If I give her what she wants every single time, I will never get what I want. She will take advantage of my generosity, and I will end up a slave to her every whim, and never get my needs met!”

My response to this is:

If that is true, then you should know it before you get involved!

When I was younger, I went out with a woman who openly said that she expected me to pay for our outings. “A man’s generosity is financial; a woman’s generosity is composed of… other things,” she said seductively.

I was somewhat alarmed by her perspective, but I decided to give it a shot. I did pay for our outings, without complaint, and then waited for reciprocity.

It never came, and the relationship ended. I was sad, but never looked back.

Closure and Self–Trust

To achieve true happiness and peace of mind, we must come to a resolution about each relationship in our lives – what is commonly called “closure.”

“Closure” is the achievement of self-trust in our own judgment. Fundamentally, we never really trust others, but rather only ourselves. It was not this woman that I needed to trust, but my own judgment about her proposition.

When we doubt, generosity always provides certainty.

In my 20s, I was involved in a long-term relationship with a woman who wanted to get into the filmmaking business. After watching her struggle for some time, I decided to write and fund a movie for her. We did end up making the movie, which did quite well.

A month or two after we had finished making the movie, I asked her to reread an unpublished novel of mine that she had criticized, and give me suggestions for improvements. She half-heartedly agreed to do so, but week after week went by and she never picked up the manuscript.

Eventually I confronted her on this, and explained my hurt feelings and mistrust of her capacity for reciprocity. She replied that the reason she had not read my novel was because I had not “motivated” her to do so. Naturally, I responded that she had not “motivated” me to spend a small fortune making a film to further her career, but rather I had done so out of a desire to help her!

This relationship also did not last for very long after this interaction.

I am by nature more cautious than generous, and I do find trusting others a challenge. In the above cases, though, generosity was the most liberating approach I could have conceivably taken. If I had hedged my bets in either of these relationships, and given 1% more while waiting for 1% more reciprocity, I would never have achieved certainty.

In relationships – particularly romantic relationships – generosity creates certainty. Giving 150% of yourself – even beyond your own “comfort zone” – quickly highlights any deficiencies in reciprocity from your partner.

When I first met my wife Christina, her capacity for love and devotion far outstripped my own. I had been somewhat scarred in the romantic trenches of my youth, and it took some time for my own heart to open up to match her generosity. I did openly talk about my difficulties in this area with her, however, which helped alleviate her concerns. “I am trying to open my heart as quickly as possible,” I said, “because you certainly deserve my full affections, but I am having trouble matching your openness.”

In the same way, if I owe monetary debt, but am temporarily unable to pay it, I am morally bound to inform my creditor of the situation, reaffirm my commitment to pay, and work like hell to get hold of the money.

Hedging

Couples get continually stuck in the tug-of-war of conditional reciprocity – “I gave you a back rub, now you owe me sex!” – which always creates more and more resentment. Not only is such “generosity” totally undercut through the expectation of reciprocity (“I’ll take out the garbage if you do the dishes”) but the degree of mistrust that is communicated by this sort of “grudging giving” is overwhelmingly insulting at its root.

If I told you that you were my best friend, and you asked me to lend you $5,000, and I said to you: “Let’s just start with $5, and see where it goes from there,” would you feel elevated by my response?

Of course not. You would be insulted. “How can you call me your best friend, and not trust me with any sum larger than five dollars?”

“Well,” I might reply, “some people in my past never paid me back.”

Here we run into a fundamental problem, which is at the root of countless relationship discords.

Baggage

e all arrive with scars, and that is not a bad thing. A boxer without scars has never fought an equal, and a lover without baggage has never risked his heart. To some degree we do learn through pain, and being on the receiving end of falsehoods and betrayal can do wonders to sharpen our criteria for trustworthiness.

However, we do run into a fundamental problem when we mistrust our lover.

Either she really is untrustworthy – in which case we chose to enter into an intimate and lengthy relationship with an untrustworthy woman – or, she is trustworthy, but we have a hard time trusting because we have been betrayed in the past.

If we have been betrayed in the past, though, we have either learned who to trust or we have not. If we have learned who to trust – primarily ourselves – then we cannot reasonably call our current partner untrustworthy.

If we have not learned to trust, then we cannot blame our current partner for being untrustworthy.

To explain what I mean by this, let us return to our “loan” example.

First I tell you that you are my best friend, and then I refuse to lend you any money because I have lent and lost money in the past.

“Well,” you say, “are you still ‘best friends’ with those who ran off with your money?”

“Of course not!” I reply indignantly.

“Thus you find untrustworthiness to be a trait unworthy of someone you call a best friend?”

“Yes.”

“Thus anyone you call your best friend must be the opposite of the people who harmed you in the past.”

“Yes.”

“Thus if you tell me that you are afraid that I will not pay you back, then you are telling me that I am untrustworthy. However, since you have rejected those who failed to pay you back in the past because they were untrustworthy, but you claim that I am your best friend, then you are in the illogical position of claiming that I am both trustworthy and untrustworthy at the same time. If I am trustworthy, then I surely have earned the title ‘best friend,’ and you should lend the money to me. If I am untrustworthy, then it is unjust to call me your ‘best friend,’ since you find untrustworthiness such a vile character trait.”

Thus keeping people in our lives who exhibit traits we call negative utterly prohibits us from blaming them for exhibiting those traits. If we act in opposition to our beliefs, we cannot reasonably blame other people for the results.

In the same way, when the fateful words “I love you” escape our lips, they cannot be reasonably construed as a recipe, but rather as a fully digested meal. We cannot reasonably say, “I love you, but I do not trust you.” We cannot reasonably say, “I love you, but I expect you to think and act completely differently in the future.”

But of course we use the words “I love you” for almost every purpose except what they actually mean.

Love

“Love” is a word that is subjected to such fantastical delusions that reclaiming its right meaning seems a near-impossible task. The word is flung around to mean anything from fetishistic attachment to co-dependency to “loyalty” towards rabid delusions such as gods and countries.

There are some things, however, that we must be able to agree on if we are to come to some reasonable understanding about how to improve the quality of our relationships.

Love and Objectivity

First of all, love must be a state that has at least some objective qualities. If love is a completely subjective state, then the concept of “quality” does not exist at all – and thus neither does “improvement.”

Furthermore, saying to someone “I love you” is a meaningless statement if the phrase merely represents purely internal or subjective preferences. We can say “I love jazz,” but jazz is not a conscious entity and can flow from a CD. To proclaim love for another human being, however, is to say that our internal state is elicited by another person. In other words, the “you” in “I love you” involves objectivity, since we experience each other through the medium of empirical reality.

If another person elicits our internal state, then some objectivity must be accepted.

Secondly, we must also accept that the word “love” represents something other than a merely chosen preference. We cannot pick a woman out of a crowd and command ourselves to love her. In other words, love must be somehow related to the actions of another person, and not simply willed. None of us would feel particularly flattered if someone told us they “loved” us while knowing nothing about us.

Thus “love” must be in its essence a reaction to the objective actions of another human being.

Thirdly, the feelings of affection that are elicited by the actions of another person cannot be entirely contradictory. My wife cannot tell me that she loves me because I am honest, and that she also loves my brother because he is dishonest. I cannot love a person because of his loyalty, and then claim to love another person equally because of her disloyalty.

Love – Compared to What?

One of the most fundamental questions in philosophy – and psychology – is the question: “Compared to what?” When I say that a proposition is “true,” then I mean that it is true compared to something else – falsehood, or inconsistency with internal logic or empirical validation.

Similarly, when we look at the question of love, clearly love is an expression of a preference. Naturally, we must then ask, “A preference – compared to what?”

If I say that I love honesty, then clearly I love it compared to dishonesty. If I say that I love virtue, then clearly I love virtue compared to vice or corruption.

Now, since we can only determine the traits of another human being through empirical observation, our experience of “love” must involve the actions of another (said actions can include words, of course). Just as our conception of “tall” is derived from the objective (i.e. measurable) characteristics of a man – and “tall” is valid relative to the average height of a human male – just so is our experience of “love” derived from the objective characteristics (words and actions) of another human being.

Thus “love” must be valid relative to an objective and external standard, which we shall work to define shortly.

Internal State, or External Fact?

The question then arises: to what degree is love valid relative to an objective and external standard?

Love cannot be completely and utterly defined by an objective and external standard, since that would mean that everyone must love the one person in the world who most completely conforms to that standard, which would be absurd. If we said that love was valid relative to height, then everyone in the world must love the tallest person, which flies in the face of the obvious variety of personal preferences the world over.

If I say that I like ice cream, then clearly I prefer ice cream to other foods that I relatively dislike. This is a largely subjective matter.

On the other hand, if I say that I prefer good health, then clearly I am expressing a desire for something that can be measured at least to some degree objectively. I cannot reasonably say that I prefer good health, and that I also prefer dying of cancer.

It is also important to differentiate between standards that can be achieved, and standards that cannot be achieved. If I say that I love good health, and then define “good health” as never getting a cold, sleeping lightly or having a headache, then clearly what I love is unattainable, and my “love” can only be measured relative to varying degrees of disappointment.

Love and Pleasure

It scarcely seems required, but it is worth noting that love must be considered a pleasurable experience. This does not mean that love always entails pleasure – any more than physical health means never experiencing any pain at all – but it must be a positive experience in general.

In other words, the positive aspects of “love” must vastly outweigh the negative aspects, just as the positive aspects of “health” must vastly outweigh the negative aspects, such as eating well and exercising.

A decent rule of thumb is to expect a positive relationship to be composed of 9/10 good things, to 1/10 bad things.

To put this together, we can say that love has the following characteristics:

It has elements of objectivity.
It is elicited by the behaviour of another person.
It is a favouring of certain characteristics relative to their opposites, or deficiencies thereof.
It is pleasurable.

Love: A Tentative Definition

I’m going to put forward a tentative definition of love, which conforms to the above requirements. We shall examine this proposition in more detail below.

Love is our involuntary response to virtue.

Science has elements of objectivity, insofar as it relies to some degree on personal inspiration, but must be validated through reason and evidence.

Love also has elements of objectivity, insofar as it relies to some degree on personal preferences, but must be validated through reason and evidence.

Of course, the idea of “validating” love offends our sensibilities to some degree, since love is so often considered to be a form of divine madness or inspiration. What, then, is meant by “validating love”?

Well, in the realm of romantic relationships, we are motivated to a considerable degree by biological attraction, or raw sexual desire. In the same way, we may feel an irrational exuberance of greed when we see an overturned Brinks truck spilling banknotes into the wind. We may even seize some of these banknotes, before shaking our heads and returning our ill-gotten gains.

Philosophy is required because our instincts can lead us astray, as in the case of eating and certain phobias. We may be sexually attracted to certain characteristics such as large breasts or bald heads, but those desires lie squarely in the realm of animal reproduction, rather than what would properly be called “love.” Teenagers may get a fairly strenuous degree of sexual satisfaction from their hand, but this would scarcely be called love.

The world looks flat, but in truth it is round. Some people are sexually attractive, but that does not mean they are lovable.

Since love has elements of objectivity, the objective elements of love must be tied to universal values, the existence of which I proved in my previous book on Universally Preferable Behaviour.

Again, this does not mean that all love is identical. The concept of “health” has elements of objectivity, but is also measurable relative to a variety of standards. A “healthy” AIDS patient is quite different from a healthy athlete. The “healthiest” person in a cancer ward is not healthy relative to the majority of people.

In the same way, we can assume that there is one person in the world who is the very best person for you to be with. Does that mean that you could never be happy with anyone else?

Of course not.

As with all disciplines, we have to weigh the pros and cons of perfection versus attainability. There is also only one “perfect” job in the world for us as well, but we can quite easily starve to death looking for it.

If we look at something like “honesty” as a behavioural trait that elicits admiration, it is true that everyone has differing degrees of commitment to – and execution of – honesty, but there is still an objective difference between honesty and dishonesty.

If I value honesty – and I am honest myself – then I will value somebody who is honest 99% of the time more than somebody who is honest 90% of the time. (100% honesty can be considered an unrealistic goal, like 100% health, or being “perfectly reasonable.”)

Naturally, I would prefer to be with someone who is as honest as possible, but I will likely have to “settle” for the most honest person that I can find. The fact that I am willing to compromise my standards with regards to honesty – partly borne of a reasonable humility regarding my own capacity for honesty – does not mean that I will value a liar. If I am a mathematician, some of my proofs will doubtless fail – but that does not mean that failing to achieve perfect consistency is exactly the same as starting out to commit a fraud.

Love as a Response

If I stand in front of a mirror weighing 300 pounds and smoking my 40^th cigarette of the morning and say “I am healthy,” have I affected my health in any objective manner?

Of course not. I have merely chosen to say the words “I am healthy” rather than achieve actual health through consistent actions.

My words have not affected reality at all. I have merely put the cart before the horse. If I lose weight and quit smoking, I can reasonably stand in front of the mirror and say “I am healthy” (or at least “I am healthier”). My words thus become an accurate identification of an objective state – a state which has preceded my words and in a sense provokes them.

My words are thus a response to my empirical behaviour, measured in objective terms (weight loss, smoking cessation).

Similarly, if I stand in front of you and say “I love you,” this statement only has validity if it is a response to your behaviour. I can stand in front of the most evil and hateful human being on the planet and also say the words “I love you,” but my preference does not make that person any more lovable – any more than telling myself that I am healthy unclogs my arteries.

As I talked about in my book “On Truth,” people in general prefer – or find it far easier in the short term – to do whatever they please in the moment, and then redefine their actions as “universally virtuous.”

It is equally true that people in general prefer – or find it far easier in the short run – to date whomever they desire, and then redefine their partner as “lovable.”

Ask most young women what they are looking for in a man and you will hear various variations on the theme of tall, dark and handsome – or, if they are slightly younger, “cute and funny.”

I have asked this question of many people, and I have never heard the word “virtue” mentioned once.

Love and Virtue

Does love have anything to do with virtue?

Yes, yes and yes!

Love and Honesty

It is impossible to imagine genuine love in the absence of honesty. For love to be genuine, it must be an accurate assessment of particular traits within another human being. If the person that we claim to “love” constantly lies to us or falsifies his actions, then whatever perception we have of that person that causes us to love him are incorrect.

Since that which causes us to love is incorrect, our “love” must thus be invalid.

To analogize this, imagine that you work for me and I pay you in cash. However, when you try to spend your earnings, you discover that I have paid you with counterfeit bills. As a result, I have received value through your work, but you have not received value through my payment. My dishonesty has thus generated a false value for you, because if you knew that I was going to pay you with counterfeit money, you would not have worked for me to begin with.

Since the truth would have produced an opposite action in you – a rejection of employment, rather than an acceptance of it – your diligent behaviour was as unjustified as your interpretation of my honesty.

In the same way, if I tell you that I am courageous, and virtuous, yet hide sordid aspects of my life from you, drink in secret and so on – and you believe me – then you will feel more positive towards me than if I told you the truth.

Since our emotions are so directly dependent upon our perceptions and are so foundational to our experience of the world, someone who lies to us is fundamentally manipulating our experience of the world.

Since our emotions also alter our bodies biochemically, a liar who gets close to us manipulates our biochemistry as surely as if he were drugging us directly.

Thus our own emotional stability, which is a key part of a peaceful and happy life, requires as a bare minimum general honesty from those around us.

Love and Courage

Fundamentally, courage is not bravery with regards to another human being, but rather with regards to moral ideals.

My wife, though wonderfully courageous in many areas, has a certain weakness when it comes to social gatherings.

For instance, she has an ex-friend who is involved in a highly dysfunctional relationship. Recently, when we were at a party, we were told that this woman had gotten married to her boyfriend. Christina exclaimed: “Oh, that’s great!”

I was somewhat surprised, to say the least, and really put my foot in it by saying to her in front of everyone: “Really? I didn’t think you were such a big fan of their relationship.”

(It’s always good to have something to talk about during the drive home.)

Of course, I was not particularly concerned with Christina’s disavowal of her true feelings in company – particularly since the woman in question showed up at the party later on. I was more concerned with the fact that she placed the perceptions of others above the truth of her own feelings – feelings which were accurate and valid. I was most concerned, however, with the fact that she did not seem conscious of her reversal of values. If she had expressed approval with her friend standing right behind her, I would have understood her caution – however, there was no compelling and immediate reason to express approval of something she did not in fact approve of.

The reason that this troubled me, of course, was that I really didn’t like the idea that Christina could betray her values – even in this minor manner – for the sake of the possible disapproval of the people we were talking to, who we see maybe once every year or two.

This also made me feel insecure, since Christina and I both hold trusting our own feelings as a high value – as well as honesty of course. I really disliked the idea that the virtues we believed in and practiced were sort of a “private world” that had nothing to do with the “real world” of everyone else.

You know that feeling you get if you are dating a woman who never wants to introduce you to her friends? You get this uneasy sensation that you are kind of “below the radar,” or something to be hidden relative to her life as a whole. You are, in fact, a sort of embarrassment, in that she obviously feels that she must be “slumming” in some manner. If she felt that you would enhance her status with her friends, she would drag you to see them against your will if she had to.

When I was 17, I worked in a day-care centre teaching a room full of kids. I became friends with a woman who was slightly older, and was just going through a divorce. Over dinner one evening, she told me about her psychic abilities. Because I was 17, my hormones and I listened attentively.

Over a departmental lunch the next day, I mentioned her psychic abilities as part of a more general conversation. She became completely red-faced, and chastised me afterwards for bringing that up.

So many of us have this kind of “private world” that we openly disavow, scorn and reject when we are in the company of others. This is a form of cowardice, since we abandon what is precious to us for fear of the disapproval or rejection of others.

In other words, we reject ourselves rather than be rejected by others.

This avoids the pain of humiliation, but also keeps us trapped in an underworld of people we know will humiliate us if we are honest.

The reason that this habit is so hard to respect or love is because it involves so many contradictions.

If a certain belief or habit is truly valuable, it does not lose its value in the presence of others. Real money does not lose its value in the presence of counterfeit currency – quite the opposite is true in fact.

Conversely, if the opinions of others is the best methodology for determining our values, then those values cannot exist except through the opinions of others – thus there should be nothing to hide in the presence of others, since no values have been accepted or practised without their prior approval.

It is hard to respect someone who wants to “have his cake and eat it too” by holding private virtues that he consistently disavows in public. We tend to shy away from these sorts of people not only because of their hypocrisy, but also because these sorts of contradictory values make raising children enormously difficult.

If you ask a woman to evaluate a particular situation and she openly says, “Oh, I have no idea, I’ll have to check with all my friends,” then there is no possibility of equality in her relationship with her friends. If all her friends hold the same values, then they will be empty echoes of endless cross-referencing, with no ideas or opinions being generated at all.

At least one of her friends must be able to generate opinions, which everyone else then references.

Thus she both prefers and dislikes opinions – she dislikes having her own for fear of disapproval, and so she must prefer that other people create her opinions for her.

Of course, you never do meet people who openly tell you that they have no opinions, but must always ask their friends – and that is why these cowardly evasions are so odious. People always claim that their opinions are both virtuous and true, that they have integrity and are willing to stand up for what they believe in, and then they generally fold at the slightest sign of pressure or disapproval.

The fact that they fold – as we all do at times – does not warn them that they are not actually living their values, and must more closely examine their companions. Since everyone has a general access to the self-medicating madness of instant mythology, all that people do when they act in a cowardly manner is redefine their actions as virtuous in some manner.

Thus a woman may say: “I know that I said that, but I didn’t want to offend people (I’m nice), and besides, people don’t change (I’m practical), and we were enjoying their hospitality (I’m not ungrateful), and the person in question was going to show up (I’m prudent) – and besides, yesterday you said X, Y and Z (you’re hypocritical).”

This is why a lack of integrity tends to make us uneasy – because it always ends up being an attack on truth in general and our integrity in particular.

Not too relaxing…

Love and Sustainability

We do not call a tire “good” if it ruptures right after being installed. “Quality” has a lot to do with sustainability. A bridge is not of high quality if it collapses six minutes after being built.

In many ways, virtue is fundamentally about sustainable behaviour. Clearly, lying is not very sustainable behaviour – particularly in a long-term relationship – because reality is always opposing the words of the liar. As “intimacy” grows in a relationship and more and more people get involved in the couple’s interactions, lies become less and less sustainable.

Similarly, cowardice is also unsustainable in a relationship, since cowardice is always supported by justifications (lies) which reframe cowardice as “courage.” This creates an unstable situation where cowardly behaviour is both condemned and praised, resulting in highly inconsistent behaviour.

Integrity, of course, is all about sustainable behaviour – its opposite, conformity, is all about seeking the approval of others, which produces highly inconsistent behaviour. People inflict a need for conformity on us as children by attacking us for independent thought and evaluation, because any such thought reveals their hypocrisy. Thus conformist habits always stem from the desire of those who hold power over us to blind us to their inconsistent and hypocritical actions. This is why conformity and integrity are so fundamentally opposed.

If we love certain characteristics or virtues, then clearly our love will stabilize and increase to the degree to which those characteristics or virtues are stable, and increase.

Love and Security

Security is an essential ingredient for intimacy. Security results from a feeling of predictability and safety, which in turn arises from consistent benevolence on the part of others. If we are randomly attacked by our lover, we can never feel safe or secure. If we have to use a rickety old footbridge to cross a chasm, each wobbly step will be a fearful nightmare.

Why do we stay in relationships where we do not feel safe and secure? One central reason is that we have a habit of listening to people’s words, rather than regarding their actions. The old adage “actions speak louder than words” has fallen out of favour in our modern age, but it is essential for evaluating potential relationships of any kind.

Abusive behaviour always results from a lack of integrity.

If, on a first date, a woman tells you openly that she will attack you whenever she feels insecure, angry or vulnerable – and promises to blame you when you get upset about being attacked – you would be very unlikely to continue dating her.

No, people always tell you that they are acting virtuously, even if their actions completely contradict their stated values. If a woman has a habit of attacking others when she feels anxious, that behaviour can only be maintained if she redefines her abuse as virtuous in some manner. She will say that she is only defending herself, or that she has been patient for a long time but “enough is enough,” or that the other party started the conflict, and so on.

If her culpability can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, she then reverts to the secondary defence of abusers, which is to say that it is ignoble to point fingers and play “the blame game,” that “forgiveness is a virtue,” and “we need to move on now.”

In other words, she will openly state that unjustly attacking others is wrong, and then will unjustly attack others.

This lack of integrity ensures that no one around her will ever feel a consistent sense of security or safety. (In fact, that is exactly what it is designed to do, since destabilizing people is an essential prerequisite for controlling them.)

Security and Values

If we accept that integrity to virtue creates security – and that security is a necessary prerequisite for love – then we can understand why it is so important to have values in a relationship that both parties can refer to.

If an agreement can be reached that raised voices and name-calling are inappropriate to a loving relationship, then if one person yells or name-calls, the other person can object to that behaviour based on values that both parties have accepted.

It is impossible to have security – or integrity – without shared and objective values.

If I hand you $1,000 and think it is a loan, but you see it as a gift, then I will not perceive you to be acting with integrity if you never pay the “loan” back – just as you will never perceive me to be acting with integrity if I demand my “gift” back.

Similarly, if a woman holds “keeping others happy” as a core “value,” then she will view any emotional confrontation or uncomfortable honesty as “rude.”

On the other hand, if she holds “honesty” as a core value, then she will view a consistent avoidance of necessary confrontations or honesty as “cowardice.”

If a man believes that verbal abuse is “assertiveness,” then asking him to refrain from verbal abuse is the same as asking him to be a coward – which will never happen, since few if any people will ever voluntarily pursue an action they define as immoral or ignoble.

If a woman believes that nagging is necessary to get what she wants, then asking her to give up nagging would be like asking her to give up having any needs or preferences, which will never happen.

Following our above methodology, when considering integrity, we must next ask: “Integrity to what?”

Objective Integrity

aving integrity is acting in accordance with rational values. This is an enormously hard thing to achieve, both because most of the “values” we were given – or rather which were inflicted upon us – are so ridiculously self-contradictory, and also because living with integrity actively eliminates a goodly number of people from your life.

Women often say that they dislike nagging, but don’t know any other way to get their needs met.

This is a prime example of not living with integrity.

If my wife has to nag me to meet her needs, then she is basically telling me that I do not care about her, and that I will never lift a finger to meet her needs unless she constantly complains that I am not meeting her needs.

In the movie “The Breakup,” Jennifer Aniston tells Vince Vaughn that she wants him to want to do the dishes with her.

What she means by this is that she wants him to want to help her, to make the job of entertaining easier, and to place her needs above his own, at least temporarily.

The reason that this kind of behaviour is so corrupt is that it is so fundamentally self-contradictory.

If Jennifer has to constantly nag Vince to meet her needs, then clearly she believes that he does not voluntarily want to meet her needs in the first place. He does not respect what she wants, or does not care that she wants it – either way, he is treating her entirely disrespectfully.

She feels frustrated because she does not feel visible to him – as women so often say: “If he only knew how important this was to me, he would not hesitate to provide it.” Thus Jennifer gets stuck in a “broken record” loop of attempting to become visible to Vince, so that he will give her what she wants.

Fundamentally, then, she is nagging him because she feels invisible to him – because she feels that he is rejecting who she really is.

This is entirely hypocritical.

Obviously, what Vince wants is to not be nagged. Over and over, he complains that she keeps nagging him. He also does not seem to enjoy entertaining – and Jennifer’s obsessive perfectionism appears particularly odious to him.

It is thus ridiculous for Jennifer to chastise him for not meeting her needs, when by that very chastisement she is failing to meet his need, which is to not be chastised.

The tragic irony is that Jennifer feels rejected, and so rejects the man that she chose because he is rejecting her.

This is exactly like saying: “I need a form of transportation,” then spending years testing various makes of cars and researching all the alternatives, and then finally purchasing a car – and then, when you get it home, standing in front of it and exclaiming: “Excellent, now I’m going to turn this thing into a boat!”

Men always resist being turned into “boats” – while women experience men’s resistance at being transformed into something they are not as a rejection of themselves. They will openly say to a man they have chosen: “Change!” and then feel genuinely rejected when he does not change.

Of course, asking someone to change is rejecting him, at least as he is. To choose a man, and then reject a man, and then complain that you feel rejected, is quite mad.

If the innocent car in the woman’s garage could speak, surely it would say: “If you wanted a boat, why on earth did you buy a car?”

Why did you choose me if you don’t even like me?

he reason that couples so strenuously avoid this elemental conversation is that if you have bought a car when you really want a boat, the point is not to nag the car into becoming a boat, but to take the car back and get a boat instead.

You cannot claim to love someone, and then want him to change.

If you’re looking for a painting and spend years finding just the right one, you don’t then bring it home and start painting over it – particularly if you’re not even a painter!

Clearly, since no one is forcing you to go looking for a painting, you should just buy the right painting and be content with what you have.

If you are not a mental health professional or a well-versed philosopher, then when you try to change people, you are like someone who has no idea how to paint attempting to “improve” a painting.

If you are a mental health professional or a philosopher, then you are wise enough to know that people do not change, and so you will never buy a painting that you have to “paint over.”

Most economists accept that any attempt by a coercive monopoly such as the state to interfere with the natural flow of voluntary trade will create ever-growing distortions in the marketplace.

In the same way, any attempt to interfere with a person’s natural personality through any kind of aggression or rejection will create ever-growing distortions in his character. Nagging, for example, leads to an excess of fear, irritation and passive aggression, which in turn leads to increased nagging…

“Fixing” the Painting…

If we attempt to “correct” a painting because just a small part of it is “wrong,” we will inexpertly daub a blob of paint and then stand back to review our handiwork.

Naturally, because we lack knowledge and skill, we will have inevitably made the painting less pleasing than it was before.

Logically, we should then sigh and say: “Well, since I am obviously not a painter, I will now stop trying to ‘fix’ this painting – and the fact that I have now made the painting less attractive will serve as my perpetual warning about trying to ‘fix’ paintings again in the future.”

Surely, if the painting were sentient, we should also apologize to it for making it uglier.

Ahh, if only we were that logical!

Sadly, what people actually do is continue to try and “fix” the painting, making it uglier and uglier, and less and less suited to their purposes.

As things get worse and worse they get more and more angry, and throw more and more paint at the painting, and get more and more frustrated, and blame the painting, and blame the paint, and blame the paintbrush – everything but themselves!

And we all know where that leads in the end.

At some point, they stand back from the painting – now completely unrecognizable from what they originally bought – which lies buried and unrecoverable under mountains of ugly and clashing colors.

They stare at that mess and say to themselves: “I really can’t believe that I ever liked this painting – it is the ugliest thing I have ever seen, and I’m going to throw it out!”

Then, they go shopping for a new painting that they can take home and “improve,” and the whole cycle begins again.

The final tragedy is that if people genuinely accepted that they cannot “improve” a painting, they would be far more careful about the paintings they bought, and would not accept imperfections or ugliness, knowing that they cannot improve it after they get it home.

In other words, the final ugliness of the painting is actually brought about by believing that the painting can be made less ugly.

Without the fantasy that a painting can be made more beautiful, true beauty could in fact be achieved.

The belief that we can reshape the personalities of other people creates a deep and inescapable polarization within a relationship, which is captured for comic effect in the statement: “I love you, you’re perfect, now change!”

But – we can’t change people at all?

In our minds, we all generally know the basic principle that we cannot change others – but this does not seem to fit with the reality that we expect to improve within a relationship.

If two human beings do not change at all in proximity to each other, then what is the point of a relationship? When we go to university, we have a relationship of sorts with our professors, and we expect to change based on that relationship. We expect to grow in knowledge and wisdom, or technical skill, or mental agility, based on having them as professors.

In the same way, if we sign up at a dojo to learn jujitsu, we expect to change – to improve – based on our relationship with our instructor.

If love is our involuntary response to virtue, then if a relationship results in an increase in virtue, then surely it will result in an increase in love – something to be ardently desired, it would seem.

How can this seeming paradox be resolved – that we must not strive to change people, but that the best relationships result in improvements for both participants?

Let us return to our painting metaphor to see if we cannot unravel this knot.

Imagine that you and I are not consumers of art, but creators of art.

Both our paintings are accepted by a gallery, and when we show up to have a look at them, we are immediately drawn to the beauty of each other’s work.

While conversing with each other, we find that we have very similar goals as artists – to ennoble people by drawing their attention to the beauty of the world they live in.

As reasonable artists, we know that objective feedback on our own work will help us achieve our goals. Thus the next time I am working on a painting, I call you when I am halfway through and ask you to have a look and let me know what you think.

You arrive, look over my painting with great attention, ask me what it is that I am trying to achieve, and then give me objective and valuable feedback on how to shape the light, colour and composition to more completely achieve my objective.

This process goes back and forth for several months – and then, since our mutual feedback is truly helping us achieve our artistic goals, and bringing us even greater joy as artists, we decide to rent a studio together and paint in the same room.

As we work together, our paintings become more and more beautiful and our trust in our own and each other’s artistic judgment grows. I learn from your feedback and you learn from mine – we internalize the principles that we provide each other, and then as we improve, we help each other surmount the new obstacles that always arise from increased excellence.

We have our disagreements, of course – but sometimes it seems that we learn even more from our disagreements! Our conflicts are resolved patiently, positively and productively, thus affirming the strength of our relationship and allowing our mutual trust to grow even stronger.

We can all understand that this kind of relationship is mutually beneficial, and results in great improvements in both skill and joy for both parties.

How is this different from a desire to change someone?

Well, the difference is that we are both helping each other achieve noble goals that we arrived at the relationship already committed to pursuing.

I am not trying to turn you from a plumber into a painter, and you are not trying to turn me from a painter into an accountant. If you want to paint beautiful portraits, I am not trying to turn you into Jackson Pollock. If you enjoy dribbling paint in semi-random patterns, I am not trying to turn you into Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. If you want to make a living as a painter, I do not try to downgrade your ambitions and turn you into a hobbyist.

The difference is that I am not setting your goals – which really means, in essence, that I am not attempting to alter your values, but rather help you achieve them.

In the above example of the conflict between Jennifer and Vince, we can see that Jennifer’s fundamental error – the mistake that makes the relationship inevitably doomed – is that she is attempting to alter his values.

“I want you to want to help me do the dishes!” she exclaims in frustration – thus revealing that what she really wants is for his values to be the opposite of what they are. Clearly, he doesn’t want to help her do the dishes – what she demands from him is the complete opposite of that existing desire.

This would be like me approaching you as you regard your painting in an art gallery, and attempting to turn you into the opposite of a painter.

We can surely picture the absurdity of an Olympic coach marching up to some overweight chain-smoking stranger lounging on a park bench and snarling at him to become more motivated, dammit, to get his ass off that park bench and start taking his training seriously!

The smoker would doubtless stare up in bewilderment, wondering what on earth could motivate someone to march up to him out of nowhere, and expect him to act in complete opposition to his clearly-expressed existing preferences.

On the other hand, if I desperately want to win an Olympic medal, and I have the ability and drive to train and diet endlessly, then a coach is essential to help me achieve my goal.

In the first example, the coach is not attempting to facilitate the goals of the chain-smoking stranger, but rather to set his goals in direct opposition to all available evidence! (Also known as: imposing your own goals on others.)

In the second example, the coach is not attempting to set goals for the motivated athlete, but rather facilitate the achievement of those goals in accordance with all available evidence.

When we treat people as objects to be fixed – like paintings we can paint over – it is not about them, but about us. When we attempt to “correct” a painting, we are fundamentally the only person in the room.

When we treat people not as objects, but as complementary souls – not as paintings, but painters – we can truly merge our lives in trust, love and beauty, because there are in fact two people in the room.

This is the difference between changing people and helping people.

This is the difference between control and love.

In relationships, this is the difference between dismal failure and joyous success.

Acceptance and Rejection

Acceptance is the opposite of rejection. It is logically impossible to both accept and reject something at the same time, just as it is impossible for a rock to fall both up and down at the same time.

Why, then, are we so drawn to attempt to “improve” the people that we claim to love?

Well, because it is far less uncomfortable to attempt to improve others than to actually improve ourselves.

How can we justify the fundamental contradiction that we both love someone and want her to change in significant ways?

The first thing to understand is that we don’t actually want to change someone else.

This may sound startling, but it is easily provable.

If I spend years shopping for a home, and then finally buy a small condominium, and then demand that, in order to complete the sale, the condo must be converted into a four bedroom house, my real estate agent would regard me as largely insane.

“If you want a four bedroom house, then you should shop for a four bedroom house!” she would say – and quite rightly too!

If I buy the condominium, and move in, and then constantly complain to everyone that my condominium is not a four bedroom house, then clearly I have bought the condominium not because I want a four bedroom house, but rather because I want to complain about not having a four bedroom house.

This is a very important distinction, which Edward Albee writes about in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” George and Martha have a demonically abusive marriage, and George complains about it endlessly, until Martha finally screams at him that he married her in order to be abused.

Why on earth would somebody enter into a relationship in order to complain about that relationship?

It does seem rather counterintuitive, but it makes sense logically when you look at the root causes.

Reversing Virtue and Vice

f I act in a cowardly manner, but I redefine my cowardice as “courage,” then I am turning morality completely upside down by converting a vice into a “virtue.”

If I am a doctor, and redefine “cancer” as “health” (and vice versa), then everything that I do will be the opposite of good medicine. I will inject cancer cells into healthy people, tell them to smoke and refrain from using sunscreen, and I will attempt to hasten the progress of cancer in sick people.

By redefining that which is unhealthy as that which is healthy, I have reversed the cause and effect in everything I do.

I have in fact become a kind of cancer.

In the same way, if I redefine my cowardice as a virtue – a cowardly action in and of itself – then I reverse the cause and effect of all my relationships.

Let us say that I fear my parents because they are abusive, either overtly or covertly.

It is not cowardice to openly admit that I am afraid of my parents.

It is also not cowardice to submit to my parents’ will as long as I openly admit my fear. If they want me to come to dinner and I go, I am not necessarily a coward.

How can that be possible – to submit to bullying without being cowardly?

Virtue and Honesty

The first prerequisite for virtue is honesty. With honesty comes at least the possibility of integrity, which can survive a temporary surrender to bullying, just as your liver can survive a glass of wine or two.

If I openly say to my wife: “We must go to my parents’ house for Sunday dinner, although I hate and fear them, because I am too afraid to either confront or avoid them,” then my wife has at least an accurate understanding of the reality of the situation.

She clearly understands that my true desire is not to go to my parents’ house, and that my barrier is my fear of my parents.

Armed with that knowledge, my wife can then help me to get what I really want by talking me through the fear that blocks me from achieving it.

This is analogous to one painter helping another painter overcome his fear of submitting his work to a gallery – something that he desperately and openly desires.

On the other hand, if I claim that I “love” my parents when I really hate and fear them, then an inevitable and terrible sequence of events is set into motion.

Virtue and Obedience

If I say that I love my parents, then I must define obedience to their wishes as obedience to virtue.

This may sound confusing, so let us look at it in a little more detail.

If I say that I completely respect my doctor, then obedience to his instructions is obedience to the objective principles of health. If I say that I completely trust my financial advisor, then obedience to his wishes is obedience to sound principles of financial management.

In the same way, if I say that I love my parents, then they must be good and virtuous people, and so naturally it follows that they must also love me – since if I were not a good person, I would not be able to love them for their virtue.

If we love each other, then obviously we take pleasure in each other’s company and have each other’s best interests at heart, and contact can only enhance the pleasure, integrity and virtue of our lives.

If I trust my doctor, and contact with my doctor always enhances my health, then anyone who tells me to avoid my doctor must ipso facto have the goal of harming my health. If my financial advisor is always right, then only a corrupt con man would tell me to fire my financial advisor.

Thus if I reframe my fear and hatred of my parents as “love,” anyone who tells me to avoid my parents must be an evil person who only wishes me harm.

Do you see the horrors that we set in motion when we lie about virtue?

Since obedience to my parents’ wishes is also obedience to “virtue,” when my parents ask me to come over for an intermittent Sunday dinner, refusing to attend is the equivalent of refusing to be virtuous – in fact, committing a moral crime.

This reversal of values creates endless catastrophes in our relationships.

If we have redefined our cowardice as a virtue, then we will inevitably perceive certain traits in those around us as dangerous and negative.

If I my stockbroker is corrupt and is busily robbing me blind, then any competent stockbroker who comes across me will see that immediately, and say:

“This stockbroker that you think is very good is actually corrupt, and is violating most if not all professional ethics, and is taking you to the cleaners, and will leave you penniless. For instance, the degree of ‘churning’ that he is performing on your account is utterly unsustainable – you would require returns of 20-30% to break even, given the commissions he is generating for himself by buying and selling stocks in your account…”

This competent stockbroker would then give you objective reasons as to why you should no longer trust your existing stockbroker, but rather fire him immediately.

Naturally, if you have defined obedience to your corrupt stockbroker as obedience to financial responsibility, having this obedience revealed as conformity to financial irresponsibility would create enormous anxiety within you.

If you claim that you want to be healthy – and genuinely do want to be healthy – and you take up chain-smoking as a result of the advice of a corrupt doctor, hearing your doctor debunked will make you very upset.

Realizing that we have conned ourselves puts us in a state of excruciating vulnerability, since it reveals so much about our own family histories, and how we were exploited and rendered “easy prey” by our parents.

Some people, of course, are able to handle this upset if they are in fact dedicated to being healthy. They will survive their own shame, humiliation and anxiety, fire their corrupt doctor, and reform their habits.

However, the majority of people will simply shoot the messenger.

Clearly, people who redefine their vices as virtues have already demonstrated their preference for avoiding their own anxiety by making up stories.

Since the best predictor of future behaviour is relevant past behaviour, what do you think that these people’s response will be to a situation that increases their anxiety?

Why, they’re just going to make up another angry story to “explain away” their “mistake.”

The Inevitable Counterattack…

Health is not a moral attribute, and so the preceding medical analogies are far less emotionally charged than the reality of redefining vices as virtues.

If my parents are corrupt or evil, then obedience to their wishes is obedience to corruption or evil.

In essence, if I obey corrupt or evil principles, I am in fact corrupt or evil.

Nothing is more emotionally volatile than labeling someone “corrupt” or “evil.”

“Evil” is obedience to evil principles or evil people.

“Corruption” is redefining that evil as “the good.”

No sane human being can look in the mirror and say: “I am evil.” Even a monster such as Hitler portrayed himself to himself as the saviour of Germany, the liberator of the Aryan race, and so on.

The moment that a human being looks in the mirror and says, “I am evil,” he must change.

This is a central reason why people would rather redefine “evil” as “the good” – since if they cannot, they are revealed as evil and must immediately start to change.

Thus if I invert rational values and redefine my cowardice as courage, I must inevitably banish everyone from my life who has even a hint of the following characteristics:

Genuine courage
Moral perceptiveness
Integrity
Honesty
Empathy
A true capacity to love
Curiosity
…and so on.

Counterfeiting Virtue

f I am a counterfeiter, I need to keep people away from me who can easily detect false currency. If I am a drug dealer, I am unlikely to befriend “drug enforcement” agents. If I am a liar, people with a strong ability to detect falsehoods – and the courage to confront liars – will be anathema to me. If I am a con man, I must prey upon the weak and gullible. Strong and perceptive souls will always be safe from me, since I will avoid them like the plague.

In the same way, when I pervert rational values by redefining my vices as virtues, I am inevitably drawn to reject and revile strong and virtuous people – and inevitably drawn towards weak and corrupt people who will not challenge my own corruption.

In other words, reversing virtue reverses love. Instead of being drawn towards virtue for the sake of happiness, you are drawn towards vice for the sake of avoiding pain.

Claiming that you are virtuous when you are not inevitably draws you to “love” people who are unlovable.

If you “love” yourself for your vices, you will inevitably be drawn to “love” others for their vices – and, as inevitably, to hate and fear other people for their virtues, just as you hate and fear true virtue in yourself.

Polarization

n this way, we are drawn to bond with people that we fundamentally dislike. We are drawn to them by the inescapable logic of our own premises – however, the hypocritical falsehoods of those premises also causes us to recoil from those we desire.

This form of attachment is basically a kind of self-destructive addiction rather than any form of benevolent love. A man who has redefined his vices as virtues has the same relationship with those that he claims to “love” that a heroin addict has to his heroin in the later stages of his addiction. He needs it because it relieves his anxiety, but he hates it because it is destroying his life.

In the same way, my partner is a mirror of myself – her virtues are my virtues, her vices are my vices.

Her capacity for honesty is my capacity for honesty.

Her integrity is my integrity.

To take a minor example of how this looks in practice, imagine a woman who has gained a few pounds struggling into her clothing, which has just returned from the dry cleaners. A mature person will first go and weigh herself, to see if she has gained any weight. An immature person will blame the dry cleaners for shrinking her clothing, or, if she finds out that she has gained weight, will blame her boyfriend for buying potato chips, or not telling her that she has gained weight, or society as a whole for “demanding” that women remain thin.

Projection

Of course, if I know that I am a coward but redefine my cowardice as “courage,” I do not eliminate my knowledge of my cowardice. If I am fat and redefine fat as “healthy,” I do not eliminate my knowledge of my obesity. If I steal a car, I do not suddenly believe that I actually bought it.

How, then, can I evade or ignore my knowledge of my own cowardice?

Well, the most common mechanism is a devilish psychological defence called “projection.”

Projection is the habit of ascribing our own negative qualities to other people.

The most common example of this is passive aggression.

Let us return to our troubled couple, Sheila and Bruce.

If Bruce is frustrated but does not, cannot or will not openly express his frustration, then he will begin to cause problems for other people: either through tangential complaints, snappy comments, stony silence, or surly stomping.

Sheila will then ask him: “What’s wrong?”

Naturally, Bruce will reply: “Nothing!”

Of course, Sheila knows that this is not the case, and will ask him again. Again and again, Bruce will deny that anything is wrong, thus causing her intense frustration.

It is in this manner that the frustration passes from Bruce to Sheila.

As Sheila becomes increasingly frustrated by Bruce’s provocation and subsequent stonewalling, Bruce begins to express increasing exasperation towards her.

He claims to be irritated by her persistent questioning – which allows him to unload his original frustration, but blame it on her actions instead of his own thinking.

Zooming Out…

o a far greater degree, we can see the same mechanism at work in the realm of geopolitics.

Let us take a little spin back to 2001.

George Bush wants to invade Iraq, but he cannot openly express that he wants to invade Iraq – so he must make up reasons that place the ownership for his decision squarely on the shoulders of Saddam Hussein. Thus he can “legitimately” turn from an initiator to a reactor, from an aggressor to a leader acting in “self-defence.”

Thus he continually repeats the mantra that Saddam Hussein is an aggressor who wants to attack the United States – thus “legitimizing” his own aggression, which is the true source of the conflict.

In the same way, our parents will often tell us that we are “selfish” for not wanting to drop by for another boring or unsettling Sunday dinner. “You are selfish,” they will say, “because you are ignoring the feelings and needs of other people, and only thinking of what you want!”

However, it is clear that they are failing their own definition of “virtue” by ignoring our desire not to attend Sunday dinner, and only thinking of what they want. They selfishly want us to be there despite the fact that it goes against our desires – but then they get angry at us for not wanting to be there because it goes against their desires.

Madness!

Thus we can see that projection is a mechanism for self-avoidance, or for actively rejecting knowledge of our own motivations.

If we are angry at our wife, but provoke her into anger instead of expressing our own anger and then release our anger based on the fact that she is angry, all that we have done is set an elaborate trap which allows us to abusively “release” our feelings without ever learning their cause.

Of course, the reason that we do not want to learn the cause of our actions is that we know deep down that our actions are unjustified – and most likely cravenly aggressive.

If I buy a stereo from a guy in a van, I will be reluctant to ask for a receipt, since I will want to avoid the knowledge that it is stolen. It is not the receipt that I am avoiding, but rather the knowledge that I am profiting from crime, and thus enabling criminals.

Changing Others

t would almost seem that, as a species, we are utterly addicted to changing others’ behaviour rather than examining our own.

There is something so elementally seductive about playing the “know it all” card and lecturing others on their deficiencies. When problems arise, for all too many people this is the default position.

If they have a near-miss in a car, their first impulse is to blame other drivers.

If they become irritated with someone, their starting position is always that the other person’s deficiencies are causing that irritation. If their children misbehave or develop bad habits, it is always the selfishness of the child, the influence of the peer group, or the tyranny of the media that is to blame.

Why is it that we are so drawn to blaming others and inevitably and endlessly attempting to correct them, rather than examining our own motives and ideas for the causes of our problems?

The obvious answer is that we prefer the short-term gain of self-righteousness to the long-term gain of actual growth and improvement in our habits – yet that does not explain very much, since we diet, exercise, go to work and see our dentists, and do all other sorts of things which sacrifice short-term gains for long-term gains.

Thus we can see that human beings certainly do have the capacity to defer immediate gratification for the sake of long-term advantage. Why is this so rarely the case in one of the most important aspects of our lives – our personal relationships?

Why We Succumb…

irst of all, other people can be manipulated in a way that, say, our teeth cannot. We can convince another person that he alone is to blame for the problems in our relationship, but we cannot “convince” a tooth that it is not infected when it is. We can bully another person into believing that he is responsible for our overeating; we cannot bully the fat off our bellies.

Secondly, the general lack of integrity in those around us positively enables the kind of “blame game” that goes on in relationships. People who are raised badly, who end up with weak wills, weak characters and manipulative habits, can be easily blamed and controlled.

If we could only achieve the kind of integrity that, say, a tooth has, we would do an enormous service to the mental health and happiness of the world.

Enabling and the Vengeance of the Slave

Allowing other people to treat us badly is a subtle form of aggression against them.

It arises from a fairly primitive time in our species, when slavery and hyper-control dominated our interactions.

If a slave hates his master – as deep down he surely does – but cannot retaliate against him in any violent or assertive manner, what are his options?

Well, when you want somebody dead, but you cannot kill him openly, your best option is to exacerbate his unhealthy habits.

In other words, a slave can eventually take vengeance on his master by continually bringing him a drink, sitting with him while he drinks, and endlessly offering to refill his glass.

On a psychological level, the slave can effectively re-create his own misery in the mind of his master by both provoking and submitting to bullying.

Every time the master beats the slave, the misery and self-loathing of the master increases. Every time the master screams at the slave, the soul of the master dies a little more. Every whip of the lash kills the master’s capacity for love, contentment and peace of mind.

This, of course, is Nietzsche’s “slave morality,” in which the slave takes a form of masochistic satisfaction and dark glee in the spiritual destruction of his master. The passive-aggressive “moral superiority” of the slave is the only satisfaction that such a beaten-down creature can hope for.

The problem, however, is that by continually pursuing the insidious satisfaction of passive-aggressive masochism, the slave often becomes dangerously addicted to this form of vengeance.

In other words, the slave becomes addicted to having a master and finds life without this form of underhanded revenge entirely lacking in stimulation and satisfaction.

It’s not entirely in the past…

Now, since most of us are raised as virtual slaves within our families and schools, it is all too common for us to become addicted to having masters – and thus attempting to “master” our rulers through self-pitying moral superiority and the enabling, or supporting, of self-destructive behaviours on the part of those who command us.

If left unexamined, this drive to destroy those who control us inevitably leads us to seek out those who will control us, and then endlessly attempt to destroy them.

As mentioned earlier, the weapon of the slave is “moral superiority,” or beatific self-righteousness. To really undo his master, the slave must set up a standard of “forgiveness,” and “unconditional love,” by which he tortures the infected conscience of his master.

The way that this paradigm translates itself into modern relationships – particularly romantic, but also parental – is that both parties intermittently take on the roles of master and slave, or persecutor and persecuted, or “unjust attacker” and “self-righteous victim.” Since their lives are based on attack, condemnation, self-righteous vengeance and frustrated control, they remain in a continual state of provocation, attack, withdrawal and moral pomposity, creating an endless closed loop of ever-increasing frustration, bitterness, fear and resentment.

On a more overt level, we can see this kind of interaction occurring in the typical cycle of an abusive marriage. Let’s be stereotypical and talk about the husband as the abuser.

Over a few weeks, Bruce becomes increasingly tense and snappy. In turn, Sheila responds to his growing aggression through provocation, either in the form of complete obsequience – which irritates him – or endless questions and nagging defiance, which inflames him. Bruce then asserts his dominance and releases his tension by attacking Sheila in a titanic blow-up either physical or verbal in nature.

However, since Bruce has asserted his dominance in such a hysterical and abusive manner, the power in the relationship now passes from Bruce to Sheila.

Since Bruce has acted so obviously unjustly, Sheila now gains control of the moral narrative of their relationship, and uses it to bully Bruce.

After his attack, she threatens to leave him. He comes crawling back, apologizing and begging for forgiveness – now playing the part of the slave instead of the master. Sheila withholds her “forgiveness,” enjoying the new power that she has over him, and abusing him in turn, both by torturing him morally and staying in the relationship.

When we disapprove of someone morally but remain in an intimate and supporting relationship with him, we are acting entirely immorally ourselves.

If I work for a corrupt boss, and am fully aware that he is stealing from his customers but continue to work for him, I am enabling his corruption as surely as if I were performing it myself. I may attempt to assuage my conscience by nagging at my boss to be a “better” man, or tentatively bringing up my “objections” in meetings, but as time goes on, and I do not quit, everyone understands that my nagging is just a ritual designed to enable me to continue to take money from a corrupt person or organization while continuing to pretend to myself that I am moral.

By continuing to work for this corrupt man – while professing my own devotion to moral principles – I am clearly communicating to him that morality is simply a tool for self-deception, and that ethical exhortation is merely self-medicating hypocrisy. This “enables” his corruption even more so than the customers he steals from, who would doubtless flee his predation if they discovered it.

Thus remaining in relationships with immoral people while complaining that they are immoral is one of the most subtle forms of abuse in the world. It is revoltingly hypocritical, insofar as it uses ethics to enable and justify corruption.

This is the difference between the mugger who steals from you because he wants to buy a drink, and the socialist who steals from you because she wants to “help the poor.”

When you look closely for this kind of interaction in the relationships of those around you – or your own relationships, for that matter – it becomes blindingly obvious and virtually omnipresent.

A man “persecutes” his wife for her lack of sexual desire, and then plays the victim when he is criticized for not helping around the house. When the woman is attacked for her lack of sexual interest, she responds with a passive aggressive “moral” argument: “I do not feel like having sex because you are not emotionally available, or we are not close enough, or you yelled at me yesterday, or I am worried about finances, or I am stressed out because I have too much housework, or you don’t help enough with the kids etc etc etc.”

If we break down the man’s moral argument, he is basically saying: “I agreed to pursue a monogamous relationship with you, giving up sex with all other women. This creates an implicit obligation on your part to have sex with me since you hold a monopoly on sexual interactions. By continually refusing to have sex with me, you are setting a terrible and unjust trap wherein I will be tempted to pursue an affair, which will result in my personal and financial destruction. Since you are using sex to punish and control me in our relationship, but I am not allowed to pursue sex outside of this relationship, you are putting me up against the wall, which is a most hateful and unloving thing to do.”

His wife, on the other hand, is saying something like: “I do not feel close to you, because you are not emotionally available, which is a failure of your duties as a husband. You also yelled at me yesterday, which is abusive, and also a failure on your part as a husband. I complain about finances because you do not make enough money. I’m stressed about housework because you do not help enough. The kids are driving me crazy because I always have to be the disciplinarian, while you get to be the ‘fun’ dad who just plays with them. Thus, you are cold, lazy, unambitious and abusive. In fact, asking for sex when you know that I feel this way is further evidence of your coldness and abusive tendencies!”

As we can see, if we look closely, what is really going on here is a not-too-subtle tug of war over the moral narrative of the relationship, which is essentially a revolving slave-to-master interaction.

Deep down, we all know that if we can get someone to admit that a certain behaviour is morally wrong, he can in no way continue to defend that behaviour, and must change.

As I have argued from the very beginning of my podcast series, morality is the most powerful tool in the arsenal of mankind.

Whoever controls “morality” controls the relationship.

We all understand this instinctively, and so continually use stories and mythologies to attempt to gain control of the moral narrative of a relationship.

The reason that we never fully succeed is that we are perpetually creating “rules” for our partner that we do not follow ourselves.

We are all perfectly aware of this kind of hypocrisy in others when we read about priests who molest children, anti-homosexual Congressman who solicit gay sex in bathroom stalls, or people like Oprah who continually talk about feminism and “woman power” while simultaneously presenting an endless cavalcade of fear-mongering stories about attacks on women. Dr. Phil is another example of this kind of phenomenon. He continually attacks those who use violence to resolve their problems while praising soldiers to the skies.

There are several common mythologies at work in romantic relationships, which we would be wise to learn by heart.

“You Lack Empathy“

The first and most common moral mythology – particularly for women – is the essential criticism: “You lack empathy.”

The criticism of “selfishness” is so common that it can be hard to hear after a while.

Many, many women truly believe that if their husbands were genuinely empathetic, their marriages would be enormously improved, and their needs would be met.

The simple truth of the fact, though, is that most people are happy to talk about what they think and feel if they meet with genuine acceptance and respect.

What women are really saying when they complain that their husbands “lack empathy” is that their husbands are not thinking and feeling what their wives want them to think and feel.

Let’s look at a common example.

The horror of chores…

A fairly constant complaint from women is that their husbands seem supernaturally resistant to initiating chores.

“Why oh why is it that I have to ask him a dozen times to take out the garbage? It’s not like garbage day magically changes from week to week! Why can he not get it through his head that I don’t want to have to manage him like some sort of mother? And if he’s not going to take out the garbage, why doesn’t he just tell me so I can do it myself, instead of just continually promising that he’s going to do it ‘in a few minutes’?”

This is a clear example of “moral positioning.” Here is a translation of the subtext:

“You’re sooo not going to get laid!”

Or, alternatively:

“He does not respect my needs, he is not pulling his weight in this household, he is just manipulating me by appeasing me in the moment, while having no intention of doing what I ask. He is passive-aggressively frustrating me – he is selfish and lazy, and is turning me into a nag, so that I end up looking like the bad person when he’s the one who’s not doing his chores!”

On the surface, this seems like a seductively appealing narrative. Who could fail to sympathize with such a hard done by and put upon woman, struggling to maintain a household while her husband lazes and obfuscates on the couch?

Sadly, it is all pure nonsense.

By attempting to control his behaviour through nagging repetition, this woman is bypassing the most important question she needs to ask about why he is doing what he is doing (or not doing).

In other words, she claims that he is not being empathetic towards her needs, while at the same time she is not being at all empathetic towards his needs.

Clearly, by not taking out the garbage, he is communicating to her that he does not want to take out the garbage.

By making up a story that portrays him as lazy and negligent, his wife is creating a mythology about his motivation rather than honestly attempting to understand it.

This is not science or logic or empiricism or common sense or intimacy, but religion.

Remember, when bad things happen in the world of religion, “sinners” are invented to take the blame.

In this case, the “sinner” is laziness – or the husband in general.

We may as well say, when striving to understand the cause of an illness, “Satan made me sick!” Sure, it’s a comforting story with a protagonist and antagonist and a satisfyingly vindictive moral theme.

Sadly, it just has nothing to do with reality whatsoever.

If I am genuinely “lazy,” I may possess that trait for any one of a myriad number of reasons. I may be depressed or lonely, or feel over-controlled, or sense that my life is going in the wrong direction, or have any variety of medical deficiencies or ailments, or I may believe that my life lacks meaning and purpose, or I may be worried about possible moral transgressions on my part, or I may feel that I am embedded in a corrupt or compromising work environment, or my children may be going through a certain phase that reminds me of sad times in my own childhood, or I may be worried that I no longer love my wife…

There can be 10,000 or more reasons underlying my “lack of motivation.”

A wife who does not sit down with sensitivity and empathy to ask her husband why he is unmotivated is just a bully and has no moral right whatsoever to criticize her husband for his lack of sensitivity and empathy.

Nagging and Humiliation

She is also humiliating him in a way that can be hard to see.

If we are married to someone, we must certainly claim to love and respect him above all others. If we treat him, however, as if he is a “defective household chore robot,” then we are implicitly denigrating him in truly terrible ways.

When a wife marches up to her husband, demands that he take out the garbage, and implies that he is lazy and selfish, she is clearly communicating the following:

“I know that I promised to love and respect you for all eternity, but right now getting the garbage outside the house is infinitely more important to me than understanding your soul. In fact, I’m perfectly willing to attack your nature, ethics and initiative in order to get you to take the trash out. On my scale of values, moving the trash is an infinite plus. Understanding your soul is not even on my list!”

To see that your true personality and being is not even on the list of your wife’s priorities – and that you have been displaced by empty and trivial tasks – is unbearably humiliating.

If this humiliation were truly felt by all the spouses in the world, it would be like a neutron bomb in the world of marriage.

Marriages, like buildings, would be left standing – there would just be no people in them.

The Abuse of Assumptions

As I talked about in my book “On Truth,” morality is almost always used as a weapon of control and dominance.

When your wife marches up to you and demands in a shrill and exasperated tone for you to “PLEASE take out the garbage!” – implying that you are lazy and selfish – there are really only two possibilities.

You are in fact lazy and selfish..?

Naturally, if you are lazy and selfish – and we assume that these pejorative terms accurately represent the entire sum of your personality – then attacking you for being lazy and selfish after voluntarily choosing you as a life partner is patently ridiculous.

If my wife could have married any man with any accent in the world, but chose me, it would seem rather strange for her to attack me for having a British accent, claiming that every man with a British accent – who is not currently residing in England – is a pretentious phony.

If I am a pretentious phony, then it is quite silly for my wife to attack me for being a pretentious phony. If I am not a pretentious phony, then my wife would only use that abusive term to hurt me – and she would only be able to hurt me with it if I was not in fact a pretentious phony, or disliked pretentious phonies myself.

If I were a pretentious phony, then clearly I would have developed that personality trait because I lacked self-esteem, and so felt a need to portray myself as wiser or smarter than I actually was in order to gain the good approval of others. (In other words, as a self-defensive “initial strike” against potential attacks.)

Now, I would only have developed this low self-esteem and dependence upon the approval of others if I had been persistently attacked and condemned by my parents when I was a child.

If, when expressing my authentic opinions, I had been dismissed as an ignorant philistine, I would then be sorely tempted to manufacture more “sophisticated” opinions in order to avoid being attacked.

In other words, I would be “pretentious” as an adult because I had been verbally abused as a child.

It is, then, entirely abusive for my wife to verbally abuse me for traits that have resulted from a history of having been verbally abused.

If you are “lazy,” it is generally because you feel a significant disconnect between your choices, your actions, and the effect you can have on your environment.

In psychological studies, when chickens or rats are given random punishments and rewards, they tend to become inert, because they cannot create any sense of rational cause and effect between their choices, their actions and their environment.

Personal energy and initiative, in other words, generally arise from a feeling of efficacy.

Depressed or inert people feel that their “locus of control” resides somewhere outside themselves. A micromanaged child will not easily develop a sense of personal initiative since his entire being is dedicated towards satisfying the endless and contradictory demands of other people.

It’s tough to plan your future when you’re dodging bullets.

I knew a woman who, when making toast, had to suffer through her mother hovering over her and constantly correcting everything she was doing. She should have brushed the breadcrumbs off the bread before putting them into the toaster, the heat was on just a little bit too high, she should not turn away from the toaster while it was in operation, in case something caught fire – and when all was said and done, she did not clean the toaster nearly well enough!

The amount of stress involved in heating two slices of bread was ridiculous. This woman had virtually no chance to develop her own methodology of thinking, of testing cause and effect, of deciding for herself how even minor goals could be best achieved.

Inevitably, she found herself largely paralyzed in the realm of major life decisions, and tended to navigate from moment to moment, based on the approval or disapproval of those around her. She wanted to achieve great things with her career, but ended up working as a secretary despite a very good education, because she had simply not developed the capacity to identify and pursue goals on her own accord, and according to own judgment – and, of course, remained hypersensitive to criticism, which crippled her ability to negotiate, and so progress in any career.

Sadly, her paralysis also invited micromanagement from others. She would proclaim her desire to achieve a certain goal, but then would take no steps towards it, while continually complaining about the difficulties of achieving it. This would invite an endless stream of people into her life who would help her set up action plans, alternative approaches, proactive time management goals and so on.

I never did see anyone actually ask what she felt when she sat down to attempt to achieve her goals.

If that question had been asked, and an honest answer had been provided, real progress could have been made.

Unfortunately, by telling her how to achieve her goals, people were in fact stepping into the role of her mother, since when we tell people what to do, we automatically denigrate their existing abilities. If I met you on the street and explained to you in great detail how to put your left foot forward, and then your right foot forward in order to walk, you would scarcely feel elevated by my opinion of your existing ability to walk.

In the same way, when a wife denigrates her husband for failing to initiate and complete chores without instruction, she is actually abusing him, denigrating him, and re-creating exactly the same circumstances – and exactly the same abuse – that prompted his inertia to begin with.

And yet, if you listen to her surface story, you will likely walk away entirely convinced that she is the victim in the interaction with her husband.

On the other hand, if you are not lazy, but your wife tells you that you are, then clearly she is using the pejorative to manipulate you.

Keep your eyes peeled. Do not be fooled.

The War of Narrative

s mentioned earlier, most relationships are founded on a war of narratives in which competing mythologies jockey for the dominant position.

Love and Mythology

How many times in relationships do we have the following interaction:

“Hey, that really hurt me, what you just said.”
“I had no desire to hurt you, you must be oversensitive, or must have misunderstood me. I’m sorry that you are so upset.”

The first statement is a statement of fact, the second statement is a statement of mythology.

For about six months, Christina and I had lengthy conversations about what I called “zinging.”

Christina would say something that hurt me, and I would express my surprise and upset. With total sincerity, she would apologize for the fact that I got hurt, claiming that she had no intention to hurt me, that she had no idea that it would be hurtful, and so on. To her endless credit, she did not say or imply that I was oversensitive or paranoid.

I replied that I completely believed that she did not consciously want to hurt me – since that would be sadistic, and thus would be a complete deal-breaker as far as the relationship went.

This was very confusing for her, of course, and was a great challenge to her sense of her own virtue and benevolence. As we continued to work on this problem of, “Stef gets hurt despite the fact that Christina has no desire to hurt him,” we did slowly get to the point where Christina was willing to explore her own history, and how she was never really apologized to in her own childhood, after she was hurt.

Eventually, we got to the point where we understood that Christina had been treated callously or cruelly at times in her childhood, and then when she expressed hurt everyone told her that no one had any intention to hurt her, that she was oversensitive, and so must have misunderstood the intentions of those around her. If she continued to express her upset, she was punished. When she was spanked, her mother would snap: “Why are you crying?”

The ironic thing about this all-too-typical interaction is that Christina was in fact ignoring her own hurt feelings rather than mine – and those hurt feelings existed in her past, not in my present.

Human beings are in essence pattern-making machines. In her childhood, Christina’s hurt feelings were endlessly minimized and ignored by others, and so a pattern was set up within her own mind, which was: “hurt = minimize.”

When her parents hurt her, and she expressed pain, her parents then experienced pain themselves – since no one really wants to hurt someone they claim to love. (Certainly when Christina finally understood that she was in fact causing me pain through her stinging comments, it was very painful to her – both because she did not want to cause me pain in the present, and because she then re-experienced her own childhood pain.)

Since Christina’s parents did not want to experience the pain and anxiety of having caused their child pain, they blamed her sensitivity and paranoia for causing her pain – and so, by extension, their pain.

In other words, it was fundamentally their own pain that they were minimizing – their dismissal of Christina’s criticisms was an effect of their own self rejection.

They rejected Christina because they rejected themselves.

Feel the Burn!

ne of the problems that arises from this habitual interaction is the lack of feedback it creates.

In fact, it could be said that the entire point of this book is to convince you that you need to feel pain.

Pain is healthy, pain is good – pain is essential to the healthy functioning of mind and body.

If we could will away the agony of a toothache, we would become very ill and possibly die. If we did not walk gingerly on a sprained ankle, we could create chronic bone problems. If we did not reduce our use of a pulled muscle, we could tear it irretrievably.

We understand the value of pain in the physical sense – however, in the emotional realm we have access to a numbing drug called “blame” that seductively promises to eliminate our anxiety, guilt, shame and remorse in the moment.

If we understand our use of blame as a classic addiction, it becomes far easier to comprehend.

We can look at an addiction as any habit that reduces anxiety or pain in the moment at the cost of failing to address (and probably exacerbating) the underlying cause.

If I take a mood-enhancing drug because I feel sad, I am not dealing with my sadness, but just “nuking” the symptom. If I take sleeping pills because I am too stressed to sleep, I am only solving the problem of being awake, not of being stressed.

Of course, it can be highly beneficial to minimize discomfort while dealing with the real underlying issue – i.e. to use Novocain during a root canal, or take antidepressants while going to therapy – as long as the underlying issue is in fact being addressed.

In the same way, there are many ways that we can approach each other’s irrationalities which minimize defensive reactions and upsets. What is not productive, however, is temporarily eliminating anxiety by permanently ignoring the problem.

The most common way of eliminating discomfort in the moment is to create a story which eliminates responsibility.

Eliminating Responsibility

One continual pattern in life is that people will drive around for years looking for a suitable cliff, take a running leap over the edge, and then spend decades complaining that they were unjustly pushed.

A woman will spend years dating and choosing a man, and then months or years in a relationship, and then months engaged, and then get married – and then with a completely straight face complain about her husband, saying with all sincerity that she had “no idea” about his true nature.

No Idea?

There are really only three possibilities when a woman says that she had “no idea” that her husband was X, Y or Z – despite having years to get to know him before marrying him.

If she is genuinely clueless about her husband, then either she is functionally retarded in her ability to judge people, or he is a truly cunning sociopath who can mask his true nature for years, with no clues whatsoever about his dangerous or dysfunctional nature – or she is lying about her ignorance of his nature.

In the first case, she may well complain about her husband, but it could be easily said that he has far more to complain about her, in that she has a negative ability to judge people and very likely needs help tying her shoes. She thought that her boyfriend was the best guy for her, and he turns out to be problematic in significant areas. That is not just a misjudgment, but rather an anti-judgment. It’s not like taking a shortcut that doesn’t work out as efficiently as you hoped: it is more like continually driving the completely wrong way while checking the map and stopping to ask for directions.

If the woman really is that foolish, then she would be too vapid to actually blame her husband for what he does, since her understanding of cause and effect would be so absent that she would be more likely to blame her unhappiness on the motion of the moon.

If she can correctly identify her husband’s dysfunctional behaviour as the “cause” of her unhappiness, then she is intelligent enough to have perceived his true nature long before they even became boyfriend and girlfriend.

If she then says that her husband is truly a cunning sociopath who fooled everyone for years, then we know that she is lying. There is no possibility that a sociopath can be so cunning that he can fool everyone for years about his true nature. If this were possible, then there would never be such a diagnosis as “sociopathic,” because such creatures would be able to avoid or mask their symptoms in all possible scenarios and tests.

Thus it can never be possible that a wife can complain first and foremost about the actions of her partner. This would be equivalent to a dermatologist blaming the sun for his sunburn.

Common Stories

tories are characterized by a number of common traits. The first and most obvious is the use of the words “always” and “never.”

For instance, a husband may say to his wife, “You never support me!”

His wife may retort: “You always accuse me of that!”

You never support me…

Let’s take a look at this statement and see how we know that it is a story.

If I tell you that you never support me, then that is either true or it is abusive. In other words, any time I tell you something negative about yourself – particularly if it is an absolute statement – then either I am telling you the truth about yourself or I am lying to you in order to hurt you. (For more on this, see my book: “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion.”)

If it is true that you have never supported me, then either you lack the capacity to support anyone, or you have the capacity to support others but choose not to support me.

If you lack the capacity to support anyone, ever, in any way whatsoever, then criticizing you for this lack is the direct equivalent of criticizing a man with no arms for his inability to play basketball, or calling a non-Greek speaker “stupid” for not being able to speak Greek.

Clearly, when we criticize someone, we can only do so with justice if he is capable of correcting his behaviour. This is why no person with any sensitivity calls a mentally retarded person “stupid,” a woman in traction “lazy,” or a man with Tourette’s syndrome “rude.”

If the behaviour cannot be corrected, then criticizing it is abusive.

Assuming you can…

Assuming that you are capable of supporting me, if I tell you that you never support me then either you have a desire to support me – but choose not to – or you do not have a desire to support me at all.

If you know how to support someone, but do not have a desire to support me at all, then clearly you believe that I am not worthy of being supported. In other words, there are people in your life that you do want to support – and do support – but I am not one of them. This must be because I am behaving poorly relative to those other people that you support, since supporting someone is an act of love.

If my bad behaviour is causing you to refrain from supporting me, even though you could, then if I attack you for your lack of support, this will only make you less likely to want to support me.

It is ridiculous for me to criticize your behaviour in such a way that I reinforce that behaviour. This is exactly like a woman giving her husband money to gamble, going with him to the casino and cheering him on, and then laying into him about his gambling habit. It certainly happens, of course, but it is quite ridiculous.

Furthermore, supporting someone must involve believing in his better nature or potential and helping him to achieve it in a positive manner. If I roundly criticize you for failing to support me, then I am saying that it would be better or nobler for you to support me. However, I am not at all helping you to achieve that “better” state in a positive manner, but rather just attacking you for failing to achieve it.

In other words, attacking you for failing to support me is the exact opposite of being supportive.

In this way, I am modeling the exact same behaviour that I condemn as unjust and unworthy in you.

Is it any wonder, then, that you hesitate to support me?

When I attack you for failing to support me, it is exactly the same as if I were a chronic liar proclaiming my honesty and demanding that you tell me the truth.

Yuck.

Lacking Knowledge?

On the other hand, if you have a desire to support me, but do not, then clearly what you lack is the knowledge of how to support me.

If the only thing that you lack is a knowledge of how to support me, then the only way that I can practically get you to support me is to give you that knowledge.

If I am Chinese, and I want you to be able to talk to my parents, who do not speak English, then I would respectfully ask that you learn Mandarin.

If you agree to learn Mandarin, then the question is whether I or someone else will teach you.

If I will teach you, then obviously I must be able to speak Mandarin in order to be able to teach you. If I do not speak Mandarin, then it would be highly hypocritical of me to criticize you for your inability to speak Mandarin.

Also, at a very practical level, I would be unable to teach you the language.

If I told you that it was of great value to be able to speak to my parents in Mandarin, but I did not speak Mandarin myself, then clearly the solution would be for both of us to take classes in Mandarin.

If I did speak Mandarin and I offered to teach you the language, it would only make sense to accept my offer if I was in fact a good teacher.

If my “courses” in Mandarin consisted of me yelling at you that you just aren’t getting the language – in an incomprehensible foreign language no less – then clearly I in fact have no interest whatsoever in actually teaching you Mandarin.

Instead, I am using my knowledge of Mandarin to humiliate you, by setting up a standard called “learn Mandarin,” and then making it completely impossible for you to learn that language.

