FDR Books. Free.

As a result of the donations of the wonderfully kind listeners, I have decided to release the three nonfiction FDR books to the general public for free, in audio book and e-book format. You can listen to them directly on this page, or download them individually, or subscribe to a feed for the material.

You can send people links to the files, or to the page, or the feed if you like.

The purpose of this move is that it will save some money on advertising, as these books get sent around - but mostly it will really help spread the word about the joys and challenges of truth and philosophy, which is, after all, the central purpose of what we're doing here.

Again, thanks so much, and enjoy the books!

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Worst Marriage Counsellor. Ever

My friend Bob is a marriage counsellor, who recently told me a rather remarkable story about a very unusual couple.

"When they came into my office, I could immediately see that she was depressed," he said last night over drinks. "He was kind of punchy and aggressive; she just sat there, hands folded in her lap, staring at the floor. I ask them what their problems were, and he went on a long tirade about how she just wasn't 'committed to the marriage.' I asked her what she thought he meant by that, but she wouldn't answer, just sat there trembling.

"He said that he wanted the marriage to work, that he loved his wife very much, and that he believed that she loved him too, but he felt that she just wasn't committed to the marriage, you know? – and that he was doing all the work, and she just sat there, he said, just like she's doing now."

Bob sighed. "I've seen this sort of thing before, where the man just kind of lords it over his wife, and then gets more and more irritated as she gets more and more passive. It's a real vicious circle – the more passive she gets, the more aggressive he gets, and so the more passive she gets, and so on. It's a really hard to break the cycle.

"I was committed to helping them in this area, though, so I promised them that if they were willing to work at their marriage, they would see significant improvements very quickly. The man immediately agreed to get started, but his wife seemed too depressed to make any kind of real decision, and just wandered out of my office, trailing after him.

"Over the next few weeks, every time I saw them, it was the same story – he talked and talked, and got more and more frustrated when his wife refused to get involved in the process, and just sat there, staring at the carpet.

"I pretty much realized that I wasn't going to get any information out of the woman while her husband was in the room, so yesterday I called her and asked to come in on her own.

"It took forever to convince her – i had to promise her that I would never tell her husband that she had come to see me on her own. I normally don't like doing that, but I sensed a real urgency in her, so I agreed.

"She came in, and couldn't meet my eyes – barely talked above a whisper.

"Why do you think that you are so resistant to getting involved in the marriage?" I asked gently.

She murmured something I couldn't hear. I asked her to repeat herself.

"Because – it is not a marriage," she whispered, tears welling up in her eyes.

I handed her a tissue. "Well no, if you're not emotionally involved, then it's…"

She raised her hand, in a strangely decisive gesture that silenced me immediately.

"No!" she said, her voice suddenly turning to steel. "It is not a marriage! I did not choose this man. I do not love this man, rather in fact I hate him with all my heart!"

"Really?" I paused, trying to figure out what she meant.

Her jaw jutted out, and she wiped her eyes defiantly. "I was taken from my village at gunpoint, I was forced to marry this man. Every act of sex has been an act of rape. I do not have any access to any money, I cannot escape, and even if I did, my parents will be thrown in jail if I leave this man. I am locked in the basement every night, I am only let out to cook and clean, and then I am locked up again. If I contradict my husband, I am beaten, thrown in the basement, and deprived of food, sometimes for days. I live in terror of him." She began to sob. "I hate my life, and wish to die, but if I kill myself, my parents also will be beaten and thrown in jail." Her hand suddenly shot forward, palms upward. "There is no way out of this dog's life for me, and so I throw myself on your mercy, I beg you for help of any kind, I beg you to help me find a way out of this nightmare of enslavement and rape, because I cannot keep living – but I am too afraid to die…"

Her whispered but emphatic words dissolved again into sobs, and she lowered her eyes. I was stunned, completely confused, and sat in silence for a minute or two.

"Well," I said finally, leaning forward, "the important thing is that for this marriage to work, you have to get more involved emotionally, and learn how to really communicate with your husband…"

I interrupted my friend Bob at this point, utterly shocked and appalled.

"You did what?"

Bob rubbed his forehead, averting his eyes. "Well, the issue was that she was disconnected from her marriage, you see, and so remained emotionally unavailable to her husband – so I wanted to teach her some ways that she might be able to open up and be more honest with him. More vulnerable…"

My mouth dropped open. "But – didn't you hear a word of what she said to you?"

Bob smiled in a sickly manner. "Oh yes, I understood that she was not happy in her marriage – my goal as a counsellor is to give her some tools that help empower her in her relationship…"

"But – Bob," I said, trying to slow down my breathing and calm my hammering heart, "did you not hear her when she said that she had been kidnapped at gunpoint, imprisoned and terrorized, and faces dire threats to both herself and her family every day?"

Bob shrugged. "But the important thing is to figure out how she can improve her situation now, not fuss about what happened in the past, which cannot be changed."

"But what happened in the past is essential to figuring out what is happening now – and what must happen in the future!" I cried. "I mean – you keep calling this a marriage, but it's just institutionalized rape and enslavement! Do you not understand? You cannot conflate that which is chosen voluntarily with that which is enforced at the point of a gun!"

He looked away, swirling his cognac, then shrugged again resentfully. "Perhaps, but the important thing now is to try and find a way to make this marriage work now – not obsess about what happened in the distant past, which as I said cannot be changed."

I took a deep breath. "So you genuinely believe that you have the power to turn years of rape, abuse and imprisonment into a positive and happy marriage?"

"Well, certainly every situation can be improved, and quite often in life we do have to try to make the best of a difficult situation…"

"So you believe that you can turn this obscene travesty of brutality and exploitation into a positive and loving marriage?"

"Well, certainly some good can come out of my involvement with this couple, I am sure of that…"

"But – why would you not tell this woman to escape from her imprisonment?"

Bob blinked. "I'm sorry – what?"

"Well you're trying to turn this evil and hellish situation into something wise and benevolent, which I don't think it's possible. It is completely unreasonable to expect a woman who has been brutalized and raped for years to try to be open, vulnerable and loving towards her abuser. Good cannot come from evil."

He smiled wryly. "Well, I can't very well counsel her to leave her husband, now can I?"

"Why not?"

He smiled, taking another sip of his $50 cognac. "Ahhh, you philosophers are so unrealistic…"

"How so?"

