Freedomain Radio - Free Philosophy Books

O Futuro da Liberdade é a Verdade do Passado

Stefan Molyneux — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:43:00 GMT

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

Stefan Molyneux — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 20:22:00 GMT

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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

Stefan Molyneux — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:39:00 GMT

(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?

Stefan Molyneux — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 02:32:00 GMT

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

Stefan Molyneux — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 08:05:00 GMT

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

Stefan Molyneux — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 03:15:00 GMT

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

Stefan Molyneux — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:27:00 GMT

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...

Stefan Molyneux — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:29:00 GMT

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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

Stefan Molyneux — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:35:00 GMT

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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.