If, at some point, you found out that the incomprehensible foreign language that I was yelling at you in was not in fact Mandarin, but some sort of gibberish, and that I did not know Mandarin at all, then you would very likely become completely enraged at my hypocrisy, condescension, and manipulation.

What are the odds that you would ever respect me as a teacher, friend or companion again?

Such are the perils of manipulative storytelling.

What on Earth?

What on earth could be the motivations for such a dysfunctional interaction? Why would I want to attack someone for not supporting me – distinctly unsupportive behaviour – when I actually could be supported if I modeled better behaviour, or chose a better partner?

In other words, if I so greatly fear being unsupported, why would I create conditions which will inevitably result in me being unsupported?

The Boxer

hy is it that we are so inevitably drawn to re-create that which we most fear?

To understand that, let us look at the parable of a boxer named Simon.

As a child, Simon is subjected to physical abuse. He is slapped, pushed, punched and beaten.

Since he is a child, he is helpless to resist these attacks. How, then, can he survive them?

Well, since clearly he cannot master his environment, or those who are abusing him, that leaves only one choice for poor Simon.

Simon must master himself.

He cannot master his attackers – or their attacks – he can only master his reaction to their attacks.

He has no control over the external world – he can only have control over his internal world.

All children take pleasure in exercising increasing levels of control over their environment. If control over their external environment is impossible, however, they have no choice but to start exercising increasing control over their internal environment: their thoughts and feelings.

This is all quite logical, and something that we would all wish for, as the best way to survive an impossible situation.

If we cannot get rid of the source of our pain, what we most desire is to get rid of the pain itself.

The Relief of Self-Control

Thus Simon grows up gaining a sense of efficacy and power by controlling his own pain, fear and hatred.

The pleasure that most children get out of mastering external tasks such as tying their shoelaces, catching a ball and learning to skate, Simon gets out of “rising above” and controlling his terrifying emotions.

Can we blame Simon for this? If anaesthetic is readily available, would we want to scream through an appendectomy without it?

When Simon is young, his self-control remains relatively stable. As he gets older, though, his parents slowly begin to reduce the amount of physical abuse they inflict on him. This is particularly true during and after puberty, when he is becoming old enough to tell others about the abuse, and also because his increasing size makes it less and less possible to dominate him physically.

How does Simon feel about these decreasing physical attacks?

Two words: terrified and disoriented.

Simon’s entire sense of power and efficacy – his very identity even – has been defined by his ability to master and control his own emotions in the face of terrifying abuse.

In other words, in the absence of abuse, he has no sense of control, efficacy or power.

In addition to being taught all the wrong things, Simon has also been taught almost none of the right things. He does not know how to negotiate, he does not know how to express his emotions, he has not been taught empathy, he has not been taught sensitivity, he has not been taught win-win interactions – the words that are missing from Simon’s social vocabulary could fill a shelf of dictionaries.

Thus, in the absence of violence, not only does Simon feel powerless – since his sense of “power” arose primarily as the result of his ability to survive violence – but he is also increasingly thrust into a world of voluntarism, where sophisticated skills of self-expression and negotiation are required for success.

As he enters into his teenage years, for the first time since he was very young Simon feels excruciatingly powerless – and vulnerable.

Since vulnerability was the original state he was in before he began to repress and control his emotional responses to those around him, he unconsciously feels that he is in enormous danger. (This arises from the reality that he was in enormous danger when he was a child, but he is only now feeling it for the first time.)

The reason that he disowned his emotions in the first place was because he felt fear and hatred in the face of physical attacks. It was the reality of his vulnerability that provoked the self-defence of dissociation and “self-mastery.”

Thus for Simon, vulnerability is always followed by excruciating and self-annihilating attacks.

Having spent years mastering his responses to these attacks, he has not learned how to deal with vulnerability in a positive and self-expressed manner.

As he becomes an adult, however, Simon no longer needs to defend himself against attacks – thus undermining his sense of control – and he also moves faster and faster into a world of voluntary interactions for which he is utterly unprepared.

Simon also unconsciously knows that learning the skills necessary to flourish in this voluntary world – if that is even possible for him anymore – will take years of excruciating labour.

Fleeing the future for the past…

Simon has access to a drug that can instantly make all of his anxiety go away. This drug can restore his sense of control, eliminate his bottomless terror of voluntary interactions, and place him right back in familiar territory where he feels efficacious, powerful and in control.

That drug, of course, is violence.

Simon finds that when he leaves the world of voluntary interactions and re-enters the world of violence and abuse, his anxiety vanishes. His sense of efficacy and control returns, and he feels mastery over his own world again.

Like an army that does not want to be disbanded, in the absence of external enemies, Simon must create them.

After realizing the relative joy and serenity that he feels after getting involved in physical fights, Simon goes down to his local gym and puts on some boxing gloves.

He finds that he is very good in the ring, because where other people feel fear and caution, he, due to his years of self-mastery, feels power and control. When he is in the ring he does not feel anxious, he does not feel afraid – he does not even feel angry – he simply feels the satisfaction of being in a situation that he can control.

The endorphins released in Simon’s system by violence quickly become addictive.

True addiction requires both a highly positive reaction from taking a drug and a highly negative reaction from abstaining from it. For Simon, boxing not only restores his sense of control, but it also eliminates the crippling anxiety he feels in the absence of violence.

Sadly, familiarity breeds content…

This is the psychological story of a boxer, of course, but it can equally apply to criminals, soldiers, policemen, and others drawn to dangerous situations.

Simon was utterly terrified of violence when he was a child, so how can we understand his pursuit of boxing as a career when he becomes an adult?

When we become addicted to controlling our fears, we can no longer live without either control or fear.

Simon became addicted to controlling his responses to abuse – thus he can no longer function in the absence of abuse.

Addiction also worsens when every step down the road of repetition makes it that much harder to turn around.

This applies to Simon in many, many terrible ways.

Every time he uses the defences he developed in his childhood, he reinforces the value of violence in his adult life. Every time he avoids the anxiety of voluntary and positive interactions through the use of violence, he takes yet another step away from learning how to negotiate in a positive manner with kind and worthwhile people.

In other words, every time he “uses” the drug of violence, he makes the next “use” of violence that much more likely – and resisting the drug that much harder.

In this way, we can truly understand how a man can be drawn to endlessly repeat that which terrified him the most as a child.

In hopefully less extreme ways, Simon’s story can also help us understand why we are so drawn to repeat that which we fear the most.

Were you rejected as a child? Beware your desire for rejection.

Were you verbally abused as a child? Watch out for verbally abusive people: they will inject you with addictive endorphins.

Were you sexually abused as a child? Watch out for predators: they will tempt you with the self-medication of surviving them.

The Sadist

he above analogy can help us understand how someone can end up spending his whole life attempting to “master” violence.

However, at least Simon is getting into the ring with an equal. How can we understand a parent who ends up abusing his or her child?

A basic fact of human nature is that it is impossible for anyone to do anything that involves a moral choice without moral justification. George Bush could not invade Iraq without claiming that it was an act of “self-defence,” or “just punishment.” When parents talk about screaming at or hitting their children, they always justify their actions by claiming that, “We have tried everything else and gotten nowhere.” Or, they claim that their exasperated responses are generated by the misbehaviour of their children: “He just doesn’t listen; he doesn’t show us the proper respect,” etc.

It is impossible to imagine a parent standing in front of a mirror and saying: “I am abusing my innocent child.” Any parent capable of making such a statement would have recoiled in horror the first time that he yelled at or struck his child, and sought the necessary help.

Continued abuse requires continual moral justifications. In fact, the very worst aspects of the abuse that a child receives are not so much the physical fear and pain, but rather the moral corruption of the lies that are told to justify the abuse.

For a child, being beaten is terrible, but being repeatedly told that the beating is a just response to his “bad” actions is worse.

So – how could this possibly come about?

Child Abuse

For the sake of this example, let us assume that the parent was abused in her own childhood, as is so often the case.

We will take the example of a mother named Wendy, who ends up verbally abusing her daughter Sally.

Wendy was verbally abused when she was a child. She was told that she was bad, disrespectful, disobedient, ungrateful, selfish and so on.

From Wendy’s childhood perspective, her own mother loomed like a titan in her little world. One of the amazing things about the differences in perspective between parent and child is that the parent screams and hits because the parent feels helpless. However, to the child, the parent seems virtually omnipotent.

We can assume that the Christian God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because He felt helpless to reform its inhabitants. However, from the standpoint of the city-dwellers burning alive in a sea of flames, God’s complaint that He felt helpless would be utterly incomprehensible. If God is all-powerful, as He claims, how can he claim frustrated helplessness as his motivation? If an all-powerful deity cannot reform individuals, how can those individuals, with infinitely less power, be expected to reform themselves?

If parents knew how large they loomed in their child’s world, they would use a far, far lighter touch in their discipline. When you are around somebody whose hearing is preternaturally sensitive, you only need to whisper; yelling is both unnecessary and abusive.

When Wendy was a child, her mother’s verbal abuse was utterly overwhelming. The stress of having someone five times your size, who has complete and utter power over you, yelling at you, putting you down, denigrating you, or abusing you in some other manner causes a fundamental short-circuit in a child’s neurological system. It is the equivalent of taking a man terrified of heights and constantly dangling him out the open door of an airplane. He may “acclimatize” himself to the repetitively awful stimulation, but only through extreme dissociation from his environment, which comes at a terrible personal cost. Victims of repetitive torture undergo the same “out of body” experience wherein they cease to feel, and in many ways cease to live, at least emotionally.

When a child is abused, she experiences her life as a series of fundamentally impossible situations. The capacity to abuse arises out of a lack of bonding, a lack of empathy, an absence of sensitivity towards the feelings of the child.

A child’s only security is her bond with her parent. Abuse is a deliberate severing of that bond – a “strangling with the umbilical.” Abusing a child requires that you eliminate your capacity to empathize with her. If a child perceives that she cannot rely on her bond with her mother – which is to say that her mother’s capacity to empathize with her comes and goes at best – then the child feels fundamentally insecure, because positive and empathetic treatment cannot be relied on.

When you are under the total power of someone who can treat you badly whenever she feels like it, you are placed into an impossible situation because that person will inevitably command you to show “respect” and “love” towards her.

If your abusive mother detects that you fear her, for instance, she will generally react with aggression. If at a dinner party your mother raises her hand and you cower in fear and beg her not to hit you, she will get very angry.

Thus you must pretend on the outside the opposite of what you feel on the inside. You must show “love” and/or “respect” despite feeling fear and hatred.

Thus, when Wendy’s mother verbally abused her, Wendy could not react with fear or hatred, because that would only increase her mother’s attacks. (“I’ll give you something to cry about!”)

Thus Wendy had to disown and repress her own authentic emotional responses and mimic their exact opposite. All her fear and pain had to be “magically” transformed into “love” and “respect.”

This form of the “Stockholm Syndrome” has disastrous effects on a child’s long-term emotional development and integrity. Instead of learning how to interact in a rational manner with reality, the child ends up forced into a situation of eternal hyper-vigilance wherein she constantly scans the behaviour of those around her, endlessly alert for any signs of an impending attack.

If you are driving a car and suddenly notice a number of wasps in the car with you, it will become very hard to concentrate on the road. In addition, imagine that you had to keep driving under increasingly difficult conditions, while the number of buzzing wasps in your car kept multiplying – all the while knowing that you were allergic to wasp venom – this is the endless livid terror of all too many childhoods.

This kind of terrible “split focus” (“I must keep driving / I must not get stung”) empties out the spontaneity and richness of the child’s inner life. Just as we cannot daydream while being pushed out of a plane, we cannot develop an internal discourse with ourselves if we are in a constant state of hyper-vigilance with regards to our surroundings.

If a child in an abusive environment stops scanning for danger, the pain of being attacked is then combined with the shock of surprise, and the inevitable self-flagellation for lowering one’s guard. Daydreaming, or self-conversation, thus becomes a form of “self abuse,” insofar as it increases the risk and agony of being attacked – it becomes as dangerous as a tightrope-walker losing his concentration and risking falling to his death.

This terrible equation – “relaxation = danger” – keeps the child in a constant state of high alert, of hyper-vigilance, and effectively prevents her from ever coming to a true understanding of her situation.

In a nation, a state of war creates the panic, haste and hysteria that prevents people from effectively questioning their government. Just so does hyper-vigilance in childhood prevent children from rationally evaluating their parents’ behaviour.

Thus, with all this in place, when Wendy becomes an adult and gives birth to Sally, an awful series of events is set into motion.

The Child Unafraid…

To understand how parental cruelty comes into being, the first and most important fact to remember is that children enter this world in an un-abused state. They are not afraid, they are not hyper-vigilant, they are not twisted, they have not become enemies to themselves or others – they are curious, perceptive, engaged and benevolent.

Remember – as a child, Wendy learned that relaxation was danger. Thus when Sally is born, Sally is fundamentally relaxed in a way that Wendy has no conscious memory of.

Since for Wendy relaxation is followed by attack, Sally’s relaxation creates great anxiety for her mother, because she associates it with an impending attack. In the same way, if Sally were crawling towards a set of steep stairs, Wendy would feel great anxiety and a compulsion to snatch Sally away from the impending danger – very aggressively if need be.

For Wendy, then, when Sally in all innocence engages in actions that in Wendy’s world would have triggered a terrible attack, it reawakens all of the repressed pain, fear and hatred in Wendy’s heart. When this occurs again and again, Wendy genuinely feels that Sally is creating or causing terrible attacks of pain, fear and hatred in her.

Now, the last time that someone else created pain and fear in Wendy, it was her own mother attacking her when she was a child. For Wendy, then, any sudden eruption of pain and fear is associated with a direct attack. Thus for Wendy, Sally’s innocent anxiety-provoking behaviour is the direct emotional equivalent of her parents’ abusive attacks.

Furthermore, the only way that Wendy could create any sense of security and control as a child was to brutally repress her own emotional responses. In other words, “that which causes anxiety must be brutally repressed” is the law of her emotional land.

Now, when Wendy was a child she could not brutally repress her own parents, because that created further attacks – thus she had to brutally repress her own anxieties.

The difference with her own child, however, is that she now has the power to repress Sally, which she did not have with her own parents when she was a child.

It is in this way that she makes the transformation from victim to abuser.

Since she experiences Sally’s actions as attacks upon herself, Wendy feels justified in controlling Sally’s behaviour so that these attacks do not occur.

If our child continually kicks us in the shins, we consider it good parenting to prevent this child from acting in such an abusive manner. We must do whatever it takes, we say to ourselves, to prevent our child from hurting others. What will happen, we think, if we allow our child to act in such a horrible manner? A life of brutality, loneliness and rejection seems inevitable, and we could scarcely call ourselves good parents if we allowed that to happen.

Many parents start off with relatively calm and patient lectures, but the absolute of “thou shalt not” remains determinedly hovering, in the not-too-distant background.

“It upsets Mommy when you act like that,” we may say gently – however, like the initially polite letters from the IRS, a not too subtle threat is always visible between the lines. We talk about “politeness,” “niceness” and “consideration for the feelings of others,” and so on, but what we are really saying is: “It makes me angry when you make me anxious, so you’d better stop!”

Children, due to their amazingly perceptive natures, find it hard to take these lectures seriously, because they sense the contradiction and narcissism at the root of such speeches. Thus they generally tend to continue to do what comes naturally to them, despite the anxiety that their actions cause other people.

Since the children remain in an un-brutalized state, they do not themselves directly feel the anxiety that their actions provoke in their brutalized parents. In the same way, if I do not have a migraine, playing loud music will bring me pleasure. If I do have a migraine, obviously it will not.

Since children continue to do what comes naturally to them, and since their actions continue to provoke anxiety, pain and rage in their parents, their parents feel a growing sense of helplessness and frustration and an increasing loss of control over their own emotions.

The basic lesson that Wendy learned in her own terrible childhood was that when someone does something that makes you feel bad, the solution is to stop the other person from doing that thing.

Thus, when Sally’s actions provoke awful feelings in Wendy, Wendy’s inevitable reaction is to prevent Sally from performing those actions, so that Wendy does not have to feel those terrible emotions.

To be a “good” daughter, Sally must stop doing whatever causes Wendy anxiety.

If Sally continues to act in a way that causes her mother anxiety, Wendy will be inevitably driven to the “conclusion” that Sally wants to cause her pain – or, at best, is utterly indifferent to the pain that her actions cause.

In this way, Wendy can frame a perception of her daughter that includes the pejoratives “cruel” and “selfish.”

Now, the battle lines are truly becoming drawn.

If we say to our child: “Stop doing ‘X,’ because it makes me feel bad,” surely the solution is simply for the child to stop doing ‘X,’ right?

Sadly, no.

The Escalation…

The true nature of Sally’s “offense” towards Wendy is that Sally is unafraid.

Remember that in Wendy’s childhood, being unafraid always invited attack – or made the inevitable attack even worse. Thus Sally’s state of calm or self-possession creates an overwhelming sense of “impending doom” for Wendy.

When Wendy was a child, spontaneous self-expression invited attack. Now that she is a mother, when Sally sits and sings to herself, this causes increasing anxiety in Wendy, and at some point she will express disapproval to Sally.

At this point, perhaps Sally stops singing. However, five minutes later, Sally states that she wants to go for a walk.

In Wendy’s world, expressing an open desire always invited attack – thus when Sally says that she wants to go for a walk, Wendy also feels anxiety, and once more snaps at Sally.

As we can imagine, this process can go on and on virtually ad infinitum.

There is no end to the escalation of “little rules” that end up snaking around Sally, like an infinity of tiny spider webs that eventually leave her bound and immobile.

However, even if Sally were to obey every single one of her mother’s “rules,” she would still not be safe.

As Sally becomes more and more inhibited and more and more fearful, Wendy begins to feel guiltier and guiltier. Sadly, Wendy also interprets this as some sort of “manipulative aggression” on Sally’s part and so is inevitably drawn to accuse Sally of “playing the victim” in order to make Wendy feel bad.

In this way, there is no possibility whatsoever that Sally can ever satisfy her mother.

If Sally acts in a natural, independent manner, she provokes an attack. If she acts in an unnatural, obedient manner, she provokes an attack. Since she can neither be spontaneous nor obedient, neither act nor refrain from acting, there is nothing that she can do to avoid being attacked or criticized in some manner.

The Evil At The Core…

The central problem is that Wendy is attempting to manage her own anxiety by controlling Sally.

However, since Sally is not the actual source of Wendy’s anxiety, controlling Sally’s behaviour will only temporarily alleviate Wendy’s anxiety – while making it worse deep down, since she is acting unjustly and blaming Sally for her own feelings.

Controlling the Bed

To understand this madness more fully, imagine that you are bedridden in a hospital and I am standing by the controls of the bed.

“Can you raise the head of my bed so that I can eat?” you ask.

I push a button, but nothing happens. I push another button and your head goes down.

“No, no!” you cry. “Up, I want my head to come up!”

I push another button, and both your legs and head start to rise, causing you pain.

“Ow! Not that way, just my head!”

As you can well imagine, this process will generate an extraordinary amount of frustration and tension in both of us. You would be panicking and yelling at me, and I would be frantically stabbing at the buttons trying to control or reverse whatever motion was giving you such discomfort.

Now imagine further that at some point, we discover that I am actually pressing the controls of a bed in another room, and the reason that your bed is moving “randomly” is that you are in fact sitting on the controls for your own bed, and your shifting around is what is causing the uncomfortable movements.

Clearly, the first thing that you would do is apologize to me for blaming me for your discomfort, and for railing against my “incompetence.”

This is the typical experience of someone who finally understands that using other people to manage his anxiety only makes his anxiety worse, causing him to further attempt to control and manipulate others, when the whole time he is “sitting on the controls” that only he can reach.

Why is this so important?

he reason that we are spending all this time focusing on how abusive tendencies come about is because it is essential to understand the genesis of the mythologies that separate us from each other.

When we look at the interaction between Wendy and Sally, we can understand that Wendy’s bad behaviour predated her justifications for that bad behaviour.

Due to her rejection of her own history, Wendy ended up attacking her daughter.

This shameful action produced a great stress in Wendy, because she wants to be – and believes herself to be – a good, fair and just person.

However, continually snapping at a child, or verbally abusing her in some other manner scarcely sits well with a benevolent and virtuous self-image.

Self–Mythology

When we perform actions that we cannot justify to ourselves, we have one of two choices. We can either recognize that we have a significant moral flaw and go through the painful work of starting to correct it, or we can say that our actions resulted from a significant moral flaw in someone else, and go through the far less painful work of starting to “correct” the other person’s flaws.

In other words, if I am angry at you, and I cannot believe that I am unjustly or abusively angry at you – which would be the case if you did nothing to provoke my anger – then I must convince myself that my anger is a just response to injustice or abuse from you.

As mentioned earlier, this shifting of moral blame is called projection, which is a wonderful word on many levels – not only does it connote the shining of an image onto a blank surface, but it also invokes a “movie” metaphor, which includes the artistic fiction that it so often actually represents.

The Crossroads

When Wendy stands over her child, her voice hoarse and her hands shaking, looking down into Sally’s bewildered and frightened eyes, it is a moment of truth for her very soul.

If Wendy recognizes that she has just attacked a helpless and dependent child – which can never be justified in any terms – then she can begin to take the necessary and humbling steps of learning how to control her temper and hopefully, over time, win back the trust of her child.

However, the majority of parents feel the terror and vulnerability within their own hearts when looking into the horrified eyes of their children – and then take the terrible step of inventing a fiction wherein the children are the perpetrators – and they, the parents, are the victims.

Remember, in the religious approach we are always taught to create sinners to blame for our mistakes – and the more immoral our errors, the worse the sinner must be.

“Look what you made me do!” is the brutal and vengeful cry that erupts from the tortured souls of the parents.

“Only a bad child would turn me into this!”

Religion and Mythology

Why is it that we are so invariably drawn to making up self-justifying stories, rather than accepting the truth about our own capacity for doing harm?

Child abuse is just one of the many, many destructive fallouts that result from our addiction to the superstitions of religion.

Religion completely externalizes the moral – and immoral – decisions of mankind. “Virtue” is obedience to the whimsical dictates of a self-contradictory deity, while “vice” is surrender to the whimsical temptations of a self-contradictory devil.

“The devil made me do it,” (often supplemented with “I was weak!”) is a constant cry among the religious – while these cultists often believe that they have the choice to reject temptation, the devil is very strong, and human flesh is invariably weak.

Furthermore, children are not only born un-abused, they are also born fundamentally anti-religious. (If you doubt this, try taking away a four-year-old’s Halloween candy and saying he will get 100 times more candy after he is dead!)

Children are empirical, secular, rational and fundamentally scientific. In fact, the progression of competence in a child’s mind directly follows the scientific method. For instance, in the first few years a child develops the recognition of causality, by tracking an object with his eyes or turning his head at a sound, followed by “object permanence,” such as recognizing that a ball placed under a blanket still exists, which then develops into basic problem solving with these objects. As the child continues to develop, these basic problem solving skills are refined by more formal use of logic in every aspect of life: identity, language, values, etc.

Just as it takes an enormous amount of statist propaganda to turn a child into a dogmatic Soviet Marxist, it takes an endless amount of religious propaganda to turn a child into a dazed “worshiper” of imaginary ghosts.

Children are not even naturally agnostic. To test this proposition, simply give a child an empty box as a birthday present and tell him that there may be an iPod in it, but there’s just no way to know for sure, so he cannot really tell you that there is no iPod in there!

See if he thanks you for this “gift” or not.

Thus, the subjugation of children in terms of religion is based on the subjugation of children to stories – exploitive, abusive, ghastly, disorienting and manipulative stories.

In reality, of course, it is impossible for a child to obey the Bible or the Koran or the Torah, because they are simply dead books with no capacity to reward or punish.

No, the subjugation of children is fundamentally the enslavement of children to storytellers – their obedience to the whims of others, presented as absolute moral and metaphysical facts.

Enslavement to the idea that the stories of others are absolute facts is a crushing blow to a child’s capacity to process objective reality – and, to the great benefit of those in authority, to criticize or question the errors of those who “teach” them.

Thus, since children are trained to automatically obey “stories,” when an abusive parent aggressively tells a new “story,” which is that the aggression of the parent was directly caused by the actions of the child, the child can only nod numbly and blame himself.

For a more detailed explanation of this, listen to podcast 70 at http://www.freedomainradio.com/Traffic_Jams/how_to_control_a_human_soul.mp3 .

VIRTUE AND LOVE

Honesty is the First Virtue

onesty is the first virtue in every relationship – and most importantly our relationship with our self.

Mythology is the opposite of honesty, because mythology provides the appearance of truth, which prevents us from actively continuing to pursue the truth.

In this section I will put forward the thesis that our existing relationships are not primarily with each other, but with our own mythologies, with our own stories about our interactions with each other.

Mother Theresa used to say that she was not administering to the poor, but rather to Christ in the poor, which is a very different thing. Since Christ “the man-god who strolled the waves and came back from the dead” is a mere fantasy, Mother Theresa did not have a relationship with the poor as individuals, but rather with her own projected fantasy of “service” to a nonexistent deity. This is a form of spiritual “stalking.”

I may as well say that I do not have a relationship with my girlfriend, but rather with the “leprechaun in my girlfriend.”

Clearly, if I say that, I am openly admitting that I do not have a relationship with anyone or anything – outside my own fantasies of course.

“Not Even Wrong”

In the world of science, the worst judgment that can be passed upon a theory is that it is “not even wrong” – in other words, it is so incomprehensible or self-contradictory that nothing can be even learned from its mistakes.

“2 + 2 = 5” is wrong; “2 + blue = unicorn” is “not even wrong.”

If I am patriotic, then clearly I am not in love with “the land” itself, since that is just earth and rock. I am not in love with the grass, or the trees, or the mountains or the clouds. I can say that I am in love with the ideals of the country that I live in, or its best and most virtuous principles – but clearly, those “ideals” exist only as ideas within the minds of those around me. If I say that I love “America,” I am really saying that I love my fellow Americans, since “America” is a concept, and has no real existence in the objective world.

Since “America” does not exist, I cannot love it, any more than I can marry a leprechaun or send the concept of “children“” to school. Thus if I claim to love my fellow “Americans,” I am not claiming to love any particular individual for his specific virtues, but rather a general group in relation to a concept that does not exist.

Of course, a “general group” is also a concept that does not exist in reality, and so when I claim to be patriotic, I am in fact expressing affection with regards to a generalized and abstract “group” (which does not in fact exist) in relation to a “country” (which does not in fact exist).

“Patriotism” is thus a mythology which separates us as individuals, because the primary relationship of the patriot is to a projected abstraction, rather than to any individuals in particular. The patriot “loves” his fellow countrymen in the same way that Mother Teresa “loves” the poor – it is a narcissistic projection, not a mature acceptance of another individual soul.

The sad thing about this is that we cannot in fact have any relationships to our mythologies, any more than we can soul-kiss our reflection in the mirror, or sit down with “the country” for nice cup of coffee and a chat.

Mythology always isolates – we can only meet in reality.

Relatedness

o be “related” to someone – to have intimacy – clearly requires that both parties feel free to speak their minds, commit to listening, and strive to understand each other.

In other words, relationships are fundamentally defined by reciprocity.

Clearly, you and I do not have a “relationship” if you forbid me to provide any feedback about anything you say or do. If I am not allowed to change my facial expression, open my mouth and say anything, or provide any response or feedback to your words or actions, then clearly I cannot be said to be having a relationship with you in any way at all.

Clearly, any intimate relationship also requires that both parties respect each other’s thoughts, emotions and opinions. I cannot say that you and I are “close,” while at the same time disagreeing with everything that you say, and criticizing everything that you do.

Similarly, intimacy requires feedback that is objective. If you show me a portrait you have painted and I tell you that it is terrible because I am jealous of how good it is, clearly the feedback that I’m giving you is not objective. This is equally true if I tell you that your portrait is wonderful when it is not because I am afraid of hurting your feelings.

This requirement for objective feedback does not exist only in relation to external objects.

If I am angry with you, and you ask me how I am feeling, and I tell you that I am “fine,” then I am not giving you objective feedback. Expecting any relationship to flourish when you mislead your partner is like expecting a doctor to cure the pain in your arm after you tell him that your leg is hurting.

Thus if you and I have an intimate relationship, it must be true that we are giving each other objective and authentic feedback. We cannot be “close” if everything I say to you is a lie, or if every emotion that I claim to feel is manufactured – or, of course, if I only tell you what I think you “want to hear,” or keep silent out of fear, or actively mislead you.

Intimacy and Value

Similarly, intimacy cannot coexist with any sort of “third-party validation” of each other’s value.

If I date you only because you “look good on my arm,” then it is not because I find particular value in you, but rather because I imagine that other people will find “value” in your appearance. If a woman marries a doctor because she primarily desires the prestige of being a doctor’s wife, then the value of the man she is marrying is defined by the possible judgments of other people – not the man in and of himself.

An actor who befriends an agent in the hopes of gaining representation cannot claim to be “close” to that agent, but rather is using him as a means to an end. This is not always bad, of course – economically, I “use” my grocer as a means to the end of getting food, just as he “uses” me as a means to the end of getting money – but I would certainly not claim that I am “close” to my grocer!

Reciprocity

Without reciprocity, relationships are empty, manipulative, meaningless – and somewhat delusional.

We would not look at a ventriloquist who said “I have a close relationship with my dummy,” as particularly sane or healthy, because his dummy, being functionally inert, clearly cannot provide any objective reciprocity in such a “relationship.”

Also, if the primary “reciprocity” in a relationship is based on third-party validation, then clearly individual, or one-on-one reciprocity, is not particularly present.

If a woman dates a man because he is “so cute that her friends will be envious,” then obviously her primary relationship is with her friends, not with the cute man. He is merely a means to an end, which is the envy of her friends. Thus the primary reciprocity she experiences is not with him, but with others.

In the same way, a man who dates a woman because he fears solitude does not have a positive relationship with her, but rather a “negative” relationship with his own fears. She is an anxiety-avoidance mechanism, and only has “value” as a human shield against his own low self-esteem. He has the same motives as a bank robber who grabs a hostage in order to avoid capture.

Intimacy

s we take a step back from our detailed brickwork, and look at the shape of the house we are constructing, we can begin to see what it looks like as a whole.

Love requires honesty, courage, integrity and virtue, both because these traits are admirable, and also because they foster predictability and security in intimate relations.

Love does not require perfection, but honesty – particularly in relation to mistakes, since perfection creates impossible standards and inevitable frustration, and love is fundamentally about sustainable pleasure, just as nutrition and exercise are fundamentally about sustainable health and well-being.

Love requires two parties that are drawn together by an objective standard – virtue – just as science requires two parties that are drawn together by an objective standard – the scientific method – and economic interactions require two parties that are drawn together by an objective standard – the voluntary exchange of economic value.

True intimacy is driven by a delight in gaining knowledge about the other person, just as scientific knowledge is driven by a delight in gaining knowledge about the material world.

Intimacy is the natural process and result of pleasurable curiosity.

A man who loves history will enjoy learning all about history.

A woman who loves a man will enjoy learning all about him.

If a man claims to “love” history, but scorns and rejects the study of history, we would not take his claim very seriously. If a man claims to “love” exercise, but never gets off the couch, and constantly mocks athletes on television, then we know that his professions of “love” are mere narcissistic foolishness.

However, active hostility is not required to repudiate claims of “love.” Mere indifference is an effective argument against protestations of affection.

If a man says: “I love yoga,” but never takes a class, watches a video, or practices, then clearly he does not love yoga, but rather is indifferent to yoga. What he “loves” is saying “I love yoga,” rather than yoga itself.

In the same way, many people say that they like classical music, although when you hunt around their music collection, there’s not a whole lot of classical there. The reason that they say they like classical music is that they like being perceived as someone who likes classical music, because it makes them appear cultured and refined.

In other words, they do not “like” classical music, but rather “like” lying, thus confirming that they are not cultured and refined – at least in this area – but rather shallow, insecure and manipulative.

I Want!

Love is a statement: “I want.”

I want to get to know you better, I want to spend time with you, I want to share myself with you, I want to see how you will react to this or that. I want to know your thoughts and feelings.

I want to run downstairs and greet you with open arms when you come home.

I want to take care of you when you’re feeling unwell.

I want your happiness.

I want you to feel safe, protected, loved and cherished.

The list goes on and on, of course – the essential aspect of “I want” is: compared to what?

All desires are limitless; all resources are limited. This fundamental principle of economics applies equally to questions of preference and prioritization.

I can say: “I love squash,” but that does not mean that I want to play it 18 hours a day, since that would leave me injured and unable to play squash.

I can say: “I want to lose weight,” but that does not mean that I really want to lose weight, if my following statement: “I want another piece of cheesecake,” takes precedence.

I can say: “I want to be a millionaire,” but that does not mean that I’m willing to sacrifice my leisure in order to achieve that goal.

Thus preferences must always be measured relative to each other.

In the example of Bruce and Sheila at the beginning of this book, we can see their initial meeting was characterized by a form of “fusion,” wherein they developed a kind of one-dimensional “intimacy” by isolating themselves from the world, thus largely rejecting the ecosystem of competing demands. In this way, they really did not get the chance to see how they really “competed” with other priorities, which did not give them an objective way to really determine each other’s value.

I used to work as a software executive, and traveled fairly regularly. I would say to my wife: “I love spending time with you,” but that did not mean that the only thing I ever wanted to do was to spend time with her. I certainly preferred spending time with her to going to work, or on a business trip, but it was in order to retain my pleasure in her company that I felt it incumbent upon me to contribute to the household income.

Life is a balance of competing pleasures, as we all know. I have to get up early, but I want to finish watching a midnight movie. My wife is calling me for dinner, but I am right in the middle of a video game. I want to continue working on this book, but a Freedomain Radio listener has an important question.

In the absence of outright evil and corruption, there are no particularly objective “right” answers. Should I continue working on this book, or take a call from a listener with a problem? There is no totally objective way to answer this. We do not receive medals in the afterlife for the actions we take in the here and now. No one is “taking score,” or giving us marks for right or wrong behaviours (except our conscience of course). We do not answer to an objective and conscious “higher power.”

We do have an inbuilt desire and drive for the truth, since we live in objective material reality, which consistently reinforces the objective and rational principles that define the truth.

We do have an inbuilt desire and drive for moral justifications, because all human beings feel a fundamental need to be virtuous.

We always have the choice, of course, to either be virtuous or to just define whatever we’re doing as “virtue,” and thus corrupt both ourselves and the world.

In the same way, we always have the choice to either love honourably, or to just define whatever we’re doing as “love,” and thus corrupt both ourselves and the world.

Love is a Verb…

“Love,” like “virtue,” is derived from actions, not defined by words.

A man who claims to “love” a woman, but scorns and denigrates her – even on occasion – not only does not “love” her, but rather hates her.

In the same way, a man who claims to “love” his country, and then puts on a costume and points a gun at whoever his leaders tell him to – foreign and domestic – clearly does not “love” his country, but rather “loves” violence – which is the opposite of love.

A superstitious man does not “love” God, but rather “loves” controlling others through morally poisonous fantasies.

A statist man does not “love” government, or his fellow citizens, but rather “loves” controlling others through morally poisonous fantasies.

In the example above, Wendy does not “love” her daughter, but rather “loves” managing her own anxiety by controlling her daughter’s behaviour.

Similarly, Bruce does not “love” Sheila – or vice versa – they just “love” managing their own anxieties by manipulating each others’ behaviour.

In my first book, “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion,” I argued that authority figures use morality to control us, thus affirming the power of morality – and our desire as children to be good – and then use that power to corrupt us and “justify” their own actions.

In the same way, any person who uses the word “love” to manipulate other people is acting in a highly corrupt manner.

The word “love” is used in many contexts, both within our personal relationships, and in our “larger” relationships to state, church and “morality.”

Before discussing how we can begin to undo these destructive fantasies in our own lives using the Real-Time Relationship, let us look at how these pious lies have corrupted our social, religious and political environments, so that we can understand the difficulties that we will face when we finally begin to really speak the truth.

Social Lies: Love, Power and Manipulation

n the absence of nutritional knowledge, human beings tend to eat what tastes good in the moment.

In the absence of philosophical wisdom, human beings tend to become mere “anxiety avoidance machines.”

Let us look at a few examples of this in various fields, before we see the enormously destructive impact this has on people’s personal relationships.

Religion and Anxiety

Religious mysticism, or superstition, is almost always driven by a fear of the unknown.

If we look at the example of epilepsy, we can see that the incomprehensible foaming and thrashing behaviour exhibited by epileptics during an attack can create great anxiety in others. What on earth is happening? Why is it happening? Could this happen to me?

Whenever we are confronted by something that we do not understand, we can either roll up our sleeves and begin the hard work of striving to understand it – a work that will doubtless remain uncompleted in our lifetime – or we can simply make up an explanation that gets rid not of our ignorance, but of our anxiety.

Clearly, sacrificing a goat in no way affects whether or not the rains will come. However, if you can convince yourself that sacrificing a goat can indeed control the rain, the brutal ritual allows you to live with less anxiety, because you have “done something” to control your environment.

The Pitfalls of Mythology

Unfortunately, every moral illusion we create for the sake of immediate anxiety avoidance tends to harden into cultish dogmatism.

If we end up convincing ourselves that slaughtering the goat controls the rains, we are usually the one who slaughters the goat. All too often, our ability to spin comforting fantasies and kill animals becomes our profession. Our livelihood then becomes based on lies.

When this occurs – when the priestly class emerges – our greatest enemy then becomes scepticism and rational curiosity. Since we make our living by lying, anyone who starts objectively looking for the truth threatens our livelihood, our sense of virtue, and our position in the community.

If it becomes revealed that we have just made up our answers to prey upon others – and that we have provided only the illusion of security and control, to the great detriment of the community – then we are also likely to be attacked in retaliation, or banished from our community as liars and con men. We will be revealed to our children as shallow and manipulative thieves, and will be cast out into the wilderness, subject to all the whims of nature, beasts and men.

This is why mythologizing is so elementally destructive. Whenever you create a group of people who profit from lies and violence – the church and the state, respectively – you create a hardened caste whose self-interest can only be maintained through brutality and a willingness to attack virtue.

Mythology always becomes cancer.

Mythology and the Appearance of Control

Mythologizing, then, masks anxiety by creating the appearance of control.

Like any drug, this temporarily reduces anxiety in the moment, while continually escalating it in the long run.

Mythologizing is in essence the creation of an unsubstantiated link between cause and effect. Why does Bob have epilepsy? Why, because he is possessed by a demon!

Naturally, since this supposed “cause and effect” is entirely illusory, it cannot rest on its own empirical merits, but must be aggressively inflicted and defended through propaganda and force.

There is no “Church of Gravity,” which drags young children into Sunday school to repeat to them over and over that gravity exists, that gravity is real, that gravity has an effect on matter – and that the children will be sent to hell for disbelieving in gravity. Similarly, there are no “Temples of the Hot Stoves” which strive over and over to inculcate the belief in children that a hot stove will burn them if they touch it.

The reason for this, of course, is that children have direct empirical perceptions of gravity and heat – the cause-and-effect is very immediate, very testable, very powerful, perfectly consistent, and so perfectly real.

It is only when the cause-and-effect is imaginary that moral and physical aggression need to be deployed against anyone who questions it.

Statism and Anxiety

The mythology around “the state” in many ways exceeds – particularly in the modern world – the mythology that surrounds superstitious religiosity.

The question: how can human society be organized? is not answered by the state, any more than the question where did the world come from? is answered by religion.

If a man says, “My wife loves me,” and then locks her in the basement and threatens to shoot her if she tries to escape, do we believe him?

A “theory” cannot be considered “proven” if all it does is shoot anyone who disagrees with it.

In fact, any theory which requires violent defense is by any rational standard of proof utterly wrong or false to begin with.

Thus the thesis that “a state is required to organize society,” is demonstrably false, because it is not in fact a thesis at all, but rather a violently aggressive dogma.

Shooting those who disagree with you does not make you right, but rather proves that your position is wrong, corrupt and evil.

The State and Society

Since the state uses compulsion to “organize” society, it repudiates the very concept of “society,” just as rape repudiates the very concept of “love making,” and robbery repudiates the concept of “property.”

Using “the state” to answer the question of how society should be organized is morally identical to using kidnapping and imprisonment to answer the question of how to get someone to “love” you.

It is the mere illusion of an answer, rather than a real answer – and like all illusory answers, not only is it brutal in the extreme, but it also actively prevents the pursuit of true answers.

The False Answers of Statism

When people ask, “How should children be educated?” – the answer, inevitably, is: we should educate them through the state.

This is not an answer at all.

We may as well answer the question how should people get married? with the answer: we should force them to cohabitate at gunpoint.

However, the moment that force is used, voluntary descriptions must be abandoned.

If I steal your wallet at gunpoint, I cannot logically call the transfer of money “charity.”

If we force people to get “married,” it is not marriage, but rather institutionalized rape.

If we force children to get “educated,” it is not education but rather institutionalized indoctrination.

In the same way, if we bully, force, manipulate or threaten children to get them to believe in God, what results is not belief, but frightened conformity, which can also be termed brain-rape or brainwashing.

And the same is true of love.

Love and Anxiety

rue knowledge reduces our anxiety, because true knowledge allows us to predict consequences, accurately manage cause-and-effect, and thus gain some objective measure of control in our lives.

Thus, when we correctly view epilepsy as a neurological disorder, we can predict that attacks will occur in the future, we can examine the causes of these attacks and develop medications to prevent recurrence – or at least manage the symptoms.

Even if we cannot control epilepsy, understanding that it is a neurological disorder at least reduces our anxiety with regards to the unknown. Even if we cannot turn on the light, once we understand that the “giant skeletal hand” scratching at our window is in fact a tree branch, our terror is sharply reduced.

On the other hand, if we believe that epileptic attacks are the result of demonic possession or invasion, then we will take the epileptic to a priest, who will sprinkle water and chant words, which have absolutely no effect on the cause of the attack, and prevent rather than provide understanding.

Trial by Fire

In the Middle Ages, there was a ritual known as “trial by fire,” wherein a person accused of a serious crime would be forced to reach into a fire and pull out a metal bar – being terribly burned in the process. If the burns became infected, then the person’s guilt was considered established, since infection was a sign of moral corruption, inflicted by God only upon the guilty.

Of course, the presence or absence of infection has nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s guilt or innocence, but is mere random chance. Inherent in the “trial by fire” was a complete understanding of this, insofar as the person had to be burned in order for the infection to possibly occur – in other words, they did not wait for a spontaneous infection to afflict a healthy person.

We may feel that we are far above this primitive brutality, but of course we are not. Governments the world over – including the United States, and other “civilized” Western nations – regularly torture “confessions” out of people. This can occur through “extraordinary rendition” programs, wherein people are kidnapped, flown to Egypt or Syria, and tortured or murdered – but it also happens countless times daily, when people are offered reduced sentences or plea bargains, in return for “confessions.”

During the Salem witch trials, women were tortured into “confessing” that they were witches – and then they were offered a quick death if they would name other witches in their “coven.” Dazed, bleeding, broken, mutilated, they coughed up the names of anyone they could think of, in order to gain the sweet release of death.

In our times, such “confessions” are also extracted through the threat of torture – since modern prisons in every country are certainly torture pits of brutality and rape – in return for “testimony” against others.

This “testimony” usually results from a person facing years or decades in prison naming whoever he can in order to reduce his sentence, and has nothing to do with establishing any sort of reasonable innocence or guilt. These “named” people are then picked up, and the process continues.

The only difference is that in the medieval “trial by fire,” at least you had a chance of not developing an infection.

Through this process, the number of crimes that are genuinely prevented is far outstripped by the number of crimes certainly committed, through the sending of innocent and terrified people to the brutal rape rooms of modern prisons.

Furthermore, since the government can invent any number of “crimes” and “criminals,” this sick and evil process both allows the government to claim that it is really good at catching criminals, and also terrifies the population through the invention of a “criminal underclass” that citizens believe they need the government to protect them from.

False Knowledge and Crime

This whole process is a vicious example of how “false knowledge” (i.e. you have committed this “crime”) both enables and exacerbates real crimes. By creating “facts” through the threat of multiyear torture, only the appearance of guilt is established.

We may as well imagine that the Salem trials were really about finding witches. While many women certainly did “confess” to being witches, that was only because they preferred a relatively quick death to the endless tortures inflicted on them by superstitious fanatics.

We can see countless other examples as we look across our intellectual landscape, from the bitchy and greedy fear-mongering of “global warming” to the filthy and viciously corrupt fear-mongering of the “War on Terror” to the exhausted and numbly-repeated fear-mongering of the “War on Drugs,” “War on Poverty,” “War on Illiteracy,” etc.

Whenever a disaster strikes a statist or religious society, the brutalized mob’s first instinct is not to find the root cause, but rather to identify a scapegoat.

New York, 2001

or example, in the case of the attacks on New York in 2001, everybody’s first desire was for vengeance, not knowledge.

This is exactly the same reaction as the superstitious desire to “attack” the demon that is causing epilepsy, rather than struggling to understand the root causes of epilepsy, and working to alleviate them.

If we refuse to understand the root causes of epilepsy, but rather just attack the epileptics, anyone suffering from epilepsy will do anything he can to shield knowledge of his symptoms from everyone else. In the same way, the president of Iran can, with a straight face, say, “We have no homosexuals in our country.” Given that homosexuals are regularly tortured and killed in Iran, it hardly seems surprising that they would be a challenge to find.

When epileptics are attacked, and then the symptoms of epilepsy mysteriously “vanish,” the attackers generally raise a cheer and toast their own effectiveness.

However, all these monsters have done is to make the study of epilepsy highly dangerous. They have eliminated the “symptoms,” but their definition of epilepsy as an “evil possession” simply makes anyone who strives to understand it scientifically “evil” as well, and thus subject to attack.

In this way, not only do they merely eliminate the symptoms of epilepsy, but they ensure that epilepsy will continue – and likely increase – by attacking anyone who displays the symptoms, as well as anyone who investigates those symptoms scientifically.

Just as refusing to investigate the aetiology of epilepsy causes one to act in a way that does nothing to alleviate the problem of epilepsy, refusing to understand the root causes of “terrorist” attacks does nothing to alleviate the problems of violence.

If fact, it only makes those problems worse.

Empathizing with Vengeance

If we are attacked, it is generally very easy to understand why.

We are attacked for exactly the same reasons that we want to attack others.

When we want to go and bomb Afghanistan after 9/11, we fully understand the mindset of the “terrorists” already.

To understand why people would want to fly planes into buildings, all we need to do is understand why we want to bomb Afghanistan.

Since we want to bomb Afghanistan because we have been attacked, we can then easily surmise that planes must have been flown into our buildings because we have attacked others.

It’s really not that complicated, and it takes an enormous amount of effort to avoid this simple and basic understanding.

The Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – serves us well here. “Others are doing to us as we have done to them.” (I use the word “we” here very loosely of course, referring rather to the foreign policy of the US government. Also, please note that I use the word “policy” here equally loosely, referring rather to its terrorist attacks on foreigners.)

To understand the “terrorism” of foreigners, all we have to do is understand our own response to “terrorism.”

When “terrorism” is inflicted upon us – paramilitary attacks without a declaration of war – we have a desire to lash out and murder others.

Thus since we wish to attack when we are murdered, we must have been attacked because we have murdered, since Muslims do not belong to another species, and human beings have similar reactions to similar stimuli.

How long does this take to figure out? Not very long at all.

A few minutes on the Internet will reveal a massive bombing campaign throughout Iraq in the 1990s, conducted by the British and American military, which resulted in the economic decimation of the middle class and the physical destruction through malnutrition and illness of upwards of half a million Iraqis.

Going further, it does not take very long to find out that the United States has tens of thousands of troops stationed in Saudi Arabia – and it also does not take an enormous leap of imagination to understand how this must make certain Saudis feel, given that many Americans would doubtless find it highly objectionable to have Muslim nuclear weapons stationed outside Washington, pointed at the White House.

Also, the US still occupies Japan, more than a half-century after conquering it, and has 700+ military bases throughout the world, and extracts billions of dollars from foreign governments to pay for these occupations – like any other criminal shakedown.

Going just a little bit further, it does not take very long to find out that America subsidizes the Israeli military to the tune of several billion dollars a year. Regardless of how one views the division down the Gaza Strip and the creation of the occupied territories, it certainly is the case that America finances the oppression of Muslims through the Israeli occupation.

Given that America was founded through the violent overthrow of a foreign “dictatorship,” it should not be hard for Americans to figure out that when you cause the deaths of those in another group by the hundreds of thousands – particularly children – and when you station “infidel” troops on the “holy land” of a highly volatile and superstitious gang of oil-rich thugs – and finally, when you subsidize a group that is viciously oppressing members of the same volatile gang – that reprisals, or “blowback,” will be inevitable.

Americans make up stories about how the Muslims “hate us for our freedoms” – and then condemn Islamic societies for their lack of freedoms. When I ask Americans if they hate Islamic dictatorships – and they say, “yes” – when I then ask them why they are not out committing acts of terrorism against those Islamic dictatorships, they just stare at me blankly, as if I were insane.

In other words, the blatant conflict between, “They attack us because they hate us in the abstract,” and, “I hate them in the abstract, but I would never attack them,” must be repressed, like all mythologies.

Hellish Reciprocity

If they come to kill us, and then we want to kill them, then logically they must have come to kill us because we have already been killing them.

If Americans stare around in bewilderment, asking “Why do they hate us?” the first person to ask, of course, is the person who attacked them.

If I sit minding my own business in a restaurant and a man comes up and slaps me across the face, my first question would be: “Why did you slap me?”

If the man says, “Because here are the pictures of you sleeping with my wife!” then I cannot claim to be ignorant of why he has hit me. I may oppose his use of force or consider it an unjust response to my actions, but I cannot claim to be ignorant of his motives.

On the other hand, if the man says: “I slapped you because you killed my entire family,” then any vengeance that I would take would seem wildly unjust to everyone else, since the wrong I had done this man far outstripped the wrong he had done me in return.

People always ignore, repress or bypass questions for which they already have answers that they do not like, or which do not serve their needs.

If the man in the restaurant slaps me, I can only take vengeance upon him if I claim that I have never done anything to harm him.

If he claims that his slap was a retaliation for my far more grievous attack upon his family, then I must not respond to that accusation in any way – neither to deny nor affirm – but must continue to protest my complete ignorance as to his motives for attacking me.

Only by ignoring his motives can I justify my vengeance.

In the case of the September attacks, this “bewilderment” reached truly ridiculous proportions. The man who claimed to be behind the attacks openly stated that his three reasons for attacking America were exactly those described above – the US occupation of Saudi Arabia, the funding of Israel, and the blockade of Iraq,

He repeated over and over that his attack was a retaliation for the far more egregious American attacks upon his fellow Muslims.

Yet still Americans claimed that they had “no idea” why they were so hated – or, that they were hated for their “virtues” – which is even more offensive and provocative.

If a man rapes a woman and then claims that she is fabricating charges against him, because he is just so “wonderful and loving,” then he is egregiously and provocatively adding insult to injury. By claiming that she is reacting in rage and hatred to his benevolence, love and virtue, he is not only rejecting the fact that he brutalized her sexually, but he is also claiming that she is emotionally corrupt and viciously anti-virtue.

Backup Lies

Of course, after the mythology of “we have no idea why we were attacked” is invented, a secondary mythology must also be created, in order to protect the first.

As described earlier, false cause-and-effect “relationships” such as “sacrificing a goat = good rains” must always be defended through the use of emotional and/or physical brutality.

After the September attacks, the backup mythology – the “thug” story – was that any attempt to understand the root causes of the attacks could only be motivated by sympathy for the attackers, and a desire to justify their murders.

This is all pure, vicious nonsense – the direct equivalent of accusing an oncologist who studies how to prevent a recurrence of cancer of being a big fan of the cancer you already have.

Clearly, someone who wishes to get to the root causes of an affliction cannot “cure” those who already have that affliction, any more than an anti-smoking campaign can reverse lung cancer.

It is precisely because lung cancer is largely irreversible that prevention is far more valuable than attempting a “cure.”

Love and Ego Identification

hy is it that the average American would be so resistant to discovering the truth about the September attacks?

What would it cost him emotionally if he discovered that those who claim to represent “his government” had done unspeakably evil things, which had brought about unspeakably evil retaliations?

If the average American reads about a Mafia hit-man who gets “whacked” in return, or some gang banger found shot dead in a gutter, does he immediately rush to the defence of the Mafia, or the gang?

Of course not.

If a mugger gets shot, the average American most likely shrugs and says, “Well, don’t mug people!” If a hit-man gets whacked, we often feel a grim, unpleasant but generally-inevitable sense of justice.

Ah, the average American might say, but in the case of the September attacks, the people who were killed were not the people responsible for the decisions of the leaders.

This is very true, of course – but it is equally true for the Iraqis, who starved and died under an embargo that supposedly resulted directly from the decisions of their leader – Saddam Hussein.

Furthermore, the Iraqis who died had no chance whatsoever to change their leader or to affect their political system in any way, shape or form. The people who died in the World Trade Center were educated, affluent, well-spoken and old enough to vote. This does not mean that they brought about their own deaths, of course, but it does mean that if the standard is brought forward that people should not be killed for the actions of their leaders, then we must have more sympathy for the helpless Iraqis, who lived in a dictatorship, than the adults of New York, who lived in a democracy.

Furthermore, it was the Iraqi children who suffered and died the most under the UK/US blockade. Should we primarily blame children for the actions of a dictator? Would it have been worse for the Muslim hijackers to target Disneyland?

Finally, what is the average Muslim to make of the simple and brutal reality that, even after the “reasons” given for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 turned out to be totally fraudulent, the sitting President was returned to office with a clear majority of the popular vote? What could it mean that, after committing a genocide against Muslims, Bush won the Presidency more decisively in 2004 than he did in 2000?

Are those who vote responsible for the decisions of their leaders?

The “Stockholm Syndrome”

The only way to truly unravel this unholy knot is to understand that the average American feels a very strong ego identification with “his” leader, “his” government, and the political ruling class as a whole.

Why is that?

Well, of course it is partly due to the endless propaganda that every citizen of every country is endlessly subjected to, particularly in government schools.

However, there is a far more central reason that we rush to the defence of our leaders, which has great ramifications for our own personal relationships as well.

Sympathy and Integrity

What would it mean to have sympathy for the victims of our own governments?

What would it mean to dispassionately survey the political and military landscape of the past generation or so, and realize the degree to which our own governments have committed unspeakable crimes and genocides throughout the world?

What would it mean?

The reason that we avoid knowing evil is not because we wish to avoid that knowledge, but rather because we wish to avoid another knowledge which is far more dangerous to us.

Imagine a prisoner who wakes up to a silent and empty prison, with the door of his cell very slightly ajar.

He calls out, but no guards come.

He rattles the bars of his cage, but no other prisoners respond, and no other sound can be heard.

Everyone has left. He is alone in an empty prison.

If we imagine that we are this prisoner, can we picture how terrifying it would be for us to actually try to open the door of our cell?

If the door opens, we at least have the chance to escape.

If the door is locked, however – ah, then we will suffer the agonies of thirst and starvation for days, and die a terrible death, alone in our locked cell.

With the stakes so high, how would we feel about actually trying to open the door of our cell?

The reason that we would avoid trying to open the door of our cage is not because we were afraid of the door being locked, but rather that we were afraid of dying of thirst and starvation, over days, agonizingly slowly.

By avoiding the door, we are avoiding the knowledge of our death.

And – the more certain that we are that the door is locked – and thus that we will die - the more terrified we are of trying to open it.

In the same way, we flock to defend our leaders, because if we objectively survey their actions and realize the violence and evil that they have committed, we are led to some terrifying and terrible conclusions about the world that we actually live in.

Democracy?

he vast majority of people in the world did not want America to invade Iraq – and even the majority of people in America did not want the invasion, or if they did it was only because of propaganda.

Yet still, the invasion occurred – even though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September attacks, had no contacts with Al Qaeda, and did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

What does this say about the true nature of the society that we live in?

If our leaders are capable of ordering a blockade that results in the deaths of half a million Iraqis, what does that say about their capacity for ethical action?

What does that say about their capacity for empathy?

What does that say about their moral values?

What are we avoiding when we do not ask these questions?

Furthermore, if our leaders perform these unspeakably evil actions and then profess “bewilderment” when their victims strike back, then clearly our leaders fully understand the ethics of “virtuous self-defence.”

Thus they cannot be mad – or at least, not morally mad.

If they are not morally mad, but perform evil actions, then they are truly evil.

And these are the people that we give our children to, to become “educated.”

In a democracy, if the leaders are evil, it is either because the people are evil, or because it is not really a democracy.

If we live in a true democracy, and the majority of people elect evil sociopaths as their leaders, then clearly the majority of people are evil.

If the majority of people are evil, and their leaders are also evil, then the attacks of September become understandable – it is just one Mafia gang attacking another in retaliation for a previous attack. There is no honor, no reasonable self-righteousness – it is just one more dirty murder following another dirty murder.

In this case, retaliation becomes impossible to justify in moral terms – and so the cycle is broken.

If, however, the people are not evil, but their leaders are evil – as surely they are – then clearly the leaders do not represent the will of the people, and thus society cannot be called a “democracy.”

If the majority of the people are good, but the leaders are evil, then clearly it is immoral to have any sort of allegiance to this corrupt and exploitive gang of political thugs.

If we saw innocent bystanders being gunned down in a drive-by gangland shooting, would we rush to the defence of the shooters?

If this type of murder occurs in a neighbourhood – dozens of people being cut down in gangland shootouts – we would tend to get angry at the gang that provoked the retaliation, not flock to their support, grab weapons and continue to escalate the war.

In other words, we would identify with the victims, not with the perpetrators.

However, in the case of the September attacks, the average American did not identify with the victims but rather with the leaders.

Again, why?

Morality and Victimhood

To start, let’s trace what happens when the average American begins to apply objective moral judgments to the actions of those involved in Christian/Muslim/Jewish violence.

Clearly, ordering the death of another is immoral. Equally clearly, in terms of ordering the deaths of other religious groups, the Christians started the cycle of violence, at least in the 20^th century. There were no Muslim attacks on America in the 19^th century even though America was far freer in many ways in those days.

The Christian attacks on the Muslim world continued throughout the 20^th century through the creation of Iraq by the British out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, and escalating in the American arming of Iraq against Iran in the 1980s, followed by the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s.

Thus in terms of “who started it,” clearly it was the Christians – initially the British, and to a smaller degree the French, and most recently the Americans.

Since ordering the deaths of other people is evil, then clearly this evil was first committed by the Western Christian leaders.

Since Westerners pride themselves on their “democratic institutions” – particularly as opposed to the dictatorial Islamic theocracies – clearly the Western citizens of those democracies have a far greater capacity to control the actions of their leaders, relative to the average Muslim.

Since in a democracy the actions of the leaders must represent the will of the people, if those leaders perform evil actions, then the people are to some degree at least responsible for that evil.

If I give a gun to a murderer knowing that he is about to kill someone, cheer him on when he does kill that person, and then give him more bullets right afterwards, then clearly I am complicit in his crimes.

Now, if the attacks of September 2001 were evil – as doubtless they were – but we apply an objective moral standard, then clearly our own leaders are far more evil than the leaders of the attackers, since they have been responsible for hundreds of times more murders than the attackers.

If our own leaders are evil, then we must attempt to prevent them from performing their evil actions.

If we live in a true democracy, then we should easily be able to prevent our leaders from performing evil actions.

In other words, the door to our cage should be unlocked.

Yet – we do not try to prevent our leaders from performing evil actions.

Even after the manipulations and falsehoods of George W. Bush were fully exposed – even in the mainstream media – he still won the popular vote with a margin of several million.

Since he had started a war based on false information, why was he not voted out?

The Knowledge We Avoid

He was not voted out because the people did not want to see that the war would continue.

The average American does not want to find out that no matter who he puts in government, the evils of the state will continue.

The average American does not want to find out that his cell door is truly and irrevocably locked.

The average American – like all of us – knows deep in his heart that he has absolutely no control over his government.

Deep down, we all know that the rapes, murders, tortures, predations, corruptions, thefts and brutality committed in the name of “the state” will continue as long as “the state” does.

We can sooner alter the orbit of the moon with our minds than control the actions of our leaders.

It is not knowledge of evil that we are avoiding, but knowledge of our own subjugation – of our own helplessness, of our own enslavement.

The moment that we actually emotionally understand, accept and truly feel the nature of our enslavement, we will find ourselves compelled to action.

And it is that action that we fear – not because it involves violence or physical danger, but rather because we know it will trigger the undoing of our entire world as we know it.

That is what is truly called “taking the red pill.”

Implosion

he moment that we begin applying objective moral values to our own life – and to the actions of those around us – we immediately step into another kind of world – or rather, step out of a prison that is only visible from the outside.

So when we question the murderous desire for retribution after the September attacks, we begin to understand that we are surrounded by people who attack anyone who speaks the truth.

If we are surrounded by people who attack the truth, then we are in fact surrounded by corrupt and brutal individuals.

If we are surrounded by corrupt individuals, then the corruption of our leaders becomes more understandable.

The corruption of our leaders becomes more understandable when we realize that we are living in a world of pious, frightened and brutal liars.

In this way, the “country” that we formerly claimed to “love” is revealed as a frightened, tyrannical and abusive “family” that showers empty goodies on blank conformists and attacks anyone who asks rational and moral questions.

In other words, the moment that we speak the truth, we find out that we were only “loved” because we were silent, stupid, obedient – and productive.

We find out that we were only “tolerated” as a means to an end, in the same way that a farmer “tolerates” his cows, because he wants milk – and meat.

The Humiliation of Knowledge

This knowledge is exquisitely and almost unbearably humiliating.

When we emerge from the “matrix” of mythology, we look back and see…

…that we licked the boots of those who kicked us. That we sang the praises of those who harvested us. That we were slaves who cheered the virtue of being owned.

And – the most terrifying realization of all...

That we are far more afraid of our fellow slaves than we are of our masters.

Once this realization sinks in, we are temporarily lost in a fog of limbo… We cannot be masters, but are no longer slaves. We cannot sup at the bloody tables of the elites, but neither are we welcome any more in the cages of the slaves, to fight over scraps and call it “plenty.”

This is the land between the stars, between the past and the present, where the fertility of the future takes root.

And it can be a very, very lonely place to be.

And it is this exile, this knowledge, that we are avoiding at all times.

The truth does set us free – at the cost of revealing to us that we are all slaves.

And – that our fellow slaves hate us most of all.

Anxiety Avoidance and Relationships

hat does the above analysis have to do with our personal relationships?

It has been my experience that it is far easier to get people to understand personal topics in an abstract context first.

As the long-time listeners at Freedomain Radio well know, I began my series on personal and political liberty with long discussions of anarchistic models of social organization, as well as abstract economic, theological and political analyses. It was only after 70 or so podcasts that I began to dip into personal topics, and only in the late 100s did I really begin to zero in on personal liberty, particularly with the series 180 to 183 – “Freedom” Parts 1-4.

Most people who are interested in political liberty know that some rather terrible things have occurred since the attacks on New York. Some have gone as far as saying that these attacks were an “inside job,” which I do not believe, but you do not need to go that far in order to understand that those who wield political, military or mercantilist economic power only stand to gain when a nation is “attacked,” particularly when a nightmarish Orwellian “endless war” can be invented.

In other words, if you really want to hurt yourself, you do not need to stab yourself: you simply need to keep poking a bear with a stick.

Most of my writing and thinking as a philosopher has been focused on answering two fundamental questions:

Why has libertarianism failed so consistently throughout history?
Given that we can have no practical effect on a nuclear-armed state, how can we best work to bring about political liberty without compromising our personal liberty?

The answer to the first question has been the subject of many podcasts on the family; the entire answer to the second question is obviously beyond the scope of this book, but I will say that once you understand the principles of the Real-Time Relationship, you will have taken an enormous leap forward in understanding how to free yourself personally, and how it can be applied politically as well.

If we distil our analysis of the September attacks as described earlier, we can come to some very valuable conclusions, which can really help us understand the nature and challenges of our personal relationships – as well as why we spend so much time and energy avoiding the truth.

The Principles of Intimacy

irst of all, I can guarantee you that examining your personal relationships in the light of what is being discussed in this book will be enormously costly.

If you continue, and move beyond the theoretical stage and actually understand these principles personally – whether you end up putting them into practice or not – it is likely that very few of your existing relationships will survive this transition.

I just think that you should know that up front.

Philosophy is not a toy – and in particular, moral philosophy is the most powerful force on the planet.

If you are going to bring this amazing power to bear on your relationships, then very few of them will actually survive. I can tell you that those that do survive will be greater than anything you can imagine at the moment. In other words, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, or “hope” at the bottom of this Pandora’s Box.

Realities

First of all, I fully accept and believe you when you say that every relationship that you are involved in at the moment is based on virtue.

None of us get up in the morning, brush our teeth, look in the mirror and say: “my wife/parents/friends etc. are evil!”

We may get angry at them from time to time, but we do not truly or consistently believe that they are full of malevolent intent, hell bent on our destruction, and selfish to the core.

If people in our lives behave in a manner that cannot possibly be construed as virtuous or benevolent, we have an endless stream of clichés at our disposal with which to wish away our wounds and knowledge of corruption:

“He did the best he could!”
“His heart is in the right place!”
“She comes from a different generation, that’s just all she knows…”
“I guess I’m just a bit oversensitive.”
“That’s just his way!”
“Oh, that’s more prevalent in his culture.”
“He never acts with any ill intent, he’s just… brusque.”
“She’s under a lot of stress right now.”

In other words, we explain away non-virtuous actions with self-medicating stories. We accept immoral behaviour by redefining it as “well-intentioned imperfection,” and then proudly wear the medal of “virtuous tolerance.”

In other words, as described in Part 1, we redefine our cowardice as “courage.”

This is very similar to the way that people view their government. While getting upset and frustrated at some evidence of incompetent, scandalous or immoral behaviour, the “value” of government in the abstract, or as an institution remains not just unquestioned – but unquestionable. “A few bad apples don’t spoil the barrel,” we say, or, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Thus we have a seemingly ineradicable habit of believing that those people we have relationships with are virtuous or have our best interests at heart, but we will do almost anything to avoid applying rational moral principles to their actions.

In the same way, theologians claim to have “knowledge” of the existence and will of some sort of deity. This “knowledge” is always presented as objective – as differentiated from their opinions – however, when any sort of objective principles are applied to this knowledge, it completely evaporates, and is revealed as, after all, a mere opinion.

This is an example of a meal that this book will take off your personal “myth menu” forever: having your cake and eating it too.

Virtue as “Objective Opinion”

eople always claim that their relationships – with their parents, friends, governments and gods – are based on virtue. However, when you attempt to ask them how they know this and what principles they have applied to derive such objective knowledge – since virtue is surely not just an opinion – they immediately and instantaneously shy away, or become aggressive.

If I claim to have created a medicine that will prevent the spread of HIV – a pronouncement greeted with cheers of gratitude – and then, when a population takes this medicine, what results is the greatest HIV plague that the world has ever seen, will people’s gratitude for my medicine continue unabated?

In the same way, patriots say: “I love my country because my country is the best!”

“Best” in this case always means most moral. Americans talk about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers and so on. In other words, they talk about how the American system limits the power of government, and how right it was for the United States to break away from England in the 18^th century.

When you then ask these patriots how it is reasonably possible to love a system that was designed to limit the power of government that has produced the most powerful government, with the greatest and most destructive military, that the world has ever known, they just shy away or become aggressive.

Furthermore, if it was right to fight against the British state in the 18^th century, when it was imposing minor taxes and duties, and threatening to impose a fiat currency, how can it be possible to love the American state in the 21^st century, with its crushing tax burdens, ridiculously overinflated fiat currency, massive national debt, monstrously imperialistic foreign policy and so on? That’s like saying that you hugely respect the virtue and courage of a woman who leaves her husband because he doesn’t take out the garbage, but that a woman should stay with a husband who half-strangles her to death every other week.

Also, if Americans love their country because the Bill of Rights and the Constitution limit the power of government, then surely they must love their country less and less, as government power grows greater and greater.

If I love sobriety and hate alcoholism, and when I married my wife she rarely drank, surely I will love her less when she becomes a raging alcoholic, hiding gin in the Listerine bottle for her morning “gargle.”

If I say that I love sobriety and hate alcoholism, but claim that I love my wife equally after she transitions from teetotaler to raging alcoholic, then clearly I am just making up criteria by which I claim to “love” her.

God is Good?

In the same way, when you talk to Christians – or any religious people – and hear from them that God is good, it is reasonable to ask them: “How do you know?” – particularly because most theologies include a deceptive devil as well, and apparently it’s always good to know the difference, to avoid being fooled into worshipping the wrong deity.

If they say: “God is good because that is written in the Bible,” then it’s worth asking them whether they believe that the Bible is the Word of God. Naturally, they will say yes.

In this case, we basically have an autobiography in which the writer claims to be virtuous. In other words, a “claim to virtue” is the equivalent of virtue itself.

If “crazy eyes” Charles Manson scratches “I am virtuous” on his prison wall using the tooth of another prisoner, does that make Charles Manson virtuous?

There were many “authorized” Soviet biographies of Joseph Stalin that claimed he was the greatest and most virtuous man who ever lived. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler also makes great claims about his own virtue, and divine mission, and piety, and obedience to God and so on.

In other words, a self-proclamation of virtue does not prove virtue any more than repeating the words “I am rich” magically creates gold in your hand.

Thus the “virtue” of a supernatural being cannot result from its own self-proclamation, but must exist relative to some other objective standard.

A scientific theory is not “proven” because its author says so, but rather relative to the objective standard of the scientific method, which is to say relative to empirical reality. A compass measures “North,” not just me yelling the word “North!”

In this way, the “virtue” of a supernatural being must be determined relative to an objective standard of virtue.

“What, then,” I always ask the superstitious at this point, “is the objective standard by which you measure the virtue of your deity?”

If the response comes back: “The 10 Commandments,” then clearly, since one of them is: “Thou shalt not kill,” I always ask if this supernatural being has ever willfully caused the death of a human being.

Naturally, any honest Bible reader has to answer in the affirmative.

We can go through the same process with other commonly-accepted moral propositions, such as “rape is evil,” “slavery is immoral,” “child abuse is unacceptable,” and so on. If we find that the “holy” words of this supernatural being approve of – or even excuse – evils such as rape, slavery and child abuse, then clearly either these things are moral, or the deity is not.

Inevitably, the superstitious cultist you are talking to will find other, more pressing matters to attend to, rather than examining the “virtue” of his own fantasy sky ghost.

I myself would not be able to find any topic more important, more essential for my own virtue, well-being and happiness, than establishing the moral rightness of a being that I loved and worshiped – particularly if my theological model included the existence of an evil and deceptive counter-deity, such as Satan.

If you heard on the news that the medicine you were taking for a minor ailment had a 50% chance of containing a fatal poison, would you shrug and continue to take that medicine, and claim that you had more pressing matters to attend to than figuring out whether it would kill you or not?

Of course not.

When the superstitious claim that they have “more important matters to attend to” than determining the virtue of the being they worship, clearly they have no interest in virtue, either in themselves or others – or in their deity.

Not having any real interest in virtue is not in itself particularly problematic – oysters doubtless do not ponder ethical abstractions, yet we would not call them evil – however, understanding the value and beauty of virtue to the degree that you attempt to pass off your own beliefs as virtuous – and then scamper away in fear or anger whenever the topic of moral principles arises – this behaviour is morally vile, and utterly corrupt.

Ethics in the Service of Evil

n the earlier example of the New York attacks, we understood that the moral stance of victimization was essential to enable the victimization of others.

Americans – and in particular the American government – had to propagate the mythology that the attacks were utterly unprovoked, stimulated only by the malevolent evil of the attackers, and were directed at America solely as a result of America’s “virtue.”

America’s capacity to sustain this mad fiction was a truly staggering “achievement.” The leader of the attackers clearly stated, in factual terms, the crimes that America had committed in terms of foreign policy. No sane human being could deny that American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia, or that the Anglo-American sanctions against Iraq had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, or that billions of dollars of aid were not flowing from Washington to Tel Aviv.

These were all facts, which were not even mentioned, let alone discussed or repudiated.

This does not mean that we must necessarily agree that the actions of the American government justified the attacks on New York. It does mean, however, that the mantra “we have no idea why they attacked us” is a complete falsehood. We may violently disagree with the moral justifications for the attacks, but the attackers were very clear as to why they attacked.

The reason that these simple explanations went instantly and irrevocably down the “memory hole” is that they threatened to bring the question of moral principles to bear on the interaction, in a simple one-two punch:

If their attacks on us are unjustified, then our far more egregious attacks on them were also unjustified. (If they are evil, we are far more evil.)
If our egregious attacks on them were justified, then their muted response against us is even more justified (If we are good, they are more good.)

The only way that the second premise could be justified is if excessive murder is considered “better” than a muted response – in other words, they are less moral than us only because they murdered fewer of us than we did of them. (This would be a difficult moral premise to argue for without openly bursting into sulphurous flames.)