Bob laughed. "Well, I cannot tell this woman to leave her marriage, because I am a marriage counsellor, and if she leaves her marriage, then I am out of pocket!"

Does this story make you feel a little queasy? Does my friend Bob's inhumanity and desire to exploit an evil situation upset you?

This is the ghastly world of government programs.

I am currently reading a book entitled "The White Man's Burden" about the endless disasters of foreign aid programs. The same pattern is at work everywhere that the state attempts to use stolen money to do good – the welfare state, the war on drugs, public schools and, most sadly, war.

Intellectuals continually say that we should attempt to do good with public money, while perpetually ignoring the basic reality that government money is either explicitly or implicitly ripped from the pockets of helpless and largely disarmed citizens at the point of a gun, or through inflation and deficit financing.

Once money passes through the bloody wall of violence, expecting it to do good on the other side – in the realm of evil – is exactly as irrational, corrupt and exploitative as imagining that a brutalized and imprisoned woman can learn to love her tormentor.

Evil can never create good, any more than cancer can create health or heading south can make you go north. Ignoring the moral origins of interactions is entirely corrupt; it is the refusal to differentiate between rape and lovemaking, between theft and trade, between a hotel room and a prison cell.

If a psychiatrist diagnoses a man locked in a tiny cell as suffering from "agoraphobia," we can easily understand that his diagnosis is tragically flawed, because he is ignoring the basic reality that the man is locked up. We can also understand that any such psychiatrist who "diagnoses" a man in a cage while ignoring the fact that he is in a cage is engaged in something pretty nefarious himself.

In the same way, when intellectuals talk about how government money should be used, they are engaged in exactly the same kind of corruption. Intellectuals will generally talk about the failures of government programs – such failures are so impossible to ignore now that they must at least be addressed on the surface – and then will provide endless suggestions about how government programs can be "improved" to achieve their stated goals.

This is directly analogous to Bob the marriage counsellor giving an imprisoned woman the advice on how she can "improve" her behaviour to achieve a happy marriage. By ignoring the basic evil at the root of the interaction – her enslavement – he is actually acting with complicity and sympathy towards her abuser.

We can also directly see Bob's financial motive to continue pretending that this abusive subjugation is in fact some sort of "marriage" – and we are repulsed when Bob openly states that he will not recognize or act on the evil she suffers because he wishes to profit from its continuance.

How is this any different from an intellectual who works at the World Bank or the IMF who refuses to address the basic fact that the money he hands out to despots and dictators throughout the world is blood money that has been stolen from citizens at the point of a gun?

By refusing to address the evil at the root of the interaction, because he wishes to profit from its continuance, he confirms his existence as a corrupt state toady who will ignore any crime in order to continue to pocket the coins that fall from his masters table.

Is it that the violence at the root of state funds is so hard to understand? Of course not. No man with an IQ over 90 has any trouble identifying what will happen to him if he does not pay his taxes. Statist intellectuals are perfectly aware what will happen if they refuse to pay. There is no possibility that they can remain ignorant of the basic nature of state funding. They do not need, as Bob did above, for someone to come in and confess a crime.

They know the crime already, in their reflections.

Hanging By A Thread

Flagpoles, Lifeboats and the Edge of Ethics

It seems to be a near-universal compulsion for those interested in ethics to attempt to find situations where ethical rules contradict themselves, therefore introducing an element of irrationality or subjectivity to ethics. “Lifeboat” scenarios (cannibalism-is-wrong-but-what-if-you’re-starving), “desperation” scenarios (all-starving-men-will-steal-so-how-can-stealing-always-be-wrong) and so on all seem to be endlessly obsessed over.

One central problem I believe is that philosophers – like most thinkers in the humanities – suffer from both “Physics Envy” and “Newton Paranoia.” “Physics Envy” is a desire to gain the kind of universal absolutism that remains possible for those dealing with non-conscious matter and energy – or mathematics, for that matter. “Newton Paranoia” is the fear that a seemingly-comprehensive and accurate theory will turn out to be incorrect in extreme situations, just as Newton’s theories did in situations of extreme gravity and extreme speed.

It is interesting to note that biologists do not seem to suffer from either of these pathologies. In dealing with the effects of DNA replication and mutation, they face a large number of “gray areas,” as well as continued scepticism from Christian superstition and a few significant challenges in the differentiation of species. Plus, the discipline was also invented centuries before the discovery of DNA, yet somehow managed to soldier on!

The fear that extreme situations will break a theory, combined with the desire for absolute certainty, has stalled the development of ethics since the days of Socrates. In the absence of rigorous philosophical proofs, ethics has remained embedded in the rather soupy morass of culture and religion, much as physics did before Bacon.

However, to me there is something enormously unpleasant and frankly irresponsible in endlessly hacking away at all of the “lifeboat scenarios” and trying to find the final and irrevocable ethical answers to the various catastrophes and extreme situations that can be imagined in this or any other world.

Philosophers – particularly moral philosophers – are the ethical physicians of mankind. Currently, ethics remains such a subjective and murky swamp that it can be reasonably said that the world is suffering from a plague of bad ethics. It is certain that the ethical propositions accepted by most thinkers – the nonaggression principle, property rights and the validity of voluntary contracts – would solve or prevent almost all the institutional evils that the world currently suffers from.

However, ethicists – particularly the academics – worry themselves half to death (and bore us almost entirely into the grave) fretting about whether a man hanging from a flagpole can kick in a window to save his life.

To me, this is like possessing the cure for cancer, but refusing to release it because if someone takes it, and is simultaneously struck by lightning, falls into a sinkhole and sneezes, there may be an adverse reaction.

I believe that this scholastic “retreat to inconsequentiality” occurs because it is far easier to endlessly debate ethical impossibilities then to actually live your ethics in your life. If – academic or not – you believe in the moral validity of the nonaggression principle, then clearly to really live that value requires you to no longer associate with people who advocate aggression, in the form of domestic violence, child abuse, or institutional violence such as war, taxation and unjust imprisonment. Certainly, most people do not see the violence inherent in the existence of a government, but it does not take more than a few moments to understand this basic fact, once it is pointed out. If, however, after weeks or months of pointing out the violence of the state, those around you continue to support it, then ethics means absolutely nothing at all if you continue to associate with them.

Of course, this is all emotionally very unpleasant, but unpleasant or not, it does remain a simple fact that if you claim that something is evil – the initiation of force – then you must by definition also accept that those who advocate evil are corrupt at best, and complicit at worst. For an ethicist to continue to associate with people he defines as corrupt or evil is a complete contradiction of any reasonable ethical standards, as foolish and ultimately contemptible as, say, a District Attorney who rails against prostitution turning out to be a customer.

That having been said, I will do my best to eliminate at least one of the challenges posed by those who wish to find the limits of property rights.

I have worked for the past few years on developing a rational proof for secular ethics, which I talk about in my book Universally Preferable Behaviour. In it, I discuss the oft-cited example of the man on the flagpole.

In this scenario, I am hanging by my fingernails from a flagpole outside the window of someone’s apartment. My choices are to either (a) kick in the window and clamber to safety, or (b) fall to my death.

I will take it as a given that just about everyone on the planet would choose option ‘a’ rather than falling to his death. In this situation, clearly we have an abrogation of property rights (breaking someone’s window and entering the apartment) which is considered the most sensible, right, proper and rational thing to do.

If voluntarily initiating the destruction of someone else’s property can be the right and sensible thing to do, how can we claim that property rights are absolute? (There are countless variations on this basic argument, such as stealing a loaf of bread when you’re starving and so on.)

To answer this opposition, we need to understand the nature of property rights a little more comprehensively.

If we start from the position that there are no unchosen positive obligations, we can easily understand that the exercise of property rights is voluntary. If my car is stolen, I am not morally obligated to assert my property rights and report the theft to the proper authorities, or go hunting for my car myself. I can quite easily shrug, blame the will of the gods and go and buy a bicycle.

Similarly, we can easily imagine a scenario wherein I would be very happy to have my car stolen. Perhaps it requires an expensive repair, and I would rather get the insurance money. Perhaps I was involved in a hit-and-run, and am happy to get rid of the evidence.

In these cases, if the thief were to ask my permission before stealing my car, I would tell him, “Yes, please go ahead and take it!” Thus his removal of my car could scarcely be called “theft” at all, but rather would be a kind of “free removal,” such as when someone takes a television set that I have left by the side of the road.

It is very likely that most people will be very upset if their car is stolen, and will attempt to pursue justice and recover their property. A tiny minority of people will actually be relieved to have their car “stolen,” in which case permission to take the car is in a very real sense granted after the theft, rather than before.

Of course, this “permission” does not have to be implicit, but rather can be entirely explicit.

Imagine that I buy a lottery ticket for five dollars, and find out that it wins nothing. Is it reasonable for me to then present this lottery ticket to you, saying that I bought it on your behalf, and that you now owe me five dollars? Very few of us would feel flattered and gratified by this unsolicited “generosity.”

Since I did not ask you to buy a lottery ticket for me, I will not accept an obligation to pay you for it “after-the-fact.”

On the other hand, if I buy a lottery ticket, and then find out that it wins $1 million, what would you do if I present this lottery ticket to you, saying that I bought it on your behalf, and that you now owe me five dollars? Clearly, you would jump at the chance to pay me five dollars in order to receive the million-dollar prize, thus happily accepting an obligation “after the fact.”

As a final example, if you come up on the street and stab me in the neck, that would be an example of a violent assault. On the other hand, if I am choking to death in a restaurant, and you are a surgeon who performs an emergency tracheotomy on me, you are also stabbing me in the neck without my permission, but I would doubtless thank you profusely afterwards for saving my life.

The difference is that I would give you my permission to stab me in the neck if I could, but you cannot secure my permission under the circumstances, so you make a perfectly reasonable guess about my preferences, which is that I would rather be stabbed in the neck then choke to death. In the same way, if I cannot or do not get your permission to buy a winning lottery ticket beforehand, I can reasonably assume that you will be happy with me buying a ticket on your behalf after the fact.

In fact, I can be completely certain that if I came back to you without the lottery ticket and said, “I held a winning lottery ticket in my hand, but I threw it out because I did not have your permission to buy it ahead of time,” you would surely be enraged – or least upset – with me.

Thus one-sided contracts created without permission are perfectly valid if the permission can be achieved voluntarily after the fact.

In this way, we can re-examine the “flagpole scenario” under quite a different light.

If I come home to find a policemen in my apartment, who introduce me to a man who had kicked in my window in order to save himself from falling to death, I would be thrilled and fascinated, and entirely pleased that he had found a way to prevent his own demise. I am quite sure that the man would be more than willing to compensate me for my broken window, but even if he did not – if he were homeless, say, or utterly broke – I would still be pleased to have played even a tiny role in saving his life. A broken window can be considered a small price to pay for a story that will thrill people for the rest of my days, and the satisfaction that comes from helping to save a life!

If, on the other hand, I come home at the end of the day to find policeman out front of my apartment building, and discover that a man had fallen to his death, crying out that he did not want to break my window in order to save himself, I would be absolutely appalled. “Why on earth would he not want to break my window, and prefer instead to plummet to his death?” I would ask.

I would surmise – no doubt correctly – that his obsession with preserving the integrity of my window was in fact a mere cover for a deeper and darker death wish.

In this case, we can see that the man who kicks in my window would be doing so with a reasonable expectation that I would prefer him to do so rather than fall to his death – just as a surgeon who cuts into my throat while I am choking reasonably assumes that I would prefer him to do so rather than allow me to die.

If permission cannot be reasonably gained about the use of property ahead of time, then it can always be sought after the fact. If I grab a lifesaver from your boat in order to throw it to a drowning man, it scarcely seems reasonable for me to imagine that you would prefer that I let the man drown rather than “steal” your property.

We perpetually take this approach in the realm of gift-giving, insofar as we transfer property with the goal of enhancing happiness, without gaining the prior approval of the recipient. If I buy you a cat for Christmas, you may be very pleased, or you may be allergic to cats. If you are pleased, and accept the present, you now own the cat. If you sneeze, and reject the present, then I cannot force the cat upon you. In other words, I cannot compel you to accept a property transfer after the fact, although of course since I’m trying to please you, I should reasonably guess which gift would give you the greatest pleasure.

Thus we can see that kicking in someone’s window to save your life is not a violation of his property rights at all, but rather a use of his property based on a reasonable assumption of how he would want his property to be used if permission could be sought ahead of time, or in the moment.