Ethical Attacks

hus, we can see that as a species we have a very strong tendency – I would say due to how we are raised, rather than what we are – to justify our immoral actions through appeals to morality, which is the mind-bending corruption that always threatens to drown the world in blood.

Also, as we can see in the above example, in essence we justify our actions according to moral principles because we want to commit immoral actions.

Because we want to attack Afghanistan and Iraq, we must pretend that we are the innocent victims of an unprovoked attack.

In other words, the end is evil; the means is false ethical “justifications.”

In this way, the power of morality is enslaved to the service of evil.

Morality thus has such astounding power not only because it creates our capacity for virtue, but also because it creates our capacity for evil.

It truly is a double-edged sword. Evil is impossible without moral justification. This is why endless propaganda is heaped upon the breaking minds of children by the state in terms of education, by religion in terms of indoctrination, and by families in terms of hypocritical moral “instruction.”

The reason that philosophy is so essential is that if we don’t use it, it is used against us in the service of evil to enable the murder and enslavement – literally – of billions.

There is a gun in the room called “ethics,” and either we take it up and fight for our freedom, or we surrender it to evildoers and remain their prisoners forever.

Warning Signs

One of the greatest warning signs of an impending attack is hearing a compelling “moral mythology” spilling out from someone’s lips.

For instance, it is impossible to listen to Hitler’s ranting oratory about the evils of the Slavic and Jewish races, and the need for defence of the Fatherland without understanding that these “moral” theories were the real weapons that he wielded – the true motive power of the war machine he launched across Europe, North Africa and Russia.

In the same way, when you hear Americans saying: “Here we were, as a country, minding our own business, when out of the blue, these goddamn Muslims attacked us for no reason!” you know that these words are mere preludes to evil.

These kinds of fantasy tales are what truly slips the “safety” off on the revolver. The immortal line from Hanns Johst's play Schlageter (first performed for Hitler's birthday in 1933): “Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!” (‘When I hear “culture,” I release the safety catch on my Browning [revolver pistol]!’) – resonates because it contains a fundamental truth.

“Culture” is a necessary prerequisite for violence.

In other words, violence – particularly institutional violence – requires false moral justifications – that culture is, in its essence, a set of ethical mythologies.

Ethical Mythologies

Ethical mythologies are moral fairy tales created and inflicted through repetition, social praise and attacks, which are useful to those in power because they justify the extension of their power over the individual.

The table below lists some common social mythologies of the Western world, and the translation of those theories into practice.

Myth	Moral	Result
The Great Depression was the result of free-market capitalism.	Without government control of the economy, massive disasters result.	Increased government control over the economy.
The free market system was only saved by the start of World War II.	The free market profits from the murder of millions.	Increased government control over the economy – particularly the “evil corporations.”
Without government schools, children – particularly poor children – would remain uneducated.	Societies as a whole – particularly parents – care nothing about poor children – only the government does.	Near-total control over the indoctrination of children for almost 15 formative years.
Democracy is the ideal political system.	You control the government.	The government controls you.
The Civil War in the United States was fought to free the slaves.	Private citizens and the free market profited from slavery; only the government could free the slaves.	Massive increases in the power of the federal government.
If Western governments had not fought Nazism, we’d all be speaking German right now.	Governments are essential for protecting freedom.	Governments destroy freedom.
Governments must control the money supply; otherwise there would be wild economic instability.	The government has your best interests at heart; voluntary private interactions are exploitive.	Wild economic instability, massive national debts and endless inflation.
Governments must intervene to provide medical care for their citizens.	Doctors will rob you blind. You will die of disease in the gutter.	Massive increases in the price of health care, utter dependence upon the State in medical matters.

As we can see, all of these cultural mythologies are put forward prior to massive expansions of state power – in fact, the net increase in violence that results from expanded state power is only possible because these moral “justifications” are put forward.

When you examine culture in its essence, it is an endless series of false and destructive moral positions inflicted upon children through repetition, social ostracism, and teacher, peer and parental hostility.

Culture is a form of slave programming wherein knee-jerk emotional defences are inflicted upon the natural personality, which cause people to automatically cough up moral justifications for their enslavement – without thought, without evidence, without rationality, without basis – and to their endless detriment.

Cultural Programming and Predictability

When you bring up the coercive nature of government to your fellow citizens, the responses that you will receive are utterly predictable.

“Taxation is force,” you say – and hear the exact same arguments back, every single time:

It’s not force because we get to vote!
It’s not force because we have the choice to leave!
It’s not force because no one has ever pointed a gun in my face!
It’s not force because I’m happy to pay! – etc.

Culture is nothing more – or less – than a series of moral lies told to children, the purpose of which is to get them to happily lick the boots of their oppressors.

If slaves perceive themselves as the equals of their masters, the relationship becomes simply one of physical dominance – which the masters can never win, since by definition they must be greatly outnumbered by their slaves (otherwise, being a master would scarcely be economically productive!).

Since the masters are so outnumbered by the slaves, they cannot rule by force alone – this was even truer in the past, before weapons of mass destruction, when a knight could never stand against ten determined peasants, and a slave-owner had to sleep at some point.

Thus physical dominance alone cannot be used to create and maintain a slave population. Certainly, the threat of physical violence is always required, but it must be approved of by the slaves in order to remain economically efficient and effective.

Culture is an economically-convenient set of ethical fictions that lower the total cost of ownership for using force against innocent individuals. It is, fundamentally, what creates and enables hegemonic and hierarchical power structures.

Thus you must get the slaves to believe amongst themselves that slavery is:

Not in fact slavery.
For their own good.
A moral ideal.
And that all possibilities other than slavery would result in endless evil and destruction.

Such is the power of morality that if you can program children to revere slavery as a moral ideal, they will never even think of becoming free.

Define freedom as “slavery,” and slavery as “freedom,” and not only will your slaves never even think of becoming free, but they will in fact attack any other slave for even talking about freedom.

It is the base tragedy of our species that the power of morality is only truly understood by those who use it in the service of evil.

Slave-on-Slave Violence

Owning slaves only works if you do not have to bother yourself too much about controlling your slaves – since that is time-consuming, expensive, and threatens the profits.

No, slavery is far more profitable – in fact, it only can be profitable – if, instead of having to expend time and energy attacking your slaves, you can program the slaves to attack each other.

And this is the purpose of “culture.”

Culture and Objectivity

efore looking into how we slaves are programmed to attack each other, rather than question our masters, let us compare “culture” to truly objective disciplines.

Culture and Science

One of the reasons that biologists chose Latin to describe species was that Latin was an international language, at least in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Because the scientific method – post-Bacon – took as its most fundamental methodology the validation of human reasoning according to measurable and empirical reality, it was fundamentally cross-cultural in nature.

What is considered “good” and “proper” is very different in India than in America. The nature of a carbon atom, however, remains identical – as do the properties of gravity, magnetism, light, sound and so on.

The only thing that separates an Indian physicist from an American physicist is form – i.e. language – not content, i.e. science.

This is distinct from their separate cultures, in which both form and content wildly diverge.

The same is true for mathematicians – the only thing that separates Chinese and British mathematicians is the form of notation they use. The underlying principles and logic remain identical.

Musicians, too, through their manipulation of objective sound waves, also use an objective framework and produce exactly the same notes when reading the same notation.

Farmers also very easily work over cross-cultural “boundaries,” since an ear of corn does not suddenly become a nunchuck when crossing the border from Pakistan to Afghanistan.

Financial transactions are also cross-cultural – with the difference, of course, that they are subject to wild predations in the form of state coercion. An objective exchange rate exists between the rupee and the yen, which allows purchasing power to objectively cross cultural or geographical boundaries.

We could continue in this vein for some time, but let us at least at this point understand that there are numerous human disciplines that are rational and objective – but culture is not one of them.

Culture and Objectivity

Since culture is not objective, it must be subjective, at least to some degree.

To the degree that culture is subjective, it cannot make reference to any objective facts or realities. For instance, if I say, “I like vanilla ice cream,” I am expressing a subjective preference – quite distinct from saying, “Objectively, vanilla is the best flavour of ice cream.”

Furthermore, if I say not only that vanilla ice cream is the best flavour objectively, but also that it is immoral to prefer any other flavour, and moral to prefer vanilla, then clearly I am going far beyond the bounds of rationality.

Not only am I claiming that vanilla is objectively “best,” but also that it is the only moral ideal, and that any preference for any other flavour is immoral.

The elevation of a subjective preference to an objective ideal – especially when it involves ethics – is simply called bigotry.

Thus culture, by elevating subjective preferences for local customs to objective – and often moral – ideals, is merely a species of petty, self-righteous, pompous, false, prejudicial and ugly bigotry.

Culture is the most dangerous lie in the world, because false moral ideals are always required for the execution of evil.

Now, what is moral must be enforced – thus by turning subjective preferences into “objective morality,” culture opens wide the hellish gates of violent control.

In other words, by turning violence into virtue, culture not only excuses violence – culture creates violence.

What Slaves Really Fear

Culture can thus be accurately viewed as a set of moral mythologies that are used to create, justify and extend violence against the majority of individuals.

What is it, then, that prevents us from shrugging off these choking and enslaving falsehoods?

In other words, who are you most afraid of?

If you start to speak the truth about culture, mythology, exploitation and violence, whose response frightens you the most?

If you openly speak about the simple reality that the state is violence, are you afraid that black-suited SWAT teams will burst through your windows and drag you off to Guantanamo Bay?

If you say that religious superstition is an exploitive lie, that the New York attacks were an unjust retaliation to far more unjust American attacks upon Muslims, that soldiers are merely men paid to kill others, like any hit-men – whose response do you fear the most?

There is a reason that we do not say these things.

There is a reason that we smile and nod and wave our flags and cheer our leaders and refuse to speak the simple truths that would inevitably set us free.

That reason is not that we are afraid of our leaders, or their thugs, or their jails, or their tortures.

The reason that we bite our tongues is that we are afraid of each other.

Why We Are Talking About Culture…

he reason that we are talking about culture and statism and religion – rather than only your personal relationships – is this:

The moment that you begin to speak the truth – a prerequisite for any form of intimacy – you will be attacked by your fellow slaves.

The question, then, since no one likes to be attacked, is: why bother speaking the truth at all?

Well, we speak the truth because we want the future to be different from the present – our own personal future, in terms of having honor, honesty and integrity in our personal relationships – and the future of the world, which yearns and deserves to be free.

If you truly take on the concepts in this book – if you speak openly and honestly about the truth – you will be endlessly attacked, your life will become very difficult in countless ways, and very few of your existing relationships – if any – will survive your new honesty.

Now, I could tell you that somewhere beyond the darkness that you will be cast into, lies a golden land of beauty, intimacy, love, laughter and true and deep friendship.

However, I cannot tell you that.

I cannot tell you that, because I cannot guarantee that.

You may be for various reasons stuck in a small town full of patriotic bigots and religious cultists.

You may be 15 years old, and remain dependent upon your parents for years to come.

You may be old, and dependent upon your children.

You may be the only sane rationalist in an Islamic village.

You may find that, if the truth destroys your marriage – or rather reveals its prior destruction – that you may never get married again, or have a satisfying romantic relationship.

You may find that, when you speak the truth to your adult children, they won’t want to have anything to do with you anymore.

I want to be clear about the dangers that always follow honesty.

We are not enslaved because we are cowards.

We are enslaved because we are objectively in danger.

We should take some relief in the enormous difficulties faced by those who speak the truth – because, if speaking the truth were easy, the state of the world, its bottomless and exploitive lies, would make absolutely no sense at all.

No, speaking the truth is incredibly difficult, and very dangerous – and not because of prisons, and not because of our masters, but because of the endless attacks from our fellow slaves.

When you sit around your family table at Christmas or Thanksgiving, it is worth taking a moment to let this basic reality seep into your very bones.

When you look at the ruddy, smiling faces around the table, it is essential to truly and finally understand that, in reality, these people are your masters.

It is not the whips of our owners that keep us down, but the frowns and snarls of our fellow slaves.

It is not the jails of our masters that keep us huddled and frozen in fear, but the disapproval of our fellow slaves.

The “state” is not in Washington, or Rome, or Madrid, or Ottawa, or Baghdad.

The “state” is not the guns of the police, the truncheons of the prison guards, the huts of the gulags, the cells of the prisons, the grenades of the troops, or the jostling darkness of the paddy wagons.

These are merely the effects, not the cause.

The “state” is not far away from you.

It is not distant.

It is not political.

It is not economic.

It is not military.

The “state” is your fellow slaves.

The Costs of the Truth

hen you sit with your family at dinner, and you begin to speak the truth, no SWAT team will come through your windows. No policeman will pound down your door. No trap door will open beneath your chair and suck you into the maw of some Syrian gulag.

The political state will not lift a finger against you.

Yet still – you are terrified to speak.

Why?

Simply because you know what will happen.

You know that you will not be attacked by the state.

You know you will be attacked by your family.

You will not be abused by your masters.

You will be abused by those around you.

You will not be humiliated by physical torture in the future.

You will be humiliated by emotional torture in the present.

Your masters will not try to control you.

Your family will.

And that is why masters exist.

Your family is the state.

The government is merely an effect of the family.

So – Why Speak?

I am telling you all of this for three main reasons.

First, so that you truly understand what you are getting into.

Second, so that you have a greater appreciation of why you have not spoken the truth in the past – so that you can be more gentle with yourself.

If speaking the truth were easy, and everyone still lied, then the world could not be saved. However, because speaking the truth can be almost unbearably difficult, the world can be saved, because people are not just cowards, but rather are frightened for very good reasons.

Thirdly, I am telling you this so that you can understand the essential service that you are providing the world by speaking the truth.

The world will not be saved by the violent lies of culture, but by the rational light of truth.

Idealists who disregard the real danger of their ideals tend to become masochists, or nihilists.

The future will not be improved by masochists, but by idealists.

I do not want you to embark upon this amazing journey in order to feel pain.

It certainly is true that you will feel pain during this journey, but you need to understand – if you are to succeed – the enormous virtue and value of what you are doing.

The reasons for refraining from speaking the truth are self-evident – we feel them all the time, every single day – the reasons for speaking the truth, however, are far from evident and can at times seem purely imaginary.

As we move into the final section of this book – how to implement the principles of the Real-Time Relationship in your own life – your anxiety will rise precipitously. You will feel clammy, your hands will sweat, you may shake, your sleep will decrease, your stomach will flip and your tension will mount.

That is how much, deep down, we so desperately want to be free.

And how much we fear our fellow slaves.

During this process, you will feel strong urges to fling this “evil” book across the room, and get back into the comfortable little box of social conformity.

Fling away – be my guest, I can take it!

Then, take a deep breath, walk across the room, and pick this book up again.

This book is not about me, or my ideas, but you, and your freedom.

The Goal

peaking the truth can sometimes feel like self-abuse, but I will share with you one thought, one vision that keeps me going, when the path is darkest.

In my mind’s eye, I see a world where people can be honest without fear – where the desperate terror that truth tellers feel now will only be felt by a few liars and cheats.

I see a world where relaxed and benevolent intimacy is the natural state of human relations.

I see a world without masters – not without a hierarchy, since ambitions and talents vary – but without coercive, exploitive and destructive monopolies like church, state and the cult of the family.

I desperately want to live in that world, but I know that I cannot, since what we are talking about here is a multi-generational project at best.

I desperately want to live in that world, but since I cannot, the best that I can hope for is to do my part to help create that world for the future.

I cannot live in a free world. I can barely see it from where I am. I squint at it though, like a man at the bottom of a well searching for a star in the distant circle of night sky above him.

I wish with all my heart that I lived in that world – and, if I did live in that world, I would feel such enormous gratitude for the brave souls who did everything they could to bring that wonderful world into being. I would admire their courage, to sacrifice immediate personal comfort for the sake of creating this wondrous world.

I feel that gratitude flowing down the steps of time from the future.

I feel the joy of those who live in a free world that we can only begin to create.

I feel them looking back in time to we poor struggling courageous souls, and thanking us for making their world so beautiful.

It is their gratitude that picks me up when I fall.

It is also the near-infinite sorrow that I would feel if I knew that such a world were to never come into being.

Imagining an eternity of human experience that is little better than what we have today – where good people cower like beaten dogs, while evil braggarts strut and rule – would make the story of our species an infinite tragedy – especially given our wondrous potential for truth and beauty.

Evil will fade from this world, if we act with integrity now.

Evil will fade from this world, but we must give up many seemingly-pleasant things in order to end it.

Surely we are glad that the early pioneers of science did not bow to the difficulties of their struggle, but persevered against torture and oppression, giving us a world of technology, medicine and wonder that they did not live to see.

We do not live in their world of medieval ignorance only because they were willing to imagine our world of science and knowledge, and work to create it.

The world we will create will be as wondrous to those who live in it as ours would be to the medieval mind.

I just wanted to remind you of the world we are in fact creating, because the beauty of the goal – even though we shall never live to see it – makes the difficulties of the journey all worthwhile.

Real-Time Relationships: The Theory

Let us now turn to the task of putting all that we have learned and discussed in the previous pages into action.

The Real-Time Relationship (RTR) is based on two core principles, designed to liberate both you and others in your communication with each other:

Thoughts precede emotions.
Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions.

Thoughts Precede Emotions

he first thing to understand about emotions is that they are not objective responses to the outside world, but rather objective responses to our internal premises – i.e. standardized responses to subjective stimuli.

To picture this in reality, think of our two good friends Bob and Doug sitting on a couch watching a hockey game, where Canada is playing the United States.

Bob the Canadian cheers every time Canada scores a goal; Doug the American cheers every time the United States scores a goal.

Here we have an example of an objective event occurring – a hockey puck bouncing into a net – which causes one man elation, and the other despair.

Clearly, these emotional responses cannot be directly caused by the movement of the puck, since the same action is producing opposite emotional results.

Now, earlier I defined “love” as our involuntary response to virtue – here I would like to append a qualifier, which is that love is our involuntary response to virtue if we are virtuous.

Bob is a fan of Team Canada, and so he cheers on that team – if we are a fan of Team Virtue, we cheer on that team. If we are a fan of Team-Not-So-Much-With-The-Virtue, we will cheer on the team with darker jerseys instead.

Now, emotions are distinct from sensations, insofar as sensations are neurobiological stimuli that occur independent of our thoughts.

“Happiness” is an emotion; physical pain is a sensation. While Bob and Doug might have opposite emotional reactions to the movement of a puck, they would not have opposite sensations if that puck happened to hit them in the face at high speed – both would feel blinding agony.

Similarly, what is called “runner’s high,” or the euphoria that results from the release of endorphins during strenuous exercise, is a sensation, as is the giddy joy that results from taking heroin.

Since physical sensations do not depend upon our thoughts, philosophy can do very little to aid us in controlling or managing them. No syllogism can eliminate a toothache – the alleviation of physical pain is a medical matter; philosophy is for the soul.

Thus we shall focus in this section on the thoughts that precede emotions, so that we can better understand how to change our thoughts – and thus change our emotions.

Emotions and Control

veryone who has absorbed even the basic principles of psychological self-awareness and self-knowledge understands that it is impossible to directly control other people. We can only control our own thoughts and our own behaviours – we cannot control other people’s thoughts, behaviours or emotions.

However, it is also important to understand that we cannot control our own emotions either.

If we stand at the edge of a cliff and hurl a stone with all our might into the ocean below, our only choice is whether to throw the stone or not – once the stone has left our hand, it is utterly out of our control.

In the same way, once we believe certain premises within our own minds, the emotions that will result from those premises are utterly out of our control.

Expectations: An Example

When I am working on a book, I plan to spend a certain number of hours a day writing. On many days, however, my plans get interrupted, because something else comes up which takes a higher priority. Perhaps there is a problem with the Freedomain Radio website, or a podcast I uploaded got cut off, or is mislabelled, or a listener wants to have a conversation about an immediate issue, or an employee calls with an urgent question and so on.

At times, I find myself getting irritated if a seemingly-endless stream of minor interruptions prevents me from getting to my “real” task. I set myself up to begin writing, get my coffee, reread what I’ve previously written, raise my hands to type – and then receive a message which prevents me from getting started.

If my thought is: I must write, then naturally every “interruption” moves me further back from achieving that goal. I then feel acute frustration, just as if I were trying to juggle and people were tossing squash balls at my head.

My temptation on these days is to externalize and trivialize the cause of these “interruptions.” What I basically say to myself is: “Jesus Christ! I’ve been trying to get down to writing for the past three hours, and everybody wants a piece of me, and I just can’t get down to what I need to get done! If I don’t get this book finished, then I won’t have enough money to advertise in two to three months, because book income is more steady than donations! And why is it that everybody picks today to need something from me – can’t they manage things themselves for once, just for today?”

And so on, and so on. We all know this mantra, which is: “I am the hard-done-by victim just trying to get something done, while every incompetent on the planet keeps interrupting me when they could take two seconds to figure out the answer to their question!”

When I notice myself sinking into this convenient little swamp of mythology, I try to reshape my thoughts – usually with great success – along the following lines:

“You are the victim? What nonsense! You left every instant messaging program on the planet open on your desktop. You checked your e-mail. You had a look at what was happening on the Freedomain Radio Board. You picked up the phone. Also, you are the one deciding what is a higher priority than writing – no one is ordering you to do that! If you decide to republish a podcast because it was cut off, that is your choice – you could very easily keep writing and simply republish the podcast later. And finally, is the fact that people need some sort of feedback from you, or are providing you with helpful information, really such an enormous problem? Would you be more content if you had five listeners, and no capacity to do this amazing job on a full-time basis? Then you would certainly have fewer interruptions, but your irritation at being interrupted would be replaced by despair about the planet as a whole!”

In other words, what I can do in these situations is simply to realign my expectations – which has everything to do with remembering that my core goal every day is to move this philosophical conversation forward in some manner – or, at least, prevent it from being moved backwards!

Thus on any given day, my purpose is not to write, or to respond to an e-mail, or to publish a podcast, but rather to do whatever it takes to move this philosophical conversation forward!

When I remember that, I no longer view interruptions as “interruptions.”

I remember that every day is a kind of dance between what you can plan for, and what you cannot. I remember that it is great to have specific goals, but they must all be measured relative to the overall goal.

Obviously, having a podcast out there that ends abruptly does not move this conversation forward, but rather irritates listeners, consumes bandwidth since they have to re-download, wastes time on the part of the listeners because they have to reload the podcast and find where it was cut off, then listen through to the end, and so on.

Since my goal is to bring as positive an experience as possible to this conversation – since heaven knows philosophy is already hard enough – clearly the immediate requirement to re-upload the podcast takes precedence over writing a few more pages in a book that will not be out for several months.

Also, it is important to remember that all days are part of a generalized “bell curve” of interruptions. Some days you can sail through with barely a ripple, while on other days, messages pile up seemingly without end. At some point, I will either explode with frustration, or surrender to the reality of where a particular day is on the bell curve, laugh about it, and put aside my writing until later.

I do find that, once I realign my expectations to take into account the empirical facts of what is happening – interruptions are piling up – then I find another interruption funny, rather than annoying.

Recognizing the “push and pull” of life – that we must make plans, but that our plans will be interrupted – takes a great deal of stress out of every day. Clearly, we cannot control interruptions – else they would scarcely be called interruptions – but we can recognize that interruptions are inevitable, and adjust our expectations accordingly.

Certainly, we will all face a rather final “interruption” called death – and so I try my best not to be too bothered by any interruption that is less significant!

Thoughts and Frustration

n the above example, it is clear that my thoughts (“interruptions are bad, because I must write!”) are clearly contradicting the reality of my situation.

If I believe both that writing is my highest priority, and also that dealing with interruptions is my highest priority, then of course I will end up feeling frustrated and paralyzed, just as I would if I truly felt that I had to go both north and south at the same time.

Practically, it is impossible for two actions that cannot be performed simultaneously to have exactly the same prioritization, because we have to choose between them.

When the rigidity of my thoughts does not keep up with the flexibility that new information requires, I am in a situation where an unstoppable force (“I must write!”) is hitting an immovable object (“I must deal with these interruptions!”).

When this occurs, I cannot rationally choose to raise the priority of dealing with interruptions without lowering the priority of writing.

If I attempt to maintain both priorities – despite the physical impossibility of this – then naturally I will become anxious and frustrated. If I know that it is going to take me an hour to get to a particular appointment, and I cannot find my keys, then I know that the time I spend looking for my keys is going to be added on to the time it takes me to get to the appointment. Thus, if I cannot find my keys, I must call to tell whoever I am meeting that I will be late.

If I try to maintain two opposing absolutes within my mind: “I must find my keys” and “I must be on time” then of course I will end up feeling frustrated and anxious.

The feelings follow the thoughts.

If I accept that “I must find my keys,” takes a higher priority over “I must be on time,” then I must give up the absolute of being on time. There is simply no other rational choice.

Choose Your Thoughts, Choose Your Feelings…

his is a relatively minor example of how our thoughts can directly influence – or create – our feelings.

Here is another.

Years ago, I had to fly to Paris, France for a business trip. Unfortunately, I could not find my passport. I looked and looked, and got progressively more anxious, tense and upset as the hours passed.

Once I realized the panic I was getting into, I took a deep breath, and said the following to myself:

“Either I will find my passport, and go to France, or I will not find my passport, and I will not go to France.”

This really helped me relax, and took the ground-shaking tension out of the situation.

As long as the absolute statement was: “I must go to France,” there really was no limit to the emotional escalation.

The moment that I gave myself a choice – or rather recognized the true options – my tension diminished considerably.

Either I was going to France, or I was not going to France – but I certainly did not “have to” go to France.

As the old saying goes, the only thing we gotta do is die.

Attempting to sustain two opposing thoughts – “doublethink,” in Orwellian terms – creates an enormous stress and tension within our minds, and tends to crank up our “fight or flight” mechanism to the boiling point.

The Impossibility of Control…

his is a continual problem in our relationships. In our own minds, we so often set up an absolute called: “My spouse must do X” – which we have absolutely no capacity to control or achieve!

This combination of an absolute requirement for a behavioural change in another person – along with a complete inability to effect that change – creates enormous tension, anxiety and hostility in our relationships.

When I was stressed out about finding my passport, it was because I had an absolute goal, but no direct control over my capacity to achieve that goal.

Flying to France required that I find my passport – but I had no direct control over my capacity to find my passport. I could do my best, of course, but in the end, either I would find it, or I would not. (I did find it, if you’re curious, and had a great trip!)

My Best Friend and My New Girlfriend

et us imagine that I am dating someone new, and I really want to introduce her to my best friend.

Obviously, I would prefer it if my best friend really liked my new girlfriend, since it would be far easier for me if I were able to spend stress-free time with both of them.

What options do I have to bring about this result?

I can certainly introduce my new girlfriend in the most positive light, and sing her praises, and show my friend that I am happier for having her in my life – which will all doubtless have some influence over the outcome – but I cannot control directly whether or not my friend likes my new girlfriend.

If I have in my mind an absolute: “He must like my new girlfriend!” then I will have a very stressful time of it when they meet.

(It is certainly true that my stress will lower the likelihood that my friend will like my new girlfriend, but we shall come back to that in a little while.)

If we understand how we can most rationally and honestly deal with this meeting, we can begin to approach the question of the Real-Time Relationship.

What is the most rational and honest statement that I can make to myself about this upcoming meeting between my best friend and my girlfriend?

Clearly, it is: “I would really like it if my friend liked my girlfriend, but I have no control over that outcome whatsoever.”

Can we all feel the sweet relief inherent in this statement?

Control versus Curiosity

hen I stopped frantically hunting for my passport, took a breath, and reminded myself of the reality of my situation, something very interesting occurred for me emotionally.

I actually wondered if I would end up going to France.

In other words, instead of being desperate to get to France, I became curious about whether or not I would end up going to France.

The opposite of control is – curiosity.

When we give up false control, we open ourselves up to true curiosity.

This is the transition from religion (false control) to science (true curiosity).

When I honestly say: “I would really like it if my friend liked my girlfriend, but I have no control over that outcome whatsoever,” the wonderful thing that happens is that I can now become curious about the outcome of the meeting.

Instead of saying: “I must control what will happen!” I can say: “I wonder what will happen?”

This is a very different state of mind.

This is rational empiricism at its finest. Instead of saying: “Sacrificing this goat will control the rains!” we can say: “I wonder why it rains?”

Abandoning our illusions of control opens us up to the magnificent wonder of curiosity.

In my mind, when I say to my friend: “You must like my new girlfriend,” I am treating him as an object to be manipulated for the sake of my desires, rather than an independent conscious being.

When I say: “I will control my friend,” the greatest lie is not that I think I can control him, but that I think I am treating him as a friend.

Using Others

Catastrophes

Why do I care so much about whether or not my friend likes my new girlfriend?

Clearly, I enjoy spending time with my friend – and I also enjoy spending time with my girlfriend. It certainly would be convenient for me if they also enjoyed spending time with each other, so I would not end up torn between a complicated and antipathetic social situation.

That is the story that I tell myself.

But that is not the truth.

In this book – as in every book I write, every article I publish, and every podcast I record – I will consistently and continually tell you that deep down, you always already know the truth about everything.

The truth is that good people always like other good people. Good people do not like bad people, and bad people do not like good people.

With bad people, it is more unstable. They will really “like” each other, then really dislike each other, and so on.

If my best friend is a good person, and my new girlfriend is also a good person, I will feel no more stress in introducing them to each other than I would in introducing cream to my coffee.

It is not that I dislike the social awkwardness that will result if they do not like each other. Oh no, it is far worse than that!

What I am really afraid of is discovering the true nature of my relationships – and thus of myself.

The Truth I Am Avoiding…

If my best friend dislikes my new girlfriend, it is either because my best friend is corrupt and my new girlfriend is virtuous – or vice versa – or because they are both corrupt, in ways that do not serve each other’s immediate needs, but rather remind each other of their respective corruption.

Thus if my new girlfriend and my best friend do not get along, that says something rather terrible about – who?

My new girlfriend? My best friend?

No, of course not.

About me.

This next part may sound very strange – but give me a paragraph or two, and perhaps it will make some sense. J

By introducing my new girlfriend to my best friend with the anxious hope that they will somehow “get along,” I am asking them to cover up the corruption that we are all enmeshed in.

I am asking everyone to pretend that we are all good – and there is only one reason why I would do that, or why they would agree to participate in such a corrupt fraud.

Because we are not good.

We will do almost anything to avoid that knowledge – not because we fear our own corruption, but because we desire to continue our own corruption.

If my best friend is corrupt and my new girlfriend is not corrupt, then she will judge – not my best friend, but rather me.

If my best friend is not corrupt, but my new girlfriend is, then they will dislike each other, of course – but some rather grim fallout will result from their meeting.

If I introduce a false, insecure and manipulative girlfriend to my best friend, obviously I am doing so in the hopes that they will “get along.”

If my best friend is a good man, then he will be highly insulted by this, and will say:

“Why would you introduce this woman to me and express a desire that we ‘get along’? Are you not aware that she is false and manipulative? Are you not aware that she is vain and shallow? Are you not aware that she talked about herself for over an hour, not asking me a single question? Are you not aware that she told me everything about her childhood – which was not pleasant – on our very first meeting? Do you not see that she lacks any rational sense of boundaries? Do you not see how self-involved and narcissistic she is?”

If I reply that I noticed none of these things, then my friend is going to be even more insulted, and say:

“But you value me as your best friend, and I exhibit none of these traits – in fact, I would consider it personally dishonourable to act in such a manner! I assumed that you valued my integrity, consideration, courage and so on because you could tell them apart from their respective opposites. If you tell me that I am the best singer in the world, and then it turns out that you are completely deaf, then clearly I cannot take your praise seriously at all – in fact, your former ‘praise’ of me would be revealed as false and manipulative, since you have no ability whatsoever to judge the quality of my singing! Thus if you cannot tell the difference between this woman and myself, then clearly you have no right to call me your ‘best friend,’ but have rather used that term to manipulate me.”

In response, I might protest that I did notice these troublesome habits in this woman, but it slipped my mind for a moment.

“Very well,” my friend will reply, “now I am even more insulted, because you introduced this woman to me in the hopes that I would like her! You recognize that she is shallow, false and manipulative; you also recognize that I am virtuous, honest and direct, and yet you genuinely and honestly believed that I would like her? Yet you claim that I am your best friend – and that you love me – because of my virtues. How is it, then, that you expect me to like this woman because of her vices? Why are we subjected to such opposite standards? No, it cannot be possible that you expected me to like her – the best that you could have hoped for was that I would pretend to like her – for your benefit, and hers of course. In other words, you wanted me to sacrifice my integrity for the sake of your shallow lusts!”

Now, when faced with such a stern and inescapable accusation, what would my response be?

I could get mad at my friend – thus confirming his diagnosis and effectively ending the friendship – or I could apologize profusely, promise to get help with my dangerous and slippery “dark side,” and immediately break it off with this corrupt woman.

If I were capable of this kind of integrity, though, I would never have tried to manipulate my virtuous friend into pretending to “like” my new girlfriend in the first place.

In fact, we can very reasonably go one step further and say that since I was the kind of man who had no problem whatsoever with manipulating a virtuous friend for my own selfish and corrupt ends, there is no possibility whatsoever that I would have a virtuous friend to begin with!

And that, my friends, is the knowledge that I am striving desperately to avoid – not my fear that my friends are immoral, but my desire to keep my immoral friends.

The moment that our own corruption becomes genuinely clear to us, we are immediately propelled into wrenching change.

We avoid the truth about our own corruption because we prefer our own corruption to the dreadful alternative…

To the endless attacks from our fellow slaves.

The alcoholic keeps drinking because he is enmeshed in a social network of mutual destruction.

Deep down, the alcoholic is not afraid of sobriety; he is afraid of being attacked by his fellow alcoholics and enablers.

Introducing Myself to Myself…

Thus, when I attempt to control the results of the first meeting between my best friend and my new girlfriend, I am really attempting to control my own anxiety by manipulating others.

This much we understand – but let us go one step further.

Why do I feel anxiety in the first place?

Well, I feel anxiety because I know the truth, and I am rejecting the truth.

In my real life, I do not feel anxiety when my wife comes home, because I am always overjoyed to see her. I rush down the stairs into her arms, and smother her with kisses.

I do not feel anxiety when I receive an e-mail from a trusted friend.

I do feel anxiety whenever I receive an e-mail from an embittered enemy – for the simple reason that these e-mails often contain unpleasant attacks which upset me.

In other words, I feel anxiety when I instinctively feel the signs of an impending attack.

Anxiety is a form of beneficial alertness, essential for survival throughout the history of our species. Anxiety is the crack of a stick in a thick bush on a dark night. Anxiety alerts us to impending danger.

Anxiety is part of our “fight or flight” neurological mechanism, designed to make the presence of danger uncomfortable – and so aid us in avoiding or escaping it.

Anxiety and Control

magine that you are the first man who ever tried to tame a horse.

You approach a horse in the wilds with great trepidation – and great desire. You know that if you can tame this beast, you can ride it and harness it to a plough. You overcome your fear by keeping your eye on the prize.

Imagine that you do catch this horse and tame it, at least to some degree. After harnessing the power of the animal, you begin to change your farming practices – you buy more land, hire more farmhands, invest in heavier ploughs, and fall deeply into debt.

Taming the horse, in other words, causes you to make decisions that depend on the horse remaining tame.

As the months pass, however, you begin to notice that the horse does not seem to appreciate being controlled. Initially, it tries to escape, but you catch it every time and bring it back. After a while, it no longer tries to escape – except perhaps on occasion – but it continually struggles to cast off its harness, throw its riders, veer to the left or right, and sometimes refuses to eat.

Here, you become stuck in a truly impossible situation.

If you had never seen the horse – or tried to tame it – you would never have changed all of your farming habits based on your expectation of being able to harness the horse’s power.

If, even months after being “domesticated,” the horse had simply bolted off and vanished into the wilderness, you would have shrugged your shoulders, sold your excess land, fired your extra workers, and resumed your former way of farming.

However, since the horse is at times obedient, and at times recalcitrant, you become truly stuck. Since you have invested so much time, energy and resources on the assumption that the horse can be controlled, you cannot now stomach the idea of simply turning the horse loose and resuming your former life.

The Subtle Tyranny of Inconsistency

As the weeks and months pass, the horse’s inconsistent obedience continues to drain more and more of your time and resources. On any given day, you can never be quite sure that the horse is going to do what you need it to do. In the morning, the horse pulls the plough beautifully – in the afternoon, it kicks a worker and cannot be restrained.

As you sink even more time and energy into trying to control the horse, your stress and anxiety continue to escalate.

After a few months, you begin to feel truly trapped – by this time, you have invested too much to turn the horse loose, but as every day goes by, it becomes more and more wasteful and frustrating to use the horse at all. (This is also known as the “waiting for the bus” syndrome – when you have waited an hour for a bus, you are far less likely to walk. We have all been there with computers as well!)

When you initially started off, you wanted to control the horse – as time goes by, however, it becomes more and more apparent that the horse is in fact controlling you.

You initially tried to tame the horse in order to reduce your workload – however, it becomes increasingly clear that having the horse around makes your job harder and more stressful.

The Vengeance of the Slave

If we recast the “horse story” above in terms of human slavery, a very similar pattern emerges.

If the slave cannot escape, and is beaten if he does not work hard, then his vengeance will always take on a more subtle form.

The slave will perform his work slightly more slowly – not enough to be punished, but enough to irritate his master.

The slave will pretend to be less intelligent than he really is, so that when he loses or breaks things, he will be more likely to escape punishment, since he is pretending in effect to be a child.

As mentioned above, the slave will also do what he can to promote any negative habits his master may have. If his master likes to drink, the slave will always be on hand to refill his cup. If his master has a tendency towards jealousy, the slave will innocently “mention” that he saw his master’s wife chatting with another man.

If the slave is particularly cunning, he will also do everything that he can to inflate his master’s ego. He will sing his master’s praises, claim joy in “knowing his place,” thank the master for everything he does, and remain fanatically “loyal.”

This hyperinflation of the master’s ego inevitably creates pettiness, vanity, hyper-irritability, and unbearable pomposity.

In other words, the slave will always turn his master into an unhappy man – who is constantly annoyed, who cannot experience love, and who engenders no respect from those around him – particularly his children. (One of the worst aspects of being a slave-owner is that it turns you into a terrible and abusive father.)

As a result of the slave’s passive-aggressive manipulations, the master becomes prone to violence – verbal and physical – self-abusive habits, crippling self-blindness, and sinks into a bottomless pit of discontent and misery.

This is the vengeance of the slave.

All slaves are Iago.

And, for the most part, all children are slaves.

As you were.

The Dangers of Vengeance

As we discussed above in the parable of the boxer, the great danger for the slave is his capacity to become addicted to the dark “satisfactions” of passive-aggressive vengeance.

By enslaving his master, the slave gains a sense of control – and also re-creates in his master his own experience of enslavement.

It is a subtle cry of hatred – and plea for empathy.

The horse above that cannot be free ends up enslaving its master.

A slave can only hope for freedom by making owning slaves unbearable for his master.

Not only might the slave’s endless passive-aggressive noncompliance and provocation provoke suicide on the part of his master – but his master’s miserable existence might also serve as a warning for others who might wish to own slaves.

In other words, the horse that makes its “owner” miserable is performing an enormous service to the freedom of other horses, since anyone else who is thinking of enslaving a horse will look at the stress experienced by existing horse owners and do pretty much anything to avoid that fate – thus leaving other horses free to roam.

However, as mentioned above, the greatest danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to the sense of control that comes from manipulating his master.

In other words, the great danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to his slavery.

If a slave begins to believe his own master-destroying propaganda, then in the absence of masters, he will create them.

The Slavery of Childhood

ost of us are raised as slaves. Our opinions are rarely sought, rules are rarely explained – and moral rules never are – we are shipped off to schools where we are treated disrespectfully; our subservience is bought with rewards, and our independence is punished with detentions. Scepticism and curiosity are scorned and belittled, while empty abilities like throwing balls, learning dates, sitting still and “being pretty” are praised and elevated.

Lies about our history become cages for our futures. Lies about our own intelligence and originality lead us to the petty enslavement of “good citizenship” – and horrifying fairy tales about life in the absence of coercive or religious control scare us back into our slave pens the moment we even think of glancing outside to the green and beautiful hills beyond our bars.

Collective punishments turn us against each other; the “kibbles and whips” of the classroom reward us for laughing at each other to gain the favor of the teacher; terrifying and brutal “morality” is inflicted upon us. We are punished for not treating those in authority with “respect” (do they treat us with respect?) – and we are bred for a life of subservience, fear, productivity and dependence as surely as fattened calves are bred for veal.

Where in the past we were not taught to fear the priests, but rather the imaginary devils the priests warned us of, now we are not taught to fear our politicians, who can debase our currency, throw us in prison and send us to war – but rather we are taught to fear each other. We are taught to imagine that the real predators in this world are not those who control prison cells, national debts and nuclear weapons, but rather our fellow citizens, who in the absence of brutal control would surely tear us apart!

The entire purpose of state education is to make sure that we never truly “leave” our childhoods: that we spend our lives trembling in fear of imaginary predators, begging for “protection” from those who threaten us with the most harm.

As sure as sunrise, we will grow and mature, leave the control of our parents, and strive to make our way in the world.

As children, we are slaves who will inevitably be “set free.”

How, then, can we remain enslaved?

Why through false virtue, of course.

But you’ll have to read my book “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion” for that! J

Holding Our Own Chains…

Because our lives are so controlled by our political, familial and religious masters, we always and inevitably attempt to regain a sense of control by controlling each other.

We cannot control our politicians; we cannot control the church; we cannot control our parents – and we are bullied and controlled by all these people – and so we turn in panic and fear to controlling each other, which makes the institutional control of all of us both possible and profitable.

To return to the incident outlined earlier, wherein I try to make my best friend like my new girlfriend, it is clear that I am really attempting to control my own anxiety – my knowledge of my own corruption and the corruption of those around me – rather than either my friend or my girlfriend.

What will the likely result of my “control” be?

Well, if my girlfriend says something unpleasant or awkward, I will feel great anxiety, and flash her look of anger or “concern.” If my best friend sighs or rolls his eyes in response to something my new girlfriend says, then I will rush in to “explain” what she “really” meant.

Basically, I will sprint back and forth throughout the conversation, trying to eliminate or explain away any symptoms of disapproval or negativity.

What will the experience of my friend and girlfriend be?

Will they feel free? Will they feel that they can express themselves openly?

Of course not.

They will feel a rising irritation towards me – since no one likes to be manipulated and controlled for the sake of someone else’s anxiety.

My girlfriend will look at my frantic efforts to “explain” her weird or awkward statements as insulting to her. My friend will see my actions as guilty and panic-stricken – and a foolish attempt to make him “respect” a woman that I clearly do not respect.

My girlfriend will also see that I am terribly and painfully vulnerable to any negative opinion that my “best friend” might have of her.

Deep down, she very well understands that this is because I share that negative opinion.

In other words, I am only afraid of having my bag searched in a store if I have actually stolen something. In the same way, I am only afraid of a negative opinion of my girlfriend if at some level I share that opinion.

Seeing me strive to control my friend’s perception of her, she also clearly understands that I am very willing to sacrifice her own sense of self-esteem and social competency if someone else disapproves of what she is doing.

It becomes blindingly clear that I will sacrifice her happiness – in other words, my good opinion of her – on the off chance that someone else might react negatively to her.

In other words, I will side with others against her.

Does this make her feel treasured? Does this make her respect my loyalty? Does this help her respect my integrity?

Of course not.

By elevating the power that my friend has in this situation, I automatically devalue my girlfriend – and thus myself.

However, the only reason that I wish to control the power that my friend has is because I have given him that power in the first place.

This is what I mean when I say that all manipulation is self-manipulation.

Trying to control my friend’s reaction to my girlfriend is as deranged as giving a gun to a madman, and then trying to talk him into giving me the gun back.

Power and Liberty

n any intimate relationship, we inevitably surrender power to others.

When you fall in love, you hand your heart to your lover on a platter.

Since love, as discussed earlier, involves integrity, and thus reduces insecurity, to refuse to be vulnerable with a lover is to openly state that you do not love her.

Thus there is no possibility that love does not involve a surrender of power.

When we try to control those who have power over us, we are clearly saying that we do not trust them to exercise that power benevolently.

It is a basic fact of life that virtuous people will rarely submit to the manipulations of others. Virtuous people know that they use their power over others benevolently – and thus experience it as insulting when other people try to control them.

A surgeon finds it equally insulting if someone attempts to wrestle his knife away from him, as if he were a common criminal.

The reality of trust and vulnerability is that if you do not trust someone, you should not be vulnerable towards her.

The solution to this, of course, is not to refrain from being vulnerable – otherwise how would you know who is trustworthy? – or to attempt to control those who exploit your vulnerability.

Remaining Vulnerable

The answer is to remain vulnerable to those around you, and systematically get rid of those who abuse your trust.

This is what I mean by the value of curiosity.

Most people take the approach that: others must treat me well, and if they do not treat me well, I am allowed to punish them.

This is pure nonsense, and a highly dangerous approach to relationships.

The simple fact of the matter is that no one has to treat you well.

We certainly prefer to be treated well – but that does not mean that we have a right to be treated well.

I prefer not to get colds – that does not mean I have a right to not get colds.

Controlling and insecure people always say: This person had better treat me well!

Curious and confident people always ask: I wonder if this person will treat me well?

In the same way, controlling and insecure people say: “There must be a God!” – while curious and competent people ask: “I wonder if there is a God?”

And… controlling and insecure people say: “There must be a government!” – while curious and competent people ask: “I wonder if there must be a government?”

Controlling and insecure people, if they receive bad service at a restaurant, feel abused and insulted, complain to everyone they know, launch lawsuits, and perform all other sorts of silly and enslaving actions.

Curious and confident people, if they receive bad service at a restaurant, simply pay their bill, leave, and never come back.

Now, if they have been coming to the same restaurant for many years and have always received excellent service, they will let the actions of one rude waiter slide. If they continue to receive bad service, they will speak to the waiter, and then to the manager, in order to try to help or save the relationship.

However, if their expressions of concern are met with indifference or contempt, then they simply stop returning to that restaurant.

They do not need to fight, they do not need to yell, they do not need to complain endlessly and they do not need to get engaged in all sorts of drama and nonsense, because they respect their own ability and right to choose their relationships voluntarily.

If they feel that they can only ever eat at that one restaurant – and can get food nowhere else – then of course they will get hysterical and aggressive, because they will be trapped in a situation of constant frustration and bad service!

This is, of course, our situation with regards to our government. Since we cannot choose how it interacts with us – or choose to avoid interacting with it – we remain in a constant state of frustration and hysterical or greedy control.

I would submit, though, that all of our relationships that are non-coercive in nature are subject to the same possibilities of choice.

Power and Family

uality as a concept, as a measure, can only exist as a result of choice.

Where we have no options, there can be no quality. We know that this is true with regards to public schools, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the IRS, the Postal Service, and all other forms of coercive and controlled “interactions.”

We generally fail to remember, however, that when we were very young, we did not have any choice whatsoever.

We do not choose our parents, our schools, our siblings, our extended family, or our neighbourhood.

We also do not choose our country or our religion, but rather these things are inflicted on us by circumstances and propaganda.

There does come a time, however, when we do slowly begin to gain the capacity to choose with regards to our family.

After puberty and throughout our teenage years, we begin to experience a growing sense of choice. What we were born into no longer dominates us through natural biology or through our physical dependence upon our parents and utter subjugation to their whims and preferences.

Unfortunately, families – and society as a whole – inflict an enormous amount of propaganda upon us about the innate “value” of family and the endless virtue of “loving” your family.

However, as we can immediately see, propaganda about the value of something is scarcely required if that thing does in fact have value. Brad Pitt or George Clooney would never benefit from a system of “arranged” (i.e. enforced) marriage, since they have their pick of women anyway.

No, it is the man that no reasonable woman would want to marry who devoutly wishes to have marriage forced upon women.

Institutionalized coercion is all about attacking someone for noncompliance with an “ethical” absolute.

The IRS does not say: “Pay your taxes, or we will shoot you!” No, it is always presented as a virtuous obligation, insofar as you consume government services, love your country, care for the poor, the sick, the old, and so on. In other words, taxes are presented as payment for a voluntary interaction – like the bill that arrives with the plasma television – and thus refraining from paying your bill is portrayed as “dishonourable.” Don’t “cheat” on your taxes; pay your “fair share.”

In the same way, parents present themselves as devoted and loving servants of your well-being as a child and thus “demand” – whether actively or passively – your love and obedience as an adult.

Yet you no more “choose” to consume government services such as public education, roads, water and electricity than you “chose” to be born into your family.

Neither of these situations are voluntary or contractual – and thus by definition cannot contain any virtue or quality in and of themselves.

This does not mean that it is logically impossible to love your parents. They may have been virtuous, considerate, solicitous, kind and firm – and thus naturally you will love them.

However, it is essential to understand that if this is the case, you do not love your parents – you love the virtue of your parents.

What you love is not the category “parents,” but rather the action “virtue.”

“Virtue” is a choice, and thus involves quality – “parent” is not a choice – at least from the standpoint of the child – and thus in no way involves quality, but rather is a rejection of quality.

Choice and Quality

In a stateless society, we will doubtless need roads, and so we will enter into contracts with those who provide our roads, based on our evaluation of their efficiency, price and competence. It is these criteria of “evaluation” that drives the criterion – and thus the possibility – of quality.

Those who do not bring quality to the table never want the possibility of voluntary evaluation to exist.

In this way, we know that those parents who demand respect and love because they are parents are morally corrupt.

When your government demands “payment” at the point of a gun, it is because it is not providing value, in the same way that a mugger does not provide value, and so must extract your money through force.

Family and History

When we interact with our families – particularly as adult children – there is an essential aspect of curiosity that we constantly strive to avoid.

The unhappy and insecure man says: “She must treat me well!”

The happy and confident man says: “I wonder if she will treat me well?”

The adult child, with regards to his parents, knows the answer already – in his very bones.

The simple question that the adult child must ask is: “Did they treat me well?”

If this question seems too hard to answer, because of a blankness in your history, or an excess of propaganda from your family, then you can answer it even more simply.

“When I see their phone number on my call display, how do I feel?”

There is nothing that we need to be taught about how our parents treated us when we were children. There is no possibility of knowledge about another human being that you do not already possess in relation to your parents (and your siblings, of course, but we shall focus on your parents for the moment).

It is a fundamental fact of human physiology that our deepest emotions are immune to propaganda, just as physical pain is immune to propaganda.

You can be told over and over again as a child that jamming a knitting needle through your hand will not hurt, but rather will feel wonderful. You may even believe this in your conscious mind, but your hand knows better. When you do stick that knitting needle through your hand, no amount of propaganda or mythology can prevent the agony you will experience.

This is why we use anaesthetic in surgery, not storytelling.

This is why Novocain is a drug, not a mythology.

Most of our emotions result from our thoughts – but our deepest and truest feelings accumulate from years of experience. These feelings cannot be eradicated or changed, any more than our experience can be eradicated or changed. Learning another language as an adult is a conscious decision – learning language as a toddler is an unconscious accumulation of experience and innate ability.

These deepest emotions occur in the body – and the body is immune to propaganda. This is why control and rejection of the body is so essential to all exploitive power structures – think of the hostility that most religions have towards the flesh.

Since our deepest emotions cannot be eradicated through propaganda, propaganda must instead focus on the creation and maintenance of psychological defences.

Think of what happens when your phone rings, you look at the call display, and you see:

YOUR PARENTS!

What probably happens is that you experience an initial sinking sensation, followed by a strong desire to avoid picking up the phone. You roll your eyes, check your watch, figure out how much time you can waste talking to them, and generally feel the exact opposite of enthusiasm.

Then, of course, you feel guilt, and chastise yourself for your ingratitude and lack of consideration for their feelings.

They did so much for me, they ask for so little, they’re always concerned about me, it costs me so little to make them happy, etc. etc.

The picture of your mother’s long-suffering face will rise in your mind, and you imagine her sadness as she slowly puts down the phone, feeling rejected. You imagine your father’s irritation when your mother complains that, “She never seems to pick up the phone any more when I call – I’m sure she’s just busy, but…”

You feel – projected into the future – a growing unease about the ever-increasing emotional cost you will incur if you continue to avoid their calls. “Might as well get it over with now,” you say to yourself, reaching for the receiver – and then, to avoid the guilt of that feeling, you pump some enthusiastic shine into your voice as you answer.

After the initial exchange of pleasantries, you feel a rising tension and boredom, because you have nothing to say to your mother. She talks about this or that, asks you some questions which only elicit monosyllabic responses from you…

Then, the awkward silence descends…

You begin to tell a story; she murmurs some noncommittal responses. She begins telling a story about someone that you barely know, and you attempt to show interest. She asks you questions which are annoying, because they’re manipulative (“Have you met anyone nice recently?”) or unanswerable (“What will you buy your nephew for his baptism?”).

You realize how little of your life you can actually share with your mother, and for the millionth time you wonder how someone could have become so old and remained so uninteresting. You also wonder what pleasure she could possibly derive from these forced and empty interactions.

She must be taking some pleasure in calling you – otherwise why would she? – but you can’t imagine what that pleasure could possibly be.

You sigh, listening to her tinny voice, and wonder when the last time was that you had a problem in your life, and really wanted to call your mother for advice.

Never, comes back the immediate answer…

Then, your mother says she is going to put your father on the phone, and you scrabble to find an excuse that will not offend him too much – and then you remember that you have used up all your excuses over the last month or two, and that if you try to make up another one, he surely will get offended. And so you swallow, roll your eyes, and say: “Hi, Dad!”

And you know, deep in your bones, that this crushingly dull and awkward ritual will be repeated many more hundreds of times in your lifetime – and that the outcome will be exactly the same each time.

After you are finally able to get off the phone, you feel empty and a little depressed – but also relieved, because you know that you have bought a certain amount of guilt-free time away from your parents.

Then, you remember that Christmas is coming up, and your depression yawns to swallow you whole…

The Empiricism of Emotions

s we can see from the above example, it is clear that the debate you are really having is not with your parents, but with your own emotions.

Everything that you ever need to know about any of your relationships is available to you in that split second of emotional authenticity that occurs when the phone rings, and you look at the call display.

Whatever your emotions tell you in that split second before your defences can react is the natural and basic truth about that relationship.

And – believe it or not – your emotions are in fact trying to help you by telling you the truth about your relationships!

The Propaganda of Regret

(I will use the word “emotions” in this section to describe our deepest feelings that accumulate from experience, rather than the more conscious emotions described in the previous section.)

Your emotions are in fact telling you that you will not live forever, that there are no unchosen positive obligations, that the hours, days, weeks, months and years that you waste in negative, dull, abusive or unproductive relationships are never “refunded” to you – and that in particular, with your family, the endless “propaganda of regret” is nothing more than a corrupt and exploitive lie – a secular “hell” that was invented to enslave you.

When we are taught to fight ourselves, we always end up enslaved. The priest who hates and fears his own sexual impulses remains utterly enslaved. The citizen who hates and fears his own desire for freedom remains utterly enslaved. The child who hates and fears his own dislike of his parents remains utterly enslaved.

Emotions are the empiricism of values – defences are the religion of subjugation.

To become authentic – to become who you truly are – requires slowing down.

When the phone rings, and you see the call display, invoking guilt-ridden or self-recriminatory defences is the most fundamental self-rejection that you are capable of.

The insecure and enslaved man says: “I must not feel this way!”

The man who has at least a chance for freedom asks: “I wonder why I feel this way?”

In religious terms, the enslaved man says: “I must not doubt there is a God!”

The man who can be free asks: “I wonder why I feel there is no God?”

The Facts of Your Feelings

All I am talking about – like any competent empiricist – is working with the facts.

The facts of your feelings.

Working with the facts of your feelings does not mean treating them as epistemological absolutes. Emotions do not equal knowledge any more than our senses equal the scientific method.

Propaganda will always seek to inflict negative moral judgments on your authentic emotional responses.

Remember, earlier in this book, we talked about how false answers are the exact opposite of true curiosity – and so knowledge.

When faced with the reality of our feelings: “I do not want to talk to my parents” – it is an utterly false answer to “explain” those feelings away by saying: “Because I am a bad person.” It makes about as much sense as saying, “I want to masturbate because I am tempted by the devil.” It is a mad fiction designed to set you at war against yourself and so have you remain enslaved to those who define such false “morality.”

In any science – in any rational philosophy – the real, honest, productive and true response to any new information is curiosity.

If you stand at the port in Lisbon in the 15^th century, watching the Santa Maria sailing off across the Atlantic Ocean, and see the hull slowly disappear “into” the ocean – and then the lower masts, and then the “crow’s nest” – you can either make up an “explanation” – “OMG Poseidon, like, totally ate that ship!” - or you can admit a lack of knowledge, and remain curious.

“I wonder what happened to the ship?”

Making up an answer will keep you mired in a stupid, exploitive and destructive state of piggish ignorance.

Retaining your curiosity may lead you to the truth: that the world is round.

Your eyes provide you an objective experience of what is happening – that the ship appears to be slowly “descending” into the water.

Based on this empirical information – what do you do? Do you make up an answer, or do you explore the question?

When the phone rings and you look at the call display, your emotions provide you clear and empirical information about your relationships.

Based on this empirical information – what do you do? Do you make up an answer (“I am a selfish child!”) or do you explore the question (“I wonder why I dislike it when my parents call…”)?

Propaganda and Motivation

henever we are conflicted, it is almost always because we have a genuine desire that does not serve the needs of others – and we have been trained to believe that our genuine desires are always “wrong.”

Our genuine desire – “I do not want to talk to my parents” – does not serve the needs of our parents.

In other words, we must have a desire to satisfy the needs of our parents – by attacking our own genuine desire as “wrong.”

This creates a truly terrible contradiction within us. Our genuine desires are “wrong” – but our artificial “desires” (to please our parents) are “right.” Thus our desires are both “right” and “wrong” simultaneously.

Are we supposed to value our desires? Are we supposed to reject them? Who knows? All that is known is that we can waste our entire lives attempting to unravel these mad contradictions.

Power Versus Pleasure

If you do not want to talk to me, but I want to talk to you, then I have two basic options.

I can either ask you openly and with curiosity why you do not want to talk to me – with the goal of making our relationship more positive, enjoyable and productive for you – or, I can attack you for not wanting to talk to me.

In other words, I can either be the “free market,” or I can be the government.

If I genuinely want to create real value for you in our relationship, ask you how our relationship can better serve your needs, remain open to self-correction and improvement, and thank you for bringing up any criticisms of me – and in addition make genuine and successful efforts to change – then clearly I am a valuable person to have around.

In other words, if I care about your feelings, then we do genuinely have a relationship, and so it can be improved.

On the other hand, if I do not care about your feelings, but rather only care about managing my own anxieties, then it would be very unlikely that you would ever want to talk to me in the first place, since no one really enjoys being a Band-Aid for rampant narcissism.

If I am only really bothered by my own feelings of being rejected, rather than your feelings of dissatisfaction, then it is all about me, of course.

If, then, I keep calling you and keep getting your answering machine, I am going to feel a steady escalation of anxiety, because you are clearly communicating your lack of desire to talk to me.

You are implicitly communicating to me your dissatisfaction with your side of our relationship. You are openly “saying” to me: “I am not taking pleasure in your company.”

If I believe – as most people do – that you “owe” me a relationship – or even just an explanation – then any hesitancy, reticence or avoidance on your part will make me angry, just as if you were refusing to repay a legitimate debt.

You cannot reasonably call up your bank manager and say that you are feeling “resentment” towards the mortgage and so you are just not going to pay it – but that you are also going to keep the house.

Your parents very likely have the same approach to you – they have given you “the house” (life and your childhood), and now you owe them the “mortgage payments” of time, love and resources until the day they die.

Since you cannot give back “the house,” avoiding your parents is the same as stealing from them – and will be met with the same passive or aggressive hostility that anyone would express if you refused to repay a legitimate debt.

I myself experience this from time to time with listeners who criticize me on various grounds. I offer to have a conversation with them over the Internet – or by phone, if they want – and yet they often come up with endless streams of excuses as to why this cannot happen. Their parents will hear, they don’t have a microphone, they don’t have time, their cell phone is too expensive, etc.

I do smile when I hear all of this nonsense, and imagine whether they would have the same set of excuses if returning a phone call were to net them $1 million, or whether if a cute girl or guy wanted their number, they would say the same things.

Of course not! J

I do not get particularly angry with these people, because they certainly do not “owe” me a phone call. I would prefer it if they told me the truth – but of course they do not “owe” me the truth either!

I simply take note of their behaviour and come to my conclusion, which is that I will not bother talking to them if they do not want to talk to me.

Follow the Benefit…

hen you are conflicted, your genuine emotional response is at war with the propaganda that has been inflicted upon you for the benefit of others.

But – how can you tell your genuine feelings from your propagandized defenses?

Ah, that’s easy!

The first thing that you feel is your always genuine emotion – the reaction is always the propaganda.

In the example above, when the phone rings, you experience a sinking sensation, followed by a dull litany of self-recrimination.

The sinking sensation is your genuine emotion – the negative self-judgment that follows is the propaganda.

Secondly, all you have to do is play the game called “Follow the Benefit.”

Whenever forensic accountants are examining a fraud or embezzlement, they always “follow the money.”

In the same way, when you are attempting to untangle your healthy flesh from your scar tissue – your true feelings from your propaganda – all you need to do is “Follow the Benefit.”

If your initial emotion is that you do not want to talk to your parents, then clearly you will benefit from not picking up the phone.

However, when we begin to understand this process, it becomes clear that the phone call has actually begun long before we pick up the receiver.

Since we do not want to pick up the phone, it must be someone else who wants us to pick it up, if we end up answering the call.

In this example, clearly there are only two parties in the interaction. Since you will not benefit from picking up the phone – since you don’t want to – clearly, the guilt and negative self-talk that you experience on the heels of your initial desire to avoid your mother – must come from your mother.

Follow the benefit…

In the same way, if you ever dream of a life free from income tax, the guilt and negative self-talk that you experience on the heels of your desire for freedom clearly does not benefit you – thus it must benefit others. (For a hint, glance at any ballot.)

Win/lose. You win, your mother loses. Your mother wins, you lose.

In positive and mature relationships – in other words, in voluntary relationships – win/lose interactions are utterly unsustainable.

In relationships that are either objectively or subjectively involuntary (state, religion and family), win/lose interactions are the norm.

Culture, Propaganda and Exploitation

ropaganda – culture, as we understand it – is entirely designed to create and sustain win/lose interactions.

Honesty is the most essential virtue, because without lies exploitation is impossible.

Slaves, as we have discussed, express their hostility to their masters through an excess of grudging obedience.

In the same way, you will answer the phone when your parents call, but you will do a bad job of even pretending to enjoy the conversation.

This is how you attempt to “explain” your enslavement to them.

This, however, keeps you in chains.

And now we will talk about how to become free.

Becoming Free:

Real-Time Relationships In Action

The Alternative to Grudging Compliance…

f you are a slave and you want to become free, the solution is actually quite simple – assuming that you are not subject to direct coercion.

If you are a slave and you want to become free, the solution is not to try and talk your owners into setting you free.

If you are a slave and you want to become free, the solution is not to try and talk your fellow slaves into joining your rebellion.

If you are a slave and you want to become free, the solution is very simple.

Very terrifying, but very simple.

If you are a slave, and you want to become free, the solution is simply this:

Stop acting like a slave!

What does this look like?

Slaves are not allowed to tell the truth. Slaves are not allowed to offend their masters. Slaves are not allowed to express preferences. Slaves must always manage their masters. Slaves must always be on guard. Slaves must always shy away from punishment.

Slaves must always fear their fellow slaves.

Slaves are not allowed to feel curiosity.

Slaves are not allowed to feel genuine emotion.

Slaves can only react to propaganda.

So if you don’t want to be a slave, stop acting like a slave.

This is the core of the Real-Time Relationship (RTR).

The Real-Time Relationship (RTR)

The reason that I call it the RTR is because it is all about telling other people in the moment how you feel.

Slaves are not allowed to tell the truth.

So – you start off by telling the truth.

If you don’t want to be a slave, when the dreaded name lights up the call display, you pick up the phone and say to your mother:

“Hi, mom. Do you know – the most interesting thing just happened – your name showed up on my call display and I felt a sinking sensation in my stomach, a kind of dread, or nervousness, and a desire to avoid picking up the phone.”

And then, you say nothing.

Nothing at all.

You must be free to say what you truly think and feel – and your mother must be free to respond as she sees fit.

Just as it is essential for your mother to know your true thoughts and feelings, so it is essential that you know your mother’s genuine response to your true thoughts and feelings.

Picture speaking this honestly to your mother – picture being that honest.

What does that make you feel?

Dread? Fear? Terror?

Hopelessness? Despair?

Like walking off a cliff?

That is your enslavement weeping.

That is your propaganda shrieking.

That is your mother speaking.

But if you want to stop being a slave, stop acting like a slave.

You feel terror – but really, what are you so afraid of?

Can your mother beat you now? Does she have total control over you, now that you are an adult?

Can she lock you in your room and deny you dinner?

Of course not.

So – I ask you again: what are you so afraid of?

The Core of Fear

I can tell you, if you like – but you already know the answer of course.

You are afraid of being revealed as a slave – not to your mother, who already knows – but to yourself.

The worst and most terrifying aspect of slavery is that you have to pretend that you are not a slave.

When you look at the history of genuine slavery, it was never justified in terms of force, but rather in terms of Christian benevolence, the mental retardation of the slaves, the “white man’s burden,” the need to save the souls of the savages and so on.

In other words, the people called “slaves” were not really slaves, any more than a baby is a “slave.”

The mythology went something like this:

These “slaves” are only owned because they lack the capacity for self-ownership. They are controlled for the same reason that a child wandering into traffic must be controlled. These savage fools are terrible dangers to themselves – they cannot handle freedom. If given their liberty, they would act out a terrible orgy of self-destruction, sexual abandon and brute violence.

And the same is considered true of us, in our “democracies.”

A terrible trap was thus set up for those who were subjugated…

If they obeyed the will of their masters, they were “good” – and “liberated” from their own tendency toward self-destruction. If they disobeyed the will of their masters, they were “evil,” “irresponsible,” “willful,” etc.

Thus: “slavery equals freedom,” and “freedom equals slavery.”

Slavery and Freedom

The moment that slaves see themselves as slaves, they immediately begin to become free.

The true equation for freedom – the thunderous power that shatters the chains of the slaves – is the simple statement: slavery equals slavery.

Thus the greatest danger for slave-owners is that they will lose control of the moral definitions of “slavery” and “freedom.”

However, they are in constant danger of losing control of these definitions, because of the rank hypocrisy involved in any form of human ownership or control, and because, deep down, the slaves yearn and burn to be free!

Reason, empiricism, science and simple experience are always dissolving the chains of mankind.

Chains must be constantly re-forged, strengthened, reinforced – they rust by the minute.

We can see this in the world of “democracy,” insofar as people are considered to be violent, greedy, evil, short-sighted and so on – yet somehow magically possess the wisdom and foresight to elect people who will force them to be “good.”

Without a government, so the mythology goes, we would all tear each other to pieces.

Human beings are by nature evil and violent – thus we should give a small monopoly of people who want to use violence to achieve their ends (the state) a monopoly over the use of force, and an endless ability to escape the consequences of their actions.

However, the truth that we all experience in reality, on a daily basis, is fear not of our fellow drivers, but of the police car. The violence that we are threatened with is not mugging, raping or home invasion, but rather jail for non-payment of taxes or disobeying the whims of our masters. What is more likely – that we will be robbed by a criminal, or that our money will lose its value through political inflation?

The supposed predations of our fellow citizens are almost nowhere to be seen – it is the state that controls the money supply, the army, the police, the guns, the bombs, the attack helicopters, the long-range bombers, the nuclear weapons – and the prisons.

True freedom would be a disaster, we are told – nature red in tooth and claw – and thus enslavement to our masters is real “freedom.”

In the same way, parents define slavery as “virtue” – despite the endless hypocrisies of this mad reversal.

The Hypocrisy of “Consideration”…

o understand why we are so blind to our own enslavement as adults, we need to understand how we are first enslaved as children.

As always, our enslavement begins with moral hypocrisies inflicted upon us by those in authority.

Parents will always call us “selfish” if we fail to act on the basis of their emotional preferences.

If your mother wants to talk to you, and you do not want to talk to her, then you are “selfish” if you choose not to talk to her.

This is a mad moral mythology which is utterly unraveled by a moment’s thought.

We are taught “consideration” not as a mere personal preference on the part of our parents, but rather as an objective and absolute moral principle.

If “consideration for the feelings of others” is thus such an axiomatic and universal moral value, then clearly it must at least apply equally to both parents and their adult children.

“It is good to be sensitive to the feelings of others,” sayeth our parents. “It is bad to perform actions which cause unhappiness in others.”

We swallow this as a moral absolute – and thus feel guilt whenever we violate this principle.

The Key to the Cell

Ah, but if “consideration” is in fact a universal principle, a moral absolute, then it binds our parents as surely as it binds us.

So…

If it is bad to cause discomfort in other people, and you feel discomfort when your mother calls, surely, when you tell her about your discomfort, she should feel bad, and want to change her behaviour.

If your mother apologizes for her lack of consideration, asks you what would make you feel better, then you can rest assured that she did not inflict the moral principle of “consideration” in order to control and bully you, but rather because she genuinely wanted you to be good – and that she knew all about goodness, because she practised moral behaviour herself.

When you report your discomfort to your mother, what do you think she will really do?

You already know the answer, because you have not told her the truth.

If your brother constantly lectures you about the need for financial responsibility – and mocks and berates you whenever you use a credit card or spend “too much” – how do you feel when he borrows money from you, and then avoids you when the time comes for repayment?

What is thus revealed about your brother’s use of the term “responsibility“?

Did he inflict negative judgments on you because he genuinely understands the value of responsibility through his own personal practice of it?

Or – did he inflict negative judgments on you because he is a self-righteous hypocrite who uses the word “responsibility” to control and demean other people?

You know everything you need to know – if you want to stop being a slave, you just need to stop avoiding your knowledge.

Testable Hypocrisy?

Perhaps you disagree with me, though, and say that you do not know the answers to these questions.

No problem!

I think we can certainly agree that it is important to know the answer to the question, “Was ‘morality’ used to control and demean me?”

If you genuinely believe that you lack answers to these questions, the test is embarrassingly simple – and reveals everything we need to know about what we already in fact know.

If your mother tells you that you should pick up the phone because you are supposed to be “considerate,” and not create negative feelings in her, how do you think she will react when you tell her the truth about the negative feelings that she is creating in you?

When you tell your mother that you feel a strong desire to avoid her phone calls, will she apologize for her own lack of sensitivity towards your feelings?

Will she ask you to tell her more about how you feel, so that you can get to the root of the issue, so that you can end up with a better experience of your relationship?

Will she ask you when you first experienced these emotions towards her?

Will she patiently support you as you peel back layer after layer of negative experience, which resulted in your desire to avoid her calls?

There is absolutely no possibility that she will do that.

None whatsoever.

Not a shred of a chance.

It will never, ever happen.

It is functionally, logically and emotionally completely and totally impossible.

How can I be so confident?

Do I know your mother?

No, but I know philosophy.

This is why it is impossible.

The Impossibility of Adult Reciprocity

If your mother were to take this course of action when you admitted your desire to avoid her calls – if she were to be truly curious about the root causes of your negative feelings – she would have a great challenge on her hands.

She would have an impossible time explaining one simple thing.

Why has she never known how you feel?

Since the roots of your desire to avoid your mother go back many, many years, how is it possible that your mother has no idea that she was inflicting any kind of negative experience upon you?

There are really only two ways that this could have come about.

Your mother knew that you were not having any fun in the relationship – and utterly ignored that reality for the sake of her own needs – which scarcely supports the theory that she values “consideration for the feelings of others” as any sort of objective or universal value.

Alternatively, she can claim that she had no idea that you had not been enjoying your relationship with her for many, many years – which means that she took no real interest in your true feelings, or rejected you if and when you honestly told her how you felt in the past.

Naturally, since we do prefer to tell the truth to each other, she must also be able to explain why you felt it necessary to hide your negative experiences from her.

Now, if your mother took no interest in your true feelings throughout the history of your relationship, it becomes very hard for her to argue that “consideration for the feelings of others” is a great virtue, since we generally do not enjoy it when other people who claim to love us take no interest in our feelings – in fact, that is a horrible experience.

Furthermore, I can completely guarantee that if you take no interest in your mother’s feelings, she will be very hurt and upset – and possibly attack you to boot!

Thus, if she claims that she had no idea that you were having any kind of negative experiences in relation to her, then clearly she was taking no interest in your feelings. Since that is behaviour that both angers and upsets her, she is openly revealed as a multi-decade complete and total hypocrite who used moral arguments to control, manipulate and subjugate you to satisfy her own narcissistic needs.

In other words, she was a total bitch and a contemptible hypocrite.