If I guess wrong, then I am liable for the consequences. If I steal your car, it is not a reasonable defense for me to say, “It was not theft because I believed that you wanted me to take your car.” If I buy a cat that you turn out to be allergic to, then the ownership of the cat reverts to me.

In the same way, if you would have preferred that I fall to death my rather than kick in your window, then of course I am liable for the property damage that I have incurred. My “guess” as to how you would want your property to be used has turned out to be false, just as if I had taken your car thinking that you wanted me to, when it turns out that you considered my action to be rank theft.

Naturally, for any of this to occur, a man must be hanging from a flagpole, have no other option than kicking in a window, and the man whose window is kicked in must have preferred that the hanging man fall to his death – and the man who has saved his life by kicking in a window must refuse to pay any and all restitution for the window he has broken.

Such a circumstance will never arise in this or any other universe. The endless pursuit of these topics tells us much more about the limitations of ethicists than it does the limitations of ethics.

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Ibidus: What the Hell is Philosophy?

Ibidus: What the Hell is Philosophy?

A nice mention of me in this excellent post!

The Narrative of the “Free Republic” - Early American Gangs and the Myth of Statehood

Separating facts from myths is always one of the greatest challenges when examining the past. In particular, narratives that benefit those in power are particularly resistant to rational examination, since they tend to be propagated among the impressionable and credible – particularly children, in the form of state "education."

The history of the United States in particular has gone through an enormous amount of propagandistic revisionism, so that now the standard view of early American history tends to resemble more the slavishly pro-state "Pravda" palimpsests of the Stalinist era than a clear-eyed and rational assessment of past circumstances and events.

There remains at present a large constituency of Americans – often regarding themselves as libertarian – who look back with nostalgia to the founding of the Republic. In their mind's eye, the late 18^th century was a noble era when the steely genius of the Founding Fathers forged in the fires of liberty precious documents designed to limit the power of the state over its citizens. These preternaturally wise philosopher-kings wafted above all human temptations for the exercise of power, remaining farseeing moral visionaries steeped in the humanism and rationality of the Enlightenment, keenly aware of the dangers of the state. These noble heroes led a people yearning for freedom to the revolution of 1776, overthrew an increasingly despotic foreign rule, and put in place a system designed to guarantee the liberty of individuals far into the future.

In this narrative, the founding of the American Republic was considered a watershed epoch in the history of humanity. Never before had a government been created according to rational and objective principles, with the express design of limiting its power, and forcing it to remain answerable to the citizens it served.

The slogans of the American Revolution have been carved into the lexicon of human fantasies about freedom – "all men are created equal," "government by and for the people," "conceived in liberty," "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and so on. Early America was considered to be the highest achievement in the construction of a benevolent, wise, limited and regulated government.

Those who hold this view regard existing escalations of state power – particularly at the Federal level – to be fundamentally anti-American, and yearn for a return to an imaginary past where selfless heroes ran the government with the sole purpose of serving others.

On the other hand, certain historians – particularly leftists – have attempted to overthrow most of the supposed virtues of this period, repeatedly pointing out that early America enslaved nearly one sixth of its population, that under the cover of its Manifest Destiny doctrine the American government forcibly uprooted and exiled dozens of native tribes, that public hangings were a common form of entertainment, and that political bribery and corruption were endemic. In many ways, according to this version of history, the expansion of the United States at the expense of Mexicans and Native Americans was very similar to modern claims that China imposes on Tibet.

I view these opposing perspectives as a false dichotomy. In the "patriotic nostalgic" version, the evils of slavery and the forced relocations of native tribes and Mexicans are acknowledged as unfortunate but necessary political compromises required to create an initial union of disparate states. It is recognized that one of the original drafts of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," was "life, liberty and property," but that the word "property" had to be removed because of its implicit repudiation of the concept of slavery – if all men can own property, no man can be property. Jefferson's own ambiguity with regards to slavery is usually referenced by quoting his words: "We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."

The inability of the Founding Fathers to realize their own idealized visions of perfect and universal human equality is usually chalked up to the political realities of the time, and the ideological prejudices of those around them.

These two versions of history can be roughly characterized in the following manner: in the "patriotic nostalgic" view, the genuine political ideals of the Founding Fathers proved unachievable in practice due to the influence of history, and the collective self-interest of basic economic and political realities – particularly in the South.

In the "cynical leftist" view, the Founding Fathers crafted an idealized world out of their own lofty moral aspirations, while ignoring all those who were non-white, non-male, and often non-middle-class. In other words, Washington, Jefferson, Adams et al did in fact believe their goals of noble and political equality, but unconsciously limited its application to their own gender, class and race. The problem was that these men did not have any real conscious conception of "equality" for women, slaves, Native Americans, children and so on.

Thus while these men genuinely believed in "equality," they were limited in their practical application of this ideal because they genuinely could not consider those unlike themselves as particularly human. The forced relocation of Native American tribes, for instance, was by any rational standard a far more egregious crime against humanity than, say, the minor indignity of the Stamp Tax, but because the Native Americans were not considered to be particularly human – at least not in the way that your average middle-class white male was – they could not be emotionally or conceptually "fitted" on the same moral spectrum.

To me, arguing whether the Founding Fathers were genuine idealists who bowed to political pragmatism, or genuine idealists tragically limited by the ethical perspectives of their time, entirely misses the point by assuming that they were "genuine idealists" of any kind whatsoever.

When we judge a man's ethical idealism, it can perhaps be said that it is unfair to compare his ideals across time to a more modern understanding of ethics. In the same way, we cannot fault a medieval physician for failing to prescribe antibiotics, because they simply did not exist when he practiced medicine.

I believe that it is also reasonable to "forgive" some of the inevitable pragmatic compromises that idealists must make with the world as they find it. Even virulently anti-tax modern libertarians can be "forgiven" for paying their taxes, given that the alternative is a life on the run or in jail.

However, the Founding Fathers meet neither of these criteria. We can only forgive an idealist for bowing to pragmatism if the corruption of his ideals is demanded by powerful elements beyond his control. We can only forgive an idealist for his limited knowledge if he does not in fact possess knowledge of the standards he fails to meet.

If, however, a supposed "idealist" voluntarily corrupts his own standards, bowing to no powerful external pressure whatsoever, then clearly he is no idealist. If I set up a charity, and then shamelessly rob those I am supposed to help, I cannot reasonably be called a starry-eyed idealist who had to bow to pragmatic reality, or who was limited by the moral standards of my time. I could only be accurately called a moral hypocrite who used ethical "standards" to corrupt and betray my victims.