Sort of a deal-breaker for anyone with any self-esteem.

Now, if you did genuinely end up hiding your feelings from your mother – which allows her to claim that she did not know what they were – there is only one reason why you would have done that.

You did that because your mother rejected what you truly felt – and attacked you for your feelings as well.

It is very hard for someone to argue that you should be considerate towards other people’s feelings, while rejecting and attacking the feelings that you have if they are inconvenient or negative to that person.

It would be the same as me arguing that you should always pay back your debts, no matter what the hardship – and then, after borrowing money from you, criticizing you for being “cheap” when you had the temerity to ask me to repay the loan.

It would be a sickening, stomach-turning display of bottomless and manipulative hypocrisy.

If your mother were to admit any of these things, she would be revealed as a horrendous and destructive person who plied you with “moral” lies in order to exploit you for her own narcissistic needs based on your very desire to be a good child and please her.

Using false moral arguments to exploit children based on their desire to be good is the very core of corruption and evil.

Following the Maternal Benefit

Let us “follow the benefit” in this case as well.

If your mother is this type of person, then remaining obedient to her wishes is to be enslaved to corruption.

Clearly, identifying your mother as corrupt and manipulative – if that is what she is – benefits you enormously.

Who, though, does it not benefit?

Why, your mother of course!

This is what I mean when I say that slavery is defined as the avoidance of the knowledge that you are a slave.

Slavery is also defined as the desire for passive revenge upon your masters.

And this is why we lie to them, and pretend to feel what we do not feel, and refuse to be honest about what we do feel.

Self-delusion is the lie that is always inflicted upon masters by their slaves.

Freedom from slavery is nothing more – or less – then a commitment to honesty, which is also a letting go of the desire for vengeance.

RTR and Empiricism

he Real-Time Relationship is about empiricism and curiosity – fundamentally, it is the scientific method applied to our relationships.

Diagnosis

If your back hurts, you go to a physiotherapist. The physiotherapist will gently press upon your spine in order to localize and identify the problem. She will ask you, over and over, “Does it hurt here?”

She presses upon nerves to find out if they hurt.

That is how she identifies where the problem exists.

You can of course avoid going to a physiotherapist – or any other health practitioner – and simply take painkillers to alleviate the symptoms. This is a clear example of preferring immediate avoidance over long-term solutions – scarcely the mark of a mature or responsible person.

In the same way, the reason that you pick up the phone with your mother and pretend to “enjoy” the conversation is that you prefer the short-term relief of empty compliance over actually pressing a nerve ending to see if it hurts, so that you can identify the source of the problem and work towards a practical and permanent cure.

Our nerve endings signal discomfort – just as your “sinking sensation” signals discomfort – but by picking up the phone and avoiding the truth, you are simply masking the symptom, rather than dealing with the problem.

Again, this approach is fundamentally religious, in that you are making up instant “answers” rather than examining the empirical evidence with curiosity and rationality.

Naturally, if we are not allowed to tell the truth in a relationship, and we are consistently bullied into pretending to be something other than who we are, we will not enjoy that relationship – because in fact, it is not a relationship at all, but rather a mutual exploitation based on immediate anxiety avoidance.

Thus our sinking sensation is clearly communicating to us that we do not enjoy this interaction.

We are perfectly aware of why we do not enjoy our relationship with our mother, which is that we are not allowed to tell her the truth – primarily, we are not allowed to tell her that we do not enjoy our relationship with her.

Thus our emotions are putting forward a theory – that our mother will attack us if we are honest with her – and if we wish to establish the validity or invalidity of this theory, all we need to do is be honest with her.

If we are honest with our mother – if we say: “I do not want to talk to you, and I do not know exactly why, and I have been feeling this for many years,” and our mother responds with genuine concern and curiosity, then our “sinking sensation” was more paranoia than accuracy.

If, on the other hand, she reacts with irritation, dismissal, avoidance, redirection, attack, or an over solicitous and cloying “concern for what’s wrong,” then our emotional thesis is amply confirmed.

The simple fact of the matter, of course, is that if our mother did have a habit of genuinely responding to our distress with curiosity and concern, we would never have any kind of “sinking sensation” when she called.

In the case of long-term relationships, the feeling is the proof.

There is no possibility whatsoever that a positive long-term relationship can exist if one or both parties is regularly feeling bad about talking to the other party.

Paranoia?

If your mother says or implies that you are “paranoid” for feeling anything negative about her calls, then not only is she rejecting and attacking your feelings (hence their negativity) but also she is the kind of person who is perfectly happy to continue for years talking to a paranoid person without once productively addressing that paranoia.

That is, sadly, in no way the mark of a healthy person.

Why is it, then, that we avoid putting our emotional theory to the test?

Well, if we avoid putting a theory to the test it is because we know the answer to that test, and we do not like it. This is one reason why religious people always avoid a rational examination of the existence of God, and always fall back on “faith,” which is defined in reality as a willed bigotry in what is known to be false.

If our emotions tell us that we will be attacked for telling the truth – and we have not been telling the truth – it is because we wish to avoid confirmation – i.e. certainty.

If we wish to “avoid” certainty, it is because we are already certain.

Thus it is not really “certainty” that we wish to avoid, but the results of accepting what we already know to be true.

The superstitious cultist who goes to church does not avoid rationally examining the question of the existence of God because he is certain that God exists, but rather because he is certain that God does not exist at all. What he truly wishes to avoid is not the knowledge of God’s nonexistence, but rather the inevitable results of that knowledge, which is the end of his association with his cult, and the inevitable attacks that will descend upon him from his fellow cult members. He also fears the contempt and hostility in his children’s eyes that will inevitably result from his recognition of the truth, since he inflicted his superstition upon them with pious self-righteousness when they were young, helpless and utterly dependent. He is also afraid to put his wife’s love to the test, because he knows exactly what will happen if he says to her: “Will you love me and the truth, or will you reject me out of fear and enslavement to our fellow cultists, if I reject falsehood?”

He already knows what her answer will be.

He already knows exactly where he sits on her hierarchy of “values.”

He already knows that his wife will kick him to the curb the moment he speaks the truth.

Thus it is not the absence of God that he fears and avoids, but the consequences of speaking the truth – and the knowledge that he has wasted his life in a squalid, corrupt cult of liars and bullies – and even worse, that he has sacrificed his children’s intelligence and integrity on the altar of his own cowardice.

Truly, to look into the mirror with such accuracy, and to see what he had truly become, would be more than his soul could possibly bear.

And so he struggles on, avoiding the truth, at war with himself, murdering his honest instincts every single day, proselytizing to helpless children and credulous fools that which he knows to be false, until nature finally takes pity upon him and puts him out of his agony with an empty and prayed-for death.

Of course for the religious, death leads to paradise, because their life is a living hell – compared to which the mere nonexistence that we all know awaits us in the grave seems like a blissful heaven.

Exploring the Facts

The simple fact is that God does not exist.

The simple fact is that “the government” is just a bunch of pompous goons with guns ordering you around, filling your children’s heads with lies, and stealing from you.

The simple fact is that you do not want to talk to your mother on the telephone.

And the simple fact is that we know exactly what will happen when we speak the truth.

We will be attacked by our fellow slaves.

We will not be invited to become a master.

And thus we shall be alone.

This is the deepest horror of living among the slaves – that the very communal power that could overturn our masters is not turned against our masters, but rather against any slave who dares to say: “We are slaves.”

We have a State because we are the State.

The shock and loathsomeness of this understanding – that we have no masters but each other – is the real horror that we avoid with our blank, smiling conformity.

This is the real reason that we make up “answers,’ and believe our own lies, crush our natural hunger for truth and freedom, attack anyone who makes us uncomfortable, attack the “enemies” that we are told to hate, and lick the boots of our owners in happy, cringing abandon.

We are not ruled by masters.

We are ruled by each other.

The “masters” simply pick up the pieces.

These are the simple facts that we know deep down. These are the simple facts that are carved into our very bones.

These are the simple facts that we will waste our lives evading if we do not find the courage to speak the truth.

Barriers to the Truth

efore you implement what we will talk about below, I think it only fair to remind you that if any of your relationships survive your honesty, you will be in a tiny minority.

Before exposing yourself to this light, it is essential to be aware of the simple fact that when your eyes have adjusted to the brightness of this new world, almost everyone around you will have vanished.

Our theory – our instinctual knowledge – is that we will be attacked and reviled for speaking the truth.

If our theory is true, then this is exactly what will happen.

Let me be more specific.

If this theory – and my experience, and the experience of thousands of other people in this philosophical conversation – is true, then you will be attacked and reviled for speaking the truth.

You will be snarled at, dismissed, waved off, condescendingly lectured to, called a fool, a cultist, a traitor, a disinformation agent – angry, paranoid, selfish, ungrateful, deluded, psychotic, insane – and fat, believe it or not!

There will be no end to the vituperation and invective that will be hurled at you.

People live in the darkness, scurrying and biting and gnawing at scraps, and each other – but they have an amazing sensitivity to light – probably because it will reveal their highly unflattering reflections.

When people sense the light of truth approaching, they snarl and growl and attack. They shed all self-restraint, all pretense of dignity, any vestige of “self-respect.” They attack with lies, with anger, with misrepresentation, with “confusion,” with scorn, with contempt, with eye-rolling – and thankfully, in the end, with ostracism.

They attack with the ferocity of cornered rats because they imagine that the threat comes from you, not from their own hearts.

By odd coincidence, at the very moment that I was writing this section, my podcast show got a new review on PodFeed – the first in months.

Useless moralism (1 star)

By: Daniella

This guy is an inadequate philosopher and neocheater. His philosophy is religious. What drives him is the quest to be morally pure. All his positions revolve around the quest to keep his hands clean and try to manipulate others to be convinced that he's a moral authority to be looked upon with awe. He is of no use to society. Don't bother.

Reviewed on 12/23/2007

I must confess to being quite fascinated by the term “neocheater,” which I have never heard before! I certainly do agree, of course, that I am no use to “society,” since it is an exploitive lie.

Working with the Facts…

Of course, I am not telling you anything about the people around you that you do not already know.

The truth is such a beautiful, wonderful and liberating thing that if people surrender it to lies, we know that it must be because they are subjected to the greatest possible duress, the most extreme threats.

We also know that people in societies that are generally more free (i.e. where they are not jailed or killed for criticizing the system) believe almost as many exploitive lies as those in societies that are less free.

Thus political freedom is not the primary factor in gauging how many lies people will believe.

Since direct threats of physical destruction or enslavement are not required for people to believe all sorts of horrible moral lies – indeed, such lies would be impossible if they required such threats – there must be another factor that drives the conformity of mankind.

Criminal Slaves

It is a tried and true principle of homicide investigations that when a husband or wife goes missing, the first suspect is always the spouse.

Whenever a crime is committed, look first to those closest to the victim.

To unravel the riddle of the enslavement of the many by the few, our first suspects cannot be the masters, but must be the slaves.

This we all know deep down.

We know that the truth is a beautiful and liberating thing – a trophy that we hunger for, yearn for, love hopelessly, desperately, at a distance, secretly – and that we cannot ever speak the truth at all.

I am here to tell you that what you fear is all true.

You cannot speak the truth to those around you.

You know exactly what they will do to you.

But you do not really know this yet – not where it counts, not in the place that will propel you into real action, into real escape, towards real freedom!

Dare I say – towards the future? J

There is only one way to find out whether our fears about speaking the truth are a valid assessment of imminent danger, or rampant and self-indulgent paranoia.

I’m sure you know where I’m going with this…

Speak the Truth

Yes, it really is that simple.

That simple, and that hard.

If you think that I am full of nonsense, or that I am wildly overstating the case, or that I am writing more of a self-indulgent manifesto than a rational call to action, I am perfectly fine with that!

I actually think that is a very healthy approach to take to what I am saying.

Scepticism is enormously healthy because scepticism requires both logic and empirical validation to be transformed into acceptance.

Fortunately, you have access to all the logic and empirical validation you could ever desire – today, right now, this minute!

For the logic, you can turn to my two previous books, and my podcasts.

For empirical validation, things are much easier.

You do not need to buy and study any books. Thank heavens, you do not need to listen to a near-infinite series of podcasts. You do not need to learn ancient Aramaic, how to juggle, ride a unicycle, or breathe water.

You only need to open your mouth.

Integrity in Honesty

If you really do dislike it when your mother’s name shows up on your call display, you may well be tempted to yank the phone off its handle and yell at her that she is a fellow slave who is keeping you down, that she bullies you like a cornered rat, and she serves the masters who rule us all!

Not only would this be unwise, it would also be dishonest.

The fact of the matter is that you do not know for certain the validity of these theories.

I am not asking you to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that these theories are true.

I think that would be a very bad idea.

The truth of the matter – as it stands for you, right now – is that you genuinely do not know why you cannot speak the truth with your mother.

Earlier, we talked about a 15^th century man watching a ship on an ocean descend slowly over the horizon. That observation is the fact that he is working with – he does not as yet have a theory as to why that phenomenon is occurring.

If this man simply started yelling at people that the world was round, whizzing around the sun at 30 km a second, that the sun was the center of the solar system, and is also whizzing along at terrifying speeds – for a combined planetary motion of 900 km/s – everyone would think that he was just mad! They would be right in that evaluation too, since he would have no theoretical or empirical proof for what could only be considered entirely wild propositions!

You have a fact to work with in your relationship with your mother, which is that you do not like it when her name lights up your call display.

You do not know exactly why that “sinking sensation” is occurring.

I have put forward a theory as to why that sensation is occurring – and the likely events that will unfold if you speak the truth.

However, it remains as yet only a theory.

It is a theory, of course, that should give you some great comfort – despite the anxiety it provokes.

If the theory is true, then you have damn good reasons for staying silent, for conforming, for refraining from speaking the truth – and for lying to yourself about why.

It makes little sense to hide if you are not being hunted.

I am telling you that you hide because you are being hunted – but this has not been proven, and therefore must be put to the test.

Your test.

So – call your mother.

Tell her that you feel unease – or a sinking sensation, or anxiety, or whatever it is – when her name lights up your call display.

That’s pretty terrifying, isn’t it?

Good.

Feel the burn!

I mean – you don’t want to go through the rest of your short life utterly deluded about the content and quality of your “relationships,” do you?

Since you yearn and burn for the truth – as we all do – don’t you want to find out if your relationships can support it?

Since you yearn and burn for love – which requires the truth, as we have discussed – don’t you want to find out if your relationships can support it?

Since you yearn and burn for intimacy, integrity, trust and devotion – all of which require the truth – don’t you want to find out if your relationships can support them?

If your existing relationships will not only never give you what you want, but exist only to rob you blind, don’t you want to stop wasting your life?

Now you can.

So – all you have to do is tell your mother how you feel.

When you are talking to her – particularly for the first time – you cannot with certainty tell her that you know exactly why you are feeling what you are feeling. Yes, she might frighten you with unconscious or subtle threats of attack or abandonment – but you have no real evidence of that as yet! Thus it would be entirely unjust – and abusive – to attack her with conclusions when you have as yet only facts.

Conclusions and Facts

he fact is that you feel anxiety when your mother calls you. The Real-Time Relationship concept demands that we are honest with each other by speaking the facts of our experience.

Not the mythologies, not the stories, not the blame, not the conclusions – just the facts.

The fact is that you feel anxiety – and you do not know why you feel this anxiety.

So what do you say to your mother?

You tell her the truth.

Nothing more, nothing less.

You say: “Mom, I feel a strange anxiety when you call – I don’t know why, I’m not saying it’s anything that you are doing, but I have felt it for quite some time – many years, actually as far back as I can remember. I’m not saying that this is your fault, because I don’t know where it comes from – I’m just telling you what I feel.”

And that’s all that you say, because that’s all that you know for sure.

Avoiding “Story Time”

You will be greatly tempted – and your mother will doubtless tempt you with this as well – to blame your mother, so that you can both take a mutual dive off the cliff of “story time.”

The way that we do this is to inflict a conclusion on someone else.

Thus we are sorely tempted to say: “Mom, I feel a strange anxiety when you call, because you are always so critical!”

Do you see the difference? Do you catch the difference between the first speech, and the second?

The first speech is an honest expression of your emotional state – feedback in real-time to the person that you are talking to about your immediate experience.

The second sentence is a conclusion – easily recognizable by the terrible use of the word “because.”

“Because” is a word that indicates a shift from experience to thesis.

Our historical friend in Lisbon, who watches the ship disappearing over the horizon, can honestly turn to someone and say: “Hey, I see that ship disappearing slowly over the horizon, hull first!” That is a true statement of his direct experience in the moment – no one can reasonably tell him that he is wrong.

The moment that he provides an explanation, however, he is open to criticism.

If he says: “The ship is disappearing slowly into the ocean because it is being swallowed up by Poseidon,” now he is in the realm of story time, since he has just made up an “explanation” for which he has no direct evidence.

Thus when you say to your mother: “I feel anxiety because you are so critical,” you are stating knowledge and certainty of a causal relationship for which you have no direct evidence.

It may be true that your mother is hypercritical – it may be true that she has attacked you for years, every single time that she calls – your thesis may be entirely true, but the problem is that you have absolutely no evidence in the moment.

This is how we so often shoot ourselves in the foot when we attempt to be honest with others.

If you say to your mother that your anxiety is caused by her critical nature, what is she going to say?

Come on, you know it exactly.

She is going to say, of course: “I am not critical.”

And what do you say in return?

You say: “You are too so critical! Like – every time we talk, you say that I sound tired…”

And so on.

And what happens with that conversation?

You argue and debate and provide evidence and deny and attack – and never talk about your true feelings at all.

Do you see how presenting conclusions is simply a massive avoidance mechanism which allows you to debate endlessly about inconsequential details that cannot be proved, rather than talk about your actual experience of your mother?

Stories can be debated endlessly – witness the endless idiocy of medieval scholasticism, or modern theological or political debates – because stories are not real.

You say that your mother is critical, and she replies that she is not – that she just has your best interests at heart, that you can be careless or irresponsible, that she never said that, or that if she did you misinterpreted it, that you have always been so sensitive, that you must be tired now, that she has always tried to do her best, that motherhood is not easy, that she doesn’t understand why the younger generation behaves the way it does, that things weren’t like that when she was your age, that you’re not a parent, you’ll understand when you are a parent – and so on and so on and so on.

Round and round and round…

A massive, cumbersome, convoluted, baffling, frustrating, empty bag of Gordian knots that no sane human being could ever unravel.

How many times has this happened in your relationship with your mother? How about your girlfriend? Boyfriend? Siblings? Friends?

When we experience a negative emotion, we are unbelievably and inevitably tempted to place the blame for that emotion on someone else, by creating an untestable mythology that defines their actions as causing our response.

And it never, ever gets us anywhere at all.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

he post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy is based upon the notion that simply because “B” happens after “A,” “A” caused “B.”

If I kill a goat, and then it starts to rain, it is completely irrational to say that the death of the goat caused the rain.

If I get angry when my wife says something, I cannot immediately prove that I got angry because my wife said something – all that I know for sure is that I felt anger after she spoke.

However, we are endlessly drawn to the fallacy of blaming others for our own feelings, because it is far easier than actually discussing our feelings in an open and vulnerable way.

Forever and a day, if you take the “blame” approach, you will be mired in dysfunctional, frustrating, empty, wasteful, negative “relationships.”

How many times do we feel that we are silently and invisibly “fencing” with someone else, where we are trying to pin the blame for our emotions on him, while he is struggling to evade our blame, and trying to turn it around and blame us?

We are priests arguing about dead gods.

We are wasting our lives fencing with ourselves.

And we deserve so much better.

But first we have to earn it.

Avoiding Mythology

hen you take the RTR approach, you simply state the facts of your experience.

You do not make up reasons as to why you feel what you feel. You simply say: “I feel X.”

You can honestly say: “I felt X after you did Y. I am not saying that Y caused my feeling, I am simply saying that my feeling followed Y.”

This is the truth. It could be that your feeling was triggered by a situation that just happened to be similar to a traumatic or difficult situation in your childhood. This does not make you paranoid, just a sensitive person with a memory. A soldier who has returned from violent combat, and who ducks when a car backfires, is not paranoid, just painfully conditioned. He felt fear after the car backfired, but not because the car backfired – and we know this because other people did not feel fear when the car backfired.

The backfire was thus merely a catalyst, not a cause.

If it were an objective cause, then everyone would feel fear, not just him.

An objective cause of pain is “being stabbed” – a subjective cause of pain is “being embarrassed.” The first is based upon our objective physiology; the second upon our subjective interpretation. The first is a fact; the second is a story.

In the same way, you can legitimately say: “When you did X, I felt Y” – it is important, however, to continually remind the person that you are talking to that you are not saying that she caused your feeling.

Not only has that not been established logically or empirically, but even if it were established, it would still not be true, because unless someone is sticking a pin in your arm, they do not have the power to make you feel anything.

“Inflicting” Emotions

f you and I go on a first date and I spend the first five minutes yelling at you, you will of course be frightened, anxious and upset. There is no way to avoid this reaction, since your autonomous nervous system will react to my potential attack with a healthy dose of “fight or flight.”

Naturally, then, you will make your excuses, leave, and never see me again.

If you do choose to see me again, and I continue to yell at you, I am not making you feel bad, you are making you feel bad.

The first time that you put your hand in an open flame, it is the flame that burns you. If you voluntarily put your hand back into that open flame, it is now you who are burning yourself.

The way that we always end up in abusive relationships is that we simply ignore, reject, minimize or mythologize how those relationships make us feel initially.

As children, we are always taught to obey external rules rather than express our honest feelings.

Feelings destroy hierarchies – particularly unjust hierarchies.

Feelings instantly tell us whether a situation or interaction is good, bad, or indifferent for us.

When you were sitting in your classroom as a child, did you feel happy, bored, frustrated, angry or indifferent to be there?

When the teacher called on you, did you feel eager or nervous?

Did the teacher ever sit you down and ask you if there was any way that you could enjoy your learning experience more?

Private companies do this all the time – they are continually polling their customers to find out if there’s any conceivable way that their needs can be better served.

Did your teachers ever ask you how they could serve you better?

Did your parents?

This may sound odd, but it is very important to understand.

Quality of Service

regularly ask my wife if there is anything that I can do to improve her experience of being married to me.

I can’t automatically tell if she is dissatisfied or unhappy about something – and I would far rather change my behaviour before those feelings arise – and so it is important to check in with her and make sure that everything is running smoothly.

Even if I am doing pretty much the same thing that I did a month ago, her needs or preferences might have changed in the interim. Sometimes, just asking the question can help uncover a new preference that she is not even fully aware that she has.

The reason that I want to talk about this aspect of a relationship is so that you understand that, as a child, you were almost never consulted about what you wanted.

When I say this, I’m not talking about things like “What do you want for Christmas?” or “What would you like for dinner?” – which you might have been asked, and which is all fine and dandy.

No, what I mean is not whether your preferences were solicited with regards to material objects, but rather with regards to the people around you.

As children, we are generally raised to conform to the preferences of those around us – though, as I talked about in my book “On Truth,” those preferences are almost always portrayed as moral absolutes – but we are not allowed to have any particular preferences of our own with regards to those around us.

Consultation

For instance, did your mother ever sit you down and say:

Is there any way that I could make your experience of being my child even more enjoyable? Is there anything that I am doing that you dislike, or that you don’t understand, or that you do not see the purpose of? Although I know that you disagree with me about certain decisions that I make for you in the moment – like “don’t eat that third candy bar” – do you understand those decisions later on, or do they remain confusing for you? Do you think that I am teaching you to follow sensible principles, for your own good, or do you find that you are merely obeying me in the moment? Overall, are you enjoying being my child? Would I be the mother that you would choose out of all the women in the world, if you could choose who was your mother? If not, why not?

Can you identify the emotion that wells up in your heart from even considering this kind of interview from one or both of your parents?

I’m telling you – this is what you need to feel to be safe, loved and happy now, and in the future.

Why is it so incomprehensible that our parents would ever ask us these sorts of questions, and ask us for honest feedback about their success as parents?

Why is it that our local pizza parlour will interview us to find out what kind of pizza we like – but our parents will never ask us what kind of parenting we like?

Do you see everything that is not being talked about in the world?

Do you see why people grow up to be so compliant, so fearful, so frustrated, so angry, so lonely – and so fundamentally cut off from their emotional experience of the world – and thus so sad in their very souls?

Muscles that we do not use inevitably atrophy.

Feelings that are never consulted inevitably go underground.

If your opinion is never sought – or if it is “sought,” but never acted on – you will simply cease experiencing opinions.

If your preferences are constantly rejected – which is always hypocritical, since to reject a preference is to express a preference – then you will simply cease experiencing preferences.

(Notice that I do not say that you will cease to have opinions or preferences – merely that you will cease to experience them.)

Whatever we accept as a general principle we inevitably end up implementing ourselves – thus if you grow up rejecting your own preferences and opinions, you will inevitably end up attacking, crushing and rejecting the preferences and opinions of others.

Particularly those who depend on you the most, such as your children, and your lover.

Identification and Self-Expression

t takes an enormous amount of work to first identify what we feel, and then learn how to express those feelings honestly.

Then it takes additional effort to truly understand the source of our feelings – the complex interaction of our ideas and our experiences of the world, and of others – and then it takes even more effort to accept the information and conclusions that our feelings provide us, and act upon them.

This complex dance is one of the greatest and most amazing experiences that life has to offer. Learning how to productively match the complexity of our inner experiences with the subtlety of our outer experiences is a truly magical journey.

Depth Right at the Surface

We so often feel that what is occurring for us emotionally in the very depths of our souls is somehow radically disconnected from the daily world that we live in.

When I first started going to therapy – I went for three hours a week for almost 2 years – I had a dream that I was being attacked by a hostile woman. I brought the dream in for analysis, spouting all this Jungian nonsense about how this angry woman was my animus, my female side and so on.

My therapist held up her hand and said: “Perhaps, but let’s start with something a little more simple. Did you talk to your mother yesterday?”

Of course I had – and of course my mother had attacked me.

This simple idea – an astounding revelation to me – that the depths of my unconscious was perfectly attuned to the realities of my daily experiences – completely changed how I viewed the value and purpose of my inner life.

As I continued in therapy, it became increasingly clear that my senses did not lie, and my unconscious did not lie – it was only my conscious mind, and my psychological defences, that were consistently and constantly misleading me through the endless invention of false narratives and imaginary cause-and-effect.

I was in fact a kind of “truth sandwich.” My senses told the truth; my dreams told the truth – but in the middle was my conscious ego, which lied and evaded constantly.

Your dreams, your instinctual emotions, your deepest and – as you think – most private experiences – are the greatest source of truth available to you, after your physical senses (and your greatest source of moral truth!).

Thus, learning to trust our instincts – rather than just “follow the rules” (even philosophical rules) is essential for living a happy, safe, loving and productive life.

However, due to the fact that as children our feelings and instincts are stifled, mocked and abused, it can take quite some time to become comfortable feeling them, let alone expressing them, understanding them and acting on them.

Feeling Your Feelings

ince the first challenge is learning how to feel your feelings, how can we approach that most productively?

First of all, you are already feeling your feelings.

Your initial impulse – the “stab” or “sinking feeling” – may be subtle, brief and fleeting, but I guarantee you that it is there.

The moment after you feel your feelings, your defences summon mythologies to label those feelings “bad,” and thus prevent you from communicating, understanding, or acting upon them.

This we all learned from the sick fantasies of religion – the mythology that certain impulses come from “the devil” and so are labeled “bad,” and so you must keep them to yourself – or perhaps confess them as a guilty secret – and thus never accept those feelings or act upon them.

Do you see the evil genius of religion?

Doubt in the truth of the fantasy of God comes from “the devil,” and thus is labeled “bad,” and so should never be communicated or acted upon.

Brilliant – simply brilliant!

Authenticity is evil; empty submission is virtue.

This is how the greatest predators feed!

Your First Feeling…

hen I was 19, I worked as a gold-panner and prospector in northern Canada for about 18 months, saving money to go to university.

Every couple of weeks, I would go into town, have a nice dinner and perhaps go to a disco.

One night, I started chatting up the prettiest woman at the bar. I found it rather difficult to talk to her, though, because she kept glancing around. We chatted for about 15 minutes – though her responses were mostly monosyllabic – and then she excused herself, because she wanted to go and talk to a friend.

I sat at the table for about 20 more minutes, not knowing if she was going to come back, feeling increasingly baffled and irritated. When she finally did return, she said she had to go. I asked her for her number – she sighed, and told me that she would prefer it if I gave her my number.

I did, and then spent the next day hoping that she would call.

Two nights later, after working out, I was sitting in a sauna, and realized that she hadn’t called me. I felt a stab of disappointment – which I immediately smothered by taking a deep, sudden breath and forcing myself to think of something else.

I had recently read my first book on psychology, and so, catching myself, I decided to relax, slow down my breathing, and actually feel my disappointment.

Shocking, I know! J

This began a lifelong process for me of re-learning how to trust my emotions.

It’s no fun to live life as if you are inhabited by some malevolent demon that is constantly “shooting you up” with random high-stimuli emotions that will inevitably mess you up in some manner.

Setting us at variance against ourselves is a prerequisite for exploitation.

A man at peace with himself cannot be exploited, except through direct violence, which the ruling classes quite sensibly shy away from.

A man at war with himself remains jittery, insecure, consumed with self-management, overeager for approval, unable to set boundaries, always available to work overtime. He feels generally unworthy of keeping his property, unable to challenge any of the moral rules that enslave him…

He lives a life of fear and self-subjugation.

It is this self-subjugation that breeds political, religious and tribal subjugation.

It is self-slavery that creates our masters.

We sell ourselves before we are bought by others.

Slowing Down...

Our defences work by creating a “rush to react,” which smothers our genuine instinctual and emotional responses.

Sitting in the sauna all those years ago, when I felt my stab of disappointment that the girl had not called me, I immediately began to make up excuses as to why my disappointment was invalid:

Ahhh, it’s her loss.
She wasn’t that pretty anyway.
Maybe she lost my number.
She might call.

Etc.

We all know these endless litanies of excuses that we invent to smother our genuine emotional reactions. We live life so frightened, so unstable, so consumed with self-management, that we become cheap lawyers, petty sophists – ready, willing and able to talk ourselves in and out of anything.

Self-manipulation is our medication.

Mythology is our drug.

The only cure is honesty.

When I made up “answers” in a “rush of reaction” to my genuine emotion, I was engaged in a fundamentally religious approach to reality.

I was not exhibiting any kind of curiosity about myself, about my emotional reaction to the girl not calling. I experienced a stimulus that I considered “negative” – and so just made up an “answer” to make the stimulus go away.

This is exactly the religious approach – when religious people experience “negative” stimuli, such as doubt, they make up answers to make the stimuli go away.

When we do not know where life came from, or how old the planet is, or what makes the lightning, we can either ask questions in all humility according to the scientific method - or we can just make up “answers” to wish our doubts away.

In the latter case, clearly we are not interested in establishing the truth, but rather in magically turning our ignorance into “truth.”

This habit is the eternal curse of our species.

When we are faced with the question “How are the children to be educated?” or “Who will build the roads?” saying, “Just give a bunch of guys a bunch of guns to make it happen,” is a complete and total non-answer.

When we are faced with the question, “Do my parents really love me?” saying, “Yes, because they tell me so,” is also a complete and total non-answer.

The Truth We Repress…

Once I began to explore my feelings of disappointment about the girl not calling, some fascinating insights began to arise.

First of all, it became clear to me over time that I was not disappointed in the fact that the girl had not called me, but rather I was frightened by my desire for a girl who would not call me.

I chose her in that bar because she was very pretty. I ignored the fact that she was quite rude, and was constantly looking around the disco while I was talking to her. I ignored the fact that she abruptly got up and talked to a friend of hers for 20 minutes, leaving me sitting in the booth, twiddling my thumbs and wondering whether I should stay or go. I ignored the fact that she gave me a very scant smile when I ask her for her number, and said, “Why don’t you just give me your number instead?”

In other words, the reality was that I was disappointed in myself, not in the girl.

And I was afraid.

Why was I afraid?

Well, I was afraid because I was putting my heart in danger.

I was afraid because, by choosing women who were obviously not very nice based entirely on their looks, I was putting myself in considerable danger. Not just in terms of disappointment, but in terms of getting into a relationship with a cold, selfish and manipulative woman – and, God forbid, having children with her – which could truly ruin my entire life.

By attempting to repress and ignore my disappointment, I was placing myself in considerable danger of ruining my life – and the lives of my potential children, which is even worse.

“Negative” feelings are designed to protect you, in the same way that physical pain is designed to protect you.

My feelings were telling me that my approach to women was going to put me in grave danger throughout my life. The value that I placed upon a woman’s looks – in complete opposition to the definition of love we have talked about in this book – left me wide open to disastrous exploitation.

As it turns out, that was not the end of the story either…

Emotions and Exploitation

y placing value on women for their looks alone, it is certainly true that I left myself open to the worst kinds of exploitation – but the reality was that I only left myself open to being exploited because I wanted to exploit the pretty women.

I wanted certain types of women because of my own vanity. We all know that looks alone are not indicators of spiritual quality – in fact, quite the opposite appears so often to be true, except for my wife.

I wanted these women to go out with me because having them on my arm would make me “look good.” In other words, I wanted to use them to dominate others, to evoke envy and establish my own superiority.

Can you see why there are considerable secondary gains in repressing these “negative” emotions?

Can you also see how far away from the truth my original “explanations” were? By providing me with instant and comforting “answers,” they could not have been more opposed to the truth than if they had been direct lies, which at least can be seen and examined.

Even Deeper…

Furthermore, my father chose my mother – a thoroughly nasty and corrupt woman – largely for her looks, since she was very attractive.

Thus, I have seen the results of this kind of mutual exploitation up close, and have lived through all the disasters of a nasty, brutish and short marriage.

However, if I were to cast aside my own shallow addiction to physical appearance, what would be the long-term result?

Having lived it now for over 20 years, I can tell you quite definitively.

When we begin to realign our standards of evaluation from inconsequential things such as appearance, status, money and prestige, towards moral standards such as courage, integrity and virtue…

Well, as I said earlier, almost none of your relationships will survive this transition – because, as you will very quickly discover, if you pursue this course, you think you have a relationship with others, but you really only have a relationship with your own illusions.

My particular illusion was that physical beauty – and the envy it produces in others – creates value.

Sadly, this was like putting a Band-Aid over a sprained ankle, which only made that sprain worse over time.

If I say that I need a beautiful woman in order to have real value, then clearly I am saying that without that beautiful woman, I do not have value – or I have negative value.

If I want to wear platform shoes, it is because I feel that I am short.

Buying and wearing platform shoes does not get rid of my belief that I am short, any more than buying and wearing a wig gets rid of my belief that I am bald.

Acting in “opposition” to an underlying belief only reinforces that belief.

Thus I pursued beautiful women because I felt that I lacked value, which arm-candy would somehow alleviate.

However, this pursuit only reinforced my belief that I lacked value – which is why it could never succeed.

As we talked about earlier, using other people to manage your own anxiety is selfish and corrupt.

For me, using the physical attractiveness of women to avoid the anxiety of my own low self-regard was selfish and corrupt.

Now – although this is of course a very painful experience to go through – and is also enormously humbling – is this not a far better approach to building a happy life than pretending to yourself that the girl just somehow “lost your number”?

Even DEEPER!

Ahhh, but it went even deeper than that!

Like just about everyone else on the planet who was not raised by wolves, I was taught that my family had value in and of itself.

I was “taught” that my father, my mother, my brother, my half-sister – my extended relations of every kind – were valuable and deserved my love simply because they were members of my family.

Of course, as a criterion for love, this is in fact as inconsequential as height, hair, or high cheekbones.

We tend to mock and ridicule the old man who dates the busty bimbo, since he is clearly communicating his shallowness, insecurity and silly vanity.

However, we tend to “cherish” and “respect” those who value family members for no reason other than similar DNA.

Beauty is accidental.

Family is also accidental.

When I began to challenge my own vanity and greedy desire to exploit others – both the pretty women and those who would envy me for being with them – I began to understand that virtue was in fact required for love.

This is a strange, terrifying and disorienting realization.

If virtue is required for love, then I cannot reasonably judge the value of my family by any standard other than virtue.

How does that sit with you?

Your family has no value.

Your country has no value.

Your religion has no value.

Your gods, governments, teachers and friends have no value.

Only virtue has value.

Is it becoming clear to you just what an enormous minefield lay underneath my stab of disappointment in that long-ago sauna?

Can you begin to understand exactly why I felt such fear and trepidation about the very idea of not repressing my feelings anymore?

Deep, deep down, of course, I totally understood the road that I was taking my first step upon. I knew where it would lead, and I knew just how few people would be willing to follow me there. I knew exactly what kind of ugly and hellish confrontations awaited me down that road, how many subtle and vicious attacks I would endure, how many sleepless nights would torture me – and to what end?

Who knew?

And all this came to pass. That fateful night in that sauna, when I made the decision to stop repressing my feelings, every fear I had came true.

When I began to view and evaluate my family members, friends, girlfriends, dates and business associates by reasonable moral standards – nothing fancy, just honesty and integrity really – the whole magnificently empty house of cards that was my social world came fluttering and crashing down.

The world is well-armed against virtue.

The world is so corrupt because being good so often totally sucks.

None of this occurred overnight, of course. It was years before I began to really apply these values to those around me – and it was another few years after that that I broke with my mother. Two years later, I broke with my brother – and the year after that, I broke with my father, which was less important, since I had never lived with him.

But it really does all come back to that first, fateful decision, to simply start listening to what we already know to be true.

The Truth Within…

Deep within our bodies, from the moment of our conception, lie all of the amazing biochemical functionality and potentiality of growth, puberty and maturity.

In the same way, within our unconscious minds, lies all the wisdom we could ever consume in a single lifetime.

We do not defend ourselves against our emotions; we do not defend ourselves against the pain of the past; we do not even defend ourselves against the discomfort of the present.

We always and only ever defend ourselves against the actions of the future.

If we have been hurt by a dentist and we fear returning, we do not fear the past, since that pain has come and gone.

We do not fear the pain of the past.

We fear the pain of the future.

Psychological defences do not exist to prevent us from feeling pain in the past; they exist to prevent us from acting with integrity in the future.

Psychological defences do not prevent us from being exploited in the past – since that has already happened. Psychological defences ensure that we shall be exploited in the future – and that we shall exploit others, which is even worse.

An addict does not take his drug in order to feel bliss in the past, but in order to feel bliss in the present – and, as the addiction develops, in order to avoid the agony of withdrawal in the future.

In the same way, we avoid our feelings in the present because we wish to avoid ugly confrontations in the future.

We ignore our “sinking feeling” when our mother calls because we wish to avoid the confrontation that will inevitably occur if we accept our feelings.

I desperately wanted to avoid my feelings of rejection, because once I felt my own feelings of rejection, it turned out that I was going to have to reject others in the future – the corrupt, the false, the evil.

It was not this particular girl’s rejection of me that I was avoiding – but rather, the inevitable rejection of others that would occur in the future, if I began to in fact judge people according to virtuous principles rather than shallow inconsequentialities.

Do you see why we avoid our feelings?

Do you see why thinking that our avoidance has anything to do with the past is so fundamentally counterproductive and erroneous?

Do you see how terrifying our true feelings are for those who exploit us?

Do you see how impossible it would be to exploit us if we truly felt our own emotions?

Do you see why I say that we must be slaves in order to facilitate slavery?

Do you understand why I say that we must first reject ourselves before we can be controlled by others?

We can do nothing about our enslavement in the past. We were children, we were forced to go to school and church, we were surrounded by people that we never chose to have in our lives – our parents, siblings, our extended family, our teachers…

The slavery of the past is unalterable.

The slavery of the future can be changed.

We cannot be free in the past, or from the past.

We can be free in the future.

And our souls are constantly whispering in our ears the combination to the lock that will set us free.

Feel, communicate, understand, act!

Dodging Defences

hen we decide to finally start telling those around us the truth of our experience of them, it is a near-certainty that they will oppose us with every fibre of their beings.

This is not because they are evil or because they are corrupt or because we are doing something “wrong.”

This is because they are frightened.

People oppose us when we speak the truth because they like to hide in shadows – because when we bring the light of truth into their dark and fearful worlds, they actually see their own darkness, which is invisible to them when there is no light.

People live in the dark because they pretend that there is no such thing as light.

When the light appears, it reminds them that darkness is a choice, not an absolute.

Flying from Flight…

If it turned out that gravity was an illusion, and that you could fly simply by picturing it, wouldn't you feel rather foolish for all the time you spent walking or waiting for the bus?

And – more importantly – how would you feel about all those who taught you that flying was impossible?

If, for your whole life, you could have experienced the joy and freedom of flight at will, how would you feel about those who had told you that flight was not only impossible, but evil?

What would that do to your image and picture of the world, if with your new understanding you saw the natural and beautiful wings of children being torn out at the roots in the name of virtue and goodness?

Would you begin to understand what type of people really run the world?

Would the wars, famines, religious conflicts, dictatorships, prisons, gulags, genocides, murders, kidnappings and child abuse all begin to make sense?

It is a simple logical correlation that we are in hot pursuit of in these pages.

The world is full of evil, and no one is allowed to speak the truth.

Throughout history, men have striven to rid the world of evil by creating institutions capable of doing evil – religions, governments, and the absolute authority of parents.

They have continued to do this despite the fact that not only do these institutions not rid the world of evil, but the evils in the world continue to increase.

Thus we can only surmise that the alternative to speaking the truth is even worse. The alternative to all the evils described above is even worse.

The alternative is, of course, discovering that we are turned towards evil through our love of goodness. That we are lied to about virtue in order to lead us to vice.

Let me put forward a simple proposition to illustrate what I mean.

Evil and Lying

Pretend that you are a child again. If a vase lies broken, your mother will command you to tell her who broke it. If you evade or lie, you will be morally attacked, because lying is wrong!

However, when her friends are over, if you tell them that sometimes she drinks in the morning, you are attacked for being “rude” and “inappropriate” and “airing our dirty laundry in public.”

This is the simple principle. It has nothing to do with morality:

If you are in possession of information that those in power want you to reveal, it is “immoral” to lie.

If you are in possession of information that those in power don’t want you to reveal, it is “immoral” to tell the truth.

You are led to serve those in power – the foundational root of all institutionalized evils – by your very desire to be good – to not be called “immoral.”

In other words, the devils destroy you with angels. The devils of this world destroy you with the angels of your nature.

The world is evil because we want to be good.

We are enslaved because we want to be free – of vice.

Every evil man in the world knows how desperately we want to be good. That is why Hitler had his soldiers swear an oath of loyalty to him before turning them on the rest of Europe. He knew that they would want to keep their word, and so would not need to be ruled by force.

World War II would have been impossible without this “integrity.”

“Virtue” created a Holocaust; it created Soviet gulags, Chinese starvation, American prisons and African famines.

Whoever owns the definition of virtue owns mankind.

This we all know. This, deep down, does not surprise us at all. It is our desire to be good – according to the terms of evil men – that turns us to the service of evil.

False virtue makes true vice.

The reason that I wanted to talk about all of this before we get into how you can recognize the defences of others is so that you understand the stakes involved in what you are about to do.

Really, it’s not about exposing the lies of your mother.

It’s about saving lives in the future.

Honesty and Proof

If we lie to evade an unjust punishment, we are called “bad.”

If, by telling the truth, we inflict a just punishment, we are called “bad.”

This is the simple evil of the world.

However in this – as in all things I write – there is absolutely no reason to take my word for it in any way at all.

If your mother ever told you not to lie, how do you think she should logically react when you tell her the truth about how you feel?

Because telling the truth is good, right?

Will she praise you for your honesty?

Try it and see.

Typical Defences

hen you begin to tell your mother the truth about how you feel, she will instinctively and inevitably begin to deploy a series of psychological defenses designed to disorient and punish you for telling the truth.

Let us have a look at the likely obstacles that will be thrown in your path when you dare to be honest.

If you tell your mother that you are afraid of answering the phone when she calls, she will immediately ask – usually in a wide-eyed, innocent voice – but… why?

The purpose of this maneuver is to have you provide a reason that she can reject – usually initially through the defence of minimization.

If you say: “I do not feel that you listen to me,” then she will immediately say something along the lines of…

Minimization

Source	Script	Translation
Mother	“What do you mean – I’m listening to you now, aren’t I?”	*You’re* actually the bad listener, because you don’t even notice that I always* listen to you!*
Mother	“Are you trying to tell me that I have never – not once in your entire life – ever listened to you?”	You’re insane and exaggerating – I am going to create an impossible standard of proof, wherein a single exception to a complaint dismisses the entire complaint. (“Hey, remember that one Sunday when I didn’t* beat you?*”)
Father	“Yeah, yeah, you had it sooo tough, didn’t you? Why, when I was your age… [Followed by cavalcades of desperate parental childhood stories.]	You’re a pussy.
Mother	“Sweetie! What on earth could have put that thought into your head?”	There is absolutely no evidence for your complaint. We must look for external sources for your insanity.

Self-Pity

Source	Script	Translation
Mother	[Bursts into tears!]	If you ask me to have sympathy for you, I will forcibly extract sympathy from you. If you think this is a two-way street, I will run you over.
Mother	“I’m sorry, I know that happened, I was so distraught, your father was never home, I was overwhelmed, I did the best I could in a difficult situation…”	Only an unbelievably cold and selfish child could fail to dissolve into tears when considering my plight…
Mother	“I’ve done everything for you! I’ve devoted my whole life to my kids – how can you accuse me of these things?”	You owe me an endless debt of allegiance and obedience – it would be utterly evil to refuse to repay it, let alone criticize me!
Father / Mother	“How many times do we have to apologize for this before you’re satisfied?”	You are using criticism as an unjust weapon to hold power over us and make us feel bad. You bastard.

Denial

Source	Script	Translation
Mother	“What nonsense – of course I listen to you!”	Your experience is utterly incorrect. You are attacking me unjustly. You're crushing my illusions! Dear god, whyyyyy?!?!
Mother	“You don’t really mean that, do you? You can’t possibly believe that!” [Tears.]	Your experience is utterly incorrect. You are attacking me unjustly!
Mother	“Nothing like that ever happened. I never did that.”	Your experience is utterly incorrect. You are attacking me unjustly! I'm an eyewitness, too, and my testimony should at least balance yours!
Siblings	“No one else has a problem – only you. What does that tell you about the reality of the situation?”	You are attacking them unjustly. We are claiming to have no problems so that you will start doubting your own experiences and shut the hell up. Because no one else who was there will support your claims, you must have been seeing things.

Counter Attack

Source	Script	Translation
Mother	“You kids were just so difficult. I know I lost my temper, and I’m sorry about that – but you kids just pushed me and pushed me, and never listened.”	You were a bad kid, and forced me act “badly” on occasion. But it was still all your fault. I get so frustrated when people explicitly tell me to punish them and then complain when I do what they ask for.
Mother	“I never did that! Why are you saying this? Why are you making up these stories? Why are you trying to hurt me?”	I am completely insensitive to your real pain, but you’d better be totally sensitive to my imaginary pain!
Siblings	“Yes, bad things happened for sure, those were difficult times for all of us – but it was a long time ago, it’s time for all of us to forgive, forget and move on.”	I feel really anxious when you bring up the past, so I’m going to pretend that you’re irrationally resentful, and that you’re bringing up the past as a weapon in order to control us in the present.
Siblings	“Yeah, you’ve always had a hard time forgiving people. You can nurse a grudge until it grows a beard.”	It is irrational to feel resentment about being badly treated in the past. You are just imagining all the pain that you suffered. Our parents were fine; you* are the bad one.*
Siblings	“Tell me – who is it in your life that you feel listens to you just the right amount – not too much, and not too little? What? No one does it exactly right? Well then, the only common denominator in all the problems you have with everyone is, well, you!”	The only reason that you could ever feel pain about the past is because you have impossible standards and can’t ever be satisfied. Mom and dad were the victims of your irrational standards.
Father	“How many times do we have to apologize for this before you’re satisfied, you selfish little…?”	I am going to get angry every time you bring this up, because since I have apologized angrily before, you should be satisfied now.

Genial Blankness

Source	Script	Translation
Mother / Father	“I don’t remember anything like that ever happening, but I can understand that it would be frustrating for you. Any time you ever want to talk about it, I’m here for you.” [Followed by blanket denials if you ever bring the subject up again.]	We’re very sorry that you had bad parents in the alternate universe that you inhabited as a child. We understand that you're insane, but we get understandably weary of it.
Mother / Father	“Your memory of that is different from mine. That’s not how it was for me, but everyone is entitled to his opinion.”	Your experience of your childhood is just an opinion, not reality. You are delusional, but we support you, because we are good parents.
Father	“I don’t remember that ever happening. Are you sure you didn’t dream that?”	It’s a shame that you find it so hard to process reality. I am more than happy to sacrifice your sanity for the sake of retaining my own illusions.

Framing

Source	Script	Translation
Siblings	[Rolls eyes.] “Oh that’s just how [your name] is – don’t mind him. He’s always got a bee in his bonnet about something.”	Only an irrationally angry person could ever complain about our parents. Don't mind him. He's always upset and angry about unimportant things.
Mother / Father	“Oh we already know how you feel about this topic – don’t start that again, we got it, you have a problem with the family…”	No matter how much we try to appease you, you always want us to grovel a little bit more, because you are addicted to shaming us.
Father	“What exactly do you want me to do with all your complaints?”	I will do my best to satisfy your insane little requirements, just to keep the peace. I have absolutely no idea what it is you're asking for, so you might want to get to the point.
Mother	“Is there anything I can do differently?” [When you give a list, you are attacked.]	I have always been very happy to accommodate your requirements – unless you actually give me your requirements, at which point I will attack you.

Aggressive Appeals to “Compassion”

Source	Script	Translation
Father	“You should not bring this stuff up with your mother, because she is fragile.”	We should be very gentle with fragile people – unless they are children, in which case we are allowed to attack them at will.
Mother	“Don’t you know how much these topics hurt me? Don’t you have any compassion for my feelings?”	Only my feelings are important in our relationship – your “feelings” only exist to serve my convenience.
Siblings	“Mom did the best she could. She had the best intentions, she just didn’t have the knowledge. Things were different back then – there was no ‘Oprah.’”	You are completely intolerant for criticizing mom – it’s like getting mad at a houseplant for not knowing how to program a computer. The fact that she had irrational standards for us when we were children is completely irrelevant.
Siblings	“Mom and Dad are getting old now. We know they didn’t always do the right thing, but they’re not about to change now, so we have to make the best of things.”	It requires real maturity – which you apparently do not possess – to accept people’s inevitable limitations. We must forgive those who do wrong – especially those who never forgave us for doing wrong!

Aggressive Appeal to “Self-Respect”

Source	Script	Translation
Siblings	“You have to give up your anger about the past, otherwise it just ends up controlling you forever.”	Now that our parents no longer have total control over your environment, I’m going to try to convince you that they have total control over your happiness. Your feelings will overrun you if you continue to feel them. If you're strong, you'll crush them.
Siblings	“We could dwell on all this for the rest of our lives, but what good would it do? You’ve just got to accept things for how they were, and move on from there.”	I am going to reject the pain that you feel, while preaching that it is moral to accept things for what they are.
Siblings	“Someone’s got to be the bigger person in this relationship – clearly it’s not going to be mom, so I guess it’s up to you then, isn’t it?”	The bigger person must always bow down to the smaller person – that’s how we know how big he really is! Mom is a horribly weak person, so she can't treat family members as they hope to be treated. Surely you won't be as weak as she is!

the Conversation

Now, we are ready to put RTR into practice.

When you pick up the phone to call your mother and tell her the truth about your experience of her, an odd but insistent undertow will attempt to pull the conversation away from your real experience and towards endlessly-debatable “conclusions.”

There is only one way to avoid this tendency, and that is to continually talk about how you feel in the moment.

Here is an example:

Mom, I want to tell you something… [deep breath] I know that this will sound strange, because I’ve never talked about it before, but it’s very important to me. For some time now – certainly months, and probably years – I have felt a kind of sinking sensation in my stomach when I see your name on the call display. I’m not saying that you’re causing this feeling – I am just telling you what happens for me, and what triggers it. It might be my fault entirely, and I may be misinterpreting everything about our relationship, but I wanted to be honest about how I feel.
Dear! I had no idea, I’m so sorry that this is happening for you – how strange! Why do you think you are feeling this way?
I don’t know. I do know that I haven’t been enjoying our conversations as much as I would like to – for quite some time – but I’m not sure why that is.
Well this is terrible! I had no idea you felt this way – why didn’t you tell me something before?
I didn’t tell you before because I felt frightened to tell you – again, I don’t know why, and I’m not blaming you – I’m just telling you what I felt.
Afraid to tell me? Good heavens – why on earth would you feel that? [laughter] Am I really such an ogre?
Again, I don’t know why I feel what I feel – I just wanted to tell you the truth.
Well! What do you think we should do about this?
I don’t really know – mostly because I don’t know why I am feeling what I am feeling. [deep breath] I can tell you this, though – I do feel sadness now, when I hear you tell me that you had no idea that I wasn’t enjoying our conversations very much.
Well it’s true! I had no idea you felt this way!
And you were enjoying our conversations?
Of course!
And you thought that I was enjoying our conversations?
Yes.
Why did you think that?
Well, I thought that it was just pleasant mother-daughter time. You know, where we chitchat about – I guess you could call them inconsequentialities, but – girly stuff. Nothing earthshaking, I know… But I guess I truly thought you were enjoying our chats. [sniff]
Mom, it sounds like you’re getting sad.
I am…
I feel a sudden sense of guilt overcoming me, because you’re feeling sad.
Oh, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty or anything – am I not allowed to feel sad when my daughter tells me she doesn’t enjoy our relationship?
I’m not trying to create any rules here – I’m just telling you the truth about my experience.
Well I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with your – revelation. You hide this from me for years, and pretend to enjoy our interactions, and then you just drop this bombshell on me without any warning!
Now I feel a certain amount of fear, because it seems to me that you’re getting angry.
No, I’m not angry, sweetie. I guess I’m just… surprised.
I can certainly understand that this would be surprising to you – but now I’m feeling a little angry, because it appears to me that all we’re doing is talking about your feelings, and managing your upset.
Well you’ve certainly made it very clear how you feel!
Now I’m feeling a little bit more angry, and I think it’s because – though I’m not saying this is right – I’ve felt unhappy about our phone calls for years, but we’re not talking about that – we’re just talking about your reactions to what I feel.
Oh, so we’re supposed to have this totally honest relationship now, but I’m not allowed to talk about what I feel?
Now, I’m feeling even more frightened and angry.
Well perhaps you could have put just a little bit more effort into figuring out what you felt before dumping it all on me!
Wow – oh wow, now I feel very scared, very sad, and very angry.
And what do you expect me to do about that? They’re your feelings, after all!
That’s true, of course – but every time you tell me something, I feel more and more scared, sad and angry.
Oh, so now you’re saying it’s all my fault!
No, I didn’t say that – I am telling you that I feel bad after you tell me something – I don’t know for sure that I feel bad because of what you say.

[pause]

Are you seeing a psychiatrist? Is that where all this psychobabble is coming from?
Now I feel confused, and disoriented – because it seems to me that you’re just kind of “jumping out” of the conversation, and trying to put it in a kind of context that has nothing to do with how I feel.
What are you talking about? I honestly don’t understand a word that you’re saying! Are you taking a new course or something? Is there some new Dr. Phil book out that I’m not aware of? It sounds like you’re reading from some kind of script.
Mom, now I feel confused and disoriented, because I don’t know what any of this has to do with how I feel, and how I have felt for years. [deep breath] Can you tell me how you’re feeling at the moment?
Oh, you want to know how I’m feeling? Well that’s nice. I am feeling that you just kind of “jumped” me with all this… psychologizing. It feels the way it has always felt with you when you get some new fad, some new idea, and just – spring it on other people without warning, with absolutely no consideration for their feelings!
Now I am feeling frustrated, because I asked you about your feelings, and all you did was provide negative judgments.
Well, you asked me how I felt, and so I told you! If you want us to have this fabulous, new, open relationship, I should be allowed to express my feelings too, right?
It doesn’t seem to me that when you say “I feel that you are inconsiderate,” that you are really expressing a true emotion, but rather just an angry judgment.
Oh, so now you are telling me what I feel? Is that where all this is going?
Mom, I am feeling increasingly frustrated and upset as a result of this conversation – I’m not saying that it’s all your fault, or that you’re making me feel anything…
Oh will you stop saying that! You sound like a robot! Stop trying to treat me like a child!
I’m not trying to treat you like a child – I’m just telling you how I’m feeling.
Oh, right – because it’s all about how you feel! How your feelings affect other people – I’m sure that hasn’t entered your mind one little bit!
Mom, I’m going to stop talking to you right now, because I’m feeling overwhelmingly sad and upset. You might be right in everything that you’re saying, that I’m inconsiderate and condescending and so on, but I can’t evaluate that objectively right now, because I am feeling so upset.

[pause]

Sweetie! I’m sorry that you feel judged – perhaps I was too hasty. I’m sorry if I’m reacting too strongly or inappropriately in some way. I just thought we had a good relationship, and now I find out that the whole thing has been a lie for heaven knows how long! Can you blame me for being upset? I guess it wouldn’t hurt to be more open about our feelings – I thought I was doing that, but I guess I am wrong again…
Now I am feeling confused, and also a little bit irritated.
Well if I am only making you feel bad by opening my mouth, it makes sense for us to stop talking, since I am obviously deviating from your script in some manner.
OK, mom.

the Principles at Work

Can you see the overall RTR approach in the above conversation?

Intimacy is not something that occurs in the abstract, or in a contained manner, or in some sort of mythological “story time” pseudo-interaction.

Intimacy occurs in real-time, in the moment, when you speak honestly about your true feelings in the presence of another.

In the above conversation, you talked to your mother openly and honestly about your feelings – you recognized that she would be surprised by your “sudden” honesty, and attempted to manage that transition.

You did not attempt to blame your mother, you did not attempt to “frame” the conversation, you did not inflict any conclusions on her – you merely tried to be honest in the moment about how you felt while talking to her.

You did not fall into the temptation of attacking her with a “conclusion,” but stayed vulnerable and open about what was happening for you throughout the conversation.

Just about everyone will feel confused, frustrated, disoriented and aggressive when you continue to provide them with honest feedback about how you feel while interacting with them. In a very real way, they genuinely have no idea what to do with honesty in the moment, as they speak and interact with you.

When you provide people continual feedback about your feelings – especially in relation to their actions – they will most often attempt to project their own increasing frustrations onto you by willfully misunderstanding you, misinterpreting your motives, inventing your supposed “conclusions,” accusing you of hypocrisy (“Oh, I’m not supposed to be honest about my feelings?”), “framing” the discussion, attacking you and so on.

The truth is that it is utter agony for most people to experience a Real-Time Relationship – particularly the first few times. They will do almost anything to avoid the radioactive pain of seeing themselves in the moment through your eyes.

There is nothing that you can do to manage or diminish the pain that other people feel in the presence of honesty – pain that is only increased by your unwillingness to blame them for your feelings.

When you express genuine curiosity about another person, it is agonizing for them because they have most likely never experienced that before in their life. The only time that most people receive “attention” is when somebody wants to hurt, control or manipulate them, or needs something from them. Thus they will inevitably react to your “attention” with fear and hostility – in order to protect their delusions about the virtue of those who raised them, and those around them.

In the above conversation, you will notice that I do not suggest trying to probe your mother’s feelings. You cannot control the degree of honesty that someone else is willing to bring to any interaction. You can certainly ask others how they feel, but if they respond with manipulative or bullying defenses you cannot reasonably call them dishonest – you can only tell them how you feel as a result of their responses.

What you also may not have noticed in the above conversation is that your mother never actually tells you that you are wrong. Your mother certainly implied that you were inconsiderate, hypocritical and so on – but she never told you that you were wrong about what you felt.

This is one of the greatest strengths of the RTR – if you avoid inflicting “conclusions,” no one can reasonably tell you that your feelings are wrong.

This is why the RTR exposes all of the manipulations, bullying and condescension of those around you. When you tell people honestly how you feel – without inflicting story-time conclusions – it arouses all of their defenses. If you continue to stick to the truth about how you feel, you will actually see all of their defenses, parading in quick sequence. This is, of course, both horrifying and revealing.

What Next?

What happens after the above conversation?

Without a doubt, you have tossed a hand grenade into the bunker of your mother’s defenses.

Initially, her defenses will be surprised, and thus will be relatively crude, openly manipulative and obviously upsetting.

After you hang up, however, she will have a chance to sit and brood, and really embellish the mythology that she feels driven to inflict upon you in order to rescue her own self-serving illusions.

Your mother may be the kind of person who just grimly or breezily ignores discomfort, and so may say nothing about the above interaction the next time you talk.

How do you respond to that?

Why, with honesty. “Mom, I feel baffled and hurt, and I think it might be because…”

Alternatively, you may get a call back in half an hour – or a day or two later – after your mother has had the time to prepare a truly wonderful and moving story about what “happened.” Most likely, she will take on a false kind of “responsibility” for what went wrong in your interaction – still, however, you will end up being blamed for upsetting the apple cart.

What do you do?

Why, you listen to your instincts, and speak the truth of course!

When your mother’s name lights up your call display again, you will undoubtedly feel a much stronger sinking sensation than you did before your last conversation.

If you do end up picking up the phone – which is a decision that only you can make – then you continue right where you left off, talking about your feelings in the moment.

“Mom, when I saw your name on my call display just now, I felt even more of a sinking sensation than I did in the past. I know that has something to do with the interaction we just had, but I’m not sure exactly how.”

And then, when your mother goes off on some mythology junket about what happened, you do not argue with her storytelling – any more than you would argue with Tolkien about whether orcs live in Isengard – but simply tell her how you feel about what she is saying.

Then when she starts manipulating you again, you simply continue to tell her how you feel about what she is saying.

The Endgame

Continuing this process will inevitably lead to one of two outcomes.

If, in conversation after conversation, your mother continually refuses to listen to how you feel, and endlessly manipulates you in order to manage her own anxiety – at some point, you will achieve closure.

In other words, you will understand in your very core the simple and tragic fact that there is no point fishing in this lake anymore, because there are no fish left in the lake.

This means that your mother is simply a mythology robot, with no capacity whatsoever to interact with you in an honest and vulnerable manner.

Fundamentally, she does not exist.

Dead Souls

In the Christian mythology, every person possesses a soul, fashioned in the image of God, which cannot be corrupted.

Thus the hope always exists that even the most evil people can achieve salvation, since they possess an immortal sliver of pure virtue within them at all times.

In the real world, nothing could be further from the truth.

The idea that our personalities possess some sort of Platonic “perfect form” that can survive every kind of abuse and corruption is a deadly myth.

If I smoke for 40 years and contract virulent lung cancer, and I am on my deathbed, what would it mean to say that somewhere within my body there still exist “perfectly healthy lungs”?

No, the reality of the situation is that my lungs are irreversibly diseased. No “magical perfect healthy lungs” exist anywhere in my body, or in any sense whatsoever.

In China, when foot-binding was a common practice, the feet of little girls would be gruesomely tortured so that they ended up “curling under” themselves, the toes burrowing into the heels.

When this process was complete, there was no such thing as “perfectly healthy feet” that floated around these women like some sort of odor. Their feet had been irreversibly mutilated and would never recover or regain their original shape.

The armies and police that are supposedly designed to “protect” citizens always end up preying upon them. When a policeman ends up as a concentration camp guard, no “virtuous policeman” clings to his shadow on the ground – he has become evil and cannot recover.

The same is true of our personalities.

There does come a time when, if we continue to act in a corrupt or abusive manner, our defenses overwhelm and extinguish the very personality that they were originally designed to protect.

When this occurs, we no longer have any access to a healthy and happy “true self.” It dies, as surely as our lungs die when we have lung cancer.

When we finally understand this about our mother – or whoever we are interacting with – we feel an enormous, bottomless sorrow. This sadness is called “closure,” which is the feeling that a surgeon experiences when his patient flatlines beyond recovery.

It is the knowledge that salvation is no longer possible – that no real relationship will ever occur, that we will never be seen or empathized with, that the only thing at the other end of the phone is an empty dungeon of dead ghosts.

When this knowledge comes to us, we shudder in primeval horror – and we also involuntarily raise our eyes to the light and bless the fortune that can help us avoid such a living death.

On the Other Hand…

The possibility always exists, however, that through continually and honestly speaking the truth about our own experiences, we will be able to break through the defenses of those around us.

In this case, relationships can be rescued, intimacy can begin and disaster can be averted.

It is highly unlikely – dare I say impossible? – that this can ever be achieved with anyone in your immediate family who has ever been consistently cruel to you.

Your beautiful world awaits – but not forever…

uring this process, you will be constantly tempted to withdraw from your new honesty. This desire will not primarily come from you, but rather from those around you who do not wish to see their own disease.

There is nothing that compels you to continue, of course, except the truth.

I strongly suggest that you avoid getting stuck in the “null zone,” where you have begun the process of speaking the truth – thus shattering your empty compliance – but then give up being honest before the process is completed, and you have gained either new possibilities or final closure.

Keep speaking the truth, no matter how hard it gets, because you deserve so much better – and the beautiful new world that awaits you will not wait forever.

Conclusion

n many ways, this is the most ambitious work that I have ever attempted.

Philosophy is so often discussed in the abstract – in terms of metaphysics, epistemology or ethics – that at times it can seem to have as much relevance to real life as quantum physics does to hitting a baseball.

I truly believe that philosophy will liberate the world, if we humbly submit to and act upon the tenets of truth.

Politics will not free us; art will not free us; by God “culture” will not free us; literature will not free us – only a steadfast examination of and commitment to the truth can break our chains.

I have not tried to pretend that freedom can be won without cost. Realizing the true extent of what it will cost us to become free is both disheartening and encouraging.

It is encouraging because if living the truth requires a near-superhuman effort, then we can be more at peace about the world’s lack of freedom.

The higher the bar, the better our chances – because if freedom were easy but had never been achieved, then it would very likely be impossible.

We do not have to be free any more than we have to eat, breathe, or exercise.

Philosophy does not command us to act with integrity, any more than nutrition commands us to eat well.

Philosophy simply reveals the truth to us – and, in combination with psychology, outlines the likely results of living a lie – but it does not command us to be honest.

Philosophy mentors; it does not bully.

Thus you should feel perfectly free to follow or reject the suggestions contained in this book.

You can lie or speak the truth. You can live with integrity, or mislead others at will. You can disbelieve in the existence of your conscience and hope against hope that your dishonest actions are not even recorded by your own soul.

I am telling you, though, that only the mad forget what they have done.

Pretending that you do not speak English does not prevent you from understanding English.

Pretending that you have told the truth does not prevent you from remembering your lies.

Pretending that you deserve love when you have not earned it does not prevent you from hating yourself.

Pretending that you “love” a woman when you merely want to have sex with her will not prevent the problems that will result.

Rejecting the research on the dangers of smoking does not make you immune to lung cancer.

Thus I urge you to really try on the suggestions in this book. It has nothing to do with obedience to me, to philosophy, to ethics – since virtue requires independent thought, which mere obedience can never generate; any more than “painting by numbers” can generate original art.

We should be honest and courageous and honourable and strong, because those actions – and those actions alone – will inevitably result in self-respect, rational pride – and the capacity to truly love, and be loved.

The joy that lies at the heart of virtue has been clouded by pious falsehoods about what is good.

The deep pleasures that arise from living with integrity must be experienced. They can barely be described to those who have yet to feel them. Real virtue brings joy to your immediate personal relationships, to be sure, but it also spreads aloft, lighting the world, like rising sunlight over a darkened plain, far beyond the mere walls of your experience.

When we light our candles, we ignite the sun!

Strike this match.

For yourself, for your future…

And for the world.

This book was written from November 2007 to January 2008 in Mississauga, Canada, with the voluntary financial support of Freedomain Radio listeners.

If you enjoyed this book, you will also like the “Freedomain Radio” podcasts, available at www.freedomainradio.com, as well as the videos available at http://youtube.com/freedomainradio.

If you’d like to discuss the ideas in this book, please drop by the Message Board, at www.freedomainradio.com/board.

My other philosophical books “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion,” and “Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics” – as well as my novel “The God of Atheists” – are available at my web site in audiobook/PDF format, as well as at:

http://stores.lulu.com/freedomainradio

Practical Anarchy - The Book

2008-11-14T13:15:00Z

Preface

Any author who gives his work away faces the unique challenge of convincing people who have not invested their money in buying it that it is worth investing their time to read it.

Samuel Johnson once wrote: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” which makes my task even harder, since either Mr. Johnson was a blockhead, or I am.

I do think that there are some circumstances under which releasing a work for free does not necessarily imply that it is worth exactly what readers pay for it. Those proposing radical new approaches to age-old problems – the addition of new thought to the human canon – will not find it particularly easy to get people to pay good money for such mad claims. If I am writing a book on Christianity, then I can sell it to Christians; if I am writing a book on libertarianism, then I can sell it to libertarians; if I am writing a book on politics, I can sell it to the deluded…

If I am writing a book for the future, for a truly free society that is yet to be, who do I sell it to? I cannot even tell in particular detail what this new society might look like, or be able to achieve – save that I am sure that they have not yet found a way to send gold backward through time, and deposit it on my doorstep.

Although improbable, it is not completely impossible that you might find something radical, thrilling and new in this book – despite its cover price. The best way to spread new ideas is to make them as available and accessible as possible, which is why I give everything away, and rely – not without reason – on the generosity of my readers and listeners.

Despite our universal abhorrence, evils continue to plague the world, without respite. We fear and hate war, yet war continues. Our souls revolt against unjust imprisonment and torture, yet such injustices continue. We feel powerless in the face of endless tax increases – and with good reason. We feel agonizing compassion for those who are caught up in the endless bloody nets of tribal conflicts, condemned to mute horror and blank-eyed starvation. The plight of the enslaved weighs down our hearts with the rusty chains of useless sympathy. We would do almost anything to free the world from such monstrous evils – yet we feel so helpless! We all want a free and wonderful world, and yet feel utterly paralyzed before these monsters who commit such universal crimes…

Violence, injustice and brutal control are truly the malignant cancers of our species. Philosophers have chided and reasoned in vain for thousands of years. Governments have been instituted to serve and protect the people – yet always escape the flimsy walls of their paper prisons and spread their choking powers across society, darkening hope and the future.

In this book, I do my part to put an end to these evils.

I know exactly how all these horrors can be ended.

I am fully aware of the outlandishness of this claim. I am fully aware that you have every right to be perfectly skeptical and cynical about the contents of this book. I would not blame you at all if you laughed in my face, spat at my feet – did anything that you pleased – as long as I could get you to turn just one more page.

Because – what if it were possible?

What if it were possible to live in a world free of the terror and genocide of war? What if it were possible to live in a world without unjust imprisonment, institutionalized rape, and the endless subjugation of the helpless and arming of the vicious and evil?

What if you held in your hands a small blueprint that could lead to just such a world? A world of peace and plenty – of compassion, voluntarism, virtue and true liberty?

Isn’t that what we all really dream of?

Isn’t that the world that we wish with all our hearts that our children could inherit?

Isn’t that the world that we would like to take even a few steps towards?

Give this book a few minutes, I beg you.

We can get there.

My next book – “Achieving Anarchy” – will show us how.

Why do we examine the destination before mapping the journey?

Nietzsche said, “He who has a why… can bear with almost any how.”

Before we discuss how to get to freedom, why must know why a stateless society is so essential.

This book will show you what real freedom looks like.

Part 1: Methodology

Introduction

The inevitable – and highly intelligent – questions that arose in response to my last book “Everyday Anarchy” mostly centered on the question of how a stateless society could self-organize in practical terms.

Naturally, these sorts of questions are a fascinating and endless kind of intellectual delight. Much as Alice mused as she fell down the hole at the beginning of Lewis Carroll’s famous book, we intellectuals are tempted to design the future down to the last detail. We try to respond to every conceivable objection with yet another essay on how roads can be delivered in the absence of a government, or how international treaties can work in the absence of law courts, or how children can be protected in the absence of the police, or how national defense can be secured in the absence of a State army, and how the poor can receive an education in the absence of public schools, and how and why doctors will help the impoverished sick without being forced to, and so on.

I have always argued that these answers – though intellectually stimulating and enjoyably debatable – will never convince those who wish to avoid the morality and practicality of nonviolent solutions to the problems of social organization.

For instance, in my last book, as well as a recent video, I provided a proof for anarchy, which relied on the reality of non-contractual special-interest group relationships with up-and-coming politicians. A large number of people wrote to me in response, saying either that such special interest relationships did not exist – surely a laughable proposition, given the 30,000 plus lobbyists registered in Washington, DC alone – or that if I wanted anarchy, and democracy was a great proof of the practical functionality of anarchy, then surely I should be happy with democracy!

There seems to be no end to the foolish statements that can be uttered by those afraid of the truth. The truth, as Socrates gave his life to show, remains highly threatening to entrenched interests and has a very personal and volatile effect on our immediate relationships.