Anarchism and Revolution

The anarchist view of history can only regard the transfer of political power as directly analogous to the transfer of criminal power, as in the example of organized crime. Since in the anarchist approach all state power is considered criminal, any transfer of that power can be far more accurately understood by looking at criminal gangs, rather than repeating the quasi-ethical ramblings of self-interested state propagandists.

If this is the correct approach – as I believe it is – then all "ideals" put forward to justify state power – whether referring to a revolution, a despotic or democratic transfer of power, or even the daily continued existence of state power – are completely irrelevant, and foolish distractions to the actual process that is occurring.

Since the state is a criminal gang, referring to the ideals in the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights makes about as much sense as referring to a Mafia stooge's claims that he only wants to "protect" a shopkeeper that he is in fact extorting, or a pimp's protestations of virtuous benevolence with regards to his enslaved prostitutes.

Political leaders use virtuous abstractions to "sell" the imposition of violent power over citizens. As long as individuals continue to be distracted by the shiny emptiness of ethical bloviating, and ignore the gun that is steadily rising towards them, we will continue to remain as enslaved to words as we are to governments.

For example, let us take the following scenario.

Imagine a U.S. president who has never traveled east of Paris or fought in a war but who nonetheless claims to possess a deep understanding of how best to deal with military conflicts in the Middle East. During his presidency, he is faced with attacks upon Americans originating from state-supported mujahideen. In order to assuage these attacks, the U.S. government has historically both sold and given arms to the very Middle Eastern government that has been attacking Americans. Naturally, this government then used its new American weaponry to increase the number and severity of its attacks upon Americans. Pundits and intellectuals claim that if war is not declared upon this Middle Eastern government, said government will actually attack America directly.

Despite achieving office partly due to his isolationist promises to avoid international military entanglements, this president secretly wants to wage war in the Middle East – however, he faces a daunting legal obstacle. The U.S. Constitution denies him the right to declare war; reserving that power to Congress alone. Since he is not certain that Congress will declare war on this Middle Eastern country, this noble President decides to sidestep the legislature and order a "police operation" that falls just short of all-out war. In this way, he can circumvent the powers of Congress and personally authorize military action in the Middle East.

Does this sound at all familiar?

May I introduce you, ladies and gentlemen, to Thomas Jefferson?

The issue that Jefferson faced was state-sponsored piracy originating from what was then called Barbary States. Over 100 American trade ships sailing through the Mediterranean and into the Middle East were on occasion attacked by state-backed pirates – the "terrorists" of the day. Goods were seized, sailors were held for ransom, and ships were converted to supplement the pirate fleet. Given that 20% of all U.S. exports took this route, it was no small problem.

All European powers faced the same dilemma, and all but the Americans decided to pay the "tribute" required for safe passage of their ships, forge the documents of "safe passage," or hire the Spanish or Dutch gunboats that made themselves available as a military escort. By the late 18^th century, the U.S. treasury was paying out as much as 20% of its annual revenue to the Barbary states – in gold and, perversely, in cannon, gunpowder and gunboats. Not for the last time would America end up going to war against a power it had well-armed prior to the conflict! (Of course, independence from England had robbed U.S. merchants of protection from the British Navy.)

In other words, one of the costs of doing business in the Middle East included the hiring of military protection, or the paying of "tribute" in order to secure a safe passage.

This, of course, was directly analogous to the ever-increasing tariffs and excise taxes that the U.S. government was imposing on its own citizens domestically. Subjecting the movement of goods to "taxes" is a universal phenomenon of governments throughout history, and around the world.

Even after paying the "protection money," good profits could still be reaped from Middle Eastern trade, particularly in the exchange of cloth for spices. However, U.S. merchants were very keen to shift those costs to the general taxpayer, in order to vastly increase their own profits and to gain a significant competitive edge over foreign merchants. Thus, merchant leaders offered to donate enormous sums to fund the campaigns of political aspirants, in return for their promises to use state funds to pay for military expeditions against the Barbary pirates.

Governments, naturally, always benefit from rousing the general population into animosity against an external enemy. As the saying goes, "war is the health of the state." It is very easy to restrict liberty, increase taxes, and promote "unity" when patriotic fervor can be co-mingled with fears of invasion and the natural – if cowardly – bloodlust that erupts at the exciting prospect of ogling a safe and distant foreign war.

In this way, the moral delusions of the population ("It's us against them!") serve both the commercial interests of the merchant class and the expansion of state power that is the primary interest of the political class.

It is both fascinating and highly instructive to see how one of the primary framers of the Constitution – and the author of the Declaration of Independence – so naturally gravitated towards violating the very principles that he claimed to be both pragmatically necessary and morally universal.

Some might argue that Jefferson had been corrupted by political power, and this was why he attempted to break the very moral rules that he had consistently espoused as the highest possible ideals. However, this thesis is empirically easy to disprove, and can be cast aside very quickly.

Jefferson claimed to be a great fan of limited government, and in particular railed against the potential tyranny of an individual despotic leader, which was why he so consistently championed the separation of powers. Naturally, since he was so against despotic leadership, and set up a system specifically designed to block the execution of war powers at the executive level, when he found that he was not just tempted by but actually initiated the process of executing these war powers on his own whim, he clearly had the intellectual ability to recognize that he had become an example of an evil that he originally aimed to conquer.

If Jefferson genuinely opposed the evil that he had become, then he would have resigned his position, and worked as hard as possible to find the flaws in the system he had helped design that had led to his own corruption. Surely, he would understand that if someone as moral, intelligent, understanding and well-meaning as himself could be utterly corrupted by political power, that the system he had worked so hard to create simply did not work.

However, there is no evidence that these pangs of conscience ever troubled Jefferson in the slightest - and he most certainly did not resign and devote himself to figuring out the flaws in his system. Instead, he sailed on attempting to foment a war between America and a variety of Muslim states, all the while attempting to bypass the powers that he had specifically reserved for Congress in order to avoid such a situation.

When a man consistently repudiates in action the moral ideals that he professes in theory, we can clearly understand that his moral ideals are only professed as a means of achieving the power to act in opposition to them. If a man claims to love and respect his wife, and then continually abuses her in private, we can understand that his claims of love and devotion are mere "covers" for his core desire, which is to continue to abuse his wife.

Thus, since Jefferson claimed that the power to declare war must be reserved for Congress alone, and then attempted to bypass that rule when he became president, it is clear that he had no interest in actually controlling the power of the executive branch of government. His "ideals" are thus revealed as a shallow form of hypocritical moral manipulation designed to hoodwink the average citizen into believing that Jeffersonian democracy is some sort of protection against the growth of tyranny.

If I convince others that my political system is designed to prevent tyranny, and then when I gain political power by implementing my system, I assiduously pursue tyrannical powers, it is surely clear to all but the most wilfully self-blinded that I only spoke of my hostility to tyranny because I wished to be a tyrant. My words were designed to disarm others, to lull their natural scepticism – and thus secure my dominance over them.

It is in this way that we can begin to pierce the quasi-religious veil of self-serving hypocrisy and look to the values that were in fact practiced, rather than the fairy tales that were merely preached. A man is revealed by his actions, not his words.

If we look at the actions of George Washington, we can see exactly the same pattern. This is a man who used violence to oppose a British tax that was not agreed to by the colonists. After the powers of the Federal government had been expanded by the replacement of the Articles of Confederation by the United States Constitution in 1789, it took less than two years for Alexander Hamilton to convince Congress to approve taxes on distilled spirits and carriages.

In order to control the increasing rebellions against this tax, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton summoned a militia of almost 13,000 men – approximately the size of the entire revolutionary army – and invoked martial law against those resisting the tax. The subsequent assault upon the rebels marked the first time that the U.S. Federal Government had attacked its own citizens in order to extract taxes, and set the precedent that laws could only be challenged through "peaceful" means.

The staggering hypocrisy in this action scarcely needs any comment at all. There is no evidence whatsoever that either Hamilton or Washington were disturbed by their own decisions – which clearly means that they had no interest in their own professed moral ideals, but rather only in the exercise of power over others.

When we look at the effects of the transfer of power through the un-Vaselined lens of anarchistic philosophy, we can see the following pattern clearly emerging. Let us analogize it – not unjustly – through the example of organized crime.

If Mafia Gang A attacks Mafia Gang B – while claiming eternal hatred for Mafia Gang B's evil practice of extortion – and then, as soon as it overthrows Mafia Gang B, immediately sets up its own more predatory extortion rackets, we can clearly understand that Mafia Gang A was motivated by jealousy of Mafia Gang B, not out of any fundamental dislike of their practices.

If we continue to believe the pious lies of statist propaganda, we will forever be drawn to drown ourselves in the mirage of a mythical past where people were "free." If we continue to believe that the "founding of the Republic" – really the overthrow of a relatively benign foreign gang by a vastly more rapacious domestic gang – was defined by the moral fairy tales designed to dull the scepticism of the average citizen, then we shall be forever drawn to repeat the mistakes of the past and waste our lives believing that a new criminal gang will somehow set us free.

If we believe that the Constitution was genuinely designed to limit the power of the state, then we will forever try to limit the power of the state by revising political documents or pursuing other kinds of political solutions. If we understand that political documents are in fact mere tools of hypocritical moral propaganda, we will be no more tempted to revise them then we would to fact-check back issues of "Pravda."

Unfortunately, as a population, we remain bamboozled by the pious sentiments of the power-hungry. We live free in a world of words, but lie chained in a prison of reality.

We can only achieve real liberty by refusing to sanctify criminals, and understanding the basic reality that the phrase "moral government" is as oxymoronic as the phrase "moral genocide."

The only path to a freer future is clarity about the tyrannies of the past.

The Ron Paul Revolution – A Postmortem (& Prescription)

Now that the Ron Paul revolution is effectively over, the time has come for a levelheaded assessment of the pluses and minuses of the single largest movement that modern libertarianism has ever engaged in.

Any rational approach to life must seek objective answers to puzzling questions – we must steadfastly refuse to make up answers, but rather humbly look for them in the evidence.

Now that the Ron Paul revolution has failed in its stated objective – to increase political liberty by getting Ron Paul elected president – our great temptation will be to either make up answers as to why, or rewrite history by substituting another objective.

However, we owe it to the principles of liberty – if not truth – to reject easy or pat answers, but rather examine the root causes of such an enormous failure, so that we can do better next time.

The Premises

To begin, we must examine the central premises held by Ron Paul supporters.

In general, the basic beliefs were these:

1. Ron Paul is the most credible candidate that libertarianism has to offer.

2. The general electorate will respond to Ron Paul’s message of liberty.

3. Ron Paul can be elected.

4. If Ron Paul is elected, political liberty will increase substantially.

All of the above beliefs support the core approach, which is that political activism can achieve liberty – and also, for many Ron Paul supporters, only political activism can ever achieve liberty.

In this essay, we will have a look at the first two points, since the last two are immaterial.

1. Ron Paul is the most credible candidate that libertarianism has to offer.

In many ways, I believe that this is entirely true. Ron Paul is a doctor, a multi-term congressman with military experience, and a member of the Republican Party. It is inconceivable that a candidate even remotely as credible can arise over the next generation or so. Even if some magic genius exists somewhere in the party at the moment, it will take him decades to accumulate the same level of experience and credibility as Ron Paul.

This is a central reason why the emotions surrounding the Ron Paul candidacy were so volatile. In our hearts, we all knew that if it wasn’t going to be Ron Paul, it just wasn’t going to happen. This is why so many libertarians and minarchists threw themselves heart and soul into his campaign, donating millions of dollars and countless hours to spreading the word about the Ron Paul revolution. Furthermore, since as credible a candidate is unlikely to arise within the next generation, if Ron Paul did not succeed, most of his supporters would not live to see any of the real freedoms that they believed could be achieved through political success. Finally, it seems highly unlikely that the existing political and financial system can possibly last for another generation – thus it truly was “Ron Paul or bust!”

In addition to his political and medical credibility, Ron Paul is a Christian – a prerequisite for participation in American politics – as well as being hostile towards illegal immigrants, which is also required. He is not a pacifist, but rather is pro-military – again, a required position.

The tens of millions of dollars raised by Ron Paul is also highly unlikely to be replicated any time soon. The fervor which accompanied his campaign will be almost impossible to replicate in the future – particularly since a far less credible candidate will doubtless be at the helm.