In reality, it is not so much a stateless society that we fear, but rather a family-less and friendless society where we rock gently, hugging our useless truths to our chests; solitary, ostracized, alone, rejected, scorned, derided. The truth is a desert island, we fear, and so as evolutionarily social animals, we join our corrupt circles in mocking and attacking the truth, and resent those who tell the truth, for revealing the corruption that formerly was only visible unconsciously – which is to say, largely invisible.

It is important to understand up front that this book will contain truths that will likely be highly threatening to you – and certainly to those around you. The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters. As I talked about in my book, “Real-Time Relationships,” the predations of the rulers survive on the horizontal attacks of the slaves. Because we savage each other, we remain ruled by savages.

Thus, you may find that as you read this book, you experience a rising frustration and irritation with its contents – and possibly with me as well, if experience is any guide.

I certainly do sympathize with these emotions, and truly understand their cause, but I would strongly urge you to refrain from sending me angry e-mails – for your sake, not mine. It is, as you know, highly unjust to attack a truth teller for the discomfort he causes.

It is not my fault that you have been lied to your whole life long.

Furthermore, the lies exist whether or not you hear the truth – from me, or from anyone else.

Limitations

It is impossible for any single man – or group of men – to ever design or predict all the details of any society. In order for you to get the most out of this book, I will make a few suggestions which may be helpful.

First of all, if you approach this book with the idea that you’re going to find every possible gap in an argument, or nook and cranny where uncertainty may reside, then this book will be a complete waste of time, and will raise your blood pressure for absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

When Adam Smith formulated the arguments for the free market in the late 18th century, it was not considered a requirement that he predict the stock price of IBM in 1961. He began working with a number of observable and empirical principles, and proved them with rational arguments and well-known examples.

The validity of the “invisible hand” was not dependent upon Adam Smith predicting and describing in detail the invention of, say, the Internet. The methods that free men and women invent and use to solve social problems cannot reasonably be predicted in advance, and finding every conceivable fault with any and all such possible predictions is arguing against a mere theoretical possibility, which is both futile and ridiculous.

That having been said, it is still worth reviewing some possible solutions to social organization that do not involve the monopolistic violence of the State. When Enlightenment thinkers attacked and undermined the exploitive illusions of religion, they were not able to provide a valid and scientific system of ethics to replace the mad moral commandments of historical superstition. It certainly is valuable to disprove existing “truths,” but if we do not come up with at least plausible alternatives, these falsehoods inevitably tend to morph and reemerge in a different form. Thus did the death of religion give rise to totalitarianism – just another worship of an abstract and irrational moral absolute; the “State” rather than a “god.” The unjust aristocratic privileges of the minority that the Founding Fathers so railed against simply morphed into the unjust privileges of the majority in the form of “mob rule” democracy – which then morphed back into the unjust aristocratic privileges of the minority in the form of a political ruling class.

Men and societies all need rules to live by, and if existing rules get knocked down, they simply rise again in another form if rational replacements are not provided. Exposing a lie simply breeds different lies, unless the truth is also advanced.

I have set myself a number of goals in the writing of this book that I wanted to mention up front, so you could understand the approach that I am taking – the strengths and weaknesses of what I am up to, as it were.

First, I promise to refrain from exhausting your patience by trying to come up with every conceivable solution to every conceivable problem. Not only would this end up being grindingly boring, but it would also indicate a strange kind of intellectual insecurity, and an unwillingness to give you the respect of accepting that you can very easily think for yourself about the solutions to the problems discussed in this book. My aim is to give you a framework for thinking about these issues, rather than have you sit passively as I explicate the widest variety of solutions to all conceivable problems.

In other words, my purpose in this book is to teach you to be a mathematician, not show you how good a mathematician I am.

Teaching you how to solve problems is far more respectful than giving you solutions. I have always said that everyone is a genius, and everyone is a philosopher. You do not need me to spell out how a stateless society can work in every detail, but rather to give you a framework which you can use to work out your own answers, and satisfy yourself how well a truly free society will work.

When Francis Bacon was putting forward the scientific method in the 16th century, it was not necessary for him to solve every conceivable scientific problem in order to prove the value of his methodology. It certainly was useful for him to show how his methodology had solved a number of vexing problems, and that it pointed the way to answers in a number of other areas, but of course if Bacon had been able to solve every conceivable scientific problem that could ever possibly arise, there would be precious little need for his scientific method at all, since we would just consult his writings whenever we had a scientific problem that we could not solve.

In the same way, as a philosopher I am interested in teaching people how to think in a new way, rather than giving them explicit answers to every conceivable problem. My approach to rational and scientific ethics – Universally Preferable Behavior (UPB) – is to provide people a framework for evaluating moral propositions, rather than to give them an utterly finalized system of ethics. If such a system of ethics ever could be developed – which seems highly unlikely, given the inevitably-changing conditions of life, society and technology – then no one would ever have to think about ethics ever again, and philosophy would fall into the abyss reserved for dead religions and defunct ideologies, interesting only as yet another example of a temporary historical illusion, like the worship of Zeus or Mussolini or Paris Hilton.

The scientific method certainly did – and does – provide an objective methodology for gaining valid knowledge and understanding of the physical world, just as UPB provides an objective methodology for separating truth from falsehood when it comes to evaluating moral propositions, and the free market provides an objective methodology for determining value in the provision of goods and services, through the mechanism of price.

The value of the scientific method only truly becomes apparent when we abandon religious or superstitious revelation as a valid source of “truth.” We only refer to a compass when we become uncertain of our direction. We only begin to develop science when we start to doubt religion. We only begin to accept the validity of the free market when we doubt the ethics and practicality of coercive central planning. On a more personal level, we only begin to change our approach to relationships when we at last begin to suspect that we ourselves may be the source of our problems.

Much like a river, alternative tributaries only arise when the original flow is blocked. The development of new paradigms in thought is in general more provoked than plotted, and erupts from a rising exasperation with the falsehoods of existing “solutions.” This spike in emotion can sometimes arise with extraordinary rapidity, from a slow build to a sudden explosion – and it is my belief that this is where we are poised in the present when it comes to an examination of the use of violence in solving social problems.

As a vivid, living value, the nation-state as an object of worship and a source of practical and moral solutions is as dead as King Tutankhamun. No one truly believes anymore that the State can solve the problems of poverty, of mis-education, of war, of ill health, of security for the aged and so on. Governments are now viewed with extraordinary suspicion and cynicism. It is true that many people still believe that the idea of government can somehow be rescued, but there is an extraordinary level of exasperation, frustration and anxiety with our existing methods of solving social problems. When someone says that we need yet another government program to “solve” all the problems created or exacerbated by previous government programs, most people now view this approach as an eye-rolling non-answer.

Of course, we still hear a lot about government “solutions” in the media, academia, and the arts, but most people now understand – at least emotionally – that this bleating arises from special interest groups that are either threatened or protected by the State – the automatic reaction of “increase regulation!” When a problem arises, this demand no longer comes from the people, but rather from those parties that will benefit from increased regulation.

The rise of the Internet has also rocked the mainstream paradigm of “government as virtue.” In particular, the US-led invasion of Iraq has contributed to a final collapse in belief about the virtue of statist solutions to complex problems. It is easier to believe the lies of the past, since we were not there when they were told – it is harder to believe in the lies of the present, since we can see them unraveling before our very eyes.

Thus, our belief that the government can solve problems is collapsing on two fronts – first, we now understand that the government cannot solve problems – and second, and more importantly, we can see that the government is not giving up any of its control over the problems it so obviously cannot solve.

This last point is worth expanding upon, since it is so important, and so often overlooked.

If the government claims to take our money in order to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, but the government clearly does not solve the problem of poverty, but rather in fact tends to make it worse, what then do we begin to understand when the government continues to take our money?

If I take your money telling you that I will ship you an iPod, what realization do you come to when I neither ship you the iPod nor return your money?

Surely you understand that I only promised you the iPod in order to steal your money.

In the same way, the government did not increase our taxes in order to solve the problem of poverty, but rather claimed that it wanted to solve the problem of poverty in order to increase our taxes. This is the only way to explain the basic fact that the problem of poverty has not been solved – and in fact is worse now – but the government continues to increase our taxes.

We are all beginning to understand – at least at an unconscious level – that the government lies to us about helping others in order to take our money.

The Answer?

If religion is not the answer, and the State is not the answer, then what is?

Well, when a particular “answer” has proven so universally disastrous, the first place to look is the opposite of that answer.

If “no property rights” (communism) is disastrous, then “property rights” (free markets) are most likely to be beneficial.

If faith is disastrous, then science is most likely to be beneficial.

If superstition is disastrous, than reason and evidence are most likely to be beneficial.

If violence is disastrous, then peace and negotiation are most likely to be beneficial.

If the State is disastrous, then anarchism is most likely to be beneficial.

It is this last statement that tends to be the most challenging for people.

Many of us can accept a world without gods and devils, without heaven and hell, without original sin and imaginary redemption – but we cannot accept, or even imagine, a world without governments.

Many of us can picture a world with a minimum government – with a State concerned only with law courts, police and the military – but we cannot picture a world without a government at all.

A Christian can accept a world where 9,999 gods are ridiculous and false illusions, but that his God – the God of the Old Testament – is a true, real and living deity. A Christian remains an atheist with regards to almost every god, but becomes an utter theist with regards to his own deity. Getting rid of almost all gods is utterly sensible – getting rid of that one final God is utterly incomprehensible.

In the same way, Libertarians, Objectivists and other minarchists feel that getting rid of 99% of existing government functions is utterly moral – but getting rid of that last 1% is utterly immoral!

We do not accept these reservations in other areas of our lives, which is enough to make us suspicious of the true motives behind such statements. A woman who is beaten up only once a month lives 99.99% of her life violence-free, but we would not consider her beatings acceptable on that ground. It would be even more ridiculous to say that a woman should not be beaten every day, but that it would be utterly immoral to also suggest that she should not be beaten at all.

If I claim that it is moral to reduce State violence, can I claim that it is utterly immoral to eliminate such violence completely? Can I dedicate my life to reducing the incidence of cancer, but then claim that eliminating cancer completely would be utterly immoral? Can I reasonably set up a charity to reduce poverty, but then claim in my mission statement that the elimination of poverty would be a dire evil?

Of course not – I would be viewed as an irrational lunatic at best for making such statements.

Those who claim that a reduction of violence is a moral ideal, but who then also claim that the elimination of violence would be a moral evil, must at least recognize, if they wish to retain any credibility, that they are proposing an entirely foolish contradiction.

By “violence” here, I do not mean that anarchism will completely eliminate human violence – the violence that I am talking about here is the morally “justified” and institutionalized initiation of force that is the foundation of State power. (I am not going to go into a lengthy discussion here about the nature of the State, or the moral reasoning against the initiation of violence, since I have dealt with those topics at length in my podcasts, and in other books. Suffice to say that the State is by definition a group of individuals who claim the right to initiate the use of force against legally-disarmed citizens in a specific geographical region.)

Thus, I think it is reasonable for us to take the approach that if it were possible to run society without a government, this would be a massive net positive.

When we have governments, we inevitably get wars, politically motivated and unjust laws, the incarceration of nonviolent “criminals,” the over-printing of money and the resulting inflation, the enslavement of future generations through immoral deficits, the mis-education of the young, rampant vote buying, endless tax increases, arms sales around the world, unjust subsidies to specific industries, economic and practical inefficiencies of every conceivable kind, the creation of permanent underclasses through welfare and illegal immigration, vast increases in the power and violence of organized crime through restrictions on drugs, prostitution and gambling – the list of State crimes is virtually endless.

When we choose to justify governments, we inevitably choose to justify the crimes of those in power. Choosing government is also choosing war, genocide, enslavement, financial, moral and educational corruption, propaganda, the spread of violence and so on.

You can never get one without the other. Imagining otherwise is like imagining that you can choose to justify the Mafia without also justifying the violence that it uses to maintain its power. We may as well imagine that we can support the troops without simultaneously supporting the murders they commit.

Given the number of bloody and genocidal crimes that orbit the power of the State, surely we can at least be open to the possibility that society can be organized far more effectively and morally without such an evil power at its center. If it turns out that society can run without a State – even haltingly, even imperfectly – then surely we should accept such practical imperfections for the sake of avoiding such rampant and bottomless crimes against humanity. Surely, even if anarchy were proven to produce fewer and worse roads, we could accept some mildly inconvenient and bumpy rides for the sake of releasing billions of people from direct or indirect enslavement to their political masters.

To analogize this, imagine that someone in the 19th century proved that cotton would be 10% rougher if slavery were abolished. Would it be moral or reasonable for people to say, “Well, it is certainly true that slavery is a great evil, but I still prefer it to slightly less comfortable cotton!”?

No, we would view such monstrous selfishness as staggeringly corrupt. The moral hypocrisy of claiming to be against slavery, but refusing to actually oppose slavery for fear of even the mildest practical inconvenience, would be an ethical evil that would be hard to comprehend.

Thus, when people dismiss the possibility of anarchy out of hand by saying, “Oh, but how would roads be provided?” what they are really saying is that they support war, genocide, tax enslavement and the incarceration and rape of the innocent, because they themselves cannot imagine how roads might be provided in the absence of violence. “People should be murdered, raped and imprisoned because I am concerned that the roads I use might be slightly less convenient.” Can anyone look at the moral horror of this statement without feeling a bottomless and existential nausea?

Now, imagine that the reality of the situation is that roads will be provided far more efficiently and productively in a stateless society?

If that is the case, then the practical considerations turn out to be the complete opposite of the truth – that we are accepting murder, genocide and rape for the sake of bad roads, rather than good roads!

This kind of net loss provides the moral and rational core of the arguments in favor of a stateless society. While it is certainly true that some people will end up losing out under anarchy, it is the evil and corrupt who will lose the most, just as priests lose out in an atheistic society, much to the relief of children everywhere. The true reality of an anarchic society is that the moral goals of every reasonable human being – the alleviation of poverty, the provision of “public services,” the education of the young, the protection of children, the old and the infirm, will actually be created and provided in a positive, productive, gentle and moral manner.

The great lie of the statist society is that the helpless and dependent are protected, when in fact they are trapped and exploited.

The great lie of the statist society is that the ignorant are educated, when in fact they are made even more ignorant.

The great truth of the anarchic society is that the helpless are protected, the ignorant are educated, the sick are treated – and that roads are built, and are better.

To gain the beauty and virtue of anarchism, we sacrifice nothing but our illusions.

Surely, we should actually want to help people, rather than just pretend that we are doing so.

Surely, we should not sacrifice the peace of the world to our fears of imperfect roads.

The Argument from Apocalypse

Of course, people do not say that we should not live in a free society because the roads might be imperfect. The endless argument against anarchism is the “Argument from Apocalypse.” (AFA)

The AFA is not an argument at all, of course, but rather relies on rampant fear mongering, and an argument from intimidation.

Basically, the argument goes something like this:

“We’re all gonna DIEEEEEEE!”

It would actually be nice if it were slightly more sophisticated than that, but the reality is that it is not.

The basic argument is that if we accept proposition “X,” civilized society will collapse, children will die in the streets, the old will end up eating each other, and the world will dissolve into an endless and apocalyptic war of all against all.

This is not an argument at all, since it relies on fear and intimidation. Darwin faced exactly the same “objections” when he first published his theory of evolution. “If we accept that we are descended from apes, everybody will abandon morality, society will collapse, war of all against all etc etc etc.”

Abolitionists faced the same argument when suggesting that slavery should be abolished; atheists face the same silly objections when disproving the existence of God; philosophers have been put to death for suggesting that ethics should be based on something other than superstition; scientists are accused of the same evils whenever some new development threatens people’s existing prejudices – it is all the most rampant nonsense, which survives only because of its endless effectiveness.

The AFA remains effective because of a basic logical fallacy which has doubtless been around since the dawn of speech: “Belief ‘X’ would result in immorality or destruction, and so only a fool or an evil man would advocate ‘X’.”

Since very few people wish to appear either foolish or evil, they tend to back down in the face of this argument, or take the imprudent path – which I have trod many a time – of attempting to disprove the AFA.

“Anarchism results in evil!” cometh the cry – and anarchists around the world endlessly respond with: “No it won’t!” – thus losing the argument before it even begins.

The only thing that is relevant in any intellectual argument is whether it is true or not. Refusing to examine the validity and consistency of a mathematical argument because you fear that accepting its conclusions will result in endless evil is simply surrendering to superstitious fear-mongering, and abandoning your rationality. Propositions cannot be evil – mathematics cannot be evil – statism cannot be evil – error cannot be evil – and the truth is not virtuous!

A proposition cannot strangle a baby; an argument cannot rape a nun, and a theory of anarchism cannot turn people into shrunken-headed zombies in hot pursuit of Will Smith.

A theory of anarchism can only be true or false, valid or invalid, logical or illogical.

If someone deploys the AFA, it proves nothing except that he has no good arguments, and that the proposition in front of him is emotionally unsettling in some way. In other words, all that the AFA proves is intellectual idiocy and emotional immaturity. It is the philosophical equivalent of arguing against the proposition that “ice cream contains milk,” by saying, “I once had a dream that an ice cream monster was trying to eat me!” It is the kind of non sequitur we would expect from a very young child, which would only indicate an utter incomprehension of the proposed statement.

People who are threatened by ideas should at least have the honesty to say, “I am threatened by this idea,” rather than pretend that the idea is somehow objectively threatening to the human race as a whole. If I am afraid of short men, I should be honest about my fears and say, “I am afraid of short men,” rather than vehemently argue that short men will somehow destroy the world!

However, prejudice against anarchists – much like prejudice against atheists – is one of the last remaining acceptable bigotries in the world. We cannot judge any group negatively – except a group that relies on reason, evidence and nonviolence.

Thus, it will not do us any good to run screaming from the idea of a stateless society, imagining all kinds of demonic horrors. If we allow fear-mongering to not only inform, but rather define and direct our thinking, then we are left without the ability to think at all, but instead must sit clutching the skirts of those who tell us tall and terrifying tales.

We cannot judge the truth of an idea by our fears of its effect.

Arguments for or against the existence of gods are not validated by our fears of – or desires for – a godless universe. We cannot oppose a theory of gravity by saying that it is unpleasant to fall down stairs; neither can we oppose a new theory by demanding prior historical examples. The entire point of a new theory is that it is unprecedented; the first man to invent a jet aircraft could scarcely submit examples of jet aircraft flying in the past.

Another common objection to anarchic theories is that they are not embraced or validated by professional intellectuals, philosophers and academics.

This is very true, and, as I explained in great detail in my book, “Everyday Anarchy,” I think we can view this as a positive, rather than a negative.

Still, is it reasonable for me to ask you to reject the near-universal consensus of highly intelligent people – professors, pundits, columnists, academics and so on – simply because they happen to disagree with or ignore the propositions that I am putting forward here? Surely we have all heard of a number of scam artists – particularly on the Internet – who sell snake oil solutions to genuine ailments, preying upon the weak, the desperate and the gullible. Is it reasonable to ask everyone to completely abandon respect for scholarship and professionalism, to turf experts for the sake of their own preferred opinions? Is this not our fear of what the Internet will do to social consensus? Can we not find on the Wild West of the Web articles claiming that smoking is good for you, that space aliens were responsible for 9/11, that exercise is dangerous, fluoride will kill you and eating fat will make you lose weight?

How can we be sure that a theory of anarchism is not just another one of these crackpot ideas that rails against the universal consensus of experts in the field, attempting to dislodge sober scholarship with wild-eyed speculation? Perhaps this book is just a form of elaborate trickery, a playing out of some wretched and buried psychological trauma, designed to separate you from your friends and family by infecting you with strange and illicit ideas – and taking your money to boot, since Freedomain Radio relies on voluntary donations!

Of course, these are all excellent questions to ask, and I for one would be highly unlikely to pit my own judgment against that of, say, my doctor or my accountant. One of the main reasons that we need specialists is because enormous swaths of human knowledge remain buried under entirely counterintuitive paradigms. Who would have thought that making your gums bleed – at least at first – with floss would lead to oral health? Exercise often feels bad, and eating pie always feels very good, and so we need experts to remind us of the long-term effects of such activities, compared to the short-term incentives and disincentives. We prefer to spend money in the moment rather than save it for a rainy day; a surgeon might make us feel very unwell in order to prevent or cure an illness that we may not have even felt yet; a friend might strive to impress upon us the emotional problems of a highly attractive sexual partner; and the dark satisfactions of discharging anger towards a spouse in the present might create for us a very unpleasant future indeed.

In all these areas, we rely on the objectivity and expertise of those around us, who possess the training and knowledge to steer us against our immediate desires, or who are not subject to our own immediate desires – as in the case of our friends – and so can often see things more clearly.

What about the famous idea that deep study tends to lead to moderation? A little learning is a dangerous thing, it is often said – and with good reason. If we are ignorant of the effects of early childhood experiences and the long-term effects on the psychology of the personality, it is far easier to look at criminals as simply “bad guys.” If we are ignorant of the basic truth that history is almost always a tale told by those in power in order to justify and support their own “virtue,” then we shall inevitably be genuinely shocked when we come across the long-lost truths of the vanquished, or the foreign – or the dead.

Thus, should we not look for moderation in our responses to complex questions? The problem of health is complex, requiring a wide variety of inputs from nutritionists, physical trainers, doctors, psychologists and so on – most of whom will counsel a form of Aristotelian moderation. Too little exercise leads to brittle bones and flab; too much exercise leads to injury. Too little food leads to a lack of energy; too much food leads to excess weight. An over-focus on the desires and needs of others leads to codependency; too little focus leads to selfish narcissism. Parents must often attempt to strike a balance between discipline and indulgence; the needs of the many must be balanced with the needs of the few, even in just the business arena; the sacrifice of our own short-term happiness for the sake of the longer-term happiness of another we love is all part and parcel of having a wise, flourishing and positive set of personal and professional relationships.

Given all this complexity, does the answer of “just get rid of the government!” not strike us as overly simplistic? My mother used to talk about three spheres within society – business, government and labor – and the need to find a balance between them. “The endless challenge in society is finding a way to stimulate business growth – but not at the expense of labor – so that there is enough tax revenue for government to provide effective social services.”

This kind of juggling act strikes us as eminently mature in many ways, and recognizes that, just as there is good and bad in every individual, so there is good and bad in every group. You can find bad and corrupt people in the realm of politics, labor and business, if you want – but stretching this basic reality into an outright condemnation of any group seems explicitly prejudicial. A man who has been robbed by a Chinese acrobat would scarcely be justified in demanding that the world be utterly rid of Chinese acrobats. One swallow does not a summer make; nor do bad politicians invalidate the value of government as a whole.

Furthermore, isn’t it rather childish to suggest that we rid ourselves of an institution that is so open and responsive to our feedback? We live in a democracy, for heaven’s sake – why throw the baby out with the bathwater, when we can get involved and change the system? If we do not like a particular company’s business practices, we do not have to throw out “capitalism” as a whole – we can inform others about their odious practices, organize boycotts and so on. Surely the communicative power of the Internet has removed significant barriers to freedom of self-expression and the exchange of information, to the point where we no longer need to sit back when an institution fails to serve us, but rather we can very quickly and effectively work to bring about change in our political system.

It also seems very alarming for us to take the enormous risk of getting rid of a government. Such a radical step has never been taken before as part of a conscious philosophical program. Governments have collapsed, of course – and we can only look at the example of Somalia to see the infighting and warlords that can arise from such a situation – and governments have been taken over, either internally or externally – but there is no example in history of consciously dismantling a State without any goal of replacing it. Does it seem sensible to go directly against the entire collective history of our species, and throw out an essential human institution that has been around as long as we have? Other radical “reorganizations” of human society have resulted in endless slaughter, chaos, war, and the staggering disorientation of children raised without families, of rampant polygamy, communal “ownership” and so on. It does seem to be a particular curse of our species that every generation or two, some new idea comes along which aims to overthrow the entire history of human interaction, and replace the controlled hurly-burly of a State-managed free market with something like fascism, socialism or communism. Then, some other wild-eyed rebel comes along and decries that, “family is dictatorship,” and attempts to undermine and destroy that most essential component of social life, the nuclear family. Then someone else comes along and says, “Property is theft!” and the cycle just seems to start all over again.

The basics of human society – of human life itself – seem to be that families are good, that private property is important, that the greed of the free market cannot provide all possible goods and services, that some form of centralized regulation and law-making seems to be essential, that there is good and bad in everyone, but there are some very good people, and some very bad people, and that the good people need a government to protect them from the bad people.

I confess that it must be quite exasperating for people to hear some of the basics that are so commonly accepted as truths opened up once more for a new examination. Perhaps it feels somewhat akin to a biologist being lectured to by a creationist during a long intercontinental flight, or a math teacher being cornered by a hyper-intense student strung out on caffeine who insists that numbers are just an illusion, man!

Scientists do not consistently reopen the basic methodology of the scientific method; economists are not continually overturning the essentials of their own profession – that human desires are limitless, but all resources are limited – and doctors do not continually debate the value of the Hippocratic Oath.

Surely, we can say, some basic aspects of human life can be accepted as given, so that we can have a firm foundation to build our edifices of thought upon. There are certain kinds of philosophers who will continually re-open the question of metaphysics and epistemology, and demand to know how we know that we are not living in the dream of an existential demon, and that everything is a managed illusion, and that we may in fact be a brain in a tank in a form of Matrix! These sorts of “thinkers” do bring up intellectually stimulating questions, to be sure, but there are very few of us who do not inevitably shrug our shoulders after failing to penetrate this veil of ignorance, and shake off the burden of these unanswerable questions, certain that we still have a life to live in the real world, and that to sit and forever ponder these unanswerable questions would be to sink into a form of hyper-intellectual coma.

Finally, let us suppose that it would be a good thing to get rid of the government – well, it might also be nice if we could fly, breathe underwater and sneeze gold! An essential component of rational prioritization is to recognize and separate the possible from the impossible. It may indeed be the case that we live in the dream of a demon, but so what? What possible difference could it make to our daily life if this were, or were not, the case? If it is utterly impossible to get rid of the government – at least in our own lifetime – then isn’t it just a kind of narcissistic self-indulgence to continue to play around with the idea as if it ever could be implemented? We could also theorize that spending a solid week in zero gravity could be an excellent cure for lung cancer, but that would scarcely help the people suffering in our own lifetime. Surely, those of us with the intellectual abilities to traverse such endless abstractions should use our abilities for a more tangible and immediate good, rather than perform the intellectual equivalent of inventing the inner workings of Klingon biology.

We certainly do have the right to be skeptical about those who take their intellectual powers and run off in hot pursuit of the impossible – what could possibly be their motivation? Why would anyone want to get involved in a series of ideas that can never be achieved, that are alienating and frustrating to discuss, that eject these thinkers from anywhere close to the mainstream of social thought – and which create endless awkward silences at dinner parties, sweaty-palmed avoidances in one’s early dating life, endless impossibilities in educational environments, teeth-grinding frustration when reading the newspaper or watching a movie, a reputation for eccentric and strangely intense thinking patterns, habitual eye-rolling from friends, a suspicious intellectual monomania that people kind of have to steer around if they wish to avoid “setting you off” – and, last but not least, some fairly endless challenges when it comes to raising your children, and filling them full of ideas that will doubtless set them approximately one solar system’s league away from their peers.

It seems like an entirely generous estimate to imagine that more than one in 100 people will ever be interested in learning more about anarchism – and perhaps one out of a thousand will avidly pursue the course of thought and become full-fledged anarchists. What are the odds that these incredibly rare creatures will just happen to be scattered around the budding anarchist’s social, familial and educational spheres?

Statistically, anarchism is a surefire recipe for social and familial isolation. After the virus of anarchism infects you, the possibility of infecting others remains very low – thus, you must either retreat to some sort of mental cave, or live a psychologically-perilous form of double life, biting your tongue and averting your eyes whenever the topic of politics, economics or the State comes up.

Given all these dire social consequences – combined with the fact that anarchism will never be implemented in our lifetime – how can we possibly understand the pursuit and acceptance of these wild ideas as anything other than a kind of intellectual shell around a hyper-tender personality, designed to alienate, frustrate and drive people away, perhaps as a result of a tortuous history of parental rejection?

Other than a strange and perverse kind of emotional masochism, what could conceivably motivate someone to take such a mad, vain, futile and unachievable intellectual course?

Surely, even if anarchism is sane, anarchists are not.

It is certainly true that there are many strange people in this world who believe many strange things – and that some of those strange people believe in anarchism. Stalin was both an evil sociopath and an atheist; Hitler was a murderous racist who also knew how to tie his shoes – this does not tell us anything about atheists or people who know how to tie their shoes as a whole.

A Merely Personal Confession…

I can say for myself – and I only mean this for myself – that although the truth often does press down like the weight of a cathedral on my sometimes-sloping shoulders, and though it does lower a dark and rippled glass between myself and the companions and family of my youth, and though it startles and scatters shocked glances in the faces of those around me, and although it renders the present unstable and the future uncertain – even with all that the truth demands and imposes upon me, I would not let you tear it from my heart with any power at your command.

The truth was not something that I set out to pursue. I dabbled in ideas when I was a child, just as I dabbled in playing certain instruments and painting in watercolor – never once dreaming that it would be anything other than a mildly diverting hobby. Looking back on it now, many decades later, it reminds me of one of those horror stories which depicts the disastrous consequences that result from “delving too deep” into the earth. Some sort of unholy beast arises from the depths and lays waste to the surface world – a beast that has lain dormant for hundreds or thousands of years is suddenly disturbed, and awakes with a sky-splitting roar, and a savage and unquenchable hunger for destruction.

During that shock of initial eruption, when the ideas that we started out merely playing with suddenly seem to take on a life of their own, like the escalating spells of Mickey Mouse, we do recoil in horror and leap back as if laser-scoped by a trigger-happy sniper, but we quickly learn the lesson of all horror stories, which is that the monsters are never outside our head.

The truth is an angry, demanding and liberating coach, who drags us kicking and screaming up a sharp and broken mountainside, and then sets us down gently to marvel in breathless wonder at the most beautiful view that can ever be conceived. As our complaints roll emptily down to disappear into the fogs of our past, in a bare ripple of white smoke, our eyes stream with tears in mute gratitude at what we have been able to behold.

Such happy and driven fools often look quite mad to those around them. The truth is a drug that renders the motives of those who pursue it incomprehensible and strangely disturbing to everyone else. The ferocity of truth’s beauty is utterly beyond addictive; there is a passion and almost desperation to regain and reenter the perfection of consistent reason and the beauty of the clicking matchup between thought and observation. It keeps us awake even when we are exhausted; it strikes us with fits of passion even when we must be both silent and still; it obscures mere faces and opens up real minds; it peels away all the petty shallowness of the world and reveals all the glories and horrors of true depth.

And that makes it all worth it. The pursuit of truth only seems like masochism to those who have not tasted its joys. If your personal pleasures tend to center around social acceptance, then you unconsciously know – or perhaps consciously – that the pursuit of philosophical truth and wisdom will strip away that which gives you the most happiness in the moment. In a very real sense, you are huddling at the oasis of small-minded social pleasures, and cannot see beyond the desert that surrounds you, to a wider and greater world.

Unfortunately, there are very few philosophers who will help you to let go of this illusion. Most philosophers will talk endlessly about the beauty of the world beyond the desert, but will not confidently lead people away from the oasis they cling to. “You really should come with me,” they say, “because this oasis is pretty bad, you know, and there is this wonderful world beyond the desert that we should all go to!” And they tug at everyone’s trousers and endlessly cajole everyone to start marching across the desert to this wonderful new world – which baffles and irritates everyone in sight.

“If this new world is so wonderful, and it is supposed to set you so free, then why does the sum total of your freedom appear to be nothing more than your endless insistence that we all follow you out into the desert? If our world is actually so small, petty and unsatisfying, then why do you spend your time here, rather than in this new world that gives you such endless pleasure and freedom? Because we must tell you directly that it appears to us that you are also afraid of this desert, and you do not wish to cross it alone, and so you are desperate to find people who will come with you, because you do not in fact believe in this wonderful new world of happiness and freedom. If you had cancer, and you had discovered a cure for it, you would not refrain from taking that cure until you had convinced everyone else with cancer to take it. Rather, you would take the cure, and document everything with as much detail as possible, so that you could better make the case to others that they should take your cure. But, this is not what you are doing. You say that you have a cure for unhappiness called “wisdom,” but this “cure” seems to require that everyone else take it at the same time. You do not appear to be willing to lead by example, but instead seem to be enslaved by a compulsive need to get everyone else to take this red pill at the same time that you do. Your pursuit of wisdom has clearly not given you the freedom, happiness and peace of mind that you claim it does – that you portray as a benefit in order to sell it to others. The world is full of people who will try to sell you ‘cures’ that they will not take themselves, and there is no good reason to believe that your claim that philosophical wisdom leads to happiness is any different!”

This basic paradox enslaves everyone at the oasis. The anarchist or philosopher, it turns out, is only tortured by his vision of the world beyond the desert – and in fact is only reinforcing everyone’s belief in the necessity of social conformity for the achievement and maintenance of happiness. In this way, the philosopher is actually turning everyone against the pursuit of wisdom, for the sake of his own social anxieties. He is actually portraying philosophy as that which tortures you with a vision that you cannot achieve, but that you must continually harass others to pursue.

Finally, since the philosopher seems utterly unable to even perceive this basic paradox – let alone solve it – how much credibility are those around him going to grant his ability to perceive, pursue and capture the truth? If I claim to be a wonderful mathematician, and go on and on about the glories of exploring numbers, but all that anyone ever sees is my continual frustration at the fact that no one else seems to be very interested in math – and my complete inability to balance my checkbook, or even notice that it doesn’t add up – then will I not be perceived as a kind of arrant fool, motivated by heaven knows what?

The “desert” metaphor is somewhat limited, since when we leave the oasis and cross the desert, we pass completely out of view. However, when we pursue the truth from our love of truth, and shrug off those who do not wish to join us, we do arise as a beacon in our social world, a sort of lighthouse that can help guide the few who are capable of being seized by such a love of truth that they are willing to give up the immediate creature and social comforts of living in a world of lies.

Those of us who cross the desert first can be deemed the most courageous in a way, but I must confess that in fact my journey felt less like a fish who braves leaving the water for the shore than a fish that is caught by the hook of philosophy and yanked unceremoniously from the depths. The future pulled me forward – against my will at times – and it was with great regret that I left almost everyone behind. I was not convinced of the glories of the world beyond the desert, but rather feared that the desert would go on forever, and that actually I might go mad. Fortunately to say the least, this did not happen, and I did discover the world beyond the desert, and all the beauties and truths that it contains.

By the time that my particular journey had slowed to at least a walking pace, I felt very little desire to go back to the oasis and try and get my former companions to join me in this new world. Once we have made the wrenching transition from ignorance to wisdom, we genuinely understand and appreciate the difficulty of the process, and would no more imagine dragging our former companions across this desert than we would choose a random person on the street to join us in an ascent of Everest.

At the end of my last book, I talked about a small village inhabited by those of us who have made it across this desert. I believe that it is our job, if we choose it, to make this little village as hospitable and inviting as possible for those few hardy, thirsty souls that we can see struggling out of the shimmering heat of the sand dunes. Creating a place where truth is welcome is the first goal for us pioneers. We know that we cannot return to the half life that we had before; we know that it would be selfish to continue on and on in the path of wisdom without creating some markers and resting places for those who are following us; and we know that the incredible advances in communication technology have for the first time in history allowed the path across the desert to be mapped and visible.

Never before has it been so relatively inviting to pursue the path of truth and wisdom. The destination is no longer the Socratic cup of hemlock, or Nietzsche’s madness, or Rand’s later cultishness, or the dry death of academic conformity – but rather a gathering place – a forum, I would say – where we can exchange ideas and experiences, and support each other, and learn how to best defend ourselves against those who would do us harm, and build our new homes – virtual though they may be for many – in the company of others, rather than alone, which has so often been the case in the past.

As we make our new homes more comfortable and inviting, we will in fact begin to draw more and more people across the desert, because they will see that there is a destination that can be achieved, and they will get more than a glimpse of the life that can be lived beyond lies. No sailor can navigate by the stars if the night is overcast – or if only one star is visible. As more and more stars wink into view, the navigation becomes easier and easier.

If you are tempted to pursue the freedom of truth and wisdom – or, to be more accurate, if the skyhook of truth and wisdom snatches you into some unsuspected stratosphere – then the choice has to some degree been made for you. To hang suspended between the worlds of conformity and wisdom is to live in a kind of null zone, where you gain neither the satisfactions of conformity nor the joys of wisdom.

It can be truly hard to leave those behind who cannot or will not join you on this journey, and the only consolation that I have been able to offer myself – and which I offer to you now – is that there could be nothing better to do with our lives than to create a world where we do not have to choose between wisdom and companions, between virtue and society – where a unity with truth will not mean a disunity with those around us.

A Few Principles…

Rather than repeat them every time I make an argument, I wanted to put a few principles out up front, before we begin.

First and foremost, although I am an anarchist, I am not a utopian. There is no social system which will utterly eliminate evil. In a stateless society, there will still be rape, theft, murder and abuse. To be fair, just and reasonable, we must compare a stateless society not to some standard of otherworldly perfection, but rather to the world as it already is. The moral argument for a stateless society includes the reality that it will eliminate a large amount of institutionalized violence and abuse, not that it will result in a perfectly peaceful world, which of course is impossible. Anarchy can be viewed as a cure for cancer and heart disease, not a prescription for endlessly perfect health. It would be unreasonable to oppose a cure for cancer because such a cure did not eliminate all other possible diseases – in the same way, we cannot reasonably oppose a stateless society because some people are bad, and a free society will not make them good.

Secondly, I am not proposing any Manichaean view of human nature in this book. I do not believe that human beings are either innately good, or innately evil. I take a very conservative and majority view, which is that human beings respond to incentives, which also happens to be the basis for the discipline of economics. Human beings are not innately corrupt, but they will inevitably be corrupted by power. Most people will respond to situations and circumstances in a way that maximizes their advantage, not explicitly at the expense of others, though that can happen of course, but we are biological as well as moral beings, and there are very few people who will sacrifice the safety and security of their family in order to follow some abstract moral principle. When human beings are forced to choose between virtue and necessity, they will in general choose necessity, and will then rework their definition of virtue to justify their own actions.

That having been said, it seems very clear that human beings are driven to a very large and deep degree by virtue. A man can almost never be convinced to do what he defines as evil – but if that evil can be redefined as a good, men will almost inevitably praise or perform it. Very few men would agree to murder for payment – but very few men will condemn soldiers as murderers.

Very few people would openly say that they oppose rape, but support the rapists – however, when the same moral equation is redefined as a good, just about everyone says that they oppose the war, but support the troops.

This is one of the lessons that I explicitly take from our existing ruling class, which is that the power of propaganda to redefine evil as good is a fundamental mechanism for controlling people and making them do what you want. Before any government can truly expand, it first needs to take control of the money supply, in order to bribe citizens, and the educational system, in order to indoctrinate children. A large percentage of the army’s communications budget is dedicated to propaganda, and I assume that these people know more than a little about how to best spend money to control the minds of others.

Thus, I do understand that the reason that the debate about a stateless society is so volatile and aggressive is because anarchists are fundamentally attempting to reclaim the definition of virtue in society – and since society as a collective is largely defined by generally-accepted definitions of virtue, the anarchist approach to ethics is an attempt to fundamentally rewrite society as a whole.

Prior attempts to do this have almost always resulted in disaster, because they have always relied on gaining control of the government and using its power to impose some new version of ethics on a disarmed citizenry. The anarchist approach is particularly unsettling because we say that initiating violence to solve social problems is a great evil – perhaps the greatest evil – and so we steadfastly reject and refuse political solutions.

In the current world of governments, not only is political violence used to solve ethical problems, but also the use of such violence is itself considered virtuous and wise. Thus anarchists are entirely above the existing debate, because we are not trying to grab the gun and point it in the direction that we approve of, but rather are pointing out that violence cannot be used to achieve a positive good within society. Thus not only are existing solutions immoral, but the entire methodology for solving problems is based on a moral evil – the initiation of the use of force.

This is a fundamental rewrite of society, and people are right to be concerned and skeptical about the anarchist approach. It is the most fundamental transition that can be imagined – it is the difference between asking how slaves can be treated better, and stating that slavery is an irredeemable moral evil. It is the difference between asking what transgressions children should be beaten for, and stating that beating children is always and forever immoral.

Using the past to justify the future…

An objection to anarchism that I hear fairly often is that human beings are not so constituted as to be able to productively and intelligently rule themselves.

This objection rests on such a fundamental error that it is worth dealing with up front, since it will show up time and again in the upcoming arguments for anarchism.

We can all understand that it would be completely irrational to say that slaves cannot be freed, because they lack initiative and education. We all perfectly understand that slaves are barred from education, and punished for taking initiative. It is like saying that a totalitarian economy cannot be privatized because all of the workers are lazy – it is clear that this “laziness” actually arises out of a totalitarian economy, rather than any innate habits of the workers. Nutritionists might as well say that fat people cannot lose weight, because they are fat. The entire purpose of an expert is to help undo the habits that ignorance and a lack of opportunity has bred, and substitute more rational and positive behaviors in their place.

It is certainly true that people who come out of a statist educational system tend to be functionally retarded in many ways – they do not understand law, they do not understand politics, they do not understand economics, they do not understand philosophy, they have very likely never taken a course in logic – or even been offered one – they do not understand the scientific method, and they fundamentally do not know how to think or debate from first principles.

These are just the natural and disgusting results of the existing system – to say that men cannot be free because they lack the habits that freedom would have inculcated is a completely circular argument – it is like saying that newborn chicks of geese that have had their wings clipped can never fly, or that the daughter of a Chinese woman who suffered through foot binding will be born with bound feet.

Rejecting the virtues of the future for the sake of the evils of the past creates a closed-loop system that we can never escape. When anarchism comes to pass, there will doubtless be challenging and wrenching transitions for many people – but so what? This is actually an argument for anarchism, rather than against it. The harder that it is to transition out of a violent statist society, the more it is necessary to do so, and to prevent it from ever reemerging again. We do not say that heroin is less dangerous because it is so hard to quit, or so addictive – this is a central reason why heroin should not be taken in the first place! Constantly increasing our dosage of heroin because it is hard to quit would scarcely be a rational response to the problem of deadly addiction. The harder it is to quit, the more we should try to quit it, and the more we should strive to avoid re-addiction.

You are not the only kind person on the planet…

Another point that I would like to make up front is that there always seems to be a strange disconnect or isolation in people’s concerns about the helpless and dependent in society.

For instance, whenever I talk about getting rid of public schools, the response inevitably comes back – automatically, it would seem, just like any other good propaganda – that it would be terrible, because poor children would not be educated.

There is a strange kind of unthinking narcissism in this response, which always irritates me, much though I understand it. First of all, it is rather insulting to be told that you are trying to design a system which would deny education to poor children. To be placed into the general category of “yuppie capitalist scum” is never particularly ennobling.

A person will raise this objection with an absolutely straight face, as if he is the only person in the world who cares about the education of poor children. I know that this is the result of pure indoctrination, because it is so illogical.

If we accept the premise that very few people care about the education of the poor, then we should be utterly opposed to majority-rule democracy, for the obvious reason that if only a tiny minority of people care about the education of the poor, then there will never be enough of them to influence a democracy, and thus the poor will never be educated.

However, those who approve of democracy and accept that democracy will provide the poor with education inevitably accept that a significant majority of people care enough about the poor to agitate for a political solution, and pay the taxes that fund public education.

Thus, any democrat who cares about the poor automatically accepts the reality that a significant majority of people are both willing and able to help and fund the education of the poor.

If people are willing to agitate for and pay the taxes to support a State-run solution to the problem of education, then the State solution is a mere reflection of their desires and willingness to sacrifice their own self-interest for the sake of educating the poor.

If I pay for a cure for an ailment that I have, and I find out that that cure actually makes me worse, do I give up on trying to find a cure? Of course not. It was my desire to find a cure that drove me to the false solution in the first place – when I accept that that solution is false, I am then free to pursue another solution. (In fact, until I accept that my first “cure” actually makes me worse, I will continue to waste my time and resources.)

The democratic “solution” to the problem of educating the poor is the existence of public schools – if we get rid of that solution, then the majority’s desire to help educate the poor will simply take on another form – and a far more effective form, that much is guaranteed.

“Ah,” say the democrats, “but without being forced to pay for public schools, no one will surrender the money to voluntarily fund the education of poor children.”

Well, this is only an admission that democracy is a complete and total lie – that public schools do not represent the will of the majority, but rather the whims of a violent minority. Thus votes do not matter at all, and are not counted, and do not influence public policy in the least, and thus we should get rid of this ridiculous overhead of democracy and get right back to a good old Platonic system of minority dictatorship.

This proposal, of course, is greeted with outright horror, and protestations that democracy must be kept because it is the best system, because public policy does reflect the will of the majority.

In which case we need have no fear that the poor will not be educated in a free society, since the majority of people very much want that to happen anyway.

Exactly the same argument applies to a large number of other statist “solutions” to existing problems, such as:

· Old-age pensions;

· Unemployment insurance;

· Health care for the impoverished;

· Welfare, etc.

If these State programs represent the desires and will of the majority, then removing the government will not remove the reality of this kind of charity, since government policies reflect the majority’s existing desire to help these people.

If these programs do not represent the desires and will of the majority, then democracy is a complete lie, and we should stop interfering with our leader’s universal benevolence with our distracting and wasteful “voting.”

We will get into this in more detail as we go forward, but I wanted to put the argument out up front, just to address the ridiculous objection that removing a democratic State also removes the benevolence that drives its policies.

A fundamental anarchic argument is that a democratic State uses the genuine benevolence of the majority to expand its own power, and exacerbates poverty, ignorance and sickness in order to justify and continue the expansion of that power.

This is not the first time that the benevolence of good people has been used to control them.

We only need to think of the example of organized religion to understand that…

One final point, and then we shall begin really rolling up our sleeves and having some fun figuring out how a free society can truly work.

Although the ideas of anarchy can be alarming, it is important to remember that anarchy is not an untried and untested system. As I talked about in my last book, anarchy is the foundation of how we organize our own personal lives, and it is also the root of how the government manages to survive, at least for as long as it does, despite its corrupt and evil nature.

Prior approaches to re-writing social ethics failed because they did not evolve out of what works in our personal lives. We fully accept that theories of physics cannot contradict that which is directly observable within our own lives; that which describes a falling planet cannot contradict our direct perception of a falling brick.

Indeed, since we would so strenuously resist the incursion of State power into our own personal and practical “anarchy,” it can be easier to understand how statism is a violent and artificial solution, not anarchy.

If we look at something like communism, we can see that it represented a radical reversal of what actually works in our own personal lives. We retain and trade property constantly in our own lives. Stripping us of the right to own and trade property is an entirely artificial “oppositional solution,” which is why it had to be imposed through endless violence, murder and imprisonment.

In the same way, when we look at something like religion, we can see that it represents a radical reversal of what we actually believe to be true in our own personal lives. Children do not need threats, bribes and propaganda to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, that gravity works and concrete is hard on the knees. They do not need to be bullied in order to learn language, or grow physically and mentally, or ask endless questions and explore their environment.

However, to believe that some ancient and fantastical Jewish zombie died for their “sins,” and that they are trailed and judged by an omnipresent and invisible ghost, and that they need to eat and drink symbolic flesh and blood to commune with some universal and incorporeal mind – well, that takes an enormous amount of propaganda, bribery and bullying. Religion is an entirely artificial “oppositional solution” to the question of existence and ethics. It must be repetitively and aggressively inflicted on children, because it scarcely comes naturally to them at all.

Anarchy, however, does not fall into this category.

For instance, when you face a problem at work, I can’t imagine that you ever sit your team down and say:

“I’ve come up with the perfect solution to our problem – what we’re going to do, see, is pick two of us, give them guns, and then those two are going to force the rest of us to do whatever they want for the next few years, and then we are going to perhaps pick two other people who will get those guns, and then they’ll be able to force us to do whatever they want us to do for the next few years, and then we’ll start all over again…”

I have yet to see a business book with anything close to the title of: “Creating A Violent Internal Monopoly To Solve Your Customer Service Woes!”

In the same way, if you face problems in your relationship, you may go to a marriage counselor, but I have never heard of any couple going to the Mafia, and saying: “We can’t quite agree on how we should be spending our money, so we’re going to buy you guys a bunch of guns and bombs, and we want you to tell us what to do, and if we disobey your orders, we want you to kidnap us and throw us in some dank and horrible cell, where we can only hope to be raped by other people!”

If you are looking for a job, I do not imagine that you will kidnap someone and force him to hire you. If you want a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, I cannot believe that you will chloroform and kidnap someone you are attracted to, like the protagonist in John Fowles’s “The Collector.”

If you are having trouble parenting, it does not seem at all likely that you will hire someone to kidnap you if you parent in a way that he disagrees with for some reason.

This list can of course go on and on, but the basic reality is that we never look for statist solutions to problems that we face in our own lives. We never create a localized monopoly, arm it and give it the right to take half our income at gunpoint, and then force us to obey its whims.

Statism and Isolation

There is something about statism, some aspect of it, which profoundly isolates us from our fellow citizens. We turn from animated problem-solvers to mindless defenders of the status quo. As an example, I offer up the inevitable response I receive when I provide an anarchic solution to an existing State function. When I say that theoretical entities called Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs) could enforce contracts and protect property, the immediate response is that these DROs will inevitably evolve into a single monopoly that will end up recreating the State that they were supposed to replace.

Or, when I talk about private roads, I inevitably hear the argument that someone could just build a road in a ring around your land and charge you a million dollars every time you wanted to cross it.

Or, when I talk about private defense agencies that can be used to protect a geographical region from invasion, I am promptly informed that those private agencies will simply turn their guns on their subscribers, take them over, and create a new State.

Or, when I discuss the power of economic ostracism as a tool for maintaining order and conformity to basic social and economic rules, I am immediately told that people will be “marked for exclusion” unless they pay hefty bribes to whatever agencies control such information.

It is the same story, over and over – an anarchic solution is provided, and an immediate “disaster scenario” is put forward without thought, without reflection, and without curiosity.

Of course, I am not bothered by the fact that people are critical of a new and volatile theory – I think that is an essential process for any new idea.

What does concern me is the fundamental lack of reciprocity in the minds of the people who thoughtlessly reject creative solutions to trenchant problems.

I don’t mean reciprocity with regards to me – though that is surely lacking as well – but rather with regards to any form of authority or influence in general.

For instance, if people in a geographical region want to contract with an agency or group of agencies for the sake of collective defense, what is the greatest fear that will be first and foremost in their minds?

Naturally, it will be that some defense agency will take their money, buy a bunch of weapons, and promptly enslave them.

How does a free society solve this problem? Well, if there is a market need or demand for collective defense, a number of firms will vie for the business, since it will be so lucrative in the long term. The economic efficiency of having a majority of subscribers would drive the price of such defense down – however, the more people that you enroll in such a contract, the greater everyone’s fear will be that this defense agency will attempt to become a government of some kind.

Thus no entrepreneur will be able to sell this service in the most economically efficient manner if he does not directly and credibly address the fear that he will attempt to create a new government.

We are so used to being on the one-sided receiving end of dictatorial edicts from those in power – whether they are parents, teachers, or government officials, that the very idea that someone is going to have to woo our trust is almost incomprehensible. “If I am afraid of something that someone wants to sell me, then it is up to that person to calm my fears if he wants my business” – this is so far from our existing ways of dealing with statist authority that we might as well be inventing a new planet.

It is so important to understand that when we are talking about a free society – and I will tell you later how this habit is so essential for your happiness even if anarchism never comes to pass – we are essentially talking about two sides of a negotiation table.

When it comes to government as it is – and all that government ever could be – we are never really talking about two sides of the table. You get a letter in the mail informing you that your property taxes are going to increase 5% – there is no negotiation; no one offers you an alternative; your opinion is not consulted beforehand, and your approval is not required afterwards, because if you do not pay the increased tax, you will, after a fairly lengthy sequence of letters and phone calls, end up without a house.

It is certainly true that your local cable company may also send you a notice that they’re going to increase their charges by 5%, but that is still a negotiation! You can switch to satellite, or give up on cable and rent DVDs of movies or television shows, or reduce some of the extra features that you have, or just decide to get rid of your television and read and talk instead.

None of these options are available with the government – with the government, you either pay them, give up your house, go to jail, or move to some other country, where the exact same process will start all over again.

Can you imagine getting this letter from your cable company?

Dear Valued Customer:

Your cable bill is now increasing 5% per month. You cannot cancel your cable. Ever. You cannot reduce your bill in any way. If you turn off your cable, your bill will remain exactly the same. If you rip your cable out of the wall, your bill will remain exactly the same, with the exception that we will charge you for the damage. Your children will be unable to cancel your cable contract.

Also, please note that we will be reducing our delivery of channels by approximately 1 every month. As we deliver fewer channels, you can anticipate that your bill will sharply increase.

If you do not pay your bill on time, the ownership of your house will revert to us, and we will lock you in an undisclosed location, where you will be forced to do tech support, and where we will be unable to protect you from assault and rape.

If you attempt to defend yourself when we come to take your house, we are fully authorized to gun you down.

Sincerely,

The Statist Cable Company

We would consider this kind of letter to be utterly criminal – and we would be outraged at the dictatorial one-sidedness of the letter, as well as the threats of violence it contained.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of communication that we get from our governments all the time – and in many ways, it is not unrelated to the kind of non-negotiated dictums that we received from our teachers when we were children.

Thus, when a philosopher of anarchy proposes private solutions to public services, we automatically and almost unconsciously feel that we are back on the receiving end of one-sided and dictatorial commandments, and fear this multiplicity of small “quasi-governments,” and imagine that instead of receiving a few such ugly letters a year, we shall get perhaps dozens per month.

However, if you do not understand that anarchism is always and forever a two-sided negotiation, then you will remain forever untempted by its rational and empirical pleasures, and continue to confuse coercion with voluntarism, which is about the most fundamental error that can be made in moral understanding.

If you feel the need for collective defense, but you are afraid that whoever you contract with for such defense will end up ruling over you, you can just sit back, put your feet up on the desk, clasp your hands behind your head, and just see who comes along with an offer that satisfies you.

Once you grasp this fundamental shift in thinking – in understanding – then you can “flip over” to the other side of the table and use your real creative mojo to start solving the problem.

In this way, you can ask yourself, “If I really wanted to sell collective defense services to a group, how could I best address and alleviate their fears that I would turn into some kind of local dictator?”

What do you think? If you could personally make $10 million a year by solving this problem, what would you come up with? How would you address and alleviate people’s fears that you would take their money, go buy an army, and rule over them?

There are as many creative and productive answers as there are people interested in the problem – here’s one that occurs to me, just off the top of my head…

I would deposit $5 million in a third-party bank account, and offer it as free payment to anyone who could prove that I was not fulfilling my contract with my customers to the letter. I would publish my accounts and inventory as widely as possible, and give free access to anyone who wanted to come by and inspect my business and its holdings.

In this way, people could rest assured that I was not amassing some secret army of black helicopters and men in robot suits.

“Ah,” you may say, “but what if no one wanted to come forward and perform these kinds of inspections?”

Again, that is easy to solve. I would just pay an organization $1 million a year to audit my business – and promise them that if they ever found me accumulating any kind of secret army or weaponry, then I would then pay them the $5 million in the third party bank account. In this way, external audits would be certain to be performed, and those auditors would have every incentive to turn over every filing cabinet in search of a miniature robot army.

“Ah,” you may say, “but what if you were secretly paying this auditing organization $2 million a year to only pretend to audit your business?”

Well, here we are starting to get into some very strange economic territory, which would be utterly unsustainable in a free market, because my company would then be out $5 million up front, be paying $1 million for an auditing company, and then a further $2 million to produce fake audits – such a company would never be able to offer competitive rates relative to a company that operated on the up and up.

But even if this were possible, it would still be an easy problem to solve, by simply paying five companies to perform audits if necessary – paying $5 million a year out of a profit of $10 million a year still leaves you $5 million ahead!

“Ah, but what if..?”

We all know that this game can go on for forever and a day – the mindset that I strongly urge you to try and get yourself into, however, is that you do not have to contract with anyone who is not willing to satisfy your desires!

Relative Risk

What happens if no entrepreneur is able to offer you a deal that successfully calms your fears?

Why, then you do not have to take any deal at all.

“Ah,” you may then say, “but then I am leaving myself open to the risk of foreign invasion!”

Well, that is very true, but clearly, if you reject all offers from entrepreneurs who want to protect you, because you feel that their protection carries too much risk, then clearly you prefer the risk of invasion to the risk of protection.

With that in mind, you may well choose one entrepreneur’s scheme – not because it is risk-free, but rather because it is less risky than the risk of invasion.

If you wish to be presented with a risk-free choice, then unfortunately you wish to be presented with a different kind of universe than the one we inhabit, since risk is an inevitable and natural part of life.

With that in mind, let us turn to one of the first great objections to the idea of a stateless society, which is collective defense, to provide an example of the methodologies we will use in this book.

Collective Defense: An Example of Methodology

Ideally, invasions should be prevented rather than repelled, just as illnesses should be prevented rather than cured.

The strongest conceivable case for anarchism is that a stateless society would by its very nature prevent invasion, rather than merely possess the ability to violently repel it.

So first, before we figure out how to repel an invasion, let us look at what an invasion is actually designed to achieve.

Why Invade?

Let us imagine a land where there are two farms, owned by Bob and Jim respectively. Bob is a rapacious and nasty fellow, who wishes to expand his farm and make more money.

To the east of Bob is Jim’s farm, which is tidy, efficient, and productive, with a wide variety of cows and chickens and neatly-planted fields.

To the west of Bob is an untamed wilderness full of bears and wolves and coyotes and mosquitoes and swamps and all other sorts of unpleasant and dangerous things.

From the standpoint of mere practical considerations, how can Bob most efficiently expand his farm and increase his income?

Surely it would be to invest in a few guns, head east, and take over Jim’s farm. For a very small investment, Bob ends up with a functioning and productive farm, ready to provide him with milk, eggs and crops.

On the other hand, Bob could choose to go west, into the untamed wilderness, and try to cull a number of dangerous predators, drain the swamps, hack down and uproot all the embedded trees and bushes. After a year or two of backbreaking labor, he may have carved out a few additional acres for himself – an investment that would scarcely seem worth it.

If Bob wants to expand, and cares little about ethics, he will “invade” Jim’s farm and take it over, because he will be taking command of an already-existing system of exploitation and production.

Thus, we can see that the act of invading a neighboring territory is primarily motivated by the desire to take over an existing productive system. If that productive system is not in place, then the motivation for invasion evaporates. A car thief will never “steal” a rusted old jalopy that is sitting up on bricks in an abandoned lot, but rather will attempt to steal a car that is in good condition.

This analysis of the costs and benefits of invasion is essential to understanding how a stateless society actually works to prevent invasion, rather than merely repel it.

When one country invades another country, the primary goal is to take over the existing system of government, and thus collect the taxes from the existing citizens. In the same way that Bob will only invade Jim’s farm in order to take over his domesticated animals, one government will only invade another country in order to take over the government of that country, and so become the new tax collector. If no tax collection system is in place, then there is no productive resource for the invading country to take over.

Furthermore, to take a silly example, we can easily understand that Bob will only invade Jim’s farm if he knows that Jim’s cows and chickens are not armed and dangerous. To adjust the metaphor a little closer to reality, imagine that Jim has a number of workers on his farm who are all ex-military, well-armed, and will fight to the death to protect that farm. The disincentive for invasion thus becomes considerably stronger.

In the same way, domestic governments generally keep their citizens relatively disarmed, in order to more effectively tax them, just as farmers clip the wings of their geese and chickens in order to more efficiently collect their eggs and meat.

Thus the cost-benefit analysis of invasion only comes out on the plus side if the benefits are clear and easy to attain – an existing tax collection system – and if the costs of invasion are relatively small – a largely disarmed citizenry.

In a very real sense, therefore, a stateless society cannot be invaded, because there is really nothing to invade. There are no government buildings to inhabit, no existing government to displace, no tax collection system in place to take over and profit from – and, furthermore, there is no clear certainty about the degree of armaments that each citizen possesses (don’t worry, we will get into gun control later…).

An invading country can be very certain that, if it breaks through another government’s military defenses, it will then not face any significant resistance from the existing citizenry. A statist society can be considered akin to an egg – if you break through the shell, there is no second line of defense inside. Invading governments are well aware of the existing laws against the proliferation of weapons in the country they are invading – thus they are guaranteed to be facing a virtually disarmed citizenry, as long as they can break through the military defenses.

Invading Anarchy

Let us imagine that France becomes a stateless society, but that Germany and Poland do not. Let us go with the cliché and imagine that Germany has a strong desire to expand militarily. The German leader then looks at a map, and tries to figure out whether he should go east into Poland, or west into France.

If he goes east into Poland, then he will, if he can break through the Polish military defenses, be able to feast upon the existing tax base, and face an almost completely disarmed citizenry. He will be able to use the existing Polish tax collectors and tax collection system to enrich his own government, because the Poles are already controlled and “domesticated,” so to speak.

In other words, he only has one enemy to overcome and destroy, which is the Polish government’s military. If he can overcome that single line of defense, he gains control over billions of dollars of existing tax revenues every single year – and a ready-made army and its equipment.

On the other hand, if he thinks of going west into France, he faces some daunting obstacles indeed.

There are no particular laws about the domestic ownership of weapons in a stateless society, so he has no idea whatsoever which citizens have which weapons, and he certainly cannot count on having a legally-disarmed citizenry to prey on after defeating a single army.

Secondly, let us say that his army rolls across the border into France – what is their objective? If France still had a government, then clearly his goal would be to take Paris, displace the existing government, and take over the existing tax collection system.

However, where is his army supposed to go once it crosses the border? There is no capital in a stateless society, no seat of government, no existing system of tax collection and citizen control, no centralized authority that can be seized and taken over. In the above example of the two farms and the wilderness, this is the equivalent not of Bob taking over Jim’s farm, but rather of Bob heading into the wilderness and facing coyotes, bears, swamps and mosquitoes – there is no single enemy, no existing resources to take over, and nothing in particular to “seize.”

But let us say that the German leadership is completely retarded, and decides to head west into France anyway – and let us also suppose, to make the case as strong as possible, that everyone in France has decided to forego any kind of collective self-defense.

What is the German army going to do in France? Are they going to go door to door, knocking on people’s houses and demanding their silverware? Even if this were possible, and actually achieved, all that would happen is that the silverware would be shipped back to Germany, thus putting German silverware manufacturers out of business. When German manufacturers go out of business, they lay people off, thus destroying tax revenue for the German government.

The German army cannot reasonably ship French houses to Germany – perhaps they will seize French cars and French electronics and ship them to Germany instead.

And what is the German government supposed to do with thousands of French cars and iPods? Are they supposed to sell these objects to their own citizens at vastly reduced prices? I imagine that certain German citizens would be relatively happy with that, but again, all that would happen is that German manufacturers of cars and electronics would be put out of business, thus again sharply reducing the German government’s tax income, resulting in a net loss.

Furthermore, by destroying domestic industries for the sake of a one-time transfer of French goods, the German government would be crippling its own future income, since domestic manufacturing represents a permanent source of tax revenue – this would be a perfect example of killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Well, perhaps what the German government could do is seize French citizens and ship them to Germany as slave labor. What would be the result of that?

Unfortunately, this would not work either, at least not for long, because slave labor cannot be taxed, and slave labor would displace existing German labor, which is taxable. Thus again the German government would be permanently reducing its own income, which it would not do.

Another reason that Germany might invade another country would be to seize control of the wealth of the government – the ability to print money, and the ownership of a large amount of physical assets, such as buildings, cars, gold, manufacturing plants and so on.

However, nothing remains unowned in a stateless society, except that which has no value, or cannot be owned, such as air. There are no “public assets” to seize, and there are no state-owned printing presses which can be used to create currency, and thus transfer capital to Germany. There are no endless vaults of government gold to rob, no single aggregation of military assets to seize.

Furthermore, if we go up to a thief and say to him, “Do you want to rob a house?” what is his first question likely to be?

“Hell I don’t know – what’s in it?”

A thief will always want to know the benefits of robbing a house – he is fully aware of the risks and costs, of course, and must weigh them against the rewards. He will never scale up the outside of some public housing welfare tenement in order to snag an old television and a tape deck. The more knowledgeable he is of the value of a home’s contents, the better he is able to assess the value of breaking into it.

The German leadership, when deciding which country to invade, will know down to almost the last dollar the tax revenues being collected by the Polish government, as well as the value of the public assets they will seize if they invade. The “payoff” can be very easily assessed.

On the other hand, if they look west, into the French stateless society, how will they know what they are actually going to get? There are no published figures for the net wealth of the society as a whole, there is no tax revenue to collect, and there are no public assets which can be easily valued ahead of time. There is no way to judge the cost effectiveness of the invasion.

Invading a statist society is like grabbing the cages of a large number of trapped chickens – you get all of the eggs in perpetuity. Invading a stateless society is like taking a sprint at a flock of seagulls – all they do is scatter, and you get nothing, except perhaps some crap on your forehead.

Thus it is completely impossible that the German leadership would think it a good idea to head west into France rather than east into Poland.

We could leave the case here, and be perfectly satisfied in our responses, but I am always willing to go the extra mile and accept the worst conceivable case.

Let us say that some mad German who was beaten with bagfuls of French textbooks when he was a child ends up running the government, and cares nothing at all about the costs and benefits of invading France, but rather just wishes to take it over in order to – I don’t know, burn all the textbooks or something like that.

We will get into the nature and content of private agencies in the next chapter, but let us just say that there are a number of these private defense agencies that are paid to defend France against just such an invading madman.

Well, if I were setting up some sort of private military defense agency, the first thing I would do is try to figure out how I could most effectively protect my subscribers, for the least possible cost.

The first thing that I would note is that nuclear weapons have been the single most effective deterrent to invasion that has ever been invented. Not one single nuclear power has ever been invaded, or threatened with invasion – and so, in a very real sense, there is no bigger “bang for the buck” in terms of defense than a few well-placed nuclear weapons.

If we assume that a million subscribers are willing to pay for a few nuclear weapons as a deterrent to invasion, and that those nuclear weapons cost about $30 million to purchase and maintain every year, then we are talking about $30 a year per subscriber – or less than a dime a day.

The defense agencies only make money if an invasion does not occur, just as health insurance companies only make money when you are not sick, but rather well.

Thus the question that I would be most keen to answer if I were running a defense agency is: “How can I best prevent an invasion?”

Let us assume that the French stateless society is a beacon of liberation in a sea of aggressive and statist nations. The French defense agencies would work day and night to ensure that the costs of invasion were as high as possible, and the benefits as low as possible. Were I running one of these agencies, I would think of solutions along the lines of the following…

Deactivated Money

If I were concerned that my subscribers might be robbed by an invading army, I would offer reduced rates to those willing to allow their electronic money to be secured so that it could not be spent without their own thumb print, or something like that. (Naturally, any system can be hacked, and people can be kidnapped along with their money, but the purpose here is not to prevent all possible workarounds, but rather to simply reduce the material benefits of invading France.)

Similarly, I might offer reduced defense rates to manufacturers that would be willing to allow a small GPS device to be installed in the guts of their machinery, so that if it was removed to another country, it would no longer work. This device could also be included in cars and other items of value, so that they would either have to be used in France, or they could not be used at all.

Given that the control of bridges is a primary military objective, in order to facilitate the movement of troops and vehicles, I would also encourage the installation of particular devices in domestic cars and trucks, which would automatically keep access to bridges open. Thus invading armies would find their access to these bridges much harder, which would again slow down the speed of their invasion.

Furthermore, if invasion seemed imminent, I would arm and train as many citizens as possible. Any invading army would face a quite different challenge in a stateless society. If Germany invades Poland, how many citizens would risk their lives fighting against just another government? Whether a Polish leader taxes you, or a German one, makes relatively little difference – which is why your average citizen does not care much about who runs the local Mafia. Citizens of a stateless society, however, would be resisting an attempt to inflict taxation and a government upon them, and so would be far more willing to fight the kind of endlessly-draining insurgencies that we see so often in the annals of occupation.

These are just a few admittedly off-the-cuff ideas, but it is relatively easy to see how the benefits of invading France could be significantly diminished or even eliminated, while the costs of invading France could be significantly increased or made prohibitive.

The objection could be raised that some lunatic group could simply detonate a nuclear bomb somewhere inside France, for some insane or nefarious motive – but that is not an argument against private defense agencies, and for a statist society, but rather quite the reverse.

The “nuclear madman” argument is not solved by the existence of a government, since no government can protect against this eventuality – however, a free society would be far less likely to be the target of such an attack, since it would have a defensive military policy only, and not an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy, and thus would be infinitely less likely to provoke such a mad and genocidal retaliation. Switzerland, for instance, faces no real danger of having airplanes flown into buildings.

It is my belief that over time, the need for these proactive and defensive strategies would diminish, since the only thing that would really ever be needed is a few nuclear weapons as a deterrent – and even the need for these would diminish over time, since either the world itself would become stateless, thus eliminating the danger of war, or the statist societies would continue to attack each other only, for the reasons mentioned above, and the need to continually defend a stateless society would diminish.

Finally, let’s look at some of the illusions that we have about statist “protection” in history, as a demonstration of how we can critically evaluate an example of a statist function.

Statist National “Defense”: A Critical Example

Briefly put, “national defense” is the need for a government to protect citizens from aggression by other governments.

This is an interesting paradox, even beyond the obvious one of using a “government” to protect us from “governments.” If you were able to run a magic survey throughout history, which government do you think people would be most frightened of and enslaved by? Would it be (a), their local State or Lord, or (b), some State or Lord in some other country? What about ancient Rome – would it be the local rulers, who forced young Romans into military service for 20 years or more, or the Carthaginians? What about England in the Middle Ages? Were the peasants more alarmed by the crushing taxation and strangling mobility restrictions imposed by their local Lord, or was the King of France their primary concern? Let us stop in Russia during the 18th century, and ask the serfs: “Are you more frightened of the Tsar’s soldiers, or the German Kaiser?” Let us go to a US citizen of today, and demand to know: “Are you more frightened of foreign invaders taking over Washington, or of the fact that if you don’t pay half your income in taxes, your own government will throw you in jail?”

Of course, we have to look at the Second World War, which has had more propaganda thrown at it than any other single conflict. Didn’t the British government save the country from Germany? That is an interesting question. The British government got into WWI, helped impose the brutal Treaty of Versailles, then contributed to the boom-and-bust cycle of the 1920s, which destroyed the German middle class and aided Hitler’s rise to power. During the 1930s, the British government supported the growing aggression of Hitler through subsidies, loans and mealy-mouthed appeasement. Then, when everything had failed, it threw the bodies of thousands of young men at the German air force in the Battle of Britain. Finally, it caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands more British citizens by defending Africa and invading France, rather than let Nazism collapse on its own – as it was bound to do, just as every tyranny has done throughout history. Can it really be said, then, that the British government protected its citizens throughout the first half of the 20th century? Millions killed, families shattered, the economy destroyed, half of Europe lost to Stalin, and China to Mao… Can we consider that a great success? I think not. Only States win wars – never citizens.

The fact of the matter is that we do not face threats to our lives and property from foreign governments, but rather from our own. The State will tell us that it must exist, at the very least, to protect us from foreign governments, but that is morally equivalent to the local Mafia don telling us that we have to pay him 50% of our income so that he can protect us from the Mafia in Paraguay. Are we given the choice to buy a gun and defend ourselves? Of course not. Who endangers us more – the local Mafia guy, or some guy in Paraguay we have never met that our local Mafia guy says just might want a piece of us? I know which chance I would take.

There is a tried-and-true method for resisting foreign occupation which does not require any government – which we can see being played out in our daily news. During the recent invasion, the US completely destroyed the Iraqi government, and now has total control over the people and infrastructure. And what is happening? They are being attacked and harried until they will just have to get out of the country – just as they had to do in Korea and Vietnam, and just as the USSR had to do in Afghanistan. The Iraqi insurgents do not have a government at all – any more than the Afghani fighters did in the 1980s.

Let’s look at the Iraqi conflict in a slightly different light. America was attacked on 9/11 because the American government had troops in Saudi Arabia, and because it caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis through the Iraqi bombing campaign of the 1990s. Given that the US government provoked the attacks, how well were the innocent victims of 9/11 protected by their government? Even if we do not count the physical casualties of the war, given the massive national debt being run up to pay for the Iraq war, how well is the property of American citizens being protected? How much power would Bush have to wage war if he did not have the power to steal almost half the wealth of the entire country? The government does not need taxes in order to wage war; it wages war because it already has the power of taxation – and it uses the war to raise taxes, either on the current citizens through increases and inflation, or on future citizens through deficits.