2. The general electorate will respond to Ron Paul’s message of liberty.

This turned out to be entirely false. Ron Paul never polled more than a few percentage points at any time – and these poll numbers were entirely mirrored by the actual votes that he received in the primaries. The famed “Internet polls” that indicated far greater support turned out to be falsified after all.

This is essential information for us to process. The communication of libertarian values has always been one of the greatest challenges of the movement. It is essential to remember not only that Ron Paul had unprecedented access to the mainstream media, but also that the medium of the Internet was available in full force for the first time in history. Given the degree that Ron Paul supporters used this medium to spread the message, the fact that the message failed to get through is highly significant.

This indicates that the barriers to the general acceptance of libertarian values are far greater than is generally supposed. If we look back at the methods of communication available to von Mises or Rothbard – limited print books, small classrooms and specialized magazines – and compare those to the instantaneous and universal Internet email/broadcast options available today, I think that it is safe to say that additional methods of communication will not solve the problem.

Of course, the additional mediums available to Ron Paul supporters are also available to every other candidate’s supporters, and thus cannot be considered any kind of key differentiator.

The great danger of post-Ron Paul libertarianism is that we will simply make up answers as to why the message failed to resonate rather than examine the facts. We can blame the mainstream media, the apathy of the general electorate or traitorous intellectuals all we like, but that will not move us one step closer to actually achieving our goals of political liberty.

Revolution?

In my view, it is not accurate to view Ron Paul’s candidacy as a revolution, but rather as a mystical devolution. The desire to return to the Constitution is really the desire to return to American political institutions as they stood in the early 19th century. (Sans slavery, of course – and with rights for women and children, but without unrestricted immigration – okay, it’s a bit of a mishmash, but that’s the general idea.)

In other words, the goal was to return to the past, and restrict the US government to the size and role mandated in the original Constitution. This is not so much a step forward as it is a step backward – an attempt to “rewind the movie” in the hopes of somehow getting a different ending.

In most horror films, some hapless optimist always tells the others: “You go for help, I’ll follow the bloody footprints!” Attempting to return to the original Constitution – especially one that never actually existed – is like starting the movie over so that this time the optimist will not get an ax in the head.

The Backup Story: The Educational Outreach Program?

The failure of the Ron Paul revolution to achieve anything close to electoral success will undoubtedly give rise to a “backup story” which will attempt to reframe the candidacy as some sort of “educational outreach program.” (“Look at the number of people who have been exposed to libertarian ideas through Ron Paul! A presidential campaign provides unparalleled access to the general media, and the interest in the candidates exposes many new people to the message of freedom!”)

Unfortunately, this position has remained utterly untested, and so remains firmly in the land of vain assertion rather than empirical knowledge. It is certainly true that some people have been exposed to certain kinds of libertarian ideals through the Ron Paul campaign – but it is equally true that many people have been turned off libertarianism through exactly the same campaign. Secular thinkers scorn Ron Paul’s fundamentalist Christianity and rejection of evolution. Advocates of multiculturalism and visible minorities thoroughly dislike his attacks on illegal immigrants. Many women fear his approach to abortion; poverty advocates fear his approach to the welfare state – the list goes on and on.

The central question then remains – what is it about Ron Paul message that has drawn some people towards his brand of libertarianism? Is it his rational and consistent arguments from first principles? Of course not – he has made no such arguments whatsoever. Thus people must be drawn to his positions for emotional reasons – they are not swayed by the rational truth of his propositions, but rather because those propositions mesh with particular biases they hold already, such as a dislike of the federal government, a fear of illegal immigration, a frustration with taxation or the invasion of Iraq and so on.

This is not the spread of philosophical knowledge, but rather the exploitation and exacerbation of already-existing biases.

It is fundamentally impossible to call this progress.

To the untutored, an obvious inconsistency in one area of a thinker’s philosophy implies inconsistencies in other, less familiar areas. As a strong atheist, if I knew nothing about Dr. Paul’s positions on economics, I would look at his views on evolution and note that they were utterly untutored and incorrect.

If a thinker is incorrect in topics that I know something about, I am not likely to grant him credibility in topics that I know little to nothing about.

Thus while it is certainly true that some people have been emotionally drawn to Dr. Paul’s brand of libertarianism, it is equally true that many others have been driven away, never to return to libertarianism of any kind. There is no way to know for sure which way the pendulum has swung overall, but we can be certain that the more critical thinkers have kept their distance, while the more superstitious, emotional and credulous have not.

Thus reframing Dr. Paul’s candidacy as an “educational outreach program” does not transform his failure into a success. First of all, people primarily donated to his campaign because they wanted him to be elected president, not because they wanted him to educate other people about libertarianism. Secondly, the number of compromises required to sustain a political campaign dilute principled libertarianism into a kind of xenophobic nostalgia-for-a-country-that-never-was. If you can only access a widespread audience by saying things that are not true, you are doing far more harm than good.

Information Versus Propaganda

Particularly in economics, libertarianism has always had the best arguments. Over 300 years ago, Adam Smith clinched the case for free trade in “The Wealth of Nations” – today, we have less free trade than his contemporaries.

If a superior argument has failed to win for several hundred years, simply repeating that argument and hoping for a different outcome is an act of rank foolishness and self-willed blindness.

The greatest tragedy of libertarianism is that we continue to pursue the course of intellectual arguments, despite the clear and empirical fact that intellectual arguments do not carry the day.

Libertarian economics and political theories may be right, but the simple truth is that they are not effective. Coffee table conversations about free trade, property rights and the gold standard have done nothing to reverse the accelerating growth of state power – yet still, that is the approach taken by almost all libertarians. Debating, arguing, reasoning, citing facts – these are all empty intellectual exercises, which do nothing to advance the cause of liberty.

Libertarianism as we know it was born over 300 years ago – slightly after the scientific and medical revolutions. When we compare the progress of libertarianism to science and medicine, it is clear just how dismal our advance has been. Other rational disciplines have made staggering leaps forward, transforming the world in unimagined ways – while we continue to repeat the same stale and ineffective arguments that do not work and think that we are somehow changing the world.

Thus libertarianism has for hundreds of years sought to advance its agenda through education and political action. Indeed, such is the paucity of imagination within our movement that if we were somehow barred from pursuing either education or political action, we would literally have no idea what to do.