This simple fact helps explain why there were almost no wars in Western Europe from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the start of World War One in 1914. This was largely because governments could not afford wars – but then they all got their very own Central Banks and were able to pave the bloody path to the Great War with printed money and deficit financing. World War One resulted from an increase in State power – and in turn swelled State power, and set the stage for the next war. Thus, the idea that we need to give governments the power to tax us in order to protect us is ludicrous – because it is taxation that gives governments the power to wage war.

For pacifist countries, this “war” may be a war on poverty, or illiteracy, or drugs, or for universal health care, or whatever. It does not matter. The moment a government takes the power – and moral “right” – to forcibly take money from citizens, the stage is set for the ever-growing power of the State.

The question then arises – how does a citizen keep his property and person safe? The first answer that I would give is another question, which is:

Which sector does more to protect you and your property – the public or the private?

Let’s look at the security mechanisms the private sector has introduced in just the past few decades:

- ATMs/credit cards (less need to carry cash);

- Cell phones (can always call for help);

- Call display (virtually eliminates harassing phone calls);

- Sophisticated home security systems;

- ID tracking tags;

- Credit card numeric security;

- Pepper spray;

- GPS;

- Security cameras;

- Anti-shoplifting devices;

- Secure online transactions;

- And much more…

What has the public sector done? Well, they shoot harmless drug users and seize their property. They will shoot you too, if you don’t pay the massive tax increases they demand. The police are virtually useless in property crimes – and many violent criminals are turned loose because the courts are too slow, or are put in “house arrest” because the prisons are too full of non-violent offenders.

So, who has most helped you secure your person and property over the past few decades? Your government, or your friendly local entrepreneurs? Those who have stepped in to protect you, or those who have doubled your taxes while letting criminals walk free? Have capitalist companies enraged foreigners to the point of terrorism? Of course not – the 9/11 terrorists attacked the World Trade Center (to protest the financing of the US government), the Pentagon, and the White House. They didn’t go for a Ford motor plant or a Apple store – and why would they? No one kills for iPhones. They kill to protest military power, which rests on public financing.

In summation, then, it makes about as much sense to rely on governments for security as it does to rely on the Mafia for “protection.” The Mafia is really just protecting you from itself, as are all governments. Any man who comes up to you and says: “I need to threaten your person and steal your property in order to protect your person and property,” is obviously either deranged, or not particularly interested, to say the least, in protecting your person and property. As long as we keep falling for the same old lies, we will forever be robbed blind for the sake of our supposed property rights, and sent to wage war against internal or external “enemies” so that those in power can further pick the pockets of those we leave behind.

Part 2: Reasoning

Introduction: The Six Questions

When considering statist objections to anarchic solutions, the six questions below are most useful.

Does the government actually solve the problem in question?

People often say that government courts “solve” the problem of injustice. However, these courts can take many years to render a verdict – and cost the plaintiff and defendant hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. Government courts are also used to harass and intimidate, creating a “chilling effect” for unpopular opinions or groups. Thus I find it essential to question the embedded premises of statism:

- Do State armies actually defend citizens?

- Does State policing actually protect private property?

- Does State welfare actually solve the problem of poverty?

- Does the war on drugs actually solve the problem of addiction and crime?

- Do State prisons actually rehabilitate prisoners and reduce crime?

It can be very tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that the existing statist approach is actually a solution – but I try to avoid taking that for granted, since it is so rarely the case.

Can the criticism of the anarchic solution be equally applied to the statist solution?

One of the most common objections to a stateless society is the fear that a political monopoly could somehow emerge from a free market of competing justice agencies. In other words, anarchism is rejected because it contains the mere possibility of political monopoly. However, if political monopoly is such a terrible evil, then a statist society – which is founded on just such a political monopoly – must be rejected even more firmly, just as we would always choose the mere possibility of cancer over actually having cancer.

Is anarchy accepted as a core value in nonpolitical spheres?

In my last book, “Everyday Anarchy,” I pointed out the numerous spheres in society where anarchy is both valued and defended, such as dating, career choices, education and so on. If anarchy is dismissed as “bad” overall, then it also must be “bad” in these other spheres as well. Unless the person criticizing anarchy is willing to advocate for a Ministry of Dating, the value of anarchy in certain spheres must at least be recognized. Thus anarchy cannot be rejected as an overall negative – and its admitted value and productivity must at least be accepted as potentially valuable in other spheres as well.

Would the person advocating statism perform State functions himself?

Most of us recognize and accept the right to use violence in an extremity of self-defense. Those who support statism recognize that, in this realm, State police merely formalize a right that everyone already has, namely the right of self-defense. A policeman can use force to protect a citizen from being attacked, just as that citizen can use force himself. However, if someone argues that it is moral to use force to take money from people to pay for public schools, would he be willing to use this force himself? Would he be willing to go door to door with a gun to extract money for public schools? Would he be willing to extend this right to everyone in society? If not, then he has created two opposing ethical categories – the State police, to whom this use of violence is moral – and everyone else, to whom this use of violence is immoral. How can these opposing moral categories be justified?

Can something be both voluntary and coercive at the same time?

Everyone recognizes that an act cannot be both “rape” and “lovemaking” simultaneously. Rape requires force, because the victim is unwilling; lovemaking does not. Because no action can be both voluntary and coercive at the same time, statists cannot appeal to the principle of “voluntarism” when defending the violence of the State. Statists cannot say that we “agree” to be taxed, and then say that taxation must be coercive. If we agree to taxation, the coercion is unnecessary – if we do not agree to taxation, then we are coerced against our will.

Does political organization change human nature?

If people care enough about the poor to vote for state welfare programs, then they will care enough about the poor to fund private charities. If people care enough about the uneducated to vote for state schools, they will care enough to donate to private schools. Removing the State does not fundamentally alter human nature. The benevolence and wisdom that democracy relies on will not be magically transformed into cold selfishness the moment that the State ends. Statism relies on maturity and benevolence on the part of the voters, the politicians, and government workers. If this maturity and benevolence is not present, the State is a mere brutal tyranny, and must be abolished. If the majority of people are mature and benevolent – as I believe – then the State is an unnecessary overhead, and far too prone to violent injustices to be allowed to continue. In other words, people cannot be called “virtuous” only when it serves the statist argument, and then “selfish” when it does not.

There are a number of other principles, which are more specific to particular circumstances, but the six described above will show up repeatedly.

We will now take a quick tour through an overview of anarchism, and sketch in broad strokes the beginnings of our solutions to the horrors of worldwide violence.

Anarchism – Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t Anarchism ‘Bad’?

Unfortunately, the term has been degraded through mythology to mean “a world without rules” – usually garbed in post-apocalyptic outerwear and riding a well-armed motorbike. This is nonsense, of course. “Anarchy” is merely the logically consistent application of the moral premise that the initiation of the use of force is wrong. If violence is a bad way to solve problems, then the government is by definition immoral, since “government” always means a group of individuals who claim the right to initiate violence against everyone else, in the form of taxation, regulations etc.

But if there is no government, how can the inevitable conflicts in human society be resolved?

The most important thing in philosophy is to consistently question the premises of propositions. For instance, embedded in the above question is the premise that conflicts within human society are currently being resolved by governments. This is pure nonsense. Governments are agencies of force – governments do not persuade, governments do not reason, governments do not motivate, governments do not encourage, governments do not resolve disputes. Governments have no more power to create morality then rape has to create love. A gun is only useful in self-defense; it cannot be used to create virtue.

For somebody who is an anarchist, you sure do sound like a politician! Wasn’t that just a complete dodge of the question?

Excellent catch! Here is as good a place as any to introduce you to the concept of Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs). This concept cannot answer every conceivable question you might have about dispute resolutions within a stateless society, but rather is a framework for understanding the methodology of dispute resolution – just as the scientific method cannot answer every possible question about the natural world, but rather points towards a methodology that allows those questions to be answered in a rational manner.

DROs are companies that specialize in insuring contracts between individuals, and resolving any disputes that might arise. For instance, if I borrow $1,000 from you, I may have to pay $10 to a DRO to insure my loan. If I fail to pay you back your money, the DRO will pay you instead. Obviously, as my credit rating improves, the cost of insuring my contracts will decline.

The DRO theory can be as complex as any other free market theory – and a lot of intellectual effort has gone into resolving how particular transactions might occur, such as multimillion dollar international contracts. Credible DRO theories have also been advanced that solve problems ranging from abortion to child abuse to murder to pollution. For more on DRO theory and practice, please see “The Stateless Society: An Examination of Alternatives” below.

But what about the roads?

The most important thing to understand about anarchism is that it is a moral theory which cannot logically be judged by consequences alone. For instance, the abolition of slavery was a moral imperative, because slavery as an institution is innately evil. The abolition of slavery was not conditional upon the provision of jobs for every freed slave. In a similar manner, anarchic theory does not have to explain how every conceivable social, legal or economic transaction could occur in the absence of a coercive government. What is important to understand is that the initiation of the use of force is a moral evil. With that in mind, we can approach the problem of roads more clearly.

First of all, roads are currently funded through the initiation of force. If you do not pay the taxes which support road construction, you will get a stern letter from the government, followed by a court date, followed by policemen coming to your house if you do not appear and submit to the court’s judgment. If you use force to defend yourself against the policemen who are breaking into your home, you will very likely be shot down.

The roads, in other words, are built at the point of a gun. The use of violence is the central issue, not what might potentially happen in the absence of violence.

That having been said, roads will be built by housing developers, mall builders, those constructing schools and towns – just as they were before governments took them over in the 19^th century. For more on this, please see the section on “Roads” below.

Okay – here’s a scenario for you: a guy builds a road that completely encircles a suburban neighborhood, and then charges $1 million for anyone to cross that road. Isn’t he holding everyone who lives in that neighborhood hostage?

This is fundamentally impossible. First of all, no one is going to buy a house in a neighborhood unless they are contractually guaranteed access to roads. Thus it will be impossible for anyone to completely encircle the neighborhood. Secondly, even if it were possible, it would be a highly risky investment. Can you imagine going to investors with a business plan that said: “I’m going to try to buy all the land that surrounds the neighborhood, and then charge exorbitant rates for anyone to cross that land.” No sane investor would give you the money for such a plan. The risk of failure would be too great, and no DRO would enforce any contract that was so destructive, unpopular and economically unfeasible. DROs, unlike governments, must be appealing to the general population. If a DRO got involved with the encircling and imprisonment of a neighborhood, it would become so unpopular that it would lose far more business than it could potentially gain.

All right, smarty-pants – what about this: the company that supplies water to a neighborhood suddenly decides to increase its rates Tenfold – people are going to be forced to pay the exorbitant price, right?

First of all, if you are so concerned about people paying increasingly exorbitant prices for services, then it scarcely seems logical to propose the government as the solution to that problem! Taxes have risen immensely over the past 30 years, while services have declined.

However, even if we accept the premise of the problem, it is easily solved in a stateless society. First of all, no one will buy a house in a neighborhood without a contractual obligation that requires the supply of water at reasonable rates. Secondly, if the water company starts charging exorbitant prices, another company will simply move in and supply water in another form – in barrels, bottles or whatever. Thus, raising prices permanently costs the water company its customers – and makes every potential customer back away, for fear that the same predation will happen to them. Investors will quickly realize that the water company is shooting itself in the foot, and will align themselves with other shareholders, resulting in a takeover of the price-gouging water company, and a reduction in rates, accompanied by rank apologies and base groveling. Given that this result will be known in advance, no CEO would be allowed to pursue such a self-destructive course. Only governments that can be manipulated by corporations to prevent competition truly endanger consumers.

Okay – what if two DROs have different rules – isn’t that just going to result in endless civil war?

First of all, it is unlikely that DROs would have wildly different rules, because that would be economically inefficient. Cell phone companies use similar protocols, so that they can interoperate with each other. Railroad companies tend to use the same gauge, so that trains can travel as widely as possible. Internet service providers exchange data with other service providers, passing e-mails and other data back and forth. Like evolution, the free market is more about cooperation than pure competition. If a DRO wants to create a new rule, that rule will be fairly useless unless other DROs are willing to cooperate with it – just as a new e-mail program is fairly useless unless it uses existing protocols. This need for interoperability with other DROs will inevitably keep the number of new rules to the most economically efficient minimum. Customers will prefer DROs with broader reciprocity agreements, just as they prefer credit cards that are valid in a large number of locations.

New rules will also add to the costs for DRO subscribers – and if it costs them more money than it saves, the DRO will lose business.

But – won’t the most successful DRO just arm itself, violently eliminate all the other DROs, and emerge as a new government?

First of all, if the potential emergence of a new government at some point in the future is of great concern, then surely the elimination of existing governments in the present is a worthy goal. If we have cancer, we go through chemotherapy to eliminate it in the present, even though we may get cancer again at some point in the future.

Secondly, unlike governments, DROs are not violent institutions. DROs will be primarily populated by white-collar workers: accountants, mediators, executives and so on. DROs are about as likely to become paramilitary organizations as your average accounting firm is likely to become an elite squad of ninja death warriors. Given the current existence of governments that possess nuclear weapons, I for one am willing to take that risk.

Thirdly, if a DRO tries to turn itself into a government, the other DROs will certainly act to prevent it. DROs would simply refuse to cooperate with any DRO that refused to submit to “arms inspections.” Furthermore, DRO customers would also not take very kindly to their DRO becoming an armed institution – and their rates would certainly skyrocket, because their DRO would have to provide its regular services, as well as pay for all those black helicopters and RPGs. Any DRO that was paying for goods or services that its customers did not want – i.e. an army – would very quickly go out of business, because it would not be competitive in terms of rates. For more on this, please see “War, Profit and the State” below.

Are There Any Examples Of Anarchic Societies Being Successful In The Past?

There are, but that is not the essential question. Again, the essential aspect of anarchic theory is the moral rule banning the initiation of the use of force. Anarchists advocate a stateless society because governments are evil. When slavery was abolished for the first time in human history, there was no prior example of a successful slave–free society — if that had been a requirement, then slavery would be with us still.

That having been said, I can confidently point towards a nonviolent society that you’re intimately aware of – you. I am guessing that you do not use violence directly to achieve your aims. It seems likely to me that you did not hold your employer hostage until you got your job; I also doubt that you keep your spouse locked in the basement, or that you threaten to shoot your “friends” if they do not join you on the dance floor. In other words, you are the perfect example of a stateless society. All of your personal relationships are voluntary, and do not involve the use of force. You are an anarchic microcosm – to see how a stateless society works, all you have to do is look in the mirror.

How can a society without a government pay for national defense?

Many people, when first hearing the concept of a stateless society, cannot imagine how collective defense could possibly be paid for in the absence of taxation. I have already briefly discussed this above – here are some more details.

This is an important question to ask, but there is a way of answering it that also answers many other questions about collective action.

In any society, there are four possibilities that can occur in the realm of collective defense. The first is that no one wants to pay for collective defense. The second is that only a minority of people want to pay for collective defense; the third is that the majority of people want to pay for collective defense; and the fourth is that everyone wants to pay for collective defense.

Let’s compare how these four possibilities play out in a state-based democracy:

No one wants to pay for collective defense. In this case, voters will universally reject any politician who proposes collective defense of any kind.
Only a minority of people want to pay for collective defense. In this case, no politician who proposes paying for collective defense will ever get into office, because he will never secure a majority of the votes.
The majority of people want to pay for collective defense. In this case, pro-defense politicians will be voted into office, and spend tax money on defense.
Everyone wants to pay for collective defense. This achieves the same outcome as number three.

Thus, all other things being equal, a democracy produces almost the same outcome as a stateless society – with the important exception of #2. If only a minority of people want to pay for defense, they cannot do so in a democracy, but can do so in a stateless society.

In a stateless society, if the majority of people are interested in paying for collective defense, it will be paid for. The addition of the government to the interaction is entirely superfluous – the equivalent of creating a Ministry devoted to communicating the pleasures of candy to children, or sex to teenagers.

However, the possibility exists that people are willing to pay for collective defense only if they know that everyone else is paying for it as well. This argument fails on multiple levels, both empirical and rational.

People tip waiters and give to charity, even though they know that some people never do.
There is no reason why, in a stateless society, people should not have full knowledge of who has donated to collective defense. Agencies providing collective defense could easily issue a “donor card,” which certain shops or employers might ask to see before doing business. Names of donors could also be put on a website, easily searchable, creating social pressures to donate.
When the money required for collective defense is stripped from taxpayers at the point of a gun, a basic moral tenet – and rational criterion – is violated. Citizens institute collective defense in order to protect their property – it makes no sense whatsoever to create an agency to protect property rights and then invest that agency with the power to violate property rights at will.
When collective defense is paid for by the initiation of the use of force, there is no rational ceiling to costs, and no incentive for efficiency – thus ensuring that costs will escalate to the point where they become unsustainable, causing a collapse of the economic system and leaving the country vulnerable.

What about education?

The question of education follows the same pattern as the question of collective defense outlined above. However, there are certain additional pieces of information that can strengthen the case for a free market in education.

First of all, it is important understand that State education was not imposed because children were not being educated. Prior to the institution of government-run education, the functional literacy rate of the average American was over 90% – far better than it is now, after hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent “educating” children. Before the government forcefully took over the schools, there was almost no violence in schools, there were no school shootings, no violent gangs, no assaults on teachers – and it did not take more than two decades and hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a reasonably-educated adult. Most of the intellectual giants of the 18^th and 19^th centuries – the Founding Fathers included – did not even finish high school, let alone go to college.

Government education in America was instituted as a means of cultural control, due to rising tribal fears about the growing number of non-Protestants in society – the “immigrant issue” of the time.

There are a number of core reasons that government education cripples children’s minds; for the sake of brevity, we will deal with only one here.

It is reasonable to assume that the majority of parents want to give their children a good education – and this education must necessarily include the teaching of values, or the relationship between personal ethics and real-world choices. In any multicultural society, however, a common curriculum cannot include any fundamental values, for fear of offending various groups. Thus values must be stripped from education, turning its focus to rote memorization, bland technical skills (geometry, sports, wood shop), and neutral and propagandistic views of society and politics (“Democracy is good!” “Respect multiculturalism!” “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!”). This effectively kills the energetic curiosity of the young, turns school into a mind-numbing series of empty exercises, creates frustration among those needing stimulation, and engenders deep disrespect for the educational system – and its teachers – who remain institutionally indifferent to the welfare of the students. Combine this hostility and frustration with the easy money available through drug sales – and the possibility of surviving on welfare – and entire generations of youths become mentally crippled. The costs of this are beyond calculation, since the damage goes far beyond economics.

Yes, but how will poor children get an education if it is not paid for through taxes?

This reminds me of the old Soviet cartoon – two old women are standing in an endless line-up to buy bread. One says to the other: “What a terribly long line!” The other replies: “Yes, but just imagine – in the capitalist countries, the government doesn’t even distribute the bread!”

Whenever I argue for a stateless society, I say: “The government should not provide ‘X’.” The response always comes back: “But how will ‘X’ then be provided?”

As mentioned above, the answer is simple: “Since everybody is concerned that ‘X’ will not be provided, ‘X’ will naturally be provided by those who are concerned by its absence.” In other words, since everyone is concerned that poor children might not get an education because it costs too much, those children will be provided an education as a direct result of everyone’s concern.

Look, either you will help poor children get an education, through charity or volunteering, or you will not. If you will help poor children get an education, you do not have to worry about the issue. If you will do nothing to help poor children get an education, it is pure hypocrisy to raise it as an issue that you claim to be concerned about.

That having been said, there are a number of ways that a free society can provide education that is far superior to the mess being inflicted on children now.

First of all, poor children are not currently getting any sort of decent education. The perceived risks of a stateless society cannot be rationally compared to a perfect situation in the here-and-now. Those most concerned with the education of the poor should be the ones most clamouring for the abolishment of the existing system. The educational statistics for poor children are absolutely appalling – and this should raise the urgency of finding a solution. It is one thing to say, “You should never cross a road against the lights, even if there is no traffic.” It is quite another thing to say, “You should never cross a road against the lights, even if you are being chased by a lion!” Those who oppose a stateless society always ignore the existence of the lion, thus adding their intellectual inertia to the weight of the status quo.

Secondly, much like the question of collective defense, the cost of education will be far lower in a free society. The $10,000-$15,000 a year currently being spent per-pupil in public schools is ridiculously overinflated. Year-round accelerated education would help the child graduate several years earlier – and with tangible job skills to boot! The resulting increase in earnings would more than pay for the education – and many companies would scramble to offer loans to such children, knowing that they would be paid off soon after graduation. Thus education would be more beneficial – and, since there would be no war on drugs or automatic “welfare” in a free society, fewer self-destructive options would be available.

As for higher education, it is either recreational or vocational. If it is recreational, then it is about as necessary as a hobby, and cannot be considered a necessity. If it is vocational, such as medicine, then additional earnings will more than pay for the costs of the education. Businesses need accountants – thus those businesses will be more than happy to fund the college expenses of talented youngsters in return for a work commitment after graduation. (This is how my father received his doctorate.)

Talented but poor children will be sought after by schools, both for the benevolence they can show by subsidizing them, and also because high-quality graduates raise the prestige of a school, enabling it to increase fees.

In a stateless society, a tiny minority of poor children may slip through the cracks – but that is far better than the current situation, where most poor children slip through the cracks. The fact that some non-smokers will get lung cancer does not mean that we should encourage people to smoke. A stateless society is not a utopia, it is merely a utopia compared to a government society.

Now, we shall really begin to make the case for anarchism by examining the question of whether the government is a valid moral entity.

Disproving the State: Four Arguments Against Government

Two objections constantly tend to recur whenever the subject of dissolving the State arises. The first is that a free society is only possible if people are perfectly good or rational. In other words, citizens need a centralized State because there are evil people in the world.

The first and most obvious problem with this position is that if evil people exist in society, they will also exist within the State – and be far more dangerous thereby. Citizens are able to protect themselves against evil individuals, but stand no chance against an aggressive State armed to the teeth with police and military might. Thus, the argument that we need the State because evil people exist is false. If evil people exist, the State must be dismantled, since evil people will be drawn to use its power for their own ends – and, unlike private thugs, evil people in government have the police and military to inflict their whims on a helpless and largely disarmed population.

Logically, there are four possibilities as to the mixture of good and evil people in the world:

That all men are moral;
That all men are immoral;
That the majority of men are moral, and a minority immoral;
That the majority of men are immoral, and a minority moral.

(A perfect balance of good and evil is statistically impossible.)

In the first case, (all men are moral), the State is obviously unnecessary, since evil does not exist.

In the second case, (all men are immoral), the State cannot be permitted to exist for one simple reason. The State, it is generally argued, must exist because there are evil people in the world who desire to inflict harm, and who can only be restrained through fear of State retribution (police, prisons etc). A corollary of this argument is that the less retribution these people fear, the more evil they will do. However, the State itself is not subject to any force, but is a law unto itself. Even in Western democracies, how many policemen and politicians go to jail? Thus if evil people wish to do harm but are only restrained by force, then society can never permit a State to exist, because evil people will immediately take control of that State, in order to do evil and avoid retribution. In a society of pure evil, then, the only hope for stability would be a state of nature, where a general arming and fear of retribution would blunt the evil intents of disparate groups.

The third possibility is that most people are evil, and only a few are good. If this is the case, then the State also cannot be permitted to exist, since the majority of those in control of the State will be evil, and will rule over the good minority. Democracy in particular cannot be permitted to exist, since the minority of good people would be subjugated to the democratic will of the evil majority. Evil people, who wish to do harm without fear of retribution, would inevitably take control of the State, and use its power to do their evil free of that fear. Good people act morally because they love virtue and peace of mind, not because they fear retribution – and thus, unlike evil people, they have little to gain by controlling the State. And so it is certain that the State will be controlled by a majority of evil people who will rule over all, to the detriment of all moral people.

The fourth option is that most people are good, and only a few are evil. This possibility is subject to the same problems outlined above, notably that evil people will always want to gain control over the State, in order to shield themselves from retaliation. This option changes the appearance of democracy, of course: because the majority of people are good, evil power-seekers must lie to them in order to gain power, and then, after achieving public office, will immediately break faith and pursue their own corrupt agendas, enforcing their wills with the police and military. (This is the current situation in democracies, of course.) Thus the State remains the greatest prize to the most evil men, who will quickly gain control over its awesome power – to the detriment of all good souls – and so the State cannot be permitted to exist in this scenario either.

It is clear, then, that there is no situation under which a State can logically or morally be allowed to exist. The only possible justification for the existence of a State would be if the majority of men are evil, but all the power of the State is always controlled by a minority of good men. This situation, while interesting theoretically, breaks down logically because:

The evil majority would quickly outvote the minority or overpower them through a coup;
Because there is no way to ensure that only good people would always run the State; and,
There is absolutely no example of this having ever occurred in any of the dark annals of the brutal history of the State.

The logical error always made in the defense of the State is to imagine that any collective moral judgments being applied to any group of people is not also being applied to the group which rules over them. If 50% of citizens are evil, then at least 50% of the people ruling over them are also evil (and probably more, since evil people are always drawn to power). Thus the existence of evil can never justify the existence of the State. If there is no evil, the State is unnecessary. If evil exists, the State is far too dangerous to be allowed existence.

Why is this error always made? There are a number of reasons, which can only be touched on here. The first is that the State introduces itself to children in the form of public school teachers who are considered moral authorities. Thus is the association of morality and authority with the State first made, and is reinforced through years of repetition. The second is that the State never teaches children about the root of its power – force – but instead pretends that it is just another social institution, like a business or a church or a charity. The third is that the prevalence of religion has always blinded men to the evils of the State – which is why the State has always been so interested in furthering the interests of churches. In the religious world-view, absolute power is synonymous with perfect goodness, in the form of a deity. In the real political world of men, however, increasing power always means increasing evil. With religion, also, all that happens must be for the good – thus, fighting encroaching political power is fighting the will of the deity. There are many more reasons, of course, but these are among the deepest.

I mentioned at the beginning of this section that people generally make two errors when confronted with the idea of dissolving the State. The first is believing that the State is necessary because evil people exist. The second is the belief that, in the absence of a State, any social institutions which arise will inevitably take the place of the State. Thus, Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs), insurance companies and private security forces are all considered potential cancers which will swell and overwhelm the body politic.

This view arises from the same error outlined above. If all social institutions are constantly trying to grow in power and enforce their wills on others, then by that very argument a centralized State cannot be allowed to exist. If it is an iron law that groups always try to gain power over other groups and individuals, then that power-lust will not end if one of them wins, but will spread across society until slavery is the norm.

It is also very hard to understand the logic and intelligence of the argument that, in order to protect us from a group that might overpower us, we should support a group that has already overpowered us. It is similar to the statist argument about private monopolies – that citizens should create a State monopoly because they are afraid of a private monopoly.

Once we begin to reason away the fogs of propaganda, it does not take keen vision to see through such nonsense.

Anarchy, Violence and the State

Does more government equal less violence?

Another common objection to a stateless society is that violence will inevitably increase in the absence of a centralized State. This is a very interesting objection, and seems to arise from people who have imbibed a large amount of propaganda about the nature and function of the State. It seems hard to imagine that this conclusion could ever be reached by reasoning from first principles, as we will see below.

There are several circumstances under which the use of violence will either increase, or decrease – and they tend to correspond with the basic principles of economics. For instance, people tend to respond to incentives, and tend to be drawn to circumstances under which they can gain the most resources by expending the least effort. Thus in the lottery system, people respond to the incentive of the million dollar payout by expending minimal resources in the purchase of a ticket.

There are several circumstances under which violence will tend to increase, rather than decrease – and interestingly enough, a centralized State creates and exacerbates all such circumstances.

Principle 1: Risk

Economically speaking, risk is the great balancer of reward. If a horse is less likely to win a race, the gambling payout must be higher in order to induce people to bet on it. By their very nature, speculative investments must potentially produce greater rewards than blue-chip stocks. Similarly, white-collar criminals generally face less physical risk than muggers. A stick-up man may inadvertently run up against a judo expert, and find the tables turned very quickly – while a hacker siphoning off funds electronically faces no such risk. In general, those interested in stealing property will always gravitate toward situations where the risks of retaliation are lower.

If force or the threat thereof is required for the theft – as in the case of taxes – one of the greatest ways of reducing the possibilities of retaliation is through the principle of overwhelming force. If five enormous muggers circle a 98 pound man and demand his wallet, the possibilities of retaliation are far lower than if the 98 pound man approaches five enormous men and demands that they surrender their wallets.

Clearly, the existence of a centralized State creates such an enormous disparity of power that resistance against government predations is, in all practicality, impossible. A man can either stand up to or move away from the Mafia, but can do almost nothing to oppose expansions of State power.

Thus, we can see that the existence of a centralized State creates the following problems with regards to violence:

The use of violence tends to increase when the risks of using that violence decrease;
The risks of initiating violence tend to decrease as the disparity of power increases;
There is no greater disparity of power than that between a citizen and his government;
Therefore there is no better way to increase the use of violence than to create a centralized political state.

Principle 2: Proximity

Using violence is a brutal and horrible task for most people. Most people are not physically or mentally equipped to use violence, either due to a lack of physical strength, a lack of martial knowledge, or an absence of sociopathic tendencies. However, the government has enormous, relatively efficient and well-distributed systems in place to initiate the use of force against largely disarmed citizens. Thus, those who wish to gain the fruits of violence can do so by tapping into the government’s network of enforcers, without ever having to directly witness or deploy violence themselves.

It can generally be said that the use of violence tends to increase as the visibility and proximity of violence decreases. In other words, if you can get other people to do your dirty work, more dirty work will tend to get done. If everyone who wished to gain the fruits of State violence had to hold their own guns to everyone’s heads, almost all of them would end up refraining from such direct and dangerous brutality.

Thus in the realm of proximity as well, the existence of a centralized State tends to both distance and hide the reality of violence from those who wish to pluck the fruits of violence – thus ensuring that the use of violence will tend to increase.

Principle 3: Externalization of Costs

In a stateless society, it is impossible to “outsource” violence to the police or the military, since they are not funded through collective coercion. When there is a government, however, those who wish to gain the fruits of violence – i.e. tax revenues, the regulation of competitors, the blocking of imports and so on – can lobby the government to enforce such beneficial restrictions on the free trade and choices of others. They will have to pay for this lobbying effort, but they will not have to directly fund the police and the military and the court system and the prison guards in order to force people to obey their whims. This “externalization of costs” is an essential ingredient in the expansion of the use of violence.

For instance, imagine you are a steel manufacturer who wants to block the imports of steel from other countries – how expensive would it be to build your own navy, your own radar system, your own Coast Guard, hire your own inspectors and so on? How would you convince all the shippers and dock owners and transporters to inspect every container on your behalf? Would you pay them? Would you threaten them? And even if you found it economically advantageous to do all that, could you guarantee that none of your competitors would do the same? Would it still be economically advantageous if you ended up getting into an arms race with all of your fellow manufacturers? And what if your customers found out that you were using your own private militia to block the imports of steel – might they not take offense at your use of violence and boycott you? No, in the absence of a centralized State that you can offload all the enforcement costs to, it is going to be far cheaper for you to compete openly than develop your own private, overwhelming and universal army.

Thus, in any situation where the costs of using violence can be externalized to some centralized agency, the use of that violence will always tend to increase. Offloading the costs of violence to taxpayers will always make violence profitable to specific agencies – whether private or public. And so, once again, we can see that the existence of the State will always tend to increase the use of violence.

Principle 4: Deferment

How much do you think you would spend if you knew that you would be long-dead when the bill came due? This is, of course, the basic principle of deficit financing – the deferment of payments to the next generation – which is perhaps the most insidious form of taxation. Forcibly transferring property from those who have not even been born yet is perhaps the greatest “externalization” of costs that can be imagined! Naturally, the risks of retaliation from the unborn are utterly nonexistent – and neither is any direct violence performed against them. Thus the principle of “deferment” is perhaps one of the greatest ways in which the existence of a centralized State increases the use of violence.

Principle 5: Propaganda

It is well known in totalitarian regimes that in order to get people to accept the use of violence, that violence must always be reframed in a noble light. Government violence can never be referred to as merely the use of brute force for the material gain of politicians and bureaucrats – it must always represent the manifestation of core social or cultural values, such as caring for the poor, the sick, the old, or the indigent. The violence must always be tucked away from direct view, and the effects of violence elevated to sentimental heights of soaring rhetoric. Furthermore, the effects of the withdrawal of violence must always be portrayed as catastrophic and evil. Thus the elimination of the welfare state would cause mass starvation; the elimination of medical subsidies would cause mass death; the elimination of the war on drugs would cause massive addictions and social collapse – and the elimination of the State itself would directly create a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk nightmare world of brutal and endlessly warring gangs.

Propaganda is different from advertising in that all that advertising can ever do is get you to try a product for the first time – if the quality of the product does not meet your needs or expectations, then you will simply never buy that product again. Propaganda, on the other hand, is quite different. Advertising appeals to choice and self-interest; propaganda uses rhetoric to morally justify the absence of choice and self-interest. Advertising can only stimulate a one-time demand; propaganda permanently suppresses rationality. Advertising generally uses the argument from effect (you will be better off); propaganda always uses the argument from morality (you are evil for doubting).

The private funding of propaganda is never economically viable, since the amount of time and energy required to instil propaganda in the mind of the average person is far too great to justify its cost. In a voluntary system like the free market, paying for year after year of propaganda (which can only result in a “first time” purchase of a good or service) is never worth it. Propaganda is only “worth it” when it can be used to keep people passive within a coercive system like State taxation or regulation. For instance, here in Canada, socialized medicine is always called a “core Canadian value,” and can be subject to no rational, moral or economic analysis. (Of course, if it really were a “core Canadian value,” we would scarcely need the State to enforce it!) Because the existing system is so terrible, it takes years of State propaganda – primarily directed at children – to overcome people’s actual experiences of the endless disasters of socialized medicine. Propaganda is always required where people would never voluntarily choose the situation that the propaganda is praising. Thus we need endless propaganda extolling the virtues of the welfare state, the war on drugs and socialized medicine, while the virtues of eating chocolate cake are left for us to discover and maintain on our own.

Government propaganda is primarily aimed at children through State schools, and usually takes the form of an absence of topics. The coercive nature of the State is never mentioned, of course, and neither are the financial benefits which accrue to those who control the State. Children do hear endlessly about how the State protects the environment, feeds the poor and heals the sick. This propaganda blinds people to the true nature of State violence – thus ensuring that State violence can increase with relatively little or no opposition.

Parents are forced to pay for the propaganda of public schools through taxation. Thus a ghastly situation is created wherein the taxpayers are forced to pay for their own indoctrination – and the indoctrination of their children. This “externalization of cost” is perhaps the greatest tool that the government uses to ensure that increasing State violence will be subject to little or no opposition or rational analysis. No corporation or private agency could possibly profit from a 14-year program of indoctrinating children – the State, however, by inflicting the costs of indoctrination onto parents, creates a situation where the slaves are forced to pay for their own manacles. And as we all know, when slaves don’t resist, owning slaves becomes economically far more viable.

For the above reasons, it is clear that the existence of a centralized State vastly increases both the profits and the prevalence of violence. The fact that the violence is masked by obedience in no way diminishes the brutality of coercion. All moralists interested in one of the greatest topics of ethics – the reduction or elimination of violence – would do well to understand the depth and degree to which the existence of a centralized State promotes, exacerbates – and profits from – violence. Private violence is a negative but manageable situation – however, as we can see from countless examples throughout history, public violence always escalates until civil society becomes seriously threatened. Because the State so directly profits from violence, eliminating the State can in no way increase the use of violence within society. Quite the contrary – since private agencies do not profit from violence, eliminating the State will, to a degree unprecedented in human history, eliminate violence as well.

War, Profit and the State

It has often been said that war is the health of the State – but the argument could also be made that the reverse is more true: that the State is the health of war. In other words, that war – the greatest of all human evils – is impossible without the State.

The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was once asked what the central defining characteristic of the free market was – i.e. since every economy is more or less a mixture of freedom and State compulsion, what institution truly separated a free market from a controlled economy – and he replied that it was the existence of a stock market. Through a stock market, entrepreneurs can achieve the externalization of risk, or the partial transfer of potential losses from themselves to investors. In the absence of this capacity, business growth is almost impossible.

In other words, when risk is reduced, demand increases. The stagnation of economies in the absence of a stock market is testament to the unwillingness of individuals to take on all the risks of an economic endeavour themselves, even if this were possible. When risk becomes sharable, new possibilities emerge that were not present before – the Industrial Revolution being perhaps the most dramatic example.

Sadly, one of those possibilities – in all its horror, corruption, brutality and genocide – is war. In this section, I will endeavour to show that, in its capacity to reduce the costs and risks of violence, the State is, in effect, the stock market of war.

All economists know the “fallacy of the broken window,” which is that the stimulation of demand caused by a vandal breaking a window does not add to economic growth, but rather subtracts from it, since the money spent replacing the window is deducted from other possible purchases. This is self-evident to all of us – we don’t try to increase our incomes by driving our cars off cliffs or burning down our houses. Although it might please car manufacturers and home builders, it neither pleases us, nor the people who would have had access to the new car and house if we did not need them for ourselves. Destruction always diverts resources and so bids up prices, which costs everyone.

(In fact, breaking a $100 window removes more than $100 from the economy, since all the time spent returning the window to its original state – calling the window repairman, deciding on the replacement, cleaning up the shards of glass, etc – is also subtracted from the economy as a whole.)

There will always be accidents, of course, and so repairs are a legitimate aspect of any free market. However, war can never be said to be an accident, is never part of the free market, and yet is commonly believed to be good for the economy – and must be, for at least some people, since it is pursued so often. How can these opposites be reconciled? How can destruction be economically advantageous, when it is so obviously bad for the economy as a whole?

We can imagine an unethical window repairman who smashes windows in order to raise demand for his business. This would certainly help his income – and yet we see that this course is almost never pursued in real life in the free market. Why not?

One obvious answer could be that business managers are afraid of going to jail – and that certainly is a risk, but not a very great one. Arsonists are notoriously hard to catch, for instance, and there are so many hard-to-trace sabotages that can be undertaken. Poison can be added to the water supply that would incriminate a water supplier, which would take months to resolve – at which point the trail would be long cold. Foreign hackers could be paid to infiltrate competitor’s networks, or mount denial-of-service attacks on their web sites – sure doom for those who sell over the Internet.

Not convinced? Well, what about eBay? If you have a competitor who is taking away your business, why not just get a hundred of your closest friends to give him a bad rating, and watch his reputation – and business – dry up and blow away?

All of the above practices are very rare in the free market, for three main reasons. The first is that they are costly; the second is that they increase risks, and the third is the fear of retaliation.

The Cost of Destruction

If you want to hire an arsonist to torch the factory of your competitor, you have to become an expert in underworld negotiations. You might pay an arsonist and watch him take off to Hawaii instead of setting the fire. You also face the risk that your arsonist will take your offer to your competitor and ask for more money to not set the fire – or, worse, return the favor and torch your factory! It will certainly cost money to start down the road of vandalism, and there is no guarantee that your investment will pay off in the way you want.

There are other tertiary costs to pursuing a path of “competition by destruction.” You can only target one competitor at a time, which is only partially helpful, since most businesses face many competitors simultaneously – some local, and some overseas and probably out of reach. Even if you are successful in destroying your competitor, you have opened a “hole” in the market, which will just invite others to come in – and perhaps compete even more fiercely with you. When it comes to competition, in most cases it is better to stay with “the devil you know.” It wouldn’t make much sense to knock out a small software competitor, for instance, and end up giving Microsoft a good reason to enter the market.

Also, if you are a business owner, competition is very good for you. Just as a sports team gets lazy and unskilled if it never plays a competent opponent, businesses without competition get unproductive, lazy and inefficient – a sure invitation to others to come in and compete. Successful businesses need competition to stay fit. Resistance breeds strength.

Also, what happens if you do manage to successfully sabotage your opponents? If you do it well, no one has any idea that you are behind the sudden spate of arson. What happens to your insurance costs? They go through the roof – if you can even get any! Furthermore, you will not be able to meet all the new demand right away, thus ensuring that clients will find alternatives, which will likely remain outside your control. Thus you have increased your costs, created incentives for potential customers to find alternatives and alarmed your employees – creating a dangerous situation where competitors are highly motivated to enter your field just when you are the most vulnerable to competition! Overall, not a very bright idea!

The Risks of Destruction

Let us say you decide to pay a man named Stan to torch your competitor’s factory – well, the basic reality of the transaction is that Stan, as a professional arsonist, knows how to work the situation to his advantage far better than you do, since you are, ahem, new to the field. Stan knows that no matter what he does, you cannot go to the police for protection. What if he tapes your conversations and then blackmails you? Then your exercise in amoral competition suddenly becomes a lifelong nightmare of expense, guilt, fear and rage.

As mentioned above, what if Stan decides to go to your competitor and reveal your plans? Surely your competitor would pay good money for that information, since he could then go to the police and destroy you legally even more completely than you were hoping to destroy him illegally. A basic fact of criminal activity is that once the gloves come off, the results become very hard to predict indeed!

What if Stan goes to your competitor and says: “For $25,000, I was supposed to torch this place – for $30,000 I can just turn around and set quite a different fire!” This pendulum bidding war can turn into a desperately stressful money-loser for everyone concerned (except Stan, of course).

And who is to say that Stan is even a “legitimate” arsonist? What if he is an undercover agent of some kind? What if he has been sent by someone else in order to get some dirt on you? What if it turns out to be blackmail, or a set-up by your competitor? How would you know? Again – it is all very risky!

The Risks of Personal Retaliation

Let us say that all of the above works out just the way you want it and Stan actually torches your competitor Bill’s factory – what might happen then? You have just created a bitter enemy who suspects foul play, knows that you have a good motive for torching his factory, and has nothing to lose. He might complain about you to the police, hire private investigators and put an ad in every local paper offering a cash reward of a million dollars for information leading to proof of your participation – so he can sue you and recover far more than a million dollars!

Either your new enemy will find out actionable information, and then go to the police, or he will find out unactionable information – hints, not proof – in which case he may choose to retaliate against you. Since you’ve been able to do it in a way that cannot be proven – and he now knows how – you have just educated a bitter and angry man on how to torch a factory and escape detection. Are you going to sleep safe in your bed? Are you sure that he’s going to target only your factory?

What does all this look like in terms of economic calculation? Have a look at a sample table below showing the costs and benefits of competition through arson. If we assign arson a cost of $50k, with a 50% probability of success, and a resulting economic benefit of $1m, we see a net benefit of $450k (50% of $1m – $50k in costs). So far so good. But if we include a 10% risk of blackmail, a 20% chance of retaliation, a 25% chance of increased competition – all reasonable numbers – and finally $100k in increased insurance and security costs – we can see that the economic benefits are erased very quickly (see below).

Action	Cost	Probability	Economic Effect	Net Benefits (benefit / risk – cost)
Arson	-$50k	50%	$1 mill	$450k
Blackmail	-$250k	10%	-$250k	-$25k
Retaliation	-$1 mill	20%	-$1 mill	-$200k
Increased Competition	-$500k	25%	-$500k	-$125k
Increased Costs (insurance, security)	-$100k	100%	-$100k	-$100k
			Net Effect	$0

(Note that the above table only shows the economic calculations – these do not include the emotional factors of guilt, fear and worry, which are of great significance but hard to quantify. This is important because even if the above numbers were less disagreeable, the emotional barrier would still have to be overcome.)

As the above conservative example shows, it is not really worth it to attempt economic gain through the destruction of property – and that is exactly how it should be. We want people to be good, of course, but we also want strong economic incentives for virtue as well, to shore up the uncertain integrity of free will!

How does this relate to war and the State? Very closely, in fact – but with very opposite effects.

The Economics of War

The economics of war are, at bottom, very simple, and contain three major players: those who decide on war, those who profit from war, and those who pay for war. Those who decide on war are the politicians, those who profit from it are those who supply military materials or are paid for military skills, and those who pay for war are the taxpayers. (The first and second groups, of course, overlap.)

In other words, a corporation which profits from supplying arms to the military is paid through a predation on citizens through State taxation – and under no other circumstances could the transaction exist, since the risks associated with destruction outlined above are equal to or greater than any profits that could be made.

Certainly if those who decided on war also paid for it, there would be no such thing as war, since war follows the same economic incentives and costs outlined above.

However, those who decide on war do not pay for it – that unpleasant task is relegated to the taxpayers (both current, in the form of direct taxes and inflation, and future, in the form of national debts).

Let us see how the above analysis of the costs of destruction changes when the State enters the equation.

The Costs of Military Destruction

If you want to start a war, you need a very expensive military – which must also be trained and maintained when there is no war. There is simply no way to recover the costs of that military by invading another country – otherwise, the free market would directly fund armies and invasions, which it never does. Or, if you would prefer another way of looking at it, you can only invade another country by destroying large portions of it, killing many of its citizens, and then fighting endless insurgencies. Given the costs of invasions and occupations – always in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars – what profits could conceivably be extracted from the bombed-out country you are occupying? That would be like asking a thief to make money by fire-bombing a house he wanted to steal from, and then staying and keeping the occupants hostage. Madness! Thieves don’t operate that way – and neither would war, without the presence of the State and the money of the taxpayers.

Since the taxpayer’s money pays for the war, the costs of destruction for those who start the war are very low – how much does George Bush personally pay for the Iraq invasion? While it is true that those who profit from the war also pay the taxes needed to support the war effort, the amount they pay in taxes is far less than they receive in profits – again, facts we know because there are always people willing and eager to supply the military.

The Risks of Annihilation

Those who decide on war and those who profit from war only start wars when there is no real risk of personal destruction. This is a simple historical fact, which can be gleaned from the reality that no nuclear power has ever declared war on another nuclear power. The US gave the USSR money and wheat, and yet invaded Grenada, Haiti and Iraq. (In fact, one of the central reasons it was possible to know in advance that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction capable of hitting the US was that US leaders were willing to invade it.)

Avoiding the risk of destruction was the reason that the USSR and the US (to take two obvious examples) fought “proxy wars” in out-of-the-way places like Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea. As we shall see below, the fact that the risk of destruction is shifted to taxpayers (and taxpayer-funded soldiers) considerably changes the economic equation.

The Risks of Military Retaliation

The “risk of retaliation” in economic calculations regarding war should not be taken as a general risk, but rather a specific one – i.e. specific to those who either decide on war or profit from it. For example, Roosevelt knew that blockading Japan in the early 1940s carried a grave risk of retaliation – but only against distant and unknown US personnel in the Pacific, not against his friends and family in Washington. (In fact, the blockading was specifically escalated with the aim of provoking retaliation, in order to bring the US into WWII.)

If other people are exposed to the risk of retaliation, the risk becomes a moot point from an amoral economic standpoint. If I smoke, but some unknown stranger might get lung cancer, my decision to continue smoking will certainly be affected!

Externalizing Military Risk

The power of the State to so fundamentally shift the costs and benefits of violence is one of the most central facts of warfare – and the core reason for its continued existence. As we can see from the above table regarding arson, if the person who decides to profit through destruction faces the consequences himself, he has almost no economic incentive to do so. However, if he can shift the risks and losses to others – but retain the benefit himself – the economic landscape changes completely! Sadly, it then it becomes profitable, say, to tax citizens to pay for 800 US military bases around the world, as long as strangers in New York bear the brunt of the inevitable retaliation. It also becomes profitable to send uneducated youngsters to Iraq to bear the brunt of the insurgency.

Externalizing Emotional Discomfort

The fact that the State shifts the burden of risk and payment to the taxpayers and soldiers is very important in emotional terms. If the “arson” example could be tweaked to provide a profit – say, by reducing the risks of blackmail or retaliation – the other risks would still accrue to the man contemplating such violence. Such risks would cause emotional discomfort in all but the most rare and sociopathic personalities – and the generation of negative stimuli such as fear, guilt and worry would still require more profit than the model can reasonably generate.

Thus the fact that the State externalizes almost all the risks and costs of destruction is a further positive motivation to those who would use the power of State violence for their own ends. Once you throw in endless pro-war propaganda (also called “war-nography”), the emotional benefits of starting and leading wars funded by others can become a definitive positive – which ensures that wars will continue until the State collapses, or the world dies.

In Other Words, The State Is War

If the above is understood, then the hostility of anarchists towards the State should now be at least a little clearer. In the anarchist view, the State is a fundamental moral evil not only because it uses violence to achieve its ends, but also because it is the only social agency capable of making war economically advantageous to those with the power to declare it and profit from it. In other words, it is only through the governmental power of taxation that war can be subsidized to the point where it becomes profitable to certain sections of society. Destruction can only ever be profitable because the costs and risks of violence are shifted to the taxpayers, while the benefits accrue to the few who directly control or influence the State.

This violent distortion of costs, incentives and rewards cannot be controlled or alleviated, since an artificial imbalance of economic incentives will always self-perpetuate and escalate (at least, until the inevitable bankruptcy of the public purse). Or, to put it another way, as long as the State exists, we shall always live with the terror of war. To oppose war is to oppose the State. They can neither be examined in isolation nor opposed separately, since – much more than metaphorically – the State and war are two sides of the same bloody coin.

A Successful Operation (a dead patient!)

Most libertarians have, at one time or another, been challenged by the problem of public property, or how the market can best protect and allocate goods “owned” in common such as fish in the sea, roads, airwaves and so on. An old economics parable sums up the problem nicely – let’s briefly review it before taking a strong swing at solving the problem of public property.

The issue is well described by a parable called the problem of the commons (POTC), which goes something like this: a group of sheep-owning farmers own land in a ring around a common area. They each benefit individually from letting their sheep graze on the common land, since that frees up some of their own farmland for other uses. However, if they all let their sheep graze on the commons, they all suffer, since the land will be stripped bare, and so they will end up watching their sheep starve, since their own land has all been turned to other uses. In many circles, this is considered an incontrovertible coup de grace for the absolute right of private property – and the free market in general – insofar as it “proves” that individual self-interest, rationally pursued, can result in economic catastrophe. Due to the POTC, it is argued, the property rights of the individual must be curtailed for the sake of the “greater good.” Thus regulation and government ownership must be instituted to control the excesses of individual self-interest for the sake of long-term stability, blah blah blah.

There is one significant difficulty with the POTC, however, which is that it fails to prove that government regulation or public ownership is necessary, or that turning the POTC over to the State solves the problem in any way. In fact, it is easy to prove that even if the POTC is a real dilemma, the worst possible way of solving it is to create government regulations or public ownership.

Problem #1: Public Ownership

The simplest rebuttal to the POTC, of course, is to point out that the problem faced by the farmers is not an excess of private property, but a deficiency. If we imagine the farms surrounding the commons to be doughnut-shaped, then clearly the POTC is best solved by simply extending the ownership of the farms to the very center, like pizza slices (yes, these metaphors are making me hungry as well!). If private property is thus extended to include the commons, farmers no longer face the problem of everyone wanting to exploit un-owned resources. Everyone can then use their extra land to feed their sheep, and everyone is content. (Alternatively, a woman can come along, buy up the commons and start charging grazing fees. To ensure the longevity of her resource, she will naturally take care to avoid overgrazing.)

However, let us accept that under some circumstances the POTC is real, and cannot be overcome through the extension of private property rights. What solutions can then be brought to bear on the problem?

Solutions to social problems always fall into one of two categories: voluntary or coercive. Voluntary solutions to the POTC abound throughout history – the most notable being the kinds of social arrangements made by fishermen. When a number of fishing communities dot a lake, villagers develop complex and effective measures to ensure that the lake is not over-fished. Any display of wealth is frowned upon, since it is clear that wealth can only come from over-fishing. Communal leaders meet to figure out how much each village can catch – and it is very hard to hide your catch in a small village. Furthermore, the problem of not knowing exactly how much fish is being taken by others – as well as natural annual variations in fish stocks – lead to significant underestimation of allowable catches, which ensures that sustainability is always achieved. Left-leaning economists might be baffled by the POTC, but there is scant recorded historical evidence of illiterates in fishing villages regularly starving to death due to over-fishing (unless their village leaders were left-leaning economists perhaps).

The POTC is yet another manifestation of that old bugbear: the blind insistence that man is a being whose sole motivation is immediate financial considerations. (Economists who believe this and who also have children are most baffling in this regard!) “Ahhh,” says the miserly farmer of this ‘instant gratification’ fairy tale, “I will graze my sheep by night and callously denude the commons, so I can grow a dozen extra turnips!” But what good will his extra turnips do him if no one in the village will talk to him, or when no one will help him build a barn, or when he gets sick and needs people to care for his sheep? No, even miserly farmers are far better obeying the rules and forgetting about their extra turnips – since they will lose far more than they gain by circumventing social norms. Communities have weapons of ostracism and contempt that far outweigh immediate economic calculations.

(Has this changed in the Internet age? Surely we are far less constrained by social norms than we used to be! Not at all – now, with tools ranging from credit reports, web searches and easy access to prior employers, conformity to basic decency is more important than ever.)

Problem #2: The State as a ‘Common’

However, let us assume that none of the above rebuttals to the POTC holds firm, and in certain circumstances there is simply no way to extend property rights to, or exercise social control over, resources which cannot be owned – what then? Do we turn such a thorny and complex problem to the tender mercies of the State to solve?

One of the most interesting aspects of using the State to solve the POTC is that the State itself is subject to the problem of the commons.

Since the State is an entity wherein property is owned in “common,” the problem of selfish exploitation leading to general destruction applies as surely to State “property” as it does to the common land ringed by greedy and short-sighted farmers. Just as farmers can destroy the commons while pursuing their individual self-interest, so can politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists and other assorted State toadies and courtiers destroy the economy as a whole in pursuit of their own selfish economic and political goals.

The POTC argues that, due to “common ownership,” long-term prosperity is sacrificed for the sake of short-term advantage. Because no one defends and maintains property that can be utilized by all, that property is pillaged into oblivion. And – the State is supposed to solve this problem? How? That is exactly how the State operates!

Let’s look at some examples of how the State pillages the future for the sake of greed in the here-and-now:

- deficit financing;

- inflationary monetary expansion;

- government bonds, which future generations must pay out;

- spending the money taken in through social security, which future generations must pay for;

- offensive “defense” spending, which future citizens will pay for through increased risk of domestic attacks;

- massive educational failures, which have immensely deleterious effects on future productivity and happiness;

- the granting of special powers, rights and benefits to lobbyists such as unions, public sector employees and large corporations, which results in higher prices and deficits (the cost to the US economy for union laws alone is calculated at $50 trillion dollars over the past 50 years);

- the failure to adequately maintain public infrastructure such as roads, schools, bridges, the water supply and so on, which passes enormous liabilities onto the next generation;

- massive spending on the war on drugs, which increases crime in the future;

- the pollution of public lands and other fixed assets, which saves money in the short run while ruining value in the long run;

- …and goodness knows how much more!

From the above examples, it is easy to see that the POTC applies to the State to a far greater degree than any other social agency or individual. If we recall our group of greedy farmers, we can easily see that they have a strong incentive to avoid or solve the POTC, since it is they themselves who will suffer from the despoiling of un-owned lands. However, in the case of the State, those who prey upon and despoil the public purse will never themselves face the direct consequences of their pillaging. Thus their incentive to prevent, solve or even alleviate the problem is virtually non-existent.

Furthermore, even if the farmers do end up destroying the un-owned lands, they can at least get together and voluntarily work to find a better solution in the future. Once the government takes over a problem, however, control passes almost completely from the private sphere to the public sphere of enforcement, corruption and politics. Once firmly planted in the realm of the State, not only is the problem of public ownership made incalculably worse, but it cannot ever be resolved, since the predation of the public purse is now defended by all the armed might of the State military. Consequences evaporate, competition is eliminated, and a mad free-for-all grab-fest simply escalates until the public purse is drained dry and the State collapses. (This is what happened in the Soviet Union; in the 1980s, as it became clear that communism was unsustainable, Kremlin insiders simply pillaged the public treasury until the State went bankrupt.)

Thus the idea of turning to the State to solve the POTC is akin to the old medical joke about the operation being a complete success, with the minor exception that the patient died. If the POTC is a significant issue in the private sector, then turning it over to the government makes it staggeringly worse – turning it from a mildly challenging problem of economics into a suicidal expansion of State power and violence. If the problem of the commons is not a significant issue, then surely we do not need the State to solve it at all.

Either way, there is no compelling evidence or argument to be made for the value, morality or efficacy of turning problems of public ownership over to the armed might of the State. Both logically and ethically, it is the equivalent of treating a mild headache with a guillotine.

If the State is an evil, corrupt and destructive solution to the problems of social organization, what alternatives can anarchism offer?

Dispute Resolution Organizations

An essential aspect of economic life is the ability to enforce contracts and resolve intractable disputes. How can a stateless society provide these functions in the absence of a government?

The first thing to understand about contracts is that they are a form of insurance, insofar as they attempt to minimize the risks of noncompliance. If I enter into a five-year mortgage agreement with a bank, I will attempt to minimize my risks by requiring that the bank give me a fixed interest rate for the time period of the contract. My bank, on the other hand, will minimize its risk by retaining ownership of my house as collateral, in case I do not pay the mortgage.

In a world without risk, contracts would be unnecessary, and everyone would do business on a handshake. However, there are people who are dishonest, scatterbrained, manipulative and false, and so we need contracts which basically spell out the penalties for noncompliance to particular requirements.

In modern statist societies, contracts are generally enforced not through the court system, but rather through the threat of the court system. I was in business for many years, at an executive level, and I never once heard of a contract being successfully enforced through the state court system, although I did on occasion hear litigious threats – which is quite different. The threat was not so much, “I am going to use the court to enforce this contract,” but rather, “I am going to use the threat of taking you to court in order to enforce this contract.” The prospect of expensive and time-consuming legal action was always enough to force a resolution of some kind. No actual court compulsion was ever required.

It is quite easy to see that when a process that is designed to mediate disputes becomes itself a threat which causes disputes to be mediated privately, it has largely failed in its intent. State court systems have become like the quasi-private car insurance companies – the threats and inconvenience of using them has caused most people to settle their disputes privately, rather than involve themselves in something that they are forced to pay for, but can almost never use.

This bodes very well for anarchic solutions to contract disputes.

In a stateless society, entrepreneurs will be very willing and eager to provide creative solutions to the problems of contractual noncompliance. As a nonviolent solution, the profits will be maximized if noncompliance can be prevented, rather than merely addressed after the fact.

To take a simple example, let us pretend that you are a loans officer at a bank, and I come in requesting $10,000. Naturally, you will be very happy to lend me the money if I will pay back both the principal and interest on time, since that is how you make your profit. However, such a guarantee is completely impossible, since even if I have the money and the intent to pay you back, I could get hit by a bus while on my way to do so, leaving you perhaps $10,000 in the hole.

What questions will you need to answer in order to assess the risk? You will want to know two things in particular:

Have I consistently paid back loans in the past?
Do I have any collateral for the loan?

These two pieces of information are somewhat related. If I have consistently paid back loans in the past, then your need for collateral will be diminished. The more collateral that I am able to provide for the loan, the less it is necessary for me to have a good credit history.

The reason that a good credit history is so necessary is not just to establish my credit worthiness, but also to help the bank assess how much I have currently invested into my good reputation. If I have taken out loans for hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past, and repaid them on time, then it scarcely seems likely that I would have gone through all of that just to steal $10,000.

If we say that my good credit rating saves me two percentage points on my interest payments, and that I will need a further $500,000 of loans over the course of my life, then my good credit rating will be saving me at a bare minimum tens of thousands of dollars. Thus, I would end up losing money if I took out a $10,000 loan and did not pay it back, since the cash benefit would not cover the losses I would incur through the destruction of my credit rating. Physical “collateral” is thus less required, since I have the very real “collateral” of a good credit rating.

These kinds of economic calculations occur regularly in a statist society, and would not vanish like the morning mist in a stateless society.

However, there are certain kinds of loans that some financial institutions would be willing to make, despite the high level of risk involved. Young people just starting out – who have no family to provide collateral – would be in a higher risk category, as would those who had failed to make loan payments in the past. As we can see from late-night television commercials for cars, no credit history – or even a bad credit history – does not make one permanently ineligible for loans.

There are two main ways to manage risk in any complex situation – hedging, and insurance. The “hedging” approach is to bet both for and against a particular outcome. In the world of currency trading, this means betting a certain amount that the dollar will go up, and another amount that the dollar will go down. In the world of horse racing, it means betting on more than one horse. This is also why people diversify their stock portfolios.

The “insurance” approach tends to be used where hedging is impossible. When I was an executive in the software world, my employees would often take out insurance in case I got sick or died. It was relatively impossible to “hedge” this risk, because keeping “backup employees” in a basement is not particularly cost-efficient, let alone moral. Life insurance is another example of this.

These strategies are already well-established in the current quasi-free market. However, in one-to-one contracts, state courts retain their monopoly. If I am an employee, I have a one-to-one contract with my employer; I cannot “hedge” the risks involved in this contract, and currently neither can I buy insurance to mitigate the risk that my employer will go out of business, while still owing me pay and expenses.

In the absence of a government, the need for the rational mitigation of risk in contracts would still be there, and entrepreneurs will inevitably provide creative and intelligent solutions to address this.

Breaking Contract

Let us take a relatively small example of how contract disputes can be resolved in a stateless society.

Let us say that I pay you $15,000 to landscape my garden, but you never show up to do the work. Ideally, I would like my $15,000 back, as well as another few thousand dollars for my inconvenience. In a stateless society, when we first put pen to paper on a contract, we can choose an impartial third party to mediate any dispute. If a conflict should arise that we cannot solve ourselves, we contractually agree in advance to abide by the decision of this Dispute Resolution Organization (DRO).

Since I am not an expert in pursuing people and getting money from them, if I had any doubts about your motives, capacity and honesty, I would simply pay this DRO a fee to recompense me if the deal goes awry. If you run off without doing the work, I simply submit my claim to the DRO, who then pays me $20,000.

When I first apply for this insurance, the DRO will charge me a certain amount of money, based on their evaluation of the risk I am taking by doing business with you. If you have cheated your last ten customers, the DRO will simply not insure the contract, thus implicitly informing me of the risk that I am taking. If you have a spotty record, then the DRO may charge me a few thousand dollars to insure your work – again, giving me a pretty good sense of how reliable you are.

On the other hand, if you have been in business for 30 years, and have never once cheated a customer, or received a complaint, then the DRO is simply insuring against delays caused by sudden madness or unexpected death. It may only charge me $50 for this eventuality.

This form of contract insurance is a very powerful positive incentive for honest dealings in business. The cost of insuring a contract is directly added to the cost of doing business, and so if it can be kept as low as humanly possible, the financial benefits to both parties are clear.

The cost of insuring a contract can be kept even lower if you are willing to provide collateral upfront. What this means is that if you cheat me out of the $15,000, and the DRO has to pay me $20,000, you promise to pay the DRO $25,000. If you cheat me, the DRO can then take this money directly out of your bank account.

In this way, contracts can be enforced without resorting to violence, or lengthy and incredibly expensive court battles. The risks of entering into contracts are clearly communicated up front, and honest people will be directly rewarded through lower enforcement costs, just as non-smokers are directly rewarded through lower life insurance costs.

Non-Payment

Suppose I have contracted with a DRO to pay restitution if I cannot fulfill my business obligations in some way, and end up owing them $100,000. What happens if I cannot pay, or simply refuse to pay?

Currently, the State will use violence against me if I do not pay. While this may be a satisfying form of medieval vengeance gratification, it scarcely helps me cough up $100,000 that the DRO actually wants from me. In a stateless society, what options are available for the DRO to get its money?

In any modern economy, individuals are bound by dozens of obligations and contracts, from apartment leases to gym memberships to credit cards contracts to insurance agreements. The costs of doing business with people who are known to honor their contracts is far lower, which is why it seems highly likely that a stateless society produce both DROs, and Contract Rating Agencies (CRAs).

CRAs would be independent entities that would objectively evaluate an individual’s contract compliance. If I become known as a man who regularly breaks his contracts, it will become more and more difficult for me to efficiently operate in a complex economy. This form of economic ostracism is an immensely powerful – and nonviolent – tool for promoting compliance to social norms and moral rules.

If an individual egregiously violates social norms – and we shall get to the issue of violent crime below – then one incredibly effective option that society has is to simply cease doing any form of business with such an individual.

If I cheat my DRO – or another individual – out of an enormous sum of money, the CRA could simply revoke my contract rating completely.

DROs would very likely have provisions which would simply state that they would not enforce any contract with anyone whose contract rating was revoked. In other words, if I run a hotel, and an “outcast” wants to rent a room, I will be immediately aware of this, since I will enter his credit card, and be promptly informed that no contract will be honored with this individual. In other words, if he sets fire to my hotel, steals or destroys property, or harasses another guest, then my DRO will not help me at all. Will I be likely to want to rent a room to this fellow, or will I tell him that, sadly, the hotel is full?

In the same way, grocery stores, taxicabs, bus companies, electricity providers, banks, restaurants and other such organizations will be very unlikely to want to do business with such an outcast, since they will have no protection if he misbehaves.

Economic interactions, of course, are purely voluntary, and no man can be morally forced to do business with another man. People who cheat and steal and lie will be highly visible in a stateless society, and will find that other people will turn away from them more often than not, unless they change their ways, and provide restitution for their prior wrongs.

An outcast can get his contract rating restored if he is willing to repay those he has wronged. If he gets a job and allows his wages to be garnished until his debts are paid off, his contract rating can be restored, at least to the minimum level required for him to hold a job and rent an apartment. A DRO, which is always interested in preventing recurrence, rather than dealing with consequences, may also reduce his burden if he is willing to attend psychological and credit counseling education.

In this way, contracts can be enforced without resorting to violence – the tool of economic and social ostracism is the most powerful method for dealing with those who repeatedly violate moral and social rules. We do not need to throw people into economically unproductive “debtor’s prisons” or send men with guns to kidnap and incarcerate them – all we need to do is publish their crimes for all to see, and let the natural justice of society take care of the rest.

Ah, but what if an “outcast” has been treated unjustly, and is being blackmailed by a DRO or CRA?

Well, remember that anarchism is always a two-sided negotiation. In order to get people to sign up to your DRO or CRA, what checks and balances would you put in your contracts to calm their fears in this regard?

The Stateless Society: An Examination of Alternatives

Let us turn to a more detailed examination of how private agencies could work in a free society.

Remember, these are only possible ideas about how such agencies could work – I’m sure that you have many of your own, which may be vastly superior to mine. The purpose of this section is not to create some sort of finalized blueprint for a stateless society, but to show how the various incentives and methodologies of freedom can create powerful and productive solutions to complex social problems, in a way that will forever elude a statist society.

We will start with a few articles that I originally published in 2005, which go over my theory of Dispute Resolution Organizations – DROs. More details about this approach are available in my podcast series as well.

If the Twentieth Century proved anything, it is that the single greatest danger to human life is the centralized political State, which murdered more than 200 million souls. Modern States are the last and greatest remaining predators. It is clear that the danger has not abated with the demise of communism and fascism. All Western democracies currently face vast and accelerating escalations of State power and centralized control over economic and civic life. In almost all Western democracies, the State chooses:

- where children go to school, and how they will be educated;

- the interest rate citizens can borrow at;

- the value of currency;

- how employees can be hired and fired;

- how more than 50% of their citizen’s time and money are disposed of;

- who a citizen may choose as a doctor;

- what kinds of medical procedures can be received – and when;

- when to go to war;

- who can live in the country;

- …just to touch on a few.

Most of these amazing intrusions into personal liberty have occurred over the past 90 years, since the introduction of the income tax. They have been accepted by a population helpless to challenge the expansion of State power – and yet, even though most citizens have received endless pro-State propaganda in government schools, a growing rebellion is brewing. The endless and increasing State predations are now so intrusive that they have effectively arrested the forward momentum of society, which now hangs before a fall. Children are poorly educated, young people are unable to get ahead, couples with children fall ever-further into debt, and the elderly are finding their medical systems collapsing under the weight of their growing needs. And none of this takes into account the ever-growing State debts.

These early years of the twenty-first century are thus the end of an era, a collapse of mythology comparable to the fall of communism, monarchy, or political Christianity. The idea that the State is even capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great skepticism – which foretells the imminent end, since as soon as skepticism is applied to the State, the State falls, since it fails at everything except expansion, and so can only survive on propaganda.

Yet while most people are comfortable with the idea of reducing the size and power of the State, they become distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of getting rid of it completely. To use a medical analogy, if the State is a cancer, they prefer medicating it into remission, rather than eliminating it completely.

This can never work. If history has proven anything, it is the simple fact that States always expand until they destroy society. Because the State uses violence to achieve its ends, and there is no rational end to the expansion of violence, States grow until they destroy the host civilization through the corruption of money, contracts, civility and liberty. As such, the cancerous metaphor is not misplaced. People who believe that the State can somehow be contained have not accepted the fact that no State in history has ever been contained.

Even the rare reductions are merely temporary. The United States was founded on the principle of limited government; it took little more than a few decades for the State to break the bonds of the Constitution, implement the income tax, take control the money supply, and begin its catastrophic expansion. There is no example in history of a State being permanently reduced in size. All that happens during a tax or civil revolt is that the State retrenches, figures out what it did wrong, and begins its expansion again – or provokes a war, which silences all but fringe dissenters.

Given these well-known historical facts, why do people continue believe that such a deadly predator can be tamed? Surely it can only be because they consider a slow strangulation in the grip of an expanding State somehow better than the “quick death” of a society bereft of a State.

Why do most people believe that a coercive and monopolistic social agency is required for society to function? There are a number of answers to this question, but they tend to revolve around four central points:

Dispute resolution;
Collective services;
Pollution, and;
Crime.

We will tackle the first three in this section, and the last one in the next.

Dispute Resolution

It is quite amazing that people still believe that the State somehow facilitates the resolution of disputes, given the fact that modern courts are out of the reach of all but the most wealthy and patient. In my experience, to take a dispute with a stockbroker to the court system would have cost more than a quarter of a million dollars and from five to ten years – however, a private mediator settled the matter within a few months for very little money. In the realm of marital dissolution, private mediators are commonplace. Unions use grievance processes, and a plethora of specialists in dispute resolution have sprung up to fill in the void left by a ridiculously lengthy, expensive and incompetent State court system.

Thus it cannot be that people actually believe that the State is required for dispute resolution, since the court apparatus is unavailable to the vast majority of the population, who resolve their disputes either privately or through agreed-upon mediators.

Collective Services

Roads, sewage, water and electricity and so on are all cited as reasons why a State must exist. How roads could be privately paid for remains such an impenetrable mystery that most people are willing to support the State – and so ensure the continual undermining of civil society – rather than concede that this problem is solvable. There are many ways to pay for roads, such as electronic or cash tolls, GPS charges, roads maintained by the businesses they lead to, or communal organizations and so on. The problem that a water company might build plumbing to a community, and then charge exorbitant fees for supplying it, is equally easy to counter, as mentioned above. None of these problems touch the central rationale for a State. They are all ex post facto justifications made to avoid the need for critical examination or, heaven forbid, a support of anarchism.

It is completely contradictory to argue that voluntary free-market relations are “bad” – and that the only way to combat them is to impose a compulsory monopoly on the market. If voluntary interactions are bad, how can coercive monopolies be better?

State provision of public services inevitably leads to the following:

- The granting of favorable contracts to political allies;

- Tax-subsidized costs leading to over-use, and intergenerational debt;

- A lack of renewal investment in infrastructure leading to expensive deterioration;

- A growth in coercive pro-union legislation, which spreads inefficiencies to other industries;

- A lack of innovation and exploration of alternatives to existing systems of production and distribution, and;

- A dangerous social dependence on a single provider.

…and many more such inefficiencies, problems and predations.

Due to countless examples of free market solutions to the problem of “carrier costs,” this argument no longer holds the kind of water is used to, so people must turn elsewhere to justify the continued existence of the State.

Pollution

This is perhaps the greatest problem faced by free market theorists. It is worth spending a little time on outlining the worst possible scenario, to see how a voluntary system could solve it. However, it is important to first dispel the notion that the State currently deals effectively with pollution. Firstly, the most polluted land on the planet is State-owned, because States do not profit from retaining the value of their property. Secondly, the distribution of mineral, lumber and drilling rights is directly skewed towards bribery and corruption, because States never sell the land, but rather just the resource rights. A lumber company cannot buy woodlands from the State, just harvesting rights. Thus the State gets a renewable source of income, and can further coerce lumber companies by enforcing re-seeding. This, of course, tends to promote bribery, corruption and the creation of “fly-by-night” lumber companies which strip the land bare, but vanish when it comes time to re-seed. Selling State land to a private company easily solves this problem, because a company that was willing to re-seed would reap the greatest long-term profits from the woodland, and therefore would be able to bid the most for the land.

Also, it should be remembered that, in the realm of air pollution, States created the problem in the first place. In England, when industrial smokestacks first began belching fumes into the orchards of apple farmers, the farmers took the factory-owners to court, citing the common-law tradition of restitution for property damage. Sadly, however, the capitalists had gotten to the State courts first, and had more money to bribe with, employed more voting workers, and contributed more tax revenue than the farmers – and so the farmer’s cases were thrown out of court. The judge argued that the “common good” of the factories trumped the “private need” of the farmers. The free market did not fail to solve the problem of air pollution – it was forcibly prevented from doing so because the State was corrupted.

However, it is a sticking point, so it is worth examining in detail how the free market might solve the problem of air pollution. One egregious example often cited is a group of houses downwind from a new factory which is busy night and day coating them in soot.

Now, when a man buys a new house, isn’t it important to him to ensure that he will not be coated with someone else’s refuse? The need for a clean and safe environment is so strong that it is a clear invitation for enterprising entrepreneurs to sweat bullets figuring out how to provide it.

If a group of homeowners is afraid of pollution, the first thing they will do is buy pollution insurance, which is a natural response to a situation where costs cannot be predicted but consequences are dire.

Let us say that a homeowner named John buys pollution insurance which pays him two million dollars if the air in or around his house becomes polluted. In other words, as long as John’s air remains clean, his insurance company makes money.

One day, a plot of land up-wind of John’s house comes up for sale. Naturally, his insurance company would be very interested in this, and would monitor the sale. If the purchaser is some private school, all is well (assuming John has not bought noise pollution insurance). If, however, the insurance company discovers that Sally’s House of Polluting Paint Production is interested in purchasing the plot of land, it will likely spring into action, taking one of the following courses:

- Buying the land itself, then selling it to a non-polluting buyer;

- Getting assurances from Sally that her company will not pollute;

- Paying Sally to enter into a non-polluting contract.

If, however, someone at the insurance company is asleep at the wheel, and Sally buys the land and puts up her polluting factory, what happens then?

Well, then the insurance company is on the hook for $2M to John (assuming for the moment that only John bought pollution insurance). Thus, it can afford to pay Sally up to $2M to reduce her pollution and still be cash-positive. This payment could take many forms, from the installation of pollution-control equipment to a buy-out to a subsidy for under-production and so on.

If the $2M is not enough to solve the problem, then the insurance company pays John the $2M and he goes and buys a new house in an unpolluted neighbourhood. However, this scenario is highly unlikely, since the insurance company would be unlikely to insure only one single person in a neighbourhood against air pollution.

So, that is the view from John’s air-pollution insurance company. What about the view from Sally’s House of Polluting Paint Production? She, also, must be covered by a DRO in order to buy land, borrow money and hire employees. How does that DRO view her tendency to pollute?

Pollution brings damage claims against Sally, because pollution is by definition damage to persons or property. Thus Sally’s DRO would take a dim view of her pollution, since it would be on the hook for any damage her factory causes. In fact, it would be most unlikely that Sally’s DRO would insure her against damages unless she were able to prove that she would be able to operate her factory without harming the property of those around her. And without a DRO, of course, she would be unable to start her factory, borrow money, hire employees etc.

It is important to remember that DROs, much like cell phone companies, only prosper if they cooperate. Sally’s DRO only makes money if Sally does not pollute. John’s insurer also only makes money if Sally does not pollute. Thus the two companies share a common goal, which fosters cooperation.

Finally, even if John is not insured against air pollution, he can use his and/or Sally’s DRO to gain restitution for the damage her pollution is causing to his property. Both Sally and John’s DROs would have reciprocity agreements, since John wants to be protected against Sally’s actions, and Sally wants to be protected against John’s actions. Because of this desire for mutual protection, they would choose DROs which had the widest reciprocity agreements.

Thus, in a truly free market, there are many levels and agencies actively working against pollution. John’s insurer will be actively scanning the surroundings looking for polluters it can forestall. Sally will be unable to build her paint factory without proving that she will not pollute. Mutual or independent DROs will resolve any disputes regarding property damage caused by Sally’s pollution.

There are other benefits as well, which are almost unsolvable in the current system. Imagine that Sally’s smokestacks are so high that her air pollution sails over John’s house and lands on Reginald’s house, a hundred miles away. Reginald then complains to his DRO/insurer that his property is being damaged. His DRO will examine the air contents and wind currents, then trace the pollution back to its source and resolve the dispute with Sally’s DRO. If the air pollution is particularly complicated, then Reginald’s DRO will place non-volatile compounds into Sally’s smokestacks and follow them to where they land. This can be used in a situation where a number of different factories may be contributing pollutants.

The problem of inter-country air pollution may seem to be a sticky one, but it is easily solvable – even if we accept that countries will still exist. Obviously, a Canadian living along the Canada/US border, for instance, will not choose a DRO which refuses to cover air pollution emanating from the US. Thus the DRO will have to have reciprocity agreements with the DROs across the border. If the US DROs refuse to have reciprocity agreements with the Canadian DROs – inconceivable, since the pollution can go both ways – then the Canadian DRO will simply start a US branch and compete.

The difference is that international DROs actually profit from cooperation, in a way that governments do not. For instance, a State government on the Canada/US border has little motivation to impose pollution costs on local factories, as long as the pollution generally goes north. For DRO’s, quite the opposite would be true.

There are so many benefits to the concept of State-less DRO’s that they could easily fill volumes. A few can be touched on here, to further highlight the value of the idea.

In a condominium building, ownership is conditional upon certain rules. Even though a man “owns” the property, he cannot throw all-night parties, or keep five large dogs, or operate a brothel. Without the coercive blanket of a central State, the opportunities for a wide variety of communities arise, which will largely eliminate the current social conflicts about the direction of society as a whole.

For instance, some people like guns to be available, while others prefer them to be unavailable. Currently, a battle rages for control of the State so that one group can enforce its will on the other. That’s unnecessary. With DRO’s, communities can be formed in which guns are either permitted, or not permitted. Marijuana can be approved or forbidden. Half your income can be deducted for various social schemes, or you can keep it all for yourself. Sunday shopping can be allowed, or disallowed. It is completely up to the individual to choose what kind of society he or she wants to live in. The ownership of property in such communities is conditional on following certain rules, and if those rules prove onerous or unpleasant, the owner can sell and move at any time. Another plus is that all these “societies” exist as little laboratories, and can prove or disprove various theories about gun ownership, drug legalization and so on, thus contributing to people’s knowledge about the best rules for communities.

One or two problems exist, however, which cannot be spirited away. A person who decides to live “off the grid” – or exist without any DRO representation – can theoretically get away with a lot. However, that is also true in the existing statist system. If a man currently decides to become homeless, he can more or less commit crimes at will – but he also gives up all beneficial and enforceable forms of social cooperation. Thus although DROs may not solve the problem of utter lawlessness, neither does the current system, so all is equal.

Interpersonal Crimes

Crimes against persons, such as murder and rape, are generally considered separate and distinct from those against property. However, this is a fairly modern distinction. In the European system of common law, crimes against persons were often punished through the confiscation of property. A rape cost the rapist such-and-such amount, a murder five times as much, and so on. This sort of arrangement is generally preferred by victims, who currently not only suffer from physical violation – but must also pay taxes to incarcerate the criminal. A woman who is raped would usually rather receive a quarter of a million dollars than pay a thousand dollars annually to cage her rapist, which adds insult to injury. Thus, crimes against persons and crimes against property are not as distinct as they may seem, since both commonly require property as restitution. A man who rapes a woman, then, incurs a debt to her of some hundreds of thousands of dollars, and must pay it or be ejected from all the economic benefits of society.

Finally, one other advantage can be termed the “Scrabble-Challenge Benefit.” In Scrabble, an accuser loses his turn if he challenges another player’s word and the challenge fails. Given the costs of resolving disputes, DROs would be very careful to ensure that those bringing false accusations would be punished through their own premiums, their contract ratings and by also assuming the entire cost of the dispute. This would greatly reduce the number of frivolous lawsuits, to the great benefit of all.

On a personal note, it has been my experience that, in talking over these matters for the last twenty-odd years, people honestly claim that they cannot conceive of a society without a centralized and coercive State. To which I feel compelled to ask them: exactly how many lawsuits have you pursued in your own life? I have yet to find even one person who has prosecuted a lawsuit through to conclusion. I also ask them whether they maintain their jobs through threats or blackmail. None. Do they keep their spouses chained in the basement? Not a one. Are their friends forced to spend time with them? Do they steal from the grocery store? Nope.

In other words, I say, it is clear that, although you say that you cannot imagine a society without a coercive State, you have only to look in the mirror to see how such a world might work. Everyone who is in your life is there by choice. Everyone you deal with on a personal or professional relationship interacts with you on a voluntary basis. You don’t use violence in your own life at all. If you are unsatisfied with a product, you return it. If you stop desiring a lover, you part. If you dislike a job, you quit. You force no one – and yet you say that society cannot exist without force. It is very hard to understand. People then reply that they do not need to use coercion because the State is there to protect them. I then ask them if they know how impossible it is to actually use the court system. They agree, of course, because they know it takes many years and a small fortune to approach even the vague possibility of justice. I also ask them if they are themselves burning to knock over an old woman and snatch her purse, but fear the police too greatly. Of course not. They just think that everyone else is. Well, after twenty years of conversations, I can tell you all: it’s not the case. Most people, given the correct incentives, act entirely honourably.

Of course, evil people exist. There are cold, sociopathic monsters in our midst. It is precisely because of the human capacity for evil that a centralized State always undermines society. Due to our capacity for sadism, our only hope is to decentralize authority, so that the evil among us can never rise to a station greater than that of excluded, hunted criminals. To create a State and give it the power of life and death does not solve the problem of human evil. It merely transforms the shallow desire for easy property to the bottomless lust for political power.

The idea that society can – and must – exist without a centralized State is the greatest lesson that the grisly years of the Twentieth Century can teach us. Our own society cannot escape the general doom of history, the inevitable destiny of social collapse as the State eats its own inhabitants. Our choice is not between the State and the free market, but between death and life. Whatever the risks of dissolving the central State, they are far less than the certain destruction of allowing it to escalate, as it inevitably will. Like a cancer patient facing certain demise, we must reach for whatever medicine shows the most promise, and not wait until it is too late.

The Stateless Society and Violent Crime

You might well now be thinking: how can a stateless society deal with violent criminals?

This challenging question can be answered using three approaches. The first is to examine how such criminals are dealt with at present; the second is to divide violent crimes into crimes of motive and crimes of passion, and the third is to show how a stateless society would deal with both categories of crime far better than any existing system.

The first question is: how are violent criminals dealt with at present? The honest answer, to any unbiased observer, is surely: they are encouraged.

A basic fact of life is that people respond to incentives. The better that crime pays, the more people will become criminals. Certain well-known habits – drugs, gambling, and prostitution in particular – are non-violent in nature, but highly desired by certain segments of the population. If these non-violent behaviors are criminalized, the profit gained by providing these services rises. Criminalizing voluntary interactions destroys all stabilizing social forces (contracts, open activity, knowledge-sharing and mediation), and so violence becomes the norm for dispute resolution.

Furthermore, wherever a law creates an environment where most criminals make more money than the police, the police simply become bribed into compliance. By increasing the profits of non-violent activities, the State ensures the corruption of the police and judicial system – thus making it both safer and more profitable to operate outside the law. It can take dozens of arrests to actually face trial – and many trials to gain a conviction. Policemen now spend about a third of their time filling out paperwork – and 90% of their time chasing non-violent criminals. Entire sections of certain cities are run by gangs of thugs, and the jails are overflowing with harmless low-level peons sent to jail as make-work for the judicial system – thus constantly increasing law-enforcement costs. Peaceful citizens are also legally disarmed through gun control laws. In this manner, the modern State literally creates, protects and profits from violent criminals.

Thus the standard to compare the stateless society’s response to violent crime is not some perfect world where thugs are effectively dealt with, but rather the current mess where violence is both encouraged and protected.

Before we turn to how a stateless society deals with crime, however, it is essential to remember that the stateless society automatically eliminates the greatest violence faced by almost all of us – the State that threatens us with guns if we don’t hand over our money – and our lives, should it decide to declare war. Thus it cannot be said that the existing system is one which minimizes violence. Quite the contrary – the honest population is violently enslaved by the State, and the dishonest provided with cash incentives and protection.

State violence – in its many forms – has been growing in Western societies over the past fifty years, as regulation, tariffs and taxation have all risen exponentially. National debts are an obvious form of intergenerational theft. Support of foreign governments also increases violence, since these governments use subsidies to buy arms and further terrorize their own populations. The arms market is also funded and controlled by governments. The list of State crimes can go on and on, but one last gulag is worth mentioning – all the millions of poor souls kidnapped and held hostage in prisons for non-violent “crimes.”

Since existing States terrorize, enslave and incarcerate literally billions of citizens, it is hard to understand how they can be seen as effectively working against violence in any form.

How does a stateless society deal with violence? First, it is important to differentiate the use of force into crimes of motive and crimes of passion. Crimes of motive are open to correction through changing incentives; any system which reduces the profits of property crimes – while increasing the profits of honest labor – will reduce these crimes. In the last part of this section, we will see how the stateless society achieves this better than any other option.

Crimes of motive can be diminished by making crime a low-profit activity relative to working for a living. Crime entails labor, and if most people could make more money working honestly for the same amount of labor, there will be far fewer criminals.

As you have read above, in a stateless society, Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs) flourish through the creation of voluntary contracts between interested parties, and all property is private. How does this affect violent crime?

Let’s look at “break and enter.” If I own a house, I will probably take out insurance against theft. Obviously, my insurance company benefits most from preventing theft, and so will encourage me to get an alarm system and so on, just as occurs now.

This situation is more or less analogous to what happens now – with the not-inconsequential adjustment that, since DROs handle policing as well as restitution, their motives for preventing theft or rendering stolen property useless is far higher than it is now. As such, much more investment in prevention would be worthwhile, such as creating “voice activated” appliances which only work for their owners.

However, the stateless society goes much, much further in preventing crime – specifically, by identifying those who are going to become criminals, and preventing that transition. In this situation, the stateless society is far more effective than any State system.

In a stateless society, contracts with DROs are required to maintain any sort of economic life – without DRO representation, citizens are unable to get a job, hire employees, rent a car, buy a house or send their children to school. Any DRO will naturally ensure that its contracts include penalties for violent crimes – so if you steal a car, your DRO has the right to use force or ostracism against you to get the car back – and probably retrieve financial penalties to boot.

How does this work in practice? Let’s take a test case. Say that you wake up one morning and decide to become a thief. Well, the first thing you have to do is cancel your coverage with your DRO, so that your DRO has less incentive against you when you steal, since you are no longer a customer. DROs would have clauses allowing you to cancel your coverage, just as insurance companies have now. Thus you would have to notify your DRO that you were dropping coverage. No problem, you’re off their list.

However, DROs as a whole really need to keep track of people who have opted out of the entire DRO system, since those people have clearly signaled their intention to go rogue and live “off the grid.” Thus if you cancel your DRO insurance, your name goes into a database available to all DROs. If you sign up with another DRO, no problem, your name is taken out. However, if you do not sign up with any other DRO, red flags pop up all over the system.

What happens then? Remember – there is no public property in a stateless society. If you’ve gone rogue, where are you going to go? You can’t take a bus – bus companies will not take rogues, because their DRO will require that they take only DRO-covered passengers, in case of injury or altercation. Want to fill up on gas? No luck, for the same reason. You can try hitchhiking, of course, which might work, but what happens when you get to your destination and try to rent a motel room? No DRO card, no luck. Want to sleep in the park? Parks are privately owned, so keep moving. Getting hungry? No groceries, no restaurants – no food! What are you going to do?

So, really, what incentive is there to turn to a life of crime? Working for a living – and being protected by a DRO – pays really well. Going off the grid and becoming a rogue pits the entire weight of the combined DRO system against you – and, even if you do manage to survive and steal something, it has probably been voice-encoded or protected in some other manner against unauthorized use.

Let’s suppose that you somehow bypass all of that, and do manage to steal, where are you going to sell your stolen goods? You’re not protected by a DRO, so who will buy from you, knowing they have no recourse if something goes wrong? And besides, anyone who interacts with you may be dropped from the DRO system too, and face all the attendant difficulties.

Will there be underground markets? Perhaps – but where would they operate? People need a place to live, cars to rent, clothes to buy, groceries to eat. No DRO means no participation in economic life.

As well, prostitution, gambling and drugs will not be “illegal” in a stateless society – and the elimination of the war on drugs alone would, it has been estimated, eliminate 80% of violent crime. There are no import duties or restrictions, so smuggling becomes completely pointless. Currency would be private, as we will see below, so counterfeiting will be much harder.

Plus, no taxation – the take-home pay for an honest worker is far higher in a stateless society!

Fewer opportunities, lower profits – and greater incentives to do an honest day’s work – there is no better way to steer those who respond to incentives alone away from a life of crime.

Thus it is fair to say that any stateless society will do a far better job of protecting its citizens against crimes of motive – what, then, about crimes of passion?

Crimes of Passion

Crimes of passion are harder to prevent – but also present far less of a threat to those outside of the circle in which they occur.

Let’s say that a man kills his wife. They are both covered by DROs, of course, and their DRO contracts would include specific prohibitions against murder. Thus, the man would be subject to all the sanctions involved in his contract – probably confined labor and rehabilitation until a certain financial penalty was paid off, since DROs would be responsible for paying such penalties to any next of kin.

Fine, you say, but what if either the man or woman was not covered by a DRO? Well, where would they live? No one would rent them an apartment. If they own their house free and clear, who would sell them food? Or gas, water or electricity? Who would employ them? What bank would accept their money?

Let’s say that only the murderous husband – planning to kill his wife – opted out of his DRO system without telling her. The first thing that his wife’s DRO would do is inform her of her husband’s action – and the ill intent it may represent – and help her relocate if desired. If she decided against relocation, her DRO would promptly drop her, since by deciding to live in close proximity with a rogue man, she was exposing herself to an untenable amount of danger (and so the DRO to a high risk for financial loss). Now, both the husband and wife have chosen to live without DROs, in a state of nature, and thus face all the insurmountable problems of getting food, shelter, money and so on.

Thus, murderers would be subject to the punishments of their DRO restrictions, or would signal their intent by dropping DRO coverage beforehand, when intervention would be possible.

Let’s look at something slightly more complicated – stalking. A woman becomes obsessed with a man, and starts calling him at all hours and following him around. Perhaps boils a bunny or two. If the man has bought insurance against stalking, his DRO will leap into action. It will call the woman’s DRO, which then says to her: stop stalking this man or we’ll drop you. And how does her DRO know whether she has really given up her stalking? Well, the man stops reporting it. And if there is a dispute, she just wears an ankle bracelet for a while to make sure. And remember – since there is no public property, she can be ordered off sidewalks, streets and parks.

(If the man has not bought insurance against stalking, no problem – it will just be more expensive to buy with a “pre-existing condition.”)

Although they may seem unfamiliar to you, DROs are not a new concept – they are as ancient as civilization itself, but have been shouldered aside by the constant escalation of State power over the last century or so. In the past, undesired social behaviour was punished through ostracism, and risks ameliorated through voluntary “friendly societies.” A man who left his wife and children – or a woman who got pregnant out of wedlock – was no longer welcome in decent society. DROs take these concepts one step further, by making all the information formerly known by the local community available to the world as whole, just like credit reports. (If you prefer your information to be kept more private, DROs will doubtless offer this option.)

There are really no limits to the benefits that DROs can confer upon a free society – insurance could be created for such things as:

· a man’s wife giving birth to a child that is not his own;

· a daughter getting pregnant out of wedlock;

· fertility problems for a married couple;

· …and much more.

All of the above insurance policies would require DROs to take active steps to prevent such behaviors – the mind boggles at all the preventative steps that could be taken! The important thing to remember is that all such contracts are voluntary, and so do not violate the moral absolute of non-violence.

In conclusion – how does the stateless society deal with violent criminals? Brilliantly! In a stateless society, there are fewer criminals, more prevention, greater sanctions – and instant forewarning of those aiming at a life of crime by their withdrawal from the DRO system. More incentives to work, fewer incentives for a life of crime, no place to hide for rogues, and general social rejection of those who decide to operate outside of the civilized world of contracts, mutual protection and general security. And remember – governments in the 20^th century caused more than 200 million deaths – are we really that worried about private hold-ups and jewelry thefts in the face of those kinds of numbers?

There is no system that will replace faulty men with perfect angels, but the stateless society, by rewarding goodness and punishing evil, will at least ensure that all devils are visible – instead of cloaking them in the current deadly fog of power, politics and propaganda.

These Cages Are Only for Beasts…

As mentioned above, DROs are private insurance companies whose sole purpose is to mediate disputes between individuals. If you and I sign a contract, we both agree beforehand to submit any disputes we cannot resolve to the arbitration of a particular DRO. Furthermore, we may choose to allow the DRO to take action if either of us fails to abide by its decision, such as property seizure or financial penalties.

So far so good. However, a problem arises if I have no DRO contract, and turn to a life of theft, murder and arson. How can that be dealt with? Above, I suggested that DROs would simply band together to deny goods, services and contracts to violent criminals.

Some readers may be concerned about the power that DROs have in a stateless society. When describing how a stateless society could deal with murderers, we are reviewing an extreme situation, not everyday economic and social relations. A doctor might say: if a patient has an infected leg, and you have no antibiotics, amputate the leg. This does not mean that he advocates cutting off limbs in less serious circumstances. When I say that DROs will track violent criminals and try to deny them goods and services, I do not mean that DROs would be able to do this to just anyone. First of all, customer choice would make this impossible. A store owner can ban anyone he likes – but he cannot do so arbitrarily, or he will go out of business. Similarly, if people see a DRO acting unjustly or punitively, it will quickly find itself without customers.

The most important thing to remember is that DRO contracts are perfectly voluntary – and that hundreds of DROs will be constantly clamoring for our business. If we are afraid that they will turn into a myriad of quasi-police states, they have to address those fears if want they us as customers.

How will they do that? Why, through contractual obligations, of course! In order to sign us up, DROs will have to offer us instant contractual release – and lucrative cash rewards – if they ever harass us or treat us arbitrarily. As a matter of course, DRO contracts will include a provision to submit any conflicts with customers to a separate DRO of the customers’ choosing. All this is standard fare in the reduction of contractual risk.

In other words, every person who says, “DROs will turn into dangerous fascistic organizations,” represents a fantastic business opportunity to anyone who can address that concern in a positive manner. If you dislike the idea of DROs, just ask yourself: is there any way that my concerns could be alleviated? Are there any contractual provisions that might tempt me into a relationship with a DRO? If so, the magic of the free market will provide them. Some DROs will offer to pay you a million dollars if they treat you unjustly – and you can choose the DRO that makes that decision! Other DROs will band together and form a review board which regularly searches their warehouses for illicit arms and armies. DROs will fund “watchdog” organizations which regularly rate DRO integrity.

If none of the above appeals to you, then the DRO system is clearly not for you – but then neither is the current State system, which is already one-sided, repressive and dictatorial. And remember – in a free society such as I describe, you can always choose to live without a DRO, of course, or pay for its services as needed (as I mention in “The Stateless Society”) – as long as you do not start stealing and killing.

For those who still think DROs will become governments, I invite you to take a look at a real-world example of a DRO – one of the world’s largest “employers.” Currently, over 300,000 people rely on it for a significant portion of their income. Most of what they sell is so inexpensive that lawsuits are not cost-effective, and transactions regularly cross incompatible legal borders – in other words, they operate in a stateless society. So how does eBay resolve disputes? Simply through dialogue and the dissemination of information (see http://pages.ebay.com/help/tp/unpaid-item-process.html). If I do not pay for something I receive, I get a strike against me. If I do not ship something that I was paid for, I also get a strike. Everyone I deal with can also rate my products, service and support. If I am rated poorly, I have to sell my goods for less since, everything else being equal, people prefer dealing with a better-rated vendor (or buyer). If enough people rate me poorly, I will go out of business, because the risk of dealing with me becomes too great. There are no police or courts or violence involved here – thefts are simply dealt with through communication and information sharing.

Thus eBay is an example of the largest DRO around – are we really afraid that it is going to turn into a quasi-government? Do any of us truly lie awake wondering whether the eBay SWAT team is going to break down our doors and drag us away to some offshore J2EE coding gulag?

Any system can be abused – which is why governments are so abhorrent – and so checks and balances are essential to any proposed form of social organization. That’s the beauty of the DRO approach. Those who dislike, mistrust or fear DROs do not have to have anything to do with them, and can rely on handshakes, reputation and trust – or start their own DRO. Those whose scope prohibits such approaches – multi-million dollar contracts or long-term leases come to mind – can turn to DROs. Those who are afraid of DROs becoming mini-States can set up watchdog agencies and monitor them (paid for by others who share such fears, perhaps).

In short, either the majority of human beings can cooperate for mutual advantage, or they cannot. If they can, a stateless society will work – especially since millions of minds far better than mine will be constantly searching for the best solutions. If they cannot, then no society will ever work, and we are doomed to slavery and savagery by nature.

Therefore, I stand by my thesis in “Caging the Beasts” above – if you mug, rape or kill, I will support any social action that thwarts your capacity to survive in society. I want to see you hounded into the wilderness, refused hotel rooms and groceries – and I want your face plastered everywhere, so that the innocent can stay safe by keeping you at bay. I abhor the thug as much as I abhor the State – and it is because such thugs exist that the State cannot be suffered to continue, since the State always disarms honest citizens and encourages, promotes and protects the thugs.

(For more details about DROs and how disputes can be resolved in a stateless society, you can subscribe to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreedomainRadio-Anarchism.)

Stateless Dictatorships: How a Free Society Prevents the Re-emergence of a Government

By far the most common objection to the idea of a stateless society is the belief that one or more private Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs) would overpower all the others and create a new government. This belief is erroneous at every level, but has a kind of rugged persistence that is almost admirable.

Here is the general objection:

In a society without a government, whatever agencies arise to help resolve disputes will inevitably turn into a replacement government. These agencies may initially start as competitors in a free market, but as time goes by, one will arise to dominate all the others economically, and will then wage war against its competitors, and end up imposing a new State upon the population. The instability and violence that this “DRO civil war” will inflict upon the population is far worse than any existing democratic State structure. Thus, a stateless society is far too risky an experiment, since we will just end up with a government again anyway!

This objection to an anarchic social structure is considered self-evident, and thus is never presented with actual proof. Naturally, since the discussion of a stateless society involves a future theoretical situation, empirical examples cannot apply.

However, like all propositions involving human motivation, the “replacement state” hypothesis can be subjected to logical examination.

Premises

The basis of the “replacement state” hypothesis is the premise that people prefer to maximize their income with the lowest possible expenditure of energy. The motivation for a DRO to use force is that, by eliminating all competition and taking military control of a geographical region, a DRO can make much more money than through free market competition, and that it is worth it to invest resources in military conflict in order to secure the permanent revenue source of a new tax base.

We can fully accept this premise, as long as it is applied consistently to all human beings in a stateless society. To make the “replacement state” case even stronger, we will also assume that no moral scruples could conceivably get in the way of any decision-making. By reducing the “drive to dominate” to a mere calculation of economic efficiency, we can eliminate any possible ethical brakes on the situation.

Starting Point

Let us start with a stateless society, wherein citizens can voluntarily choose to contract with a DRO for the sake of property protection and dispute resolution. Each citizen also has the right to break his contract with his DRO.

There are essentially three possible ways that a DRO could gain military control of an entire region:

By secretly amassing an army, and then suddenly unleashing it upon all competitors;
By openly amassing an army, and then doing the same thing;
By posing as a voluntary “Defense DRO,” amassing arms supposedly for the legitimate defense of citizens, and then turning those arms against the citizens and instituting itself as a new government.

There is one additional possibility, which is that a private citizen can try to assemble his own army.

Let’s deal with each of these in turn.

The Secret Army

In this scenario, let’s say that a DRO manager called “Bob” decides that he is tired of dealing with customers on a voluntary basis. He decides he is going to spend company money buying enormous amounts of armaments and training an army. (For the moment, let us assume that Bob can make this decision entirely on his own, and does not need to submit to any sort of Board, bank or investor review.)

Let us assume that Bob’s DRO has annual revenues of $500 million a year, and profits of $50 million a year.

The most immediate challenge that Bob is going to face is: how on earth am I going to pay for an army? Given that, in a free society, there is no way of knowing exactly how many citizens are armed – or what kinds of weapons they have – it would be necessary to err on the side of caution and assemble a fairly prodigious and overwhelming army to gain control of an entire region, otherwise Bob’s investment would be entirely lost in a military defeat. Such armies are scarcely cheap. For the purposes of this argument, let’s say that it is going to cost $500 million over five years for Bob to assemble his army – surely a lowball estimate. How is he going to get the money to pay for this?

Raising Rates

The most obvious way for Bob to raise the extra $500 million is to charge his customers more. The $500 million Bob needs represents more than 10 years of his DROs annual profits of $50 million a year (reinvesting the $50m for 5 years at 10% yields $805.26m). Thus, in order to pay for his army within five years, Bob is going to have to more than double his prices. Since we have already assumed that it is Bob’s greed that makes him want to create a new government – and that this greed is common to all citizens within the society – we can also assume that his customers share his motivation. Thus, just as Bob wants to have an army so that he can maximize his income, his customers just as surely do not want Bob to have an army, for exactly the same reasons. The moment that Bob informs his customers that he will now be charging them more than double for exactly the same services, he will lose all his customers, and go out of business. Sadly, no army for Bob.

Full Disclosure

Perhaps, though, Bob recognizes this danger, and plans to keep his customers by telling them that he is raising their rates in order to fund an army. “Help me buy an army by paying me double your current rates,” he tells them, “and I will share the plunder I’ll get when I take over such-and-such a neighborhood!” Even if we assume that Bob’s customers believe him, and are willing to fund such a mad scheme, Bob’s secret is now out, and society as a whole – including all the other DROs – have been informed of Bob’s nefarious intentions. Clearly, all the other DROs will immediately cease doing business with Bob’s DRO. Since a central value of any DRO is its ability to interact with other DROs – just as a core value of a cell phone company is its ability to interact with other cell phone companies – Bob’s DRO will thus be crippled. In other words, Bob will be more than doubling his rates for many years – while providing a far inferior service – for a highly uncertain and dangerous “profit.”

In addition, Bob’s bank would immediately cease doing business with him, rendering him unable to pay his employees, his office rental, or his bills. Bob’s electricity company will cease supplying electricity, he will find his taps strangely dry, his phones will be cut off, and many other misfortunes will arise as a result of his stated desire to become a new dictator. It is hard to imagine him lasting five days, let alone retaining all of his paying customers at double the rates for the five years required to build his army!

Even if all the above problems could somehow be overcome, it is hard to imagine that Bob’s customers would be happy to arm Bob in the hopes of sharing in his plunder. Unlike the government, which can tax at will, DROs must actually protect their customer’s property in order to retain their business. Given that those who contract with DROs are those with the most interest in protecting their property, it makes little sense that they would fund Bob’s DRO army, since they would have no actual control with that army once it was created, and thus no way of enforcing any “plunder contract” created beforehand. In a free society, people would not try to “protect” their property by funding a powerful army that could then take it away from them at will. That sort of madness requires the existence of a government!

Alternative Funding

Perhaps Bob will try to fund his army in other ways. He may try and borrow the money, but his bank will only lend him the money if he comes up with a credible and measurable business plan. If Bob’s business plan openly states his desire to create an army, his bank would cease supporting him in any way, shape or form, since the bank would only stand to lose if such an army were created. If Bob took the money from the bank by submitting a fraudulent business plan, the bank would be aware of this almost immediately, and would take the remainder of the money back – and impose stiff penalties on Bob to boot! Again, no army for Bob.

What if Bob tried to pay for his army by reducing the dividends he was paying to shareholders? Naturally, the shareholders would resent this, and would either have him thrown out, or would simply sell their shares and invest their money elsewhere, thus crippling Bob’s DRO. Perhaps Bob would try paying his employees less, but that would only drive his employees into the arms of other DROs – also destroying his business.

It is safe to say that it is practically impossible for Bob to get the money to pay for his army – and even if he got such money, his business would never survive such a dangerous transgression of social and economic norms.

There are other dangers, however, which are well worth examining.

Defense DROs

The most likely threat would seem to come from “Defense DROs,” since those agencies would already have weapons and personnel that might be used against the general population. However, this would be very difficult for two main reasons. First, “Defense DROs” would require investment and banking relationships in order to grow and flourish. Given that investors and banks would not want to fund an army that could steal their property, they would be certain to insert myriad “failsafe” mechanisms into their “Defense DRO” contracts. They would make sure that all arms purchases were tracked, that all monies were accounted for, and that no secret armies were being assembled.

“Defense DROs” would also be subject to the same kinds of funding problems as Bob’s DRO. Let’s say that Dave is the head of a “Defense DRO,” and wakes up one day seized by the desire to assemble his own army and pillage society.

First of all, citizens would never contract with any “Defense DRO” that would not submit to regular audits of its weapons and accounts to ensure that no secret armies were being created. If Dave decides to bypass this contractual obligation, and start secretly funding his own army, how is he going to pay for it? The moment he raises his rates without increasing his services, his customers will know exactly what he’s up to, and withdraw their support. Bye-bye army. Dave’s funding would also be subject to all the other problems raised above.

It can thus be seen that there is no viable way for any DRO to pay for a secret army without destroying its business in the process. Armies are only really possible when the government can force taxpayers to subsidize them.

Independently Wealthy?

Perhaps, instead of Bob or Dave, we have a privately wealthy individual named Bill, a multibillionaire who decides to raise an army and institute himself as a new dictator. Due to his immense wealth, he is not dependent on any customers, employees, or shareholders. Let us say that he can pay for an army out of his own pocket, immediately.

Bill’s challenge, of course, is that in a free society, he cannot exactly pick up a complete army at his local Wal-Mart. Armies are fundamentally uneconomical, expensive overhead at best, and thus it seems likely that geographical defense in a free society would be limited to a couple of dozen nuclear weapons, to deter any potential invader. Thus even if he could get a hold of one, buying a nuke would not help Bill very much, since he would be unable to use it to overwhelm all of the other “Defense DROs.”

What about more conventional weapons? Part of the service that “Defense DROs” would offer to subscribers would be a guarantee that they would do everything in their power to prevent the rise of an independent army – either of their own making, or of anyone else’s. Thus arms manufacturers would have to provide rigorous accounts of everything they were making and selling, to be sure that they weren’t selling arms to some secret army, probably in the foothills of Montana. If people were really worried about the possibility of someone creating a private army, they would only do business with “Defense DROs” that guaranteed that they bought their arms from open and legitimate arms dealers – subject to independent verification, of course.

Thus when Bill came along trying to buy $500 million worth of weapons, and hire an army of tens of thousands of soldiers, one question would be: where on earth would they come from? Arms manufacturers would not be sitting on $500 million of inventory, due to the limited demand for such products, and the costs of making and storing them. Thus the arms manufacturers would have to really crank up their production, which could not be hidden from the general population, or the Defense DROs that such extra production would directly threaten. In order to make all the extra armaments, manufacturers would have to borrow money to expand production. Where would they get this extra money from? Their banks would surely not fund such a dangerous endeavor, and would immediately notify any Defense DROs it had contracts with, and drop the rogue arms manufacturer as a customer. Defense DROs and general customers would also never do business with such a dangerous arms manufacturer ever again, thus driving it out of business.

No manufacturer would ever expand production for a “one time” purchase, any more than you would buy a car to make a single trip. Also – why would an arms manufacturer sell deadly weapons to a private individual, knowing that this individual would be able to use those arms to steal more weapons from the manufacturer?

Secondly, even if Bill could somehow get his hands on the necessary weapons, where would these tens of thousands of new troops come from? In a stateless society, the military would not be exactly the same kind of “in demand” career that it is today. In order to assemble an army of tens of thousands of men, Bill would have to advertise, recruit, pay them, train them, etc. This would be impossible to hide. Since it would be completely obvious that Bill was assembling an army, what could people in society conceivably do to stop him?

First of all, if this were a potential risk, his bank would have a clause in its service agreement giving it the right to refuse to honor any payments clearly designed to fund a private army. Secondly, no DRO would do business with Bill – or his soldiers – the moment that it became apparent what he was up to. This would mean that none of Bill’s soldiers would have any guarantees that they would get paid, grocery stores would not sell them food, electricity companies would cut them off, gas stations would not sell them gas, etc. When society as a whole wants to stop doing business with you, it becomes very hard to get by.

The Question of Profit

Remember, we began this section with the premise that someone would want an army in order to make money. Let us see if this can be achieved, even if all the above obstacles can somehow be overcome.

Let us say that our first friend “Bob” can somehow get his army – the question is: can he make that army pay?

Remember, it cost Bob $500 million over five years to assemble his army – let us say that it costs another $1 billion over the next five years to subdue a reasonably-sized region, due to the loss of life and equipment involved in combat. What kinds of financial returns can Bob expect?

If you know that Bob’s army is going to be at your house in two weeks, and there is no way to stop it, you would just pull a “scorched-earth Russian defense” and leave, right? You would take everything of value with you, and perhaps destroy everything that you could not bring. Thus, what would Bob’s army end up getting control of? Not much.

However, let us imagine that Bob’s army could somehow seize assets that would be worth something. How much would they have to steal in order to make a profit?

First, let us look at the alternatives, or the opportunity costs of Bob’s army.

Bob has to invest $100 million each year over five years to assemble his army – what does that cost him overall?

If Bob invested the $100 million back into his DRO instead, he will likely get 10% ROI. In five years of compound returns, that translates to $832.61m.

Then, Bob has to invest another billion dollars over the next five years invading a series of neighborhoods. How much does that really cost him? $1,665.22m, or $1 billion invested at 10% over five years. But that’s not all – the $832.61m above would also have gained 10% per year over the remaining 5 years, resulting in a total of $1,340.93m.

Thus Bob’s five years of preparation and five years of military rampaging have cost him over $3 billion. Given the enormous risks involved in such an endeavor, investors would likely demand at least a 20:1 pay off – similar to the software field. Thus Bob would have to steal well over $60 billion, given that he would likely want to keep some money for himself.

Where would this $60 billion come from? The burned-out houses? The abandoned cars? It is hard to imagine that anything Bob got his hands on would be worth very much at all.

(The evidence of history tends to support this conclusion. Economically, imperialism is a disaster for everyone except those intimately connected to the coercive power of the State.)

Also, Bob has wrecked an economy that was enabling him to generate a 10% annual return on his investments – even if he steals billions of dollars, it would still be less than he would have received over the course of his life if he had just re-invested his money! Reinvestment also carries with it the considerable advantage of not exposing Bob to the risk of death through assassination or war.

What if Bob wanted to spring a surprise attack on citizens and start taxing them? Again, all the other DROs would stand to lose all their customers in such an event, and so would take all necessary steps to prevent it from occurring. They would have to provide innovative “checks and balances” solutions to potential customers in order to win them as clients, ensuring their collective vigilance against such surprise attacks. Furthermore, given that there are no borders in a stateless society, those that Bob’s army encircled would just abscond in the middle of the night, fleeing his predations.

However, even if all of the above problems can be somehow overcome, and the creation of a rogue army in a free society could become both possible and profitable, the solution to this danger is simple. Any “Defense DRO” would simply buy the trust of its clients by promising to pay them a fine in excess of any potential military profits if that DRO was ever discovered to be assembling an army. As mentioned above, DROs would simply put millions of dollars in trust, payable to any customer that could find evidence proving that a rogue army was being created. Problem solved.

When we look at the series of steps required to make the creation of a private “rogue” army economically profitable, we can see that it becomes so unlikely as to be functionally impossible. If we assume that the economic incentive of maximizing profits would drive someone to consider such a course, we can easily see that the fears of inevitable private tyrannies are merely imaginary.

The “replacement state” mythology is just another ghost story invented to keep us in cages whose bars are merely fictional.

Irrational Laws?

Another question that constantly arises about anarchistic social organization is the degree to which different communities will create or maintain unjust or irrational rules. What would stop an Islamic community from imposing Sharia law, or a particular group that wishes to raise their children communally, or have multiple spouses, or ban the wearing of red clothing?

This is of course possible, but there are several tendencies within an anarchic society that will discourage and eliminate such obtuse practices in the long run.

First of all, though, it is important to understand that there is no real solution for this in a statist society – assuming it is not a dictatorship. As long as we do not aggress against others, if a group of friends and I wish to get together and live in an enormous house, share all our property and live in some polyamorous hippie flesh-pile, there is nothing illegal about this in a statist society. As long as our children are fed, cared for and educated, we can all choose to live common-law and raise our children collectively if we want.

Similarly, if a group of Muslims wish to live according to Sharia rules, and everyone voluntarily accepts these rules and lives by them of their own free will, there is very little that a stateless society can do about that either. Since governments only have violence and propaganda to maintain their rule, they can only send SWAT teams in to break up communes, or tanks and helicopters to dismember religious groups – but very few of us would applaud that as a reasoned and positive response to the challenges of varying beliefs within society.

Economically, a stateless society is fundamentally characterized by an inability for particular groups to violently offload the costs of their preferences onto others.

If you are part of a group that wishes to invade Iraq, for instance you will have to find a way to fund that yourself – you will not be able to print money or tax others to pay for your preferences. Do any of us truly believe that the chicken-hawks in the current political administration would have decided to commit genocide against the Iraqi population if they had been sent the multi-trillion dollar bill for the evils they contemplated? Would any purely private financial institution have funded such a monstrous invasion? Of course not – war is impossible without taxation.

The most economically efficient legal system is the one which extends reasonable resources to prevent problems before they occur – and then sits inert until someone complains about an injustice.

The DRO system is wonderful at preventing problems, since it inherently contains all sorts of red flags for potential criminal behavior, as described above. What do I mean by saying that it will very likely sit in an inert state?

Let us look at gambling as an example.

Gambling – though obviously potentially addictive – is a voluntary transaction between adults. In any reasonable legal system, where there is consent, there can be no crime. A man may complain if he loses his shirt at a roulette table, but he cannot claim that he was the victim of force or fraud.

If we understand this, we can see that there is an enormous difference between a proactive and a reactive legal system. A reactive legal system waits patiently until it receives a complaint about an injustice – then, it leaps into action to provide justice.

A proactive legal system sends armed men out in waves, ferreting and rooting around in society in order to capture and punish adults interacting in a voluntary and peaceful manner. This kind of legal system is an ugly stepchild of the Spanish Inquisition, and arises out of a hysterical form of aggressive moral puritanism, generally religious in origin. In this kind of legal system, an absence of force or fraud is not enough to allow people to escape moral condemnation, capture and punishment. These “voluntary crimes” tend to revolve around mind-altering substances, gambling and prostitution, and are often instigated in a statist society by women who find out that they have married the wrong men (the Women’s Christian Temperance Union etc.)

Activities which certain people find distasteful are ferreted out and punished not because the participants find them evil or immoral, but because others do. The man who smokes some vegetation, gambles some money, or pays for sex obviously is not the criminal complainant – neither is the person who sells him weed, casino chips or sex. Instead, it is others who wish to wreak their moral vengeance upon such transgressions.

Mencken once wrote: “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” As a philosopher, I do not counsel or believe that drugs, gambling or visiting prostitutes is a recipe for long-term happiness and wisdom – but I also understand that unwise or ill-considered actions are not solved by the initiation of violence.

The insertion of this “third party” into a legal system – the entity that brings charges in the absence of complaints by any individuals in a transaction – is very, very expensive. Can you imagine how expensive it would be for a computer company to send someone over to your house every time you wanted to install a program, to make sure you got it right? Compare this to the cost of your average reactive tech support call center – it would be hundreds – if not thousands – of times more expensive.

There are many people who find it highly objectionable that other people enjoy taking mind-altering substances – how many of them would be willing to fund the true cost of their outrage themselves?

In the United States, the Drug Enforcement Agency budget for 2007 was over $2.3 billion. If we imagine that there are perhaps 25 million taxpaying adults in America who are virulently anti-drug, would they remain as virulently opposed to drugs if each of them received a bill for $100 a year? What about the approximately $100 per year that it costs to incarcerate the resulting prisoners, and the $100 in other law enforcement costs? Overall, the war on drugs costs over $20 billion a year - $800 for each of the 25 million taxpaying adults who find drugs so objectionable.

How many of these people would find themselves somehow magically able to manage a “live and let live” attitude towards drug consumption if they were sent an $800 bill every single year? Can we imagine that 50% of them would drop out? If so, then the remaining 12.5 million people would be sent a bill for $1,600 – how many of them would drop out that this rate? Half? Very well – then the remaining would be sent a bill for $3,200 – and so on, until the last man to be sent the bill for $20 billion somehow found it in his heart to avoid the bill by embracing tolerance and compassion.

The “drug war” (which is a war of course on people, not drugs) would inevitably collapse if those who found drugs so objectionable actually had to pay for their moral outrage themselves.

Similarly, enforcing Sharia law requires just such a proactive legal system, which is horrendously expensive relative to a reactive legal system. How long would such religious intransigence last if the fanatics had to pay for their mania themselves, and faced competition from perfectly functional legal systems that charged one tenth the cost?

Proactive legal systems are prohibitively expensive, unless the costs can be violently extracted from others. In this way, we know for certain that proactive legal systems would have a very short lifespan in a stateless society, and that the natural justice of reactive legal systems would very quickly become – and remain – the norm.

What is commonly called “culture,” in other words, is most often little more than a set of violently subsidized and irrational prejudices.

Tank Control

Two other questions that arise about anarchism is the “tank in the garden” problem and the question of gun control. I have kept these examples in the “Reasoning” section because the answers to these questions pertain so many other questions as well.

The Tank in the Garden

This objection runs something along these lines:

“Let us suppose that you have a neighbor who becomes obsessed with military hardware, and begins building a tank in his backyard. It looks like a very realistic tank, and he even gets a hold of shells. He then drives the tank back and forth in his backyard, and points the turret directly at your house. Clearly, this is not a good situation for you, but your neighbor is only exercising his own property rights, and so what right do you have to interfere with his tank-building? Certainly, if he accidentally blows the top off your house, you can act in response, but surely you should not have to wait for such a disaster in order to intervene – forcefully, if necessary.”

If we believe that anarchism is a society without rules or laws, then this would seem to be a perplexing problem. In a statist society, you simply have laws against private tank ownership, and the problem is solved!

However, as we have discussed above, anarchism is not a society without rules or laws, but is rather populated by agencies entirely devoted to preventing foreseeable problems. Some problems are complicated and hard to detect – but the “tank in the garden” is not one of those problems. Furthermore, if we are so concerned about military hardware being used against us, it scarcely seems a wise “solution” to arm a government to the teeth, and disarm ourselves proportionately.

If people are afraid of the “tank in the garden,” all they have to do is ensure that their DRO contract contains protections against well-armed neighbors. How can this be achieved? Well, when my wife and I bought our house, we signed a contract stipulating that we were not to repaint the outside of our house for a period of five years. I am sure that we would not have hesitated to sign the contract if it also included a ban on building tanks, nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers.

If someone does break their DRO contract by building such weapons, the DRO can invoke all of the exclusion and ostracism penalties discussed above.

Gun Control

Some people prefer to live in neighborhoods where there are no guns; some people prefer to live in neighborhoods where everyone has a gun – and some people do not particularly care one way or the other. Anarchism perfectly satisfies everyone’s preferences in this area. If you are a developer building a new neighborhood, you can require everyone buying a house to sign a contract promising to refrain from owning a gun. The enforcement possibilities for this are endless, but need not be intrusive – if I were a DRO and wanted to prevent gun ownership, I would simply revoke my contract with anyone who used or showed a gun in the neighborhood – including acts of self-defense.

On the other hand, I could build a neighborhood which required that everyone be willing to have and know how to use a gun – as is already the case in Switzerland. If I believe that gun ownership in a net positive, I would buy a house in this neighborhood.

Ah, but what if you have a gun in the glove box of your car, and you are driving from neighborhood to neighborhood? Well, then, you are just taking a risk that if you are discovered, your DRO may revoke your contract, just as if you carry a concealed weapon against the law in a statist society. Or they may not care about drivers.

In general, it seems very likely that few if any gun restrictions would be in place in a stateless society. The level of crime would be at least 90% lower than it is today; children would grow up happier, better educated and more secure – and of course you do not need to actually own a gun in order to gain the protective benefits of gun ownership. A thief who wants to break into your house does not know in advance whether you have a gun or not – if everyone is legally disarmed, then he can be quite sure that you do not. However, in a stateless society, there are no “laws” against gun ownership, except those that people enter into voluntarily. If a large number of thieves somehow figure out how to operate in an anarchic society, they will inevitably be drawn to those neighborhoods which have anti-gun contracts, so they will face less risk during their robberies. If these crimes become prevalent, then randomized gun ownership would be the most optimal solution – if these crimes remain extraordinarily rare, as is most likely the case, insofar as only the mentally ill would attempt them, then gun ownership would become an unnecessary overhead, and would very likely decline to almost nothing. There would still be people who would own guns, but they would be a small minority of eccentric collectors, like those who collect medieval swords – legacies of a brutal past that has long since faded into history.

Part 3: Examples

Roads

The question of roads always seems to arise as a central objection to a stateless society – which makes perfect sense in a way, because it is a form of public ownership that we have all experienced firsthand, and because it can be hard to picture what they may look like in the absence of a government.

The alternative to state-funded roads is generally conceived to be toll-based roads. This is considered a disastrous solution, because who wants to stop every block to put a quarter in a meter?

Remembering our methodology from above, it is essential that we put ourselves into the mind of a road developer, sitting on the other side of that table, attempting to sell us access to his roads.

Imagine that you have sunk your life savings into building a complicated network of roads. If you don’t attract drivers who are willing to pay to use them, you are finished – your children are going to cry themselves to sleep with hunger.

When you stand up to make a presentation to a group of potential customers – drivers – are you seriously going to tell them that in order to drive a half a mile to pick up a loaf of bread, they are going to have to stop a few times to put quarters into a toll meter?

Of course not.

So – how are you going to convince drivers to use your roads?

For those who have not spent any time – or blood – in the entrepreneurial world, this is exactly how almost all companies are funded. You take your business venture to a group of investors, who play a very serious game of “devil’s advocate,” trying to find holes in your business plan.

If your entire fortune hung in the balance, how would you answer these objections? If you cannot provide good answers, you will never get to sell your roads.

I am certainly no expert in construction – I was an entrepreneur in the software world – but I can tell you some possible answers that I would explore in order to prepare for such a meeting. I can also tell you that none of them would involve having drivers stop every few minutes to push change into a slot.

If I desperately wanted to build roads in a stateless society, I would first approach construction companies who wanted to build houses or malls in some area not currently served by a road. If you want to build a mall a few miles out of town, you’re not likely to attract many investors unless your business plan includes road access to the mall, since there are very few people who enjoy the prospect of a bracing hike to and from a “Target” store.

If you are developing a housing complex, you will face exactly the same requirement – it is true that you can sell houses without road access, but you will not be able to sell them for more than it costs to build them.

So there are really two kinds of roads, in two kinds of environments – highways and intercity roads, and already-existing and new roads.

New Roads

It is easy for us to understand that highways to new places will be built in the free market, for the simple reason that if you cannot build a highway to that new place, that new place will never come into existence. Secondly, there is not much point building a highway to a new housing development, without building roads from the highway to and within the housing development.

Thus, anything that is built that is new will only be built if roads to access it are constructed at the same time.

If I want to buy a new house somewhere outside of town, and a new highway and new roads are built to accommodate my desire, I will certainly be very interested in the long-term quality of the roads that have been built, since so much of my property’s value hinges upon easy and comfortable access to it.

Thus, the long-term quality of these roads will be a significant factor – probably a deciding one – in my decision to buy a house. Road quality is as important as the house’s construction quality when it comes to evaluating the value of a property. How much would you pay for a million-dollar mansion in the middle of the Amazon forest, with no road access? Assuming you are not Howard Hughes, probably nothing at all.

What about the danger that someone sells me a house, and then jacks up the price of the road maintenance?

Knowing that this is a risk, when I was negotiating my mortgage, I would ensure that a built-in and fixed price for road maintenance was included in my mortgage terms. I would also want the right to demand an open bid on road maintenance services when the contract came up for renewal.

We can all understand that the construction and maintenance of new buildings – commercial or residential – can only occur with high quality road access. (We can see this kind of phenomenon, to a smaller degree, in the fact that almost no malls are built without parking spaces, or houses without driveways and garages.)

So really, the question of road construction and maintenance – as far as it is raised as an objection to a stateless society – only hinges on existing roads, not new ones.

The Statist Pony

Imagine some communist country which provided out of the public purse a pony for each girl on her sixteenth birthday. Now, imagine that some crazy capitalist thinker came along and said that this country should switch from communism to the free market.

Naturally, just about everyone would then demand: “But how will each girl get a free pony on her sixteenth birthday?”

Of course, the answer is that she will not – but it may very well be asked whether the pony is really such an absolute necessity for every girl.

Government roads are just such a kind of “statist pony” – they are extravagantly wasteful, badly planned and allocated, and facilitate all sorts of dangerous and inefficient behaviors, just like every other government program on the planet. There is thus no possibility that a free market system of roads will look exactly the same as a statist system – because drivers will have to pay for road use directly, rather than offloading the total costs to taxpayers as a whole.

Thus when picturing a free system of roads, the question becomes: what will we as drivers be happy to pay for?

Certainly we will pay for safety, which we currently do not receive. We get jolting and wasteful traffic lights instead of gentle and fluid roundabouts. We get endless predatory ticketing instead of road systems that promote safety. We get endless construction that does not take place in the dark of night, but rather in the agonizing slow motion of rush hour. We get a sagging expansion of our cities, because developers do not have to pay for the costs of the roads that lead to their houses, office buildings, factories and shopping malls. We get eighteen-wheeler trucks blaring and rocketing beside small passenger cars. We do not see businesses adapting to the monetary and social costs of rush hour, because they do not face increased demand in wages because traveling in rush-hour costs more. Thus everyone has to start at nine a.m. or thereabouts.

Like every other government program, roads and traffic control are run for the profit of special interests – construction companies, unions, bureaucrats and cops, primarily – and not for the sake of the end users, the drivers. The tens of thousands of deaths – and hundreds of thousands of injuries – that occur annually in the United States alone, would be a completely unacceptable body count in any private industry. Experiments such as roundabouts, removing traffic signs and lanes, charging a premium for high-volume traffic and so on – all of which have been proven to increase efficiency and safety – simply do not spread across the system, any more than salmon steaks showed up in your average Stalinist store.

Existing City Roads

No matter what happens to the highway system in general, we all appreciate that city roads have to be maintained. How can this happen without a toll at every corner?

If we look at the average downtown core, it is largely composed of shops and businesses. Is it beyond the pale of human thought to imagine that the stores and businesses on a particular city block would be able to get together and all chip in for a relatively modest fund to maintain the roads and sidewalks around them – particularly when they no longer have to pay property and profit taxes to the State?

If we do believe that this is impossible, then we face exactly the same problem that we faced before about democracy. The central idea of democracy is that citizens are able to put aside their own petty personal self-interest and vote according to their conscience, with an eye to the collective good of society. If we accept that human beings are capable of voting in this way, then surely we can accept that they can put a few bucks a month into a common pot to pay for the roads that bring customers and employees to them. If we do not think that human beings can organize themselves to take care of a few hundred meters of roads that they directly benefit from, then they will never be able to vote for political candidates with any thought for the common good, and democracy must be abolished.

Either way, we end up with a stateless society.

There are, of course, many other ways to charge for roads in a free society. GPS tracking devices can effortlessly monitor the movements of cars, and a single bill can be sent, and the proceeds apportioned out to the road companies involved.

Furthermore, non-dangerous advertising could very easily subsidize the cost of roads – one possibility that springs to mind is radio commercials that would be inserted into programs based on the location of drivers, so that they did not provide visual distractions.

A Predatory Road Monopoly?

All right, you may say, but what about the reality that highways – and city roads – are extremely non-competitive situations, since no one is going to build a highway next to another highway and compete with it?

That is somewhat true, although it is important to be precise in terms of what is meant by the word “competition.”

Brad Pitt has a monopoly on Brad Pitt – or at least, he did before he got married. However, Brad Pitt still faces competition – not just with other actors, but rather with everything else that human beings could be doing instead of going to see a Brad Pitt movie. He competes with bowling, sex, napping, reading books on anarchy – everything you could imagine! Thus, although he has a monopoly on Brad Pitt, he does not have a monopoly on you. (That is the difference between the government and the free market – the government does have a monopoly on you, because it initiates the use of force against you.)

In the same way, any particular highway may have a monopoly on getting from A to B in the straightest line – but that does not mean that it has a coercive and exclusive hold over everyone’s entire decision-making processes.

Let us take an example of an “evil capitalist highway robber baron” named Jacques, who decides to start jacking up the rates for any driver using his highway.

First of all, Jacques will not be making this decision in a vacuum. After roads become privatized, everyone who buys a house who relies on a particular highway will be fully aware of their vulnerability to increased road tolls in the future. As an enterprising construction capitalist, I would sweeten the pot for people in this regard by negotiating a twenty year guarantee with Jacques that he would not raise their prices any more than one or two percentage points a year. (This highlights again a very essential aspect of understanding how a stateless society works, which is that obvious worries will always be addressed and alleviated ahead of time. If people are afraid that someone is going to jack up their road prices, they will simply negotiate fixed fees ahead of time – which is the essence of mortgages and car payments of course.)

However, let us imagine that no binding contracts limit Jacques’s ability to raise his prices, and one day he announces that his rates are going to triple.

What happens then?

Well, people are not about to move because the price of their road travel is going up, so that is not likely to be an issue – what they will do, however, is go to their bosses and say that they need a raise.

Bosses – having been one myself – are notoriously cheap individuals, who do not want to pay a penny more than they have to for what they want. If I were a boss in this situation, I would explore other alternatives to giving raises.

For instance, I might offer them a day or two a week to work at home. Alternatively, since no doubt Jacques’s prices are higher during rush-hour, I would also offer more flexible hours to those who wanted them, so that they would not have to pay a premium to come to work at a specific time.

If I were another kind of entrepreneur, I would set up a website dedicated to helping people find carpooling, so that people would end up paying less.

Also, the increased prices per vehicle might very well make it economically viable to start running buses along the highway.

In this way, Jacques might gain a temporary increase in his revenues, but consumers would simply adapt to his increased prices, in such a way that this increase could not be both significant and permanent.

In other words, by drastically raising his prices, all that Jacques is really doing is teaching people to find alternatives to using his highway. He is training them to avoid his service – and one of the terrible aspects of this practice is that once people get used to working at home or car pooling, not all of them will revert to their old habits if he drops his prices.

Jacques also creates another significant risk, which can easily escape the inexperienced eye.

By increasing the price of his highway, Jacques has reduced the collective wealth of entire neighborhoods to a far greater degree than he has increased his own wealth specifically. Of course, no one expects Jacques to be motivated by some abstract considerations of social wealth, but nonetheless he is creating a very dangerous situation.

Almost all neighborhoods have some sort of Business Association, where members meet to discuss a variety of collective concerns. This Association will certainly meet – and pointedly not invite Jacques – a day or two after he jacks up his prices, in order to figure out what they should do. They will likely decide to ostracize Jacques, which will certainly have a negative effect on his ability to move with ease and profit in the business world, since so many deals are consummated through existing relationships.

It is very possible that this form of business ostracism will cost Jacques more than he can possibly make by raising his rates, especially after the inevitable consumer adaptation.

However, perhaps Jacques doesn’t care about these particular business relationships – it does not matter, his ability to do business is still irretrievably harmed.

Whomever Jacques wants to do business with next will be fully aware that he has a habit of outrageously jacking up his prices without warning. Therefore, if someone has a choice about doing business with Jacques, he will very likely refrain.

Anyone who does end up wanting to – or having to – do business with Jacques will have to do far more due diligence and legal wrangling than before his fears were elevated by Jacques’s deleterious and unpredictable business practices.

Thus it is enormously unlikely that jacking up his prices will end up having a permanent and positive effect on Jacques’s profits.

However, to take the argument to its extreme case, let us say that Jacques does somehow end up creating a permanent and positive enormous profit.

His actions have created a large number of business people who have a direct interest in reducing those prices again – all those people whose property values and business expenses have been negatively impacted by Jacques’s price increase.

The Business Association members would be highly motivated to plot and execute a takeover of Jacques’s highway business, in order to restore their own property and business values. Whatever debts they may incur in this process will be more than recompensed by the increase in these values. Since the personal profits that Jacques is accruing remain far less than the collective costs he is inflicting on others, he remains highly vulnerable and exposed to a takeover bid, either hostile or friendly.

Of course, the Business Association members are unlikely to be experts at running a highway, so they would more likely act as investors for competing highway companies, to fund an expansion takeover, on the condition that this new company would guarantee a return to the original rates, along with a longer-term guarantee of reasonable rate increases.

Thus in general the instability, customer alienation, ostracism and endless competitive risks introduced by sudden and large price increases do not pay off at all, and in fact threaten the viability of the business as a whole. In the example above, we have simplified the scenario by pretending that Jacques can make all of these decisions on his own, which would never be the case in any free market. Any industry that has a potential for a monopoly would require a large amount of capital investment and management, which comes with stockholders, investors, and a board of directors. Jacques would not have the right or the ability to make significant decisions about price without the support of the majority of the interested stakeholders – all of whom would view, and quite rightly too, the jacking up of prices as far too threatening to the long-term value of their investment.

My Way or the Highway?

We could imagine a scenario where Jacques is able to build a $500 million dollar highway out of his own pocket, because he has inherited billions or something like that – but it seems very unlikely that his venture would succeed in the long run, because people would be hesitant to get into business with someone who does not have a multitude of other interested parties to temper his judgment, and who retains a tyrannical level of control over his own organization. For instance, people do not want to get heavily involved in a company without a succession plan, and having a single “dictator” in a company does not bode well for its long-term success. If Jacques is not actively grooming a number of successors, and if he then gets hit by a bus, no one will be able to step into his shoes, and his company will fail. This level of risk would be too high for most other companies, since it would take a number of years to build his highway, and Jacques’s company could collapse at any time, leaving bills unpaid and orders unfulfilled. If Jacques insisted upon these conditions, all that he would be revealing would be his own lack of business judgment, which would also cause more experienced businesspeople to shy away from getting involved with him. Thus it seems exceedingly unlikely that Jacques would be able to build such a capital-intensive structure while retaining dictatorial control over the company.

I do apologize for the detailed and somewhat technical nature of the above explanation, but I do think that it is essential to understand that there are always two sides to every negotiation. In a free society, there are a near-infinite set of options available to peacefully address what could be considered sub-optimal business practices on the part of others.

Automobile Insurance

Finally, let us look at how the provision of automobile insurance would affect the safety of roads.

In most Western countries, automobile insurance is compulsory – I believe that this would continue to be the case in practice, if not in principle, in a free society.

I would much prefer to use someone’s roads if I could know for certain that all the other drivers carried insurance. Thus it seems very likely that insurance would be required for anyone traveling on a road. (How could this be enforced? A number of options spring to mind, most notably that currency companies would not process gas purchases from uninsured drivers.)

Naturally, the fewer car accidents there are, the more car insurance companies can make in profit. This direct correlation is one of the core foundations to the achievement of security in a stateless society. If, say, Jacques’s roads are unsafe, then the car insurance companies will charge a premium for anyone who wants to drive on them – thus cutting into Jacques’s profits considerably. This will drive Jacques to invest in road improvements.

At the moment, insurance companies have no direct control over government road policies, and so these companies can only compete on price, not on the proactive promotion of road safety. However, when competition for roads heats up through privatization – and remember, the competition is not just between different road systems, but also between using roads and not using them – insurance companies will be forced to compete on creating the safest possible roads, in order to keep their prices as low as possible.

When the costs of roads are directly borne by the drivers, the benefits are both staggering and almost limitless. Without the ability to externalize the cost of roads to other taxpayers, drivers can make more informed and rational decisions about the costs and benefits of driving. Where to live, how far to commute, whether to drive in rush hour, whether to use public transit, whether to carpool, whether to work from home – all of these decisions are fundamentally driven by cost, but in a statist society, these decisions almost always turn out to be disastrous, because the simple and rational efficiency of the price mechanism is not allowed to function, to the detriment of resource consumption, the health of the environment, and the quality of life for literally hundreds of millions of people.

An example of private roads

If I were to say that roads should not only be provided by the free market, but also that they should be enclosed under a roof, cooled in the summer and heated in the winter, that all stairs should in fact be escalators, that all corners should be landscaped with plants and fountains, and patrolled by security guards – surely you would say that this would be an outlandish standard, which could never be achieved in the free market.

Well – that is exactly what a mall is.

Never underestimate what the free market can provide.

Health Care

The provision or subsidization of health care is considered a foundational justification for State power, for a number of seemingly compelling reasons.

First of all, health care expenses can be both unexpected and enormous. Secondly, people undergoing an acute health crisis are scarcely in a position to negotiate, haggle and wait. If you have been hit by a bus, and are bleeding out, you will not barter with whoever arrives to treat your injuries. Thirdly, health care providers are generally considered to be in a difficult position, insofar as they almost never refuse to treat someone who arrives in the emergency room, whether that person can pay or not. Fourthly, people have certain reservations or fears about the trustworthiness of medical advice, and so wish to ensure the quality and consistency of the instructions they receive. Finally, since doctors, pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare providers currently profit from illness, rather than health, the incentives are considered reversed, in that pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are motivated to deliver medication, rather than discover alternatives to medication or prevent the problem in the first place.

The “solution” to the above problems has almost always been the creation and expansion of State power over the medical field. In all Western democracies except the United States, this has resulted in the socialization of medicine, or the creation of a fundamentally communist monopoly that is funded by the taxes generated through the efficiency and productivity of the free market. Those who are healthy are forced at gunpoint to pay for those who are sick. Furthermore, the State regulates the licensing of health care providers, creating significant legal barriers to entry to doctors, nurses and other practitioners.

The imperative of providing health care – the axiom that it is a “right” – is considered a justification for the violence of the State in a way that trumps just about every other consideration. Even those who would be willing to accept the substitution of private charities for public welfare find themselves hard-pressed to defend the idea that health care should be a for-profit industry, because of the fear that, as the song goes, “the rich stay healthy, the sick stay poor…”

Every empathetic person feels the utmost compassion for an innocent child born with some form of correctable birth defect, to poor parents perhaps, who might require tens of thousands of dollars of expert help to correct the problem. The sheer random misfortune of such a disaster truly stirs us with sympathy, because we all understand that this wounded child could easily have been us, or our own child.

Similarly, those who are born with some genetic or congenital disorder are also “unjustly” inflicted with additional medical costs, through no fault of their own. A child whose teeth just happen to grow crooked requires thousands of dollars more in dental work than a child whose teeth just happen to grow straight.

When a person is struck down by an unexpected, unanticipated or inevitable medical condition – as will happen to all of us, in the case of death itself – it feels excruciating to imagine that they would have to debate costs and benefits. Particularly in the case of parents, having to choose between the best medical care for a sick child, and the medical care that they can afford, seems brutal and inhumane. Michael Moore’s documentary “Sicko,” for instance, opened with the story of a man who, it is claimed, had to choose between replacing one finger or another, but could not afford both.

The vulnerability and fear that accompanies significant medical ailments should, we feel, not also be combined with cold calculations about costs and benefits. Should a man with cancer be forced to choose between chemotherapy and eating? Surely a just and compassionate society should do everything within its power to avoid inflicting such stark and ghastly choices upon its citizens.

Furthermore, since medical advice can be truly a matter of life or death, a compassionate society should take every conceivable step to ensure that medical practitioners go through a rigorous process of training and evaluation. Again, the vulnerability and fear involved in medical decisions should never be exacerbated by fears that the self-interest of the medical practitioner is not directly aligned with the self-interest of the patient.

Anarchism and Medical Care

There is no question that human beings are not possessed by innate sainthood. Doctors can be abrupt, greedy, false and treacherous. Patients, as well, can be difficult, obstructive, non-compliant, litigious and hypochondriacal. They can fake injuries in order to gain unjust benefits, and can also become addicted to certain medications such as painkillers, and become dangerously manipulative.

Anarchism recognizes the empirical reality of human corruption in a way that statism simply does not. Anarchists recognize that power corrupts, while statists forever believe that power is the cure for corruption. Anarchists understand that the only valid and proven way to oppose human corruption is through voluntarism and competition – statists believe that the only way to oppose human corruption is to create a monopoly of violent power.

Fundamentally, anarchists believe that virtue results from a marketplace of voluntary interactions – statists believe that virtue is a dictatorial compulsion, created and maintained at the point of a gun.

Ideally, no matter what your political convictions, we can all recognize that medical care should be:

Focused on prevention, rather than cure;
As cheap as possible;
As competent as possible;
As accessible as possible;
Aligned with the interests of the patient.

Existing Systems

A basic law of economics is that whatever you subsidize, increases; and whatever you tax, decreases.

Statist health care “systems” follow the basic model that the doctor does not get paid when you are healthy, but only gets paid when you are sick.

In other words, the doctor has no direct economic incentive to prevent illness, but every incentive to treat it.

In statist health care systems, the doctor is paid per patient visit, not for a successful cure. Thus doctors do not make their money from curing patients, but rather from seeing patients – thus they have every economic incentive to keep consultations as short as possible, and to outsource any complicated “cures.”

Furthermore, in socialized medical systems in particular, it is actually illegal to collect and publish information about the quality and success rates of doctors. If I find out that I have prostate cancer, I cannot possibly find out which doctor has the greatest or best success rate in curing it. (More importantly, if I have a family history of prostate cancer, I cannot find out which doctor has been most successful in preventing it from occurring.)

When you sit back and really think about it, this is staggering – absolutely staggering!

It is illegal to sell a food item without publishing the nutritional information. It is illegal to run a public company without publishing your financial information. It is illegal to sell a car without publishing its fuel efficiency. Hell, it is illegal to sell an item of clothing without publishing where it was made.

Every stupid and irrelevant piece of information is required by law – but the success rates of doctors are not only not required, but you will actually go to jail for collecting and publishing this information!

Why is that?

This information is violently banned in most countries for two simple reasons – firstly, in any socialized system, this information would cause a stampede of sick people towards the most effective doctors. Since access to a doctor cannot be determined by price, the waiting times for good doctors would increase exponentially, while the incomes of bad doctors would decrease. Voters would go largely insane if they could not get access to the most competent doctors, and would demand immediate changes in the system. Unfortunately, the only way to limit general access to specific doctors in a socialist medical system is to allow those doctors to raise their prices – thus eliminating the communist aspect of the system.

The second reason that this information is unavailable in most medical systems is that it is already available to particular individuals, who specifically do not want it to be shared among the general population.

“Two-Tiered” Health Care

Whenever the “specter” of privatized medical care is raised, every pundit on the planet starts wailing about the evils of a “two-tiered” medical system. Basically, this is the fear that if elements of privatization are introduced to a public health care system, all the good doctors will flee to the private sector, leaving a dilapidated public area.

The fascinating aspect of this scare story is that these same pundits genuinely do not seem to imagine that a “tiered” medical system does not already exist within a socialized environment.

There are in fact four tiers in a socialized medical system; the first is inhabited by rich and prominent people, such as politicians, media personalities, pundits and so on – who do not wait in line to get MRIs or consultations with the top specialists in the field. These people inhabit a sort of “Potemkin village” of “show medicine,” and are never allowed to fall through the cracks, for fear that they may write about or describe the true realities of the system. Those in the know will direct these people to the most competent medical specialists, and ensure that they are ushered into private consultations without the indignity of having sit in a waiting room. These patients then inevitably move to the front of the line for treatment, and remain immensely satisfied with the public health care system, because they do not actually have to deal with it, but rather remain quite happy to have everyone else pay for their elite private medical care.

The second tier is composed of those who are inside – or at least near – the medical profession itself. A gentleman I know who is a psychologist received the bad news that his father had colon cancer. Because he was relatively close to the medical profession, he could call on friends and immediately find out who was the best specialist in town for this disease. Then, he introduced himself to this doctor, saying that he was a friend of so-and-so, and thus inevitably vaulted to the front of the line – and this special treatment followed his father all the way through his diagnosis and chemotherapy. He always got the best doctors, and he rarely had to wait. This is not because doctors are evil, or innately corrupt, or anything like that, but rather because it is very uncomfortable to refuse a favor to a friend – and it is in fact easier to gather and keep friends when you can do favors for them, because then they will inevitably do favors for you as well.

The third tier is composed of rich people without political or medical contacts who can fly overseas for medical treatment, to the US or other more market-driven health care environments.

The fourth tier is composed of those who are not prominent, or do not wield power, are not rich, and who also do not have contacts within or near the medical profession. These hapless souls shuffle through the public health care maze, consistently displaced by those with more power, unable to gain even a scrap of information about the quality of the care that they are receiving, waiting with numb hope for the system to grace them with an appointment, with x-rays, with treatment, with advice – lost, helpless, dependent, frightened, ignorant – with no more actual “rights” than a forgotten cow lodged in a stall awaiting antibiotics.

Since a doctor is paid to see as many of these people as possible, he will impatiently rush them through his office, spending a documented average of about eighteen seconds listening to their symptoms – and by far his most common treatment option will be to write a prescription, or refer the patient to a specialist.

There are three main reasons that he writes a prescription; the first is that it gets the patient out of his office as quickly as possible, as well as transferring the bulk of any potential liability to the pharmaceutical company. The second reason, which is directly related to first, is that pharmaceutical companies shower him with gifts and trips and seminars in order to promote their medications. The third reason is that a patient can be seen very rapidly if he or she is only coming in to get a refill of the prescription – “Are you still experiencing the same symptoms? Very well, here you go!” – thus ensuring continued high-volume billing.

Of course, referring a patient to a specialist is also a very rapid way of getting him out of your office, thus maintaining your billing rate.

The Anarchist “Solution”?

Imagine if I suggested the following as the solution to the problem of how to deliver healthcare in a stateless society:

The way that I see it working is this: one DRO should amass enough weaponry to violently drive all other medical DROs out of business. This DRO should then take about twenty percent of people’s income – and kidnap or shoot them if they do not give up their money – and then provide health care as it sees fit. This same DRO should also have complete control over how many doctors there are, and how a doctor should be trained, and how a doctor should be paid. Again, if anyone attempts to become a doctor without following the detailed and lengthy rules of this DRO, they can be kidnapped and/or shot. This DRO should pay doctors per patient visit, to ensure that doctors would see as many patients as possible in any given day – and it should make sure that doctors are neither paid for successful treatments, nor penalized for any unsuccessful treatments. Doctors should not make any money whatsoever by preventing illness, but rather should get paid for treating as many illnesses as possible, as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, this DRO monopoly should be able to shoot or kidnap anyone who dares to collect and publicize any information about the success rates of its doctors.

In order to ensure that citizen feedback is available to this DRO, every couple of years, citizens should be able to appoint a representative of their choice to the Board of Directors. Whoever they choose should be paid by the existing doctors that the DRO controls, or by the pharmaceutical companies…

We could continue with this example, but I think that you can see the ridiculousness of this “solution.” If I put this forward as my answer, I would receive an unbelievable tsunami of incredulous and contemptuous e-mails, wondering just what particular drugs I had been on when I described this as the best possible solution to the problem of providing health care.

Inevitably – and again, ludicrously – these same people will also deluge me with incredulous and contemptuous e-mails when I suggest privatizing the provision of health care.

How It Doesn’t Work: An Analogy

In socialized medicine – as in any socialized or communistic system – the consumers are not the customers. I talked about this in terms of academia in my previous book, “Everyday Anarchy,” but this reality has far more dire consequences in the realm of health care.

If automobile manufacturers were paid to produce automobiles by politicians, rather than by consumers, it is easy to imagine what the results would be. Since consumer input would be almost nonexistent, the preferences and needs of the consumer would have almost no effect on what was produced.

If this statist monopoly also supported and protected a monopolistic public sector union, can we imagine what the efficiency and productivity of these workers would be?

What if these manufacturers were paid by the number of cars that were delivered, not the quality of each car? Can we imagine what would happen to the wheels when we attempted to drive the cars off the lot?

What if these car manufacturers were also heavily subsidized by the oil and gasoline industries –and those subsidies were directly proportional to the inefficient fuel consumption of their cars? Can we imagine that they would build energy-efficient cars, or would they want to increase their income by building inefficient cars?

Does anyone ever suggest that we should nationalize car production? Yet it is impossible to have a health care system without cars – or at least ambulances – since there is no easy way to deliver doctors, medicines or patients without cars.

(We could easily make the same arguments about the software and computer industry, with even more deleterious results!)

It is hard to imagine why we would create such a horrendous system for health care, while rejecting it as ridiculous and inefficient in terms of car production.

Surely our health is far more important than our cars.

Any time a coercive agency intervenes on behalf of the consumer, that coercive agency then immediately and permanently becomes the consumer, and the needs and desires of the actual consumer are almost entirely eliminated from the equation.

How It Will Work

Ever since Blaise Pascal discovered the laws of probability, a singular human institution has arisen to help people deal with unpredictable risk – insurance.

Insurance is simply a way of playing the law of averages in order to create predictability. If one out of a hundred people is going to be randomly hit with a ten thousand dollar bill, it makes sense for everyone to have the option of paying a fixed amount of money in order to be insured against such a bill.

(Please note that in this section, I am talking about the free market insurance companies of the future, not the mercantilist semi-statist monsters of the present.)

The wonderful thing about insurance is that the interests of consumers are almost exactly aligned with the interests of providers, since both are directly motivated by the desire to decrease risk.

If I take out insurance against the dangers of smoking, the insurance company only has to pay out if I get sick from smoking – thus the insurance company will inevitably reduce my rates if I quit. In the same way, if I have taken out insurance against the danger and expense of diabetes, my insurance company will charge me less if I lose weight.

(To be slightly more precise, the insurance company does not exactly want me to quit smoking, but rather wants to make money out of insuring me. An insurance company can as easily make money insuring smokers as it can non-smokers – however, insurance companies know that customers are more likely to stay if their rates can be reduced, which means creating incentives to quit smoking.)

Every sane individual prefers to prevent an illness rather than cure it – and this is exactly the same motivation that drives insurance companies as well, since they make the most profit from healthy people, rather than sick people.

Thus, in a free society, insurance companies provide two essential services – one that you have to pay for, and one that you get for free.

The service that you get for free is an objective and detailed risk analysis of various lifestyle options. If you want to know how dangerous hang gliding is, all you have to do is apply for insurance, tell them that you are a hang glider, and see what happens to your rates. You do not have to sign up in order to gain detailed information about the risks your habits and hobbies incur – all you have to do is apply. Insurance companies are invaluable sources of information about relative risk, since their entire livelihood is based upon a rational and sustainable evaluation of risk.

The service that you have to pay for is the alleviation of risk by spreading it around.

(This is an enormous topic, but I would briefly like to mention that any discussion of free-market health-care provision – and insurance companies in particular – will doubtless draw comparisons to the existing system within the United States. This “system” has very little to do with the free market, in that more than fifty cents of every health care dollar is spent by the government, which violently protects a monopolistic doctor’s union called the American Medical Association, and also hyper-regulates the medical field with literally hundreds of thousands of laws, rules, directives and requirements. The incentive of private profit, combined with the corrupt largesse of a public purse, is technically called “fascism,” rather than freedom.)

In terms of health care, then, we can be sure that your insurance company wants to keep you as healthy as possible. The farmer who sells cows is interested in their long-term health, in a way that the butcher who disassembles them is not.

Due to this motivation, private insurance companies will be reasonably proactive in attempting to prevent health problems from developing, rather than merely curing them after they have occurred. They will be sure to pay doctors first for prevention, and then for successful cures, rather than for merely cycling as many patients through their offices as humanly possible.

In any situation where lifestyle choices can ameliorate health problems, those will be chosen in preference to endless medication. It does not cost the insurance company any money if you go for a walk or do some sit-ups; it does if you have to be on insulin for the rest of your life.

Conversely, medication is in general cheaper than surgery, all other things being equal, and so effective medications will be researched, developed and prescribed more often than invasive and dangerous surgery.

Healthcare Information

Spending money on a pricey doctor is probably about the most cost-effective investment you will ever make. The most effective doctors are those who cure the most efficiently – and for sure, most customers of health care insurance would also purchase life insurance from the same company, so that any disastrously failed “cures” would cost the company an enormous amount of money.

In this way, returning a customer to health not only guarantees future health care payments, but it also postpones the payment of death benefits. In this way, the self-interest of the insurance company is directly aligned with the self-interest of the customer, who doubtless does not prefer to be either sick, or dead. If the doctor is also paid to prevent, cure and keep alive, then all three parties have the same goal, which is the polar opposite of any statist system.

Thus whenever anyone starts evaluating which health care insurance company to go with, each company would be tripping over themselves to provide independently verified statistics about the long-term health of their customers – the number of ailments prevented, identified and cured; the average life expectancy, successful pregnancies and births and so on. These companies would be selling health to you, rather than inflicting repetitive treatments on you, which is the case with socialized medicine.

The proactive and dedicated partnership between insurance company and customer – designed to serve the self-interest of each – would create a very positive and prevention-based healthcare approach. In the same way that companies that sell dental insurance require you to go for bi-annual checkups, proactive insurance companies would require regular health checkups. (I have experienced this directly in my career. Most investors require senior managers to be insured against illness, to protect their investment – in order to qualify for this, I had to go through a full checkup by a private agency, which reviewed my blood work, my history, and ran a wide battery of tests.)

In this way, the self-interest of the doctor – who normally gets paid for treatment, not cure – and that of the patient, who prefers prevention rather than treatment – can be productively aligned.

Health Care and the Poor

It is not a subject that many people are particularly comfortable with, but charity can be a very complex and dangerous thing.

We certainly want to help the unfortunate, but we do not wish to enable and subsidize bad decisions – this is only part of the complexity involved in helping others – which a statist society cannot distinguish or deal with at all.

If society gave everything that a poor person could possibly require in order to live comfortably, that would scarcely reduce the numbers of poor people, but would rather increase them considerably. On the other hand, the children of poor people are scarcely responsible for any bad decisions their parents may have made – however, if charities give a lot of money to poor people with children, more poor people will tend to have more children, which will only increase poverty.

This balancing act is one of the enormous and complex challenges of true charity – and yet another reason why a violent monopoly will never end up helping the poor in any substantive or permanent manner.

When it comes to health care, there is no doubt whatsoever that the majority of people care about the provision of health care for those who cannot afford it. At a hospital I visited recently, I saw a placard on the wall thanking the five thousand volunteers who helped run the place.

Doctors as a whole will always treat someone who comes with an immediate injury, whether they can pay or not. If we assume that medical treatments for the genuinely deserving and needy poor would consume about ten percent of general health care spending, then we can be completely certain that this amount of money would be donated by concerned individuals, either in time or money. We can be certain of this because we know of a large number of religious organizations that require ten percent of people’s total income – twenty percent in fact, since this is pretax income – and people are quite happy to pay that.

Thus the medical needs of the poor would be entirely taken care of in a free society through charity and pro bono work. Charities would also compete to provide the most effective care for the poor, in order to gain the most donations. I would certainly prefer to give my money to an organization that was best able to create and provide sustainable health practices and medical treatments for the poor.

In this way, not only would the self-interest of doctors, insurance companies and customers be aligned – but also the self-interest of donators, charities and the poor they serve.

In a stateless society, the poor will be genuinely served by a far better system, composed of those whose self-interest is directly aligned with the health of the poor.

As has been shown over and over again, throughout history and across the world, benevolent self-interest, enhanced by free association and voluntary competition, is the only way to create sustainable compassion within society.

I am aware that I have not answered all possible objections to the question of how health care is provided in a free society. I am also aware that the possibility always exists that people can “fall through the cracks,” or that charities could conceivably make mistakes, and either fund the wrong people, or fail to fund the right people.

Once more, this possibility of corruption and/or error is often considered to be an airtight argument against anarchy, when in fact it is an airtight argument for anarchy, and against statism.

Competition and voluntarism are the only known methodologies for repairing and opposing the inevitable errors and corruptions that constantly creep into human relations. The fact that human beings can make mistakes – and are always susceptible to corruption – is exactly why they should never be given a monopoly power of violence over others.

When an entrepreneur – whether charitable or for-profit – makes a mistake by failing to provide value – others will immediately rush in to provide the missing benefit. It is this constant process of challenge and competition that allows the best solutions to be consistently discovered and reinvented in an ever-changing world.

Stateless Prisons

One of the great challenges of anarchistic philosophy is the problem of prisons, or the physical restraint of violent criminals. Let us examine the punitive mechanisms that might exist in the absence of a coercive State system.

Firstly, we can assume that in the absence of a State, DROs will necessarily band together to deny the advantages of a modern economic life to those individuals who egregiously harm their fellow citizens. Such necessities as bank accounts, credit, transportation, lodging, food and so on, can all be withheld from those who have been proven to have committed violent crimes. Also, in a stateless society, since there is no such thing as “public” property, violent criminals would have a tough time getting anywhere, since roads, parks, forests and so on would all be privately owned. Anybody providing aid or comfort to a person convicted of a violent crime could face a withdrawal of services and protections from their own DRO, and so would avoid giving such help.

However, this solution alone has not been sufficient for some people, who still feel that sociopathic and violent criminals need to be physically restrained or imprisoned for society to be safe.

Before tackling this issue, I would like to point out that if the problem of violent sociopaths is very extensive, then surely any moral justifications for the existence of a State become that much more untenable. If society literally swarms with evil people, then those evil people will surely overwhelm the State, the police, and the military, and prey upon legally disarmed citizens to their hearts content. If, however, there are very few evil people, then we surely do not need a State to protect us from such a tiny problem. In other words, if there are a lot of evil people, we cannot have a State – and if there are few evil people, then we do not need a State.

Also, whenever punitive measures are discussed, fears arise about unjust punishments. What if DROs act against someone who has been wrongly convicted of a crime? Well, according to our usual methodology, we must remember to compare a stateless society not to some perfect utopia, but rather to existing statist societies. Are people currently unjustly sent to prison? You bet. Are non-violent drug users jailed? Yes, by the millions. Do some people pretend to confess to less grievous crimes because they are threatened with terrifying sentences if they do not? Of course. Do the police manufacture evidence? Yes. Are policemen rewarded for preventing crimes, or obtaining convictions? The latter.

And – are war criminals such as George Bush charged with their genocidal crimes? Of course not. They are given pensions and speaking tours.

If we live in a terrifyingly obese nation, saying we should not bother dieting because some thin people get diabetes is irrational to say the least.

The Rapist

Let us imagine what might happen to a rapist in a stateless society. All general DRO contracts will include “rape protection,” since DROs will want to avoid incurring the medical, psychological and income costs of a rape for one of their own customers. Part of “rape protection” will be the provision of significant financial restitution to a rape victim. (Women who can’t afford “rape protection” will be subsidized by charities – or lawyers will represent them pro bono in return for a cut of the restitution.)

If a woman gets raped, she then applies to her DRO for restitution. The DRO then finds her rapist – using the most advanced forensic techniques available – and sends an agent to knock on his door.

“Good morning, sir,” the agent will politely say. “You have been charged with rape, and I’m here to inform you of your options. We wish to make this process as painless and non-intrusive as possible for you, and so will schedule a trial at the time of your earliest convenience. If you do not attend this trial, or testify falsely, or attempt to flee, we shall apply significant sanctions against you, which are outlined in your existing DRO contract. Our agreement with your bank allows us to freeze your assets – except for basic living and legal expenses – the moment that you are charged with a violent crime. We also have agreements with airlines, road, bus and train companies, as well as gas stations, to prevent you from leaving town until this matter is resolved.

“You can represent yourself in this trial, choose from one of our lawyers, or we will pay for any lawyer you prefer, at standard rates. Also, as per our existing contract, we are to be allowed access to your home for purposes of investigation. You are free to deny us this access, of course, but then we shall assume that you are guilty of the crime, and will apply all the sanctions allowed to us by contract.

“If you are found to be innocent of this crime, we will pay you the sum of twenty thousand dollars, to be funded by the woman who has charged you with rape. We will also offer free psychological counseling for you, in order to help you avoid such accusers in the future.”

The trial will commence, and will return a verdict in due course. (It seems highly likely that lie-detectors will be admissible, since they are more than 90% accurate when used correctly, which is better than most witnesses. The reason that they are not admissible now is that they would make lawyers less valuable, and also would reveal the degree to which the State police lie.)

If the man is found guilty, he will receive another visit from his DRO representative.

“Good afternoon, sir,” the agent will say. “You have been found guilty of rape, and I’m here to inform you of your punishment. We have a reciprocal agreement with your bank, which has now put a hold on your accounts, and provided us limited access. We will be deducting double the costs of our investigation and trial from your funds, and will also be transferring half a million dollars to the woman that you raped. We are aware that you do not have sufficient funds to cover this cost, which we will address in a moment. We also have reciprocal agreements with the companies that provide water and electricity to your house, and those will now be cut off. Furthermore, no gas station will sell you gasoline, and no train station, airline or bus company will sell you a ticket. We have made arrangements with all of the local grocery stores to deny you service, either in person or online. If you set foot on the street outside your house, which is owned privately, you will be physically removed for trespassing. Your wife and children can leave at any time. If they have no place to go, we will cover their transition costs, and charge you for them.

“Of course, you have the right to appeal this sentence, and if you successfully appeal, we would transfer our costs to the woman who has accused you of rape, and pay you for the inconvenience we have caused you. If, however, your appeal fails, all additional costs will be added to your debt.

“I can tell you openly that if you choose to stay in your house, you will be unable to survive for very long. You will run out of food and water. You can attempt to escape your own house, of course, leaving all of your possessions. If you do successfully escape, be aware that you are now entered into a central registry, and no reputable DRO will ever represent you. Furthermore, all DROs which have reciprocal agreements with us – which is the vast majority of them – will withdraw services from their own customers if those customers provide you with any goods or services. For the rest of your life, it will be almost impossible for you to open a bank account, use centralized currency, carry a credit card, own a car, buy gas, use a road – or any other form of transportation – and gaining food, water and lodging will be a constant nightmare for you. You will spend your entire existence running, hiding and begging, and will never find peace, solace or comfort in any place.

“However, there is an option. If you come with me now, we will take you to a place of work for a period of ten years. During that time, you will be working for us in a capacity which will be determined by your skills. If you do not have any viable skills, we will train you. Your wages will go to us, and we will deduct the costs of your incarceration, as well as any of the costs I outlined above which are not covered by your existing funds. A small amount of your wages will be set aside to help get you started after your release.

“During your stay with us, we will do our utmost help you, because we do not want to have to go through all of this with again you in the future. You will take courses on ethics. You will take courses on anger management. You will take psychological counseling. You will emerge from your work term a far better person. And when you do emerge, all of your rights will be fully restored, and you will be able to participate once more in the economic and social life of society.

“You have a choice now, and I want you to understand the full ramifications of that choice. If you come with me now, this is the best offer that I can give you. If you decide to stay in your house, and later change your mind, the penalties will be far greater. If you escape, and later change your mind, the penalties will be greater still. In our experience, 99.99% of people who either run or stay end up changing their minds, and end up that much worse off. The remaining 0.01%? They commit suicide.

“The choice is now yours. Do the right thing. Do the wise thing. Come with me.”

Can we really imagine that anyone would choose to stay in his own house and die of thirst, unable to even flush his toilet? Can we imagine that anyone would choose a life of perpetual running and hiding and begging? Even if the rapist had no interest in becoming a better person, surely the cost/benefit of the options outlined above would convince him.

There will always be a small number of truly evil or insane people within society. There are far better ways of dealing with them than our existing system of dehumanizing, brutal and destructive State gulags, which generally serve only to expand their criminal intent, skills and contacts. Also, it is important to remember that the existing State prisons contain relatively few evil or insane people. The majority of those in jail are nonviolent offenders, enslaved and in chains because they used recreational drugs, or gambled, or went to a prostitute, or did not pay all their taxes, or other such innocuous nonsense – or turned to crime because State “vice” prohibitions made crime so profitable, and State “education” kept them so ignorant.

Our choice, then, is between a system which removes the tiny minority of evil people from society, rehabilitates them if all possible, and makes them work productively to support their own confinement – or a State system which spends most of its time and energies enslaving innocent people, while letting the evil and insane roam free – or become Commander in Chief.

Money

Another central justification for the existence of the State is the need for a stable and universal monetary system. In the absence of any general system for determining price and value, the argument goes, economic activity grinds to a standstill, since all that is left in the absence of cash and prices is self-sufficiency, barter and/or an inefficient command economy of some kind.

If the government stops defining and promulgating the money supply, the argument goes, money would cease to exist, and the economy would collapse. Every group would come up with their own definition of money, and at the mall, you would have to try to negotiate with people who were using diamonds, gold, shark teeth, salt, spices, DVDs and goodness knows what else as cash.

Our economic life would thus become an endless runaround of attempting to match a variety of currencies to a variety of products; the value of our salaries would be diminished – or perhaps eliminated – by the amount of labor that it would take to find someone who would accept our “currency.” Furthermore, given the enormous multiplicity of “currencies” in a stateless society, we would never be sure whether or not we were being ripped off in some manner, as someone tried to convince us that 12 shark’s teeth were in fact equal to our bag of cinnamon – and horror of horrors, we might get home and find out that those shark’s teeth were in fact fakes!

(I hope that we are far enough along in our understanding to recognize an “Argument from Apocalypse” when we see it!)

Like so many arguments against a stateless society, the above approach can be defined as the “idiot kindergarten” argument. In this view, society is composed of largely retarded adults, who find it impossible to cooperate for mutual advantage, but instead run around like chickens with their heads cut off, grabbing and snatching at whatever value they can, eyeing each other with suspicion and hostility, and probably eating glue and stuffing plasticine up their noses.

The essential thing to understand about money is that cash is just another product, exactly like an iPod, a car or a telephone line.

A telephone line is designed to facilitate communication in a “many to many” scenario – anyone who pays to access it can talk to anyone else who has paid to access it. From the standpoint of the consumer, a telephone line is an “invisible” medium for the exchange of conversation, from anyone, and to anyone.

In the same way, money is an “invisible” medium for the exchange of value in a market system. Money is only required because people wish to trade – I do not generally set a “market price” for the vegetables that I grow for my own consumption in my backyard. (Although my time certainly has a form of “price” of course…)

Money reflects the degree of actionable demand for goods and services – actionable because we all may want a Lamborghini, but very few of us actually have the money to purchase one.

Quite literally, money is a way of measuring apples versus oranges. How much of my economically productive time is a dozen oranges worth? How many oranges is a dozen apples worth? In the absence of money, the only alternative is direct trade, which is horribly inefficient, for the obvious reason that if I want to trade apples for oranges, I have to find someone who wants to trade oranges for apples.

Like any commodity, money has a price – and this price is called “interest.” If I want to rent a car, rather than buy it, then I do not have to outlay the entire capital cost of the car, but rather I can borrow the car (which really means borrowing the capital cost of the car, since someone else has to have already paid for it) and pay a rental fee.

In the same way, if I want to borrow money, then I have to pay a “rental fee,” which is interest, which equals the amount that I am willing to pay in order to have something sooner rather than later. “Interest” exists because time is the most precious commodity that we have, because it can never be replaced, and without it we are nothing.

I can save for 20 years in order to buy a house outright, but there is no particular value in that; it is true that if I take this approach, I have saved myself a loss of money and interest, but so what? I have only exchanged paying interest for paying rent on some other place to live – both of which are forms of non-recoverable income. Whether I hand my money to a bank or a landlord is immaterial.

If we are afraid that a stateless society will not be able to create or sustain any form of objective monetary system, then what we are really saying is that human beings will refuse to cooperate, even if their lack of cooperation means a complete collapse of the economic system, and the entire basis of their high living standard.

We can easily imagine that in the absence of cash, economic wealth and growth would collapse by probably 95%. Let us say that the average annual income of a developed economy is about $35,000 a year – when we reject a stateless society for fear that it cannot sustain a monetary system, we are really saying that human beings would accept an annual drop in income from $35,000 to $1,750 rather than cooperate with each other.

To put it another way, if I were willing to pay you $33,250 a year – the difference between living in a mud shack and living in a comfortable home, between near starvation and having more than enough food, between plumbing and an outhouse – in order to cooperate with other human beings, would you say “no”?

Of course not.

If human beings do not possess enough rational self-interest to accept a 20 fold increase in their income simply for the sake of participating in some reasonable monetary system, then philosophy, medicine and society of any kind would be utterly impossible, and you would not be able to read this, because you would have said to yourself that the effort of learning how to read is not worth it.

I apologize if I am hammering the point perhaps too hard, but another way of understanding this is to imagine the following scenario.

The Anarchist Credit Card

Let us say that you make $35,000 a year, and one day, you get a letter in the mail from the Anarchist Credit Card Company:

Dear [You]:

We have a very exciting offer for you! If you agree to sign up for the Anarchist Credit Card (ACC), and agree to use it for at least 80% of your consumer purchases, we will deposit $700,000 into your ACC account every single year, free of charge, for you to spend as you see fit!

We will also only charge you 1% interest per year…

Would that be an offer that just might interest you? $700,000 of free money every single year, just for signing up for and using particular credit card?

Well, this is exactly the anarchist offer!

Given the massive incentives involved in participating in a voluntary monetary system, we can be certain that all but the insane will leap at the opportunity.

Entrepreneurs who can offer people an immediate and permanent 20-fold increase in their income will not find any shortage of people willing to sign up for their services.

Thus, we can be absolutely and completely sure that a stateless society will have a stable and beneficial monetary system.

We can now spend some time examining how it might work.

What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?

It is always fascinating to see what Ayn Rand used to call the “blank out,” which occurs when people defend the existing statist system of currency.

Government predation upon the economy through its monopoly on currency is one of the most savage and destructive aspects of a statist society.

The overprinting of money, which is used to bribe existing special interests, results in inflation, or the loss of purchasing power that results from too many dollars chasing too few goods and services.

If I wanted to start a credit card company, and sent out a business plan to investors informing them that my goal was to ensure that consumers paid 5% more per year for all their purchases, and use that as the basis for my profit, they would laugh at me as insane and ridiculous! “Who would sign up for such a vampiric credit card?” they would chortle, and probably send it around to each other as a joke.

Then, these very same investors will run across an anarchist, and end up defending the existing statist currency system, without even noticing the rank contradiction.

This is the true strangeness of the world that only the anarchist can see.

Inflation is a brutal attack upon the poor; deficit financing is also a staggering predation upon the unborn, the financial equivalent of a farmer securing a loan by pledging his unborn future livestock.

The reason that statist monetary systems always grow to collapse is the simple financial equation that lies at their root.

The reason that Mafia protection schemes “work” is because the costs of enforcement are far less than the rewards of intimidation. If you ask a restaurant owner for $1,000 a month in “protection,” but it only costs you $100 a month to pay a thug to threaten him, the economic benefit is clear. In effect, the thug’s wages are directly paid for by his victims, and the vast profits go to the thug’s leaders.

The limitation in the profits of organized crime is the balance of power between the thugs and the restaurant owners. If the Mafia predation becomes too great, the owners will simply sell their restaurants and set up shop elsewhere. Alternatively, they can hire their own security guards to protect their restaurants, thus starving the Mafia out of business – or hire their own thugs to threaten the Mafia thugs in return. (In “The Godfather,” for instance, a young Corleone decided to kill a thug rather than pay him.)

However, governments are subject to no such “restrictions.” Moving out of Brooklyn is one thing; moving out of the United States is quite another, due to the time and expense involved. Furthermore, moving to another country does not solve the problem of taxation, because “protection money” will be violently extracted from you no matter where you end up living.

Furthermore, citizens cannot hire security guards to protect them against the police and the military, since they are so outgunned. Thus the limitations of evasion or retaliation simply do not exist in a statist society.

In addition, governments become less and less reliant on direct and immediate taxation over time, since their ability to print money and take out loans against future taxation diminishes the need to please the taxpayer in the short run.

Thus we can see that the Mafia would only continue to grow if they could somehow establish the following situations:

The restaurant owners could never leave.
The restaurant owners could never defend themselves.
The Mafia could take out legal loans against future “protection” profits.
The Mafia could print as much money as it wanted – whenever it wanted – and would never face any significant “counterfeit” competition.
The Mafia was well-paid to collect this protection money.

This situation would result in a cancerous growth in the size and power of the Mafia, because the significant imbalance between short-term gains and long-term pains would be so great that the deferral of immediate profits would never occur. We may as well expect a single and childless young man who knows that he has only two weeks to live to spend one of those weeks planning and investing in his retirement.

Of course, it is entirely natural and inevitable that the government defines its own actions as virtuous, and the exact same actions as evil and criminal if performed by others. Printing money is an essential and virtuous government function; the private printing of money is the evil act of “counterfeiting” – although both are the creation of fiat currency out of thin air for the private profiteering of particular individuals.

If you’re in the mood for a bit of intellectual fun, it is always enjoyable to try out the following approach when arguing for an anarchist society: describe how you think an anarchist society should run, but smuggle statist principles in, just to see if people notice the substitution.

In the case of currency, I would say something like this:

“The way that I see currency working in a stateless society is that one particular private agency should have the right to print as much money as it wants, whenever it wants – and it should use this power to pay for an army that it would then use to shoot anyone who tried printing competing currencies. This agency should have the right to create debts for people who have not even been born yet, and to charge whatever it wants to the citizenry as a whole, using the future income that will steal from them as collateral for spending in the here and now!”

Naturally, people are shocked and appalled when I propose such a system. They consider it corrupt and evil for money to be created and promulgated in this manner, and immediately respond with myriad examples of the endless and immoral consequences of my proposed system.

Then, they inevitably defend the Federal Reserve…

The “shock treatment” of this sudden reversal has at least the potential to jolt someone’s conscience into a kind of desperately-needed rationality, and help them finally see the savage amount of propaganda that has been inflicted on them.

Monetary Aspects of Stateless Money

It is impossible to know for certain how money will work in a stateless society, but I can at least tell you what I would prefer as a consumer.

Stability

One of the greatest – and unnecessary – challenges in existing statist societies is a near-complete inability to know what the future holds in terms of monetary stability. The interest rate goes up and down according to the whims of the leaders; more money is printed, and then less money is printed; the government scoops up more, then less, of available capital in terms of loans; bonds are issued with a variety of interest rates, and so on.

In particular industries, the business environment is even more random. Regulations swell and change; tariffs rise and alter; import restrictions grow and fall; union rules come and go – and the endless teasing possibility of government subsidies and contracts keeps many a faltering business around long after its natural expiry date.

Thus, the first guarantee that I would require from anyone wishing to enroll me in a monetary system would be stability. I do not want to have to worry about whether my money will be worth less next year, or whether its value is going to fluctuate in any substantial manner.

Portability

There is a reason that people tend to travel with credit cards, rather than with gift certificates for specific stores and restaurants. Since gift certificates are not as portable, they would have to carry a significant stack of them to spend money from place to place.

When traveling abroad, credit cards are generally preferable to cash, because they do not have to be converted, and are less convenient to steal.

In the same way, gold has been a common currency throughout history because it is rare, portable, strong enough to last (but soft enough to mould), universally valued, easily dividable, and does not lose value when it is split, like a diamond.

Thus, to get my business, any particular currency would have to offer portability.

The cost savings for monetary systems tend to take the form of a bell curve – when a currency is not very portable, like a gift certificate, it remains very cheap to produce and consume. When a currency becomes somewhat portable, it operates in a kind of limbo – it is much more expensive than a gift certificate, but not as cheap as a currency that is very portable, which has economies of scale working for it.

For instance, it might be valuable for the retailers in my geographical region to offer me a form of subsidized currency that I could only spend in their stores. This already occurs in used-books stores; you can either take cash or credit – and the credit is much more lucrative, because the store owner gains the additional value of knowing that you will buy only from him.

However, localized currencies face the significant disadvantage of being unusable in transactions that require wider economic reach. It is unlikely that the company that provides your electricity resides in your county, in which case your “local dollars” could not be used to pay your electricity bill, which would cost you additional time and energy to pay the bill from a different account, using a more universal currency.

In a stateless society, your bank could also analyze your spending habits and proactively buy particular currencies. If you spend $100 a month at Store X, it could buy 100 “Store X dollars” a month, getting a 5% discount, since Store X can book its unspent consumer dollars as an asset and guarantee of future earnings. The bank may charge you 1% for this service, but you would still be 4% ahead.

We must remember that inconvenience breeds entrepreneurs. In a stateless society, an obvious service would be a “transparent” way of paying your bills using the most advantageous currency available. I might have bank accounts with five different kinds of currency – and thus my bank would provide bill payments in a universal format; I would not need to know all the details, but the bank would complete my transaction using the most advantageous currency. In this way, I might have different kinds of money, but that difference would be largely invisible to me, except for the savings I would receive. (Note that these different currencies would also be a disincentive for invasion, as mentioned above.)

Would it be cheaper for me to participate in a currency that would be accepted on the other side of the world? That is very hard to predict ahead of time, because there would be significant cost savings in a universal currency, but there would be significant costs as well. It is hard to imagine that a Chinese food seller would be interested in offering currency-based discounts to a teenager in Zimbabwe, and so the local incentive to provide subsidized currency would be diminished. On the other hand, the significant amount of technical resources required to run any currency would not have to be duplicated.

Of course, since inconvenience breeds entrepreneurs, it is certain that a number of enterprising souls would come up with a framework for running currencies that could be populated with any number of specific currencies, just as websites almost never write their own “shopping cart” code from scratch, but rather populate existing frameworks with their own products and prices.

This approach could very easily overcome the problem of duplicate investments in technical currency frameworks – this, combined with a transparent abstraction layer for bill-paying in multiple currencies, would create an enormously efficient and user-friendly currency system – or systems, to be more precise.

Security

If the above two criteria were met, my next consumer question would be: how secure is this currency?

Security is always a delicate balance between usability and safety. Any online transaction could require you to enter 10 unique passwords, each 255 characters long, which would then be virtually unbreakable – the problem is that no one would use it, for the same reason that very few people put 20 locks on their front door, and walk around like some sort of apartment superintendent, their key rings clanking like a suit of chain mail. It certainly is an inconvenience to be robbed, but it is also inconvenient to spend 20 minutes opening and locking your door every day.

I would not require that my currency be perfectly secure (if this were even possible) – I would prefer that this security at least match my preferences and requirements.

Some people are carefree; some people are cautious, and some people are downright paranoid. The paranoid people always prefer to shift the costs of securing their money to the carefree people; in the same way, the carefree people resent paying for all the extra security features that the paranoid prefer. Thus, any effective supplier of a monetary system would very likely have different levels of security and precautions, and would charge the appropriate costs for each level.

Carefree people might choose to have few if any security features at all, and thus pay the least for participating in a monetary system. On the other hand, the paranoid might require voice and fingerprint identification, as well as retina scans, specific dance moves and obscure Urdu phrases in order to complete a transaction. All this specialization is part and parcel of the inevitable entrepreneurial obsession with providing the most possible value in every conceivable situation, in order to avoid leaving even one thin dime of potential profit on the table.

Of course, a central purpose of the free market is not to create profit, but rather to eliminate it, or at least make it as small as possible. Any firm which overcharges will inevitably be undercut, which is why profits even in successful companies are generally no more than a few percentage points. Thus we can be sure that there will be just the right number of currency systems in a free society – not so many that economic interactions become complicated and cumbersome, but not so few that a lack of competition will allow profits to inflate.

The majority of economic transactions in a free society will be performed electronically, because the transaction costs are far lower – however, cash will always be necessary, for a variety of reasons. The price of cash transactions, being higher, will be reflected in a lack of discounts – or a surcharge – in the price, which will discourage but not eliminate these kinds of interactions. It also seems likely that cash will not carry a guarantee of restitution in the case of loss or theft, in the way that electronic currency would, unless there was a way to electronically associate cash with a particular individual.

At the moment, it may seem that electronic transactions are subjected to a surcharge, while cash transactions are not – however, this is not the case at all.

Credit card companies do charge a few percentage points per transaction, while cash can get you certain kinds of discounts at computer stores, but in reality the exact reverse is true.

Currently, if you take your money and put it under a mattress, it will lose a few percentage points at least per year due to inflation. Furthermore, a certain percentage of your taxes is used to maintain and defend the statist monopoly on currency. It is quite likely – if we include debts and deficits – that you are paying at least 10% of your income for the “privilege” of participating in a statist currency system. This system has all the characteristics of any brutal and violent monopoly, which is that it is exploitive, random, destructive, cancerous, and on a certain course toward annihilation.

I pay a percentage point or two on most of the donations I receive for Freedomain Radio, which come through PayPal. I assume that in a free market, this would be halved at least – thus I think it is safe to say that currency transactions would be very likely around 1% of the total value, or one tenth of the bare minimum of what you’re paying at the moment for the statist system.

A 90% reduction in cost, combined with far greater security features, guaranteed stability in the value of the currency, portability proportional to your requirement – as well as discount incentives to shop in particular areas – would result in an essentially “free” monetary system. (It would also doubtless be the case that you could choose not to pay a penny in fees to use a currency, if you were willing to submit to advertisements on that currency!)

Bankruptcy?

What would happen, though, if a particular currency DRO ended up going bankrupt? Would everyone end up losing his or her life savings?

The standard cliché here – at least for older people – is the “bank run” scene in Depression-era movies, where frantic people storm a bank desperate to get their money, once they hear that it might be going out of business.

Of course, this vision is always considered to be negative towards banks, rather than towards the relatively new Federal Reserve, which was in charge of the currency for the entire nation. In the same way, if a foreign enemy were to bomb farm fields in the Midwest, it is doubtless the greedy capitalist grocery store owners who would be blamed and vilified in perpetuity for the resulting price increases.

Let us say that some greedy or improvident DRO currency provider started running his company poorly – what would happen?

Well, the first thing that would happen is that his investors and board of directors would notice.

The first thing that I would require from the group in charge of any currency system I was involved in would be that they hold the majority of their savings in the currency system that they are trying to sell to me. I would demand external audits to ensure that at least 80% of their savings were in their own currency system. The moment that any of these people began to sell off their own currency holdings, it would be a clear indication that they no longer had faith in the long-term viability of what they were selling.

Secondly, I would require an immediate sale of the company should its asset/debt ratio exceed a very conservative number. How would a sale help me? Well, if someone wanted to buy a distressed currency company, he or she would only want to do so if the existing customer base could be retained. In other words, additional benefits would have to be offered to the customers in order to retain them – a fee holiday, some sort of cash bonus or something like that. In order to keep me from withdrawing my money from this currency system, someone would have to pay me to accept the increased risk if it was in distress.

Thirdly, I would demand that any significant losses come directly out of the bank accounts and assets of those in charge of the currency. If I ended up only being paid 80 cents on the dollar, because they had screwed up the business, I would make damn sure that they ended up with zero cents on the dollar, and living in a van down by the river as well!

This would eliminate the incentive for managers to prey upon the company for personal gain. No matter how badly their customers ended up, they would end up in a far worse situation.

Fourthly, I would demand the right to withdraw all of my money at any time I wanted.

Let us now trace the likely sequence of events that would occur if a currency company got into financial trouble.

As mentioned above, the leadership and investors would be very quickly aware of any potential problem, and would be equally if not painfully aware that if a whiff of scandal or instability leaked into the marketplace, their entire investment may very well go down the drain.

Since voluntarism and a free society is all about preventing problems, rather than curing them – the direct opposite of statism, which is all about inventing problems, and then exacerbating them – managers and investors would be hyper-vigilant in protecting the financial soundness of their organization. The success of any voluntary money system starts and ends with credibility and trust – the moment that either becomes even remotely compromised, the entire system is called into question. Competitors will always be looking for weaknesses in other monetary systems, and will provide incentives to lure customers away. Thus the investors and managers would put every conceivable check and balance in place to ensure that the system remained trustworthy.

Should some upcoming problem escape them, however, and Company XYZ were to encounter real financial difficulties, what would happen?

Well, when any company hits a financial problem, it is either because it is no longer viable, or it is being badly run. Since we have already established the innate value of and requirement for currency, we know that XYZ cannot be in trouble because no one needs its services anymore – thus its difficulties must result from being badly run.

If a company is being badly run, it can either reform itself from within, or it cannot.

If XYZ can reform its management practices from within, then bankruptcy will not be the result of its misstep – some firings, some dropped bonuses, and some cutbacks, but not bankruptcy. Customers might not even have a clear sense that anything is amiss at all.

Ah, but what happens if XYZ cannot reform itself from within?

In any free market system, there exists a plethora of so-called “raiders” who are constantly looking for poorly-run companies to snap up and improve. These raiders would doubtless very quickly sniff out the problems within the company, and would try to take it over in some manner.

If I were one of these raiders, I would face a very difficult balancing act, which is that it would be advantageous for me to leak the problems XYZ was experiencing, in order to drive down the value of the company and pick it up for less money – however, such a leak would also create a panic among the customers, which could largely eliminate the value of the company.

Thus, my best strategy would be to leak the problems at XYZ – and simultaneously offer a guarantee to existing customers that their currency would be protected, as well as some sort of incentive or bonus to retain their allegiance. I would be willing to put all of this in writing, of course, in a binding contract, which would take effect the moment I got control of the company.

This would cause a temporary dip in the price of XYZ, thus allowing me to gain control of it more cheaply – and would at least help alleviate the fears of existing customers by providing a binding guarantee to retain the value of their money.

However, as a raider, I would be facing significant competition from another source – other currency companies.

Company ABC, on hearing about any possible problems with XYZ, would immediately take out full-page advertisements, offering significant bonuses to any XYZ customers who transferred their money to the ABC Company. There would be so many “lifeboat” companies offering to rescue XYZ customers at par or greater that such customers would doubtless be able to walk to shore!

It could be the case that whatever solution any individual customer chooses might not pan out – in other words, a raider might offer a five percent bonus to currency holdings, and then fail to deliver it, falter in his execution, and customers might end up having to pull out at eighty or ninety cents on the dollar.

Color me cold, but I cannot see the innate tragedy in such a situation. Anyone who offers you “free” money does so with the implicit – though perhaps unspoken – background of risk. If I decide to leave my money in a troubled company, in the hopes of gaining five percent more, and I end up getting ten percent less, it is hard to see how that is significantly different from investing in a stock or a bond – or a horse, for that matter.

Thus, there is no conceivable situation in which currency customers would wake up one day to find their savings utterly wiped out – there is so much profit in customer retention, particularly in currency situations, that a literal stampede of entrepreneurs would attempt to insert themselves into the equation, to the benefit of the existing customers.

Compared to What?

Doubtless there are ten thousand churning minds out there at this very moment, chanting their heated way through every conceivable possibility that might result in financial ruin for customers of the XYZ Currency Company. And perhaps such a possibility exists – but again, this is an argument for anarchism, not against it.

Any farmer can fail to produce crops at any particular time – this is a natural reality and risk of farming, or indeed of any human endeavor.

Since any farmer can fail to produce crops, the only way that we can guarantee – as best as possible – the continual supply of crops is to have a large number of farmers. If we only have one farmer for the entire world – to take an exaggerated example – then the moment that the inevitable happens, and that farmer fails to produce crops, worldwide starvation inevitably results.

This distribution of risk is an essential part of any rational strategy to reduce danger. If you are only ever allowed to buy one stock your whole life long, then you may do very well, but you also may do very badly. Diversification is the key to minimizing risk.

In the same way, when we have a State monopoly on currency, and we accept that currency organizations can fail from time to time – and certainly there is no shortage in history of examples of States corrupting and destroying their currencies – we have truly all of our eggs in one very precarious basket.

If we are truly concerned about currency failure in a free market system, then the worst possible solution we could come up with would be to create a violent monopoly over a single currency. If we are concerned about farm failures, then obviously the solution is to have as many farms as economically possible, so that those that fail can be shored up by those that succeed.

In other words, if currency failure is not a problem, then a stateless society is the best solution.

If currency failure is a problem – then a stateless society is the best solution.

Saving Children: The Stateless Society and the Protection of the Helpless

All moralists interested in improving society must answer the most essential questions about human motivation, and show how their proposed solutions will create a rational framework of incentives, punishments and rewards that further moral goals generally accepted as good. The 20th century clearly showed that there is no possibility for ideology to invent or create an “ideal man” – and that all such attempts generally create a hell on earth. Utopian thinkers must work with man as he is, and recognize the inevitability of self-interest and the positive responses to incentives that characterize the human soul.

In the previous chapters on the stateless society, I have shown how society can operate in the absence of a centralized government. One question that repeatedly arises in response to these possibilities has been the following:

In the absence of a centralized State-run police force and law/court system, how can child abuse be prevented, or at least minimized?

When discussing ethical issues, it is essential to deal with what is arguably the greatest evil within human society: the abuse of children by their parents or primary caregivers. If we can create a society that treats children better than they are currently treated, we have created a goal or a destination worthy of the considerable efforts it will take to achieve it.

In any post-tribal society, family life generally becomes very opaque. Great evils can be committed within the family home, in isolation from the general view of society, and children by their very nature can do almost nothing to protect themselves. Excepting grave or obvious physical injuries, governmental agencies rarely get involved – and even when such agencies do get involved, it is far from clear that their involvement results in a better situation for the victimized child.

As we know from totalitarian regimes, any situation which combines an extreme disparity in authority with a lack of accountability for those in power tends to increase abuse. This does not mean that all parents are abusive, of course, but it does mean that in situations where abusive tendencies do exist, the power differential between parents and children, combined with the reality that few parents face any legal or direct financial consequences for their abuse, tends to prolong and exacerbate child maltreatment.

Due to this situation, it is hard to say that the existing system works to maximize the protection and security of children. While there is no perfect utopia wherein all children will be loved, nurtured and protected, any society which contains strong positive incentives for good parenting is a vast improvement over the current situation. Since children are by far the most vulnerable members of society, if a stateless society can protect them better than a statist society, it is perhaps the greatest moral benefit that anarchism can bring to bear on the human condition.

Before discussing how a stateless society can far better protect children, let us first look at how existing societies create problems for children.

The existence of the welfare state has directly contributed to the rise of single-parent families. Abuse is generally more prevalent in single-parent families.
The war on drugs has created extremely unstable, volatile and violent social circumstances.
Government-run housing projects have gathered together unstable single mothers and unstable drug dealers (in fact, housing projects are sometimes called “girlfriend farms” for such men) – thus exposing children to highly dysfunctional role models.
Public school education often creates unstable and dangerous environments for children, where younger children in particular are easy prey for bullies.
The rise of taxation has reduced take-home income to the point where, for many families, both parents need to work. This has left children vulnerable to abuse by outside caregivers – and often leads to an excess of unsupervised time for children in their early teens.
Government-run social agencies are no better at protecting children than any other State agencies are at protecting the environment, helping the poor, healing the sick, or any of the other self-appointed “missions” that bureaucrats devise for themselves.
If a badly-raised child becomes a criminal, parents are not directly liable for the resulting social, medical, legal or property costs.
If, through their bad parenting, parents end up alienating their children, they face far fewer financial problems in their old age, due to State-run social security benefits.

It is clear, then, that the existing system has room for improvement, let us say. How, then, does a stateless society better encourage good parenting?

First of all, in a stateless society, disputes between people are mediated by DROs. Is there any way that DROs can profitably intervene in a situation where there are deteriorating relationships between parent and child, or where the child is being directly harmed?

One of the primary reasons for the existence of DROs is to protect citizens against unacceptable levels of risk. In a free society, if a child goes off the rails and begins hurting other people or damaging their property, DROs will hold the parents responsible. To take a true disaster scenario, if your child paralyzes another child, you as a parent will be on the hook for a lifetime of medical bills, rehabilitation and equipment. Given that childhood – even in the absence of malice – is a physically risky time, few parents would accept the risk of having no protection for any potential injuries their child might commit or experience.

Like any insurance company, DROs would lower rates for children who were less at risk. An insurance company would prefer that your child be active – or they would face the health problems which naturally arise from inactivity – but not that your child be aggressive, especially towards other children. Children who learned positive negotiation skills – or at least did not hit, throw, punch or push other children – would be cheaper to insure. Parents who raised aggressive children would be charged far more in insurance than those who raise more peaceful offspring.

Some forms of child abuse do not generally result in destructive tendencies towards others, but rather towards the self. Anorexia nervosa, self-mutilation, excessive piercings and hyper-dangerous activities are all signs that a child has experienced specific forms of abuse – usually sexual in nature. Given that DROs also provide health insurance, it seems likely that DROs would do as much as possible to prevent and detect these kinds of activities, since they scarcely profit from self-destructive behavior.

At this point, you may be thinking that bad parents would scarcely stay in a DRO system, since it would be very expensive to insure their children. This is a natural response, but incorrect.

For instance, most parents prefer to have their children educated – even parents who abuse their children. Most schools would doubtless prefer DRO coverage for their students, because “unprotected” children would be more risky to have around. Thus, in order to get their children educated, parents have to have a DRO contract that protects them. If you are a bad parent, it will be almost impossible to avoid the significant costs imposed upon you.

Furthermore, I would prefer that my DRO refuse to insure parents without also insuring their children, because I care deeply about the health and well-being of children.

I am sure that I am not alone in this desire.

Proactive Protection

Currently, when you apply for medical insurance in the United States, you are subjected to a battery of tests aimed at determining your general level of health, and so your future medical risks. Similarly, life insurance costs usually depend on health indicators such as smoking, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Also, the earlier that you buy insurance, the lower your initial payments are.

Thus, we can imagine that a variety of DROs will approach new parents with a number of different insurance offers, all designed to protect their children.

These DROs will be eager to offer the lowest possible rates for the parents. How can they achieve that? When a young man applies for his first car insurance, the insurance company usually takes into account any driving courses that he has taken. Similarly, DROs will offer lower rates to parents who take specific training on how to best raise children to be peaceful, safe and healthy members of society. DROs will also work hard to determine exactly which parenting practices are most likely to produce such happy children.

Children need very specific guidelines and parenting skills at different stages in their development. Given that parents are likely to want to keep insurance coverage on their children until they turn 18 – and that DROs are very interested in preventing problems over the long run – it also seems likely that DROs will continue to provide lower-cost coverage if parents update their parenting skills periodically.

There are other significant indicators that parenting is becoming problematic. For instance, parental substance abuse virtually guarantees that the children will be abused or neglected. DROs will offer far lower rates to parents who have either never shown these tendencies, or if they have, are willing to subject themselves to rehabilitation and random testing to prove that they are still clean. Remember that these tests are in no way intrusive in nature – parents can always refuse to take such tests, and simply accept the consequences.

What about the children? Since prevention is by far the better part of cure, their insurance costs will remain the lowest if potential problems can be identified before they manifest themselves in costly antisocial behavior. With the young in particular, early intervention is the key. How can DROs best keep the costs low for these children? Intermittent psychological and behavioural assessments would be a good start, as would proactive parenting classes. Naturally, no parents would ever be required to submit their children for assessment – they would just pay for the increased costs if they did not.

If a child displayed truly problematic behavior, DROs would threaten to drop family coverage entirely unless the parents accepted intervention.

This combination of research, financial incentives and constant updating creates three partners in the raising of children – parents who wish to keep their children happy and their insurance costs as low as possible, DROs who wish to prevent problems rather than pay for their remediation, and experts who constantly research and communicate best practices in parenting.

Parents who were themselves poorly raised often do not understand the best way to raise their own children. Lacking access to objective information and best practices, they often repeat the same mistakes that were inflicted upon them. Parents currently reluctant to “lift the blinds” on their parenting and familial circumstances would be presented with strong and positive financial incentives to do so. Parents who refused any kind of DRO coverage for their children – or who refused reasonable interventions to help them improve their parenting – would face negative repercussions from the DRO system, which have been discussed at length above. Thus it seems highly likely that a stateless society would create a wide variety of social interests all focused on improving the parenting of children, and ensuring the children were raised to be as peaceful, happy and productive as possible.

A Parenting Fable

There is an old fable that goes something like this: the Sun and the Wind are having an argument as to which one of them is stronger. The Wind boasts that he is able to uproot trees, tear the roofs off houses and throw down power lines. The Sun looks sceptical. Below them, as they argue, a man is walking along a country road. “Ah”, says the Wind, “I bet I can tear the cloak right off this man’s back!” “Go ahead,” smiles the Sun. The Wind goes down and tears around this man, attempting to pry his cloak off his back. Naturally, the man simply clutches his cloak tighter, and the Wind can find no purchase. Finally, exhausted, the Wind withdraws. “Let me show you how it’s done,” says the Sun. Bursting into full brilliance, the Sun generates enormous heat, and the man begins to sweat. After ten minutes or so, the man sighs, wipes his brow – and slowly shrugs off his cloak.

This parable contains a powerful message about the difference between a stateless society, and society ruled by centralized government. The government always tries to force people to do things, which only increases their resistance and secrecy with regard to State power. Human society, though, only advances when a multiplicity of competing voluntary agencies create and maintain circumstances which truly benefit virtue and punish vice. This is an apt description of the free market – and it is also a description of the manner in which a stateless society will continually work to improve the safety and happiness of children.

Preventing Tragedy – An Anarchic Analysis of Abortion

Abortion is always a tragedy, and one of the saddest occurrences on this earth. Government “solutions” are also always disastrous, and so it is hard to understand how combining a tragedy with a disaster can create any kind of positive outcome. Mixing arsenic with mercury does not solve the problem of poison – and combining the violent inefficiency of the State with the tragedy of abortion does not solve the problem of family planning.

All those wishing to reduce the incidence of abortion – surely all rational and sensitive souls – must recognize that giving the government the power to combat abortion also gives it the power to promote abortion, which it currently does to a hideous degree. The best way to reduce the incidence of abortion is to withdraw State subsidies and allow the economic and social consequences to accrue to those who engage in sexually risky behaviours.

Reducing the incidence of abortion is not very complicated, since it is subject to the same laws of supply and demand as any other human activity. Simply put, any activity that is subsidized will increase, and any activity that is taxed will decrease. The incidence of abortion will go down only when abortion is no longer subsidized – and when responsible family planning is no longer taxed.

Abortion is very rare in a stable marriage, and is generally only performed under an extremity of financial or medical distress. The vast majority of abortions occur to single women, or women in unstable relationships. Particularly over the past fifty-odd years, the role of sexuality has been forcibly separated from marriage and procreation. This is an entirely predictable – although perfectly horrible – development, given the role of the State in breaking down stable family structures.

Subsidizing Abortion

In general, any program which subsidizes pregnancy in the absence of a stable family structure will also tend to encourage abortion. In particular, State subsidies which encourage the pursuit of sexual pleasure in the absence of virtue, financial stability (or at least opportunity) and personal responsibility will also tend to increase the number of abortions. When the financial and social consequences of pregnancy are mitigated through State programs, risky sexual behaviours will inevitably increase – resulting in an increase of both pregnancies and abortions.

Controlling or mitigating the financial consequences of unwanted pregnancies directly alters the kinds of decisions that women make about sexual practices and partners. Having a child out of wedlock is one of the most costly decisions a woman can make, insofar as it tends to significantly arrest her educational, emotional and career development. The physical impossibility of being able to work for money and care for an infant at the same time reduces most young single mothers to a life of dependency, exhaustion and poverty. The chance of meeting a good man when already burdened with a baby lowers a single mother’s chances for a good marriage. Not only does she come with a baby and significant expenses, but she probably also has few economic skills to offer. Plus, it is hard to date when you are breastfeeding. For these and many other reasons, single mothers often end up settling for unstable, unreliable men, just to have any sort of man around. Inevitably, the chances of having another baby thus increase – sadly, without a corresponding increase in relational stability.

This is why, in the past, society expended considerable effort to ensure that women did not get pregnant before marriage. The staggering financial losses incurred by childbirth without commitment usually accrued to the new grandparents, and so it was those parents who tried to do their best to prevent such a disaster. This need, being common to all parents, was generally shared across society, creating a near-impenetrable web of sexual chaperoning. (Social self-government based on individual incentives is the only way that social problems have been – or ever will be – solved to any degree of stability.)

It currently costs about $250,000 to bring a child from birth to age 18, under the current system. In a free market environment, with fully privatized and charity-supported education, health care, housing and so on, this cost will decrease of course (since all taxation would cease, and competition increase) – but it would still be considerable.

Babies, in short, are expensive. However, when the welfare state enters the equation, all of the above changes. Now, if a young woman gets pregnant out of wedlock, she can survive quite nicely. She will very likely never be rich – or probably even middle class – but she will be able to survive on some combination of any of the hundreds of State subsidies which directly benefit poor mothers.

In addition to the usual suspects – welfare, Medicare, child supplements, food stamps – there are many other ways she can lean on the State. When her child grows up, the State will also pay for his or her education. Does she need to take the bus? That is subsidized as well. Drop her child off for a story at the library? Subsidized. Daycare is subsidized as well, as is her apartment through rent control or public housing. Dental problems? No problem – subsidies take care of most if not all of the bills. The amount of money and resources provided to single mothers by the State is literally staggering! And when she gets old? Not to worry if she has been unable to save much money, or has alienated her children – Social Security will take care of her!

Since getting pregnant while unmarried is no longer a “life or death” issue, a young woman has far less incentive to keep her womb to herself until the right man comes along. She will not have a great life economically, but she will survive just fine – and also nicely avoid having to slave away at low-rent jobs. If you were staring at years of McJobs before you got any kind of decent career, “Plan B for Baby” might start looking pretty attractive, too!

Through such State-enforced subsidies, young women are seduced into self-destructive decisions, and sink into an underworld of dependent and dangerous lifestyles. If they have daughters, those girls will grow up in a world filled with unstable men, and without a loyal father’s love and guidance. What are the odds of such girls growing up to be sexually responsible? Not nil, certainly, but not high either.

As a result of the increasing subsidization of poor sexual choices, the stage is set for rising numbers of abortions – and, since having an unnecessary abortion is one of the most egregious examples of preferring short-term gains to long-term gains, subsidizing error is scarcely the best method of encouraging greater rationality.

Taxing Family Planning

It is very hard to make good decisions when everyone around you is making bad decisions. Either you go along, and jump right into their pit of error, or you withdraw, provoking social ostracism and, all too often, outright hostility. When, encouraged by the endless subsidies of State programs, a certain number of unplanned pregnancies are reached, they become the norm, and vaguely something “not to be criticized.” Young women, in order to keep their friends and not be attacked as “superior,” often decide that it is cool to engage in sexually risky activities. When combined with the financial incentives outlined above, the “social acceptance” motive proves overwhelming for far too many women.

What alternatives are available to those young women who decide to take the “straight and narrow” course and avoid risky behaviours? What kind of opportunities are out there? Minimum wages, State-monopoly unions, over-regulation, crippling taxation, mind-numbing apprenticeship programs and a thousand other political factors have virtually killed off good job opportunities for the poor and unskilled. Jobs are scarce, taxes are high, and careers almost impossible. State schools fail to train poor youngsters for anything useful, and higher education is probably out of the picture as well. So it is fairly safe to say that productive and honorable lifestyles are as thwarted as irresponsibility and instant gratification are encouraged.

The Men

So far we have only been talking about women – but what about the men? How has male behaviour been affected by these fundamental reversals in social values? Well, as the negative effects of sexual indiscretion become smaller and smaller, men also become conditioned to expect, let us say, “short term” interactions with the fairer sex. As more and more women decide to engage in risky sex without requiring a commitment, the value of education, integrity and hard work for men goes down proportionally. As male virtue becomes debased, other values, more sinister and shallow, take their place. Women go for “hot” guys, or guys with lots of cash to spend, or with the kind of predatory status that comes with gang membership. The entire ecosystem of sexual attraction and stable provision is turned upside down, and the men formerly viewed as losers become winners – and vice versa.

Thus, a woman looking for a “good” man faces a distinct scarcity of such paragons – and may also face the mockery of her peers if she chooses a geeky provider over a shifty stud-muffin. “Good men” become more scarce – and objects of ridicule to boot. Female attractiveness, formerly the coin that purchased male loyalty, now becomes a magnet for shallow and unstable man-boys looking for another notch in their belts.

Problems such as abortion are so complex that they cannot be solved without reference to the shifting nature of rewards and punishments created by an ever-growing and ever-violent State. Like most social problems, the solution must be voluntary, and based on the financial, social and moral realities of biology and economics.

Part 4: Conclusions

The Value of Anarchism

I am often asked why on earth anyone should get interested in anarchism, when there is virtually no chance that a stateless society will ever come into existence in our lifetime, or in the foreseeable future at all.

This is a very interesting question, and to some degree it involves a very personal answer, and so I hope you will forgive me if I forego the odd syllogism or two, and speak directly from the heart.

The Future

The story of the progress of human morals is almost entirely populated by people who did not live to see the world that they loved in their minds. Those to whom the idea of the separation of church and state arose as a tiny, faint glimmer over the burning horizon of religious warfare did not live to see these two whores pried apart by the power of philosophy.

Those who first dreamed of a world free of slavery lived only to see slavery increase and worsen, not diminish and collapse.

Those who dreamed of reason, evidence and science in the late Middle Ages saw their dreams go up in endless flames – and, all too often, themselves as well, under the burning mercies of Christian “salvation.”

Those who dream of peaceful debate rather than flashing swords taste the bitter dregs of hemlock, not the sweet nectar of victory.

It is an inevitable consequence of inertia and corruption that those who dream of a better world almost always die before those dreams come true. The entrenched and pompous self-righteousness of viciousness and exploitation always moves to discredit any attack with all the resources it has stolen. The embedded corruptions of existing familial, professional, economic and political relationships is a sinewy Hydra that a thousand men with a thousand swords cannot possibly bring down in one generation.

However, you may say, even if this is true, what form of altruistic madness could take hold of us to the point where we are willing to sacrifice so many comforts in this world in order to secure a better one for people we shall never meet? Why should I care for people who are living 200 years from now, and their opinion of me, and those who fight beside me in a war whose spoils only the unborn will receive? Even if they thank us, and build statues in our names, what possible good can that do for us now? Why should we give up all the creature comforts of blind conformity and refuse to surrender to the endless momentum of the cultural riptide, gaining no love and peace in the present, but rather only willed incomprehension and spiteful calumny?

There may be those among us who are motivated for the most part by a love for a future that they shall never inhabit. There may be those of us willing to sit in the dark and tell tales of green fields to our fellow dungeon-dwellers, so that our grandchildren’s children, whose lineage has been sustained by the bright stories of a free world beyond their walls, can emerge from the rubble of their crumbling jails into a sunlight that has been pictured and predicted, though not seen, for many decades.

And it will be our world, this world of the future, that we shall never tread. The evils and pettiness of the world that is will fall away from our rising ideals, like unneeded past boosters from a rocket piercing the stratosphere and launching to the stars. The door to this world of beauty, and plenty, and generosity, and peace, and benevolence can only be opened by the key of philosophy, of wisdom. I personally consider it the greatest possible honor to do my part in helping to fashion this golden key. I am a kind of intransigent warrior, far more at home in this time of war, the war for the future, than I would be I think in this world of the future, where all major foes and evils have been laid to rest. A natural warrior can rejoice to be born in a time of war – I am just such a born fighter, and take enormous pride and satisfaction in confronting and attempting to master the embedded evils and lies of the human mind. The size of my soul, it has turned out, is directly proportional to the size of my enemies, the enemies of wisdom and virtue. In this time, where the exploration of this world has largely ceased, but the exploration of other worlds has yet to begin, my restless, combative and explorative nature finds its true natural home and greatest possible purpose in the mental wrestling with unseen demons.

Thus, I can genuinely say that I could not conceivably wish to be born or to live in any other time. This new universe of instantaneous communication is my natural element, and the endless potential of these unexplored lands of thoughts, feelings, dreams and insights has given my soul scope to expand in a way that I never imagined possible. I am hopefully slightly larger than the size of my enemies; and certainly far smaller than the scope of the world I explore.

For me, then, the small pleasures of social conformity shrink to insignificance next to the glory of leading the charge in this kind of battle, the thrill of reasoning out new connections, the excitement of lighting up my own mind, and helping to light up the minds of others. To feel the power of significant evolution within the span of a few years, within my own mind, within my own soul, within my own life, is for me a staggering and unprecedented gift, which I would live a thousand years of social discomfort in order to attain.

I am also acutely aware of the reality that had I been born and lived in a different time – a later time, or an earlier one – I would have been pedaling a bicycle with a broken chain, if you understand me. The power of the conversation that I have initiated and am involved in is what gives my mind traction, links and engages it in the real world; it is the other stick that brings the new fire.

Thus for me it is an irreplaceable privilege to be doing what I am, where I am, during this time in history. I am a man who is excited by navigation, not the unloading of cargo. I live to explore, not to settle and consolidate. I live for battle, not administration.

I fully realize that my joys are not everyone’s joys. If you do not happen to have my particular fetish for the endless swordplay of abstract battles, why on earth would you be interested in exploring and understanding the characteristics of a land you will never set foot on?

Anarchy and Relationships

Within our minds, because of our personal histories, there exists – for want of a better phrase – a kind of “dead zone,” which is the black and broken scar tissue of the endless dictatorial commandments we were subjected to as children.

These commandments may have existed within your own home, but without a doubt this is exactly what you were subjected to in school. When you were a young child, opening up and exploring your own mind, and the new world before you, your teachers – and by proxy, your parents – never asked you what you most wanted to learn and explore.

Instead, you were jammed into a little desk, in a tight boxlike row with other children, while a teacher scratched with grating chalk on an old blackboard. Your individuality was not respected and explored; the natural and specific direction of your mind was not harnessed and expanded; your latent talents and abilities were not teased and conjured into full, magnificent view.

This was a dictatorial, almost entirely one-sided “relationship” – and this “relationship” showed up in school, in church, and very likely at home as well. Who really cared what you thought? Who really cared what you preferred to do? Were you not in general treated, at home, in school and at church, as a generally disobedient and largely inconvenient kind of pet? Did people talk to you, ask you questions, sit down and open you up to yourself – or did they feed you, clothe you, wash you and manage you? Was your childhood a more or less endless series of little commandments and “suggestions” – put that down, pick that up, don’t go there, go here, share, be nice, don’t raise your voice, go and read a book, turn that off, brush your teeth, finish your homework, don’t use those words, use these words, stop playacting, calm down, go to bed, wake up – all of these teeth-gritting and petty commandments circle your childhood like an endless buzzing cloud of little gnats, that can never be swatted, are never full, and can never be escaped.

In the face of the needs and preferences of others – particularly those in authority – do we not fall back on a kind of empty, dull and resentful conformity? When others get irritated with us – particularly in our personal relationships – do we not either flash up with resentment, or sink back with resentment? Do we not either bully back, or surrender and plot?

When we explore anarchy as a theoretical ideal, we slowly and surely – and painfully – make gradual inroads back into this “dead zone.” Like the last man in a city struggling to start the generator that will bring it back to life, when we continually re-imagine what it is like to sit on the other side of that negotiating table, we re-grow these deadened nerve endings of resentful conformity and dull compliance.

In the statist paradigm, we listen only to God, and obey His commandments.

In the anarchist paradigm, God also listens to us, and we negotiate as equals.

When we mentally practice sitting on the other side of that negotiating table, we re-learn a lesson that has long been pounded out of us – the lesson of empathy and mutually-advantageous debate. When we imagine being a DRO owner and attempting to sell our services to a community, we challenge and break the mental habits of evasion or compliance to authority.

By far the most popular video that I have ever produced has been an off-the-cuff discussion of how best to approach a job interview. This video explicitly follows anarchic principles, in so far as I remind people that although they are being interviewed, they are also the ones doing the interviewing, and evaluating the person who is evaluating them. In the same way, when you are on a first date, if you only worry about how you are being perceived, rather than being curious about how you are perceiving the other person, then you are not in fact having a relationship at all, but rather are acting out an empty form of self-erasure and compliance to the needs and preferences of someone else.

When you explore the anarchic paradigm of human interactions, you continually imagine sitting on the other side of the negotiating table and attempting to provide benefits to yourself.

In the statist paradigm, we struggle to exist under a coercive and one-sided monopoly. We never practice sitting on the other side of that table, because there is no other side to that table, any more than slaves get to negotiate their wages. We seethe with resentment or hysterical “Stockholm Syndrome” patriotism, but we no more think of reasoning with our political masters then we think of trying to control a plane psychically while jammed in the back of “economy class.”

When we are on the receiving end of brutal and coercive instructions, our self-esteem, our very souls, fade and flicker and diminish and collapse. We cannot think of ourselves fundamentally as having value because we are never treated as if we have value in and of ourselves. Our teachers seem constantly irritated with us, our parents are constantly correcting and managing us, and our preachers are constantly informing us of our sins.

Self-esteem has a lot to do with believing (or at least understanding) that we have value in and of ourselves, and that our feelings and thoughts are worthy of consideration. We are treated so little this way when we are children that I strongly believe that we grow up fundamentally scarred in our ability to comprehend our own independent value.

For instance, I can only remember one incident in my childhood when I was able to sit with an adult and chat in a relaxed fashion – and be asked questions – for any length of time. It was with a camp counselor, when I was 13 or so. I couldn’t sleep, and we sat out front of our cabin, looking up at the stars, and chatting easily back and forth about our thoughts. (I clearly remember him telling me that everyone thought Frankenstein was the monster, when in fact it was the name of the doctor who created him – and I know that I remember that for very clear reasons, to do with my family! For anyone who is interested, I used that interaction as the basis of the sleepover conversation between the two girls in my novel “The God of Atheists.”)

When we repeatedly picture the natural “win-win” interactions of an anarchist society, we unconsciously remind ourselves that we are worthy of being negotiated with, and that other people have to bring value to the table if they want to interact with us – that we do not exist simply to fulfill the greedy needs of others.

This mental exercise has staggering benefits in our personal relationships – and is the surest and most stable set of bricks that we can use to build a bridge to the future. Once we get used to the idea that we are worthy of negotiation, and that other people need to bring value to our lives in order to be of value to us, our self-esteem necessarily rises proportionally.

I face this quite often in my conversation with people in a variety of forums, including the Freedomain Radio Board. People will be difficult, or negative, or hostile, or evasive – and genuinely believe that I have some duty or obligation to continue to interact with them.

This is fundamentally a statist position, insofar as these people do not believe that they have to provide consistent or overall value in order to receive resources from others. In the past, before I became an anarchist and practiced this way of thinking, I was very susceptible to this kind of entitlement and manipulation. Now, however, it has become almost funny for me to see the shock that people experience when I simply find interacting with them more negative than positive. Almost inevitably, they will attempt to “rope” me in by attempting to snag me with my own values (“I thought you valued debate!”) – or, if I ban them for being genuinely unpleasant or abusive, they haughtily inform me that I am “censoring” them, and going against “anarchism,” and rejecting the values I proclaim on my very website (“free”) and so on.

The truth of the matter is that I am acting in complete accordance with anarchistic principles when I refrain from interacting with people who do not bring me value. The fact that they are unable to “sit on the other side of the table” and empathize with my perception of the interaction only tells me that they have a long way to go in the journey towards understanding what voluntarism really means. The idea that I – or anyone – “owe” them any form of interaction is entirely statist in its essence. It is the belief that value does not have to be reciprocal, that one side can dictate terms to the other – and, most fundamentally, and most subtly, that the “values” of the person not receiving value should force them to continue the interaction. (“Don’t you love your country?”)

When we get used to sitting on both sides of the table, so to speak, it becomes that much harder to exploit us, and press us into the service of other people’s neurotic defenses, needs and desires. We get habitually used to “checking in” with our own feelings, to see whether or not we are enjoying a particular interaction – and if we are not, we feel perfectly free to disengage. We do not “owe” other people time, energy or resources – they must “earn” our attention through positivity, just as an entrepreneur must “earn” our business through the provision of value.

When we raise our standards in this manner, it is certainly true that large numbers of people will react with incomprehension (and sometimes hostility), because we are in a very real sense rewriting our social contract with those around us. Before, they could count on us to provide them with what they wanted, and they did not have to trouble themselves by considering what we wanted. When we begin to require reciprocity in our relationships, people tend to get upset with us, because we are in fact highlighting their own entitled narcissism.

To give a minor example, as you may know I give listener conversations for free over the Internet, which I then publish as podcasts if the listener agrees. The majority of people politely request these conversations – however, a not-insignificant minority simply inform me that they are “ready” for a conversation. This is always surprising to me, the idea that I somehow “owe” them a conversation, because I am “dedicated” to philosophy and mental health. (This entitlement is all the more jaw-dropping when these people tell me in advance that they do not want to this conversation released as a podcast – and don’t even offer to donate either!)

Helping people to understand that they need to provide value in their relationships is a very tricky and challenging endeavor – but one that is vastly easier with people who have genuinely and deeply explored anarchism and voluntarism, particularly in their own personal relationships.

Once people understand that if they do not provide value in their relationships, they do not in fact have relationships, but rather are just using people in an exploitive manner, then they can work to undo the damage of the legacy that they have inherited from their family and their school and their church, which is that you either take value from people, or you give value to people – but a mutual exchange of value is not possible. You either steal, or you are stolen from – this is not the best paradigm for having a strong, deep and emotional understanding of the “free market of relationships” that is the primary characteristic of an anarchic world view.

Thus, exploring anarchy will free you in your world right now, the world you actually live in, the world of your professional, familial and social relationships. Learning how to negotiate from both sides of the table will make you a more powerful and effective employee; a better and more loving spouse; a happier and more credible parent – it will bring you all the joys and liberties of a free society, even as you labor under excessive taxation and regulation.

Finally – and not insignificantly – the more that we can teach people, directly or by example, that relationships must be mutually beneficial in order to be considered positive, the more we will teach people that the State is evil, because it is one-sided, and violent, and exploitive.

The world will be free of the State when we finally see that the State is inferior to all of our personal and professional relationships. When we are completely used to thinking in terms of mutual advantage, the violent exploitation of the State will finally become clear to us, and it will fall away.

AFTERWARD

I truly thank you for taking the time to read this book. I hope that I have stimulated some interest within you about the thrill and value of exploring anarchy.

If you are interested in exploring these ideas further, you might enjoy some of the Freedomain Radio podcasts, which are available at www.freedomainradio.com.

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