(In my podcast series at Freedomain Radio, I talk about the “third way” of advancing the cause of personal and political liberty. To be clear, I view this “third way” as the only way.)

Ron Paul and Closure

I have had my disagreements with Ron Paul supporters – and the Ron Paul candidacy in general – going back over a year, but I think that the time has now come to praise these starry-eyed political activists.

Throwing all of your energies behind a cause is incredibly liberating – because, if that cause does not work, you can at least get closure.

If you are in a bad marriage, where you fight constantly, then it is usually a good idea to do everything that you can to try and save that marriage. You should read books on how to communicate better, go to marriage counseling, strain every muscle and fiber to improve the relationship.

If, after months or years of working as hard as possible to improve your marriage, your marriage is still fractious and unhappy, you can at least walk away from it without regret, knowing that there is nothing more you could have done to change that outcome.

There is a kind of peace that comes from giving it your all, which libertarianism as a movement has gained from the highly committed focus of all of the Ron Paul supporters.

If the Ron Paul candidacy had received only a few hundred thousand dollars in donations, then the “answer” to the question of why his candidacy failed would be: “Because we didn’t have enough money.” If only a few volunteers had shown up to lick envelopes, make phone calls and pound lawn signs, then the candidacy would have failed because, “We didn’t have enough manpower.” If Ron Paul had been shut out of all of the major debates, his failures would have been blamed on a lack of media exposure.

However, none of those conditions arose – Ron Paul had access to tens of millions of dollars, tens of thousands of volunteers, many hours of mainstream media coverage – and unprecedented access to potential voters through blogs, podcasts, e-mails, videos and so.

Thus the intense and unwavering efforts of his supporters have removed all of the obvious reasons as to why his candidacy failed. No one can now seriously argue that if Ron Paul had only had another few million dollars, or another few hundred volunteers, he would have made it to the White House.

Thus, since the single greatest chance that libertarianism ever had – and will ever have – to achieve freedom through political activism and education – has utterly failed, we can now turn our attention towards how we can actually succeed.

What Went Wrong

The central problem with the Ron Paul candidacy can be summed up by a two sentence exchange that the congressman had with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show”.

Ron Paul said that the government did everything badly, and that everything should be privatized. Jon Stewart asked if that included the military. “Oh no!” exclaimed Dr. Paul.

There you have it, in a nutshell.

Propaganda is by its nature highly inconsistent – if it were consistent, it would be science, philosophy or just truth.

Citizens have been conditioned by statist propaganda for many, many years by the time they become politically active. They are able to hold opposing Orwellian “doublethink” principles without even noticing the inconsistencies. “The government that steals half my property at gunpoint is designed to protect my property” and so on.

Propaganda feels consistent to people, because it is consistent with the propaganda that everyone else believes. The only way to oppose propaganda is through complete consistency. The moment that inconsistent principles arise in any philosophy that opposes the general mythology of society, that opposing philosophy will inevitably fail. (We have seen the same phenomenon with Objectivism, the philosophy that utterly opposed the initiation of the use of force, but then supported the existence of a government.)

Thus when a libertarian candidate shows rank inconsistency within the first few seconds of a debate, the average audience member rolls his eyes and discounts the libertarian position. He says to himself: “Well, clearly libertarianism has nothing to do with intellectual consistency, and so it is in no way fundamentally different from the mainstream positions. Now, I can see that enormous difficulties will arise in my life if I accept the libertarian position, since I will become baffling and annoying to almost everyone I know. Thus, since the mainstream positions and the libertarian position both involve inconsistency, I might as well choose the inconsistency that is more comfortable.”

If you want to sell a product on the intellectual marketplace, it either needs to be highly beneficial or highly consistent. (Unfortunately, it cannot be both in our world as it stands.)

Highly beneficial beliefs are those that ease social interactions with those around you, or help advance your intellectual career. Highly consistent beliefs do quite the opposite – they irritate others, and tend to stall intellectual careers.

When the choice is between a highly advantageous inconsistent position (Republican/Democrat), and a highly disadvantageous inconsistent position (Libertarian), how many people will choose the latter?

Well, as we have seen from the numbers, all too few.

Consistency and Integrity

Libertarianism – even the economic aspects – is fundamentally based upon moral principles such as property rights and the universal validity of the nonaggression principle.

The only way that we can bring freedom to this world is to live by valid moral principles. Since taxation is the initiation of the use of force, then those who advocate taxation are either ignorant of its evil, or evil themselves.

Thus our first goal must be to educate people on the immorality of the system that we live in. However, libertarianism has for 300 years gotten stuck in a “broken record” repetition of its first five minutes. After communicating to people the basic reality that taxation is evil, libertarians then just repeat that argument – and a thousand others – without ever acting on that belief.

If you truly believe that taxation is evil, then those who advocate taxation – the initiation of force against you – are evil. If taxation is evil, but those who advocate it are not, then belief and action become completely disconnected, and ethics cease to exist.

A child is not a Nazi if he cheers Hitler while knowing nothing of Hitler’s policies and actions. A man becomes a Nazi when he cheers Hitler while knowing what Hitler thinks and does. In the same way, a person is not evil if he advocates taxation without understanding the moral evil of taxation – however, the moment that he understands this evil, he becomes responsible for his advocacy.

What do libertarians do when they tell someone that taxation is evil, and that person continues to advocate taxation?

Why, in general, they either repeat the argument, or switch to the evils of welfare, the war on drugs, the Patriot Act, the war on terror, fiat currency, public education and so on.

The most basic inconsistency in libertarianism is that morality is considered both essential and immaterial. It is essential, because it underpins the entire philosophy – it is immaterial, however, in that libertarians continue to associate with people that they define as evil.

If you define a man as evil, and you continue to associate with him – whether he is your brother, father, friend or whatever – then all your words and speeches and ethical theories amount to less than nothing.

This is why I say that education and political activism will never advance the cause of libertarianism one single inch.

Freedom will advance only when we act with integrity in our personal relationships – when we reject those we define as evil.

As libertarians, we expect people to accept wrenching changes in their lives as a result of our philosophy. We expect public sector employees to switch over to the private sector. We expect drug enforcement agents to lose their entire careers. We expect corporate participants in the military-industrial complex to accept catastrophic downsizing. We expect people trapped in the quicksand of the welfare state to claw their way out. We expect a decommissioned soldier to make the transition to a civilian life, even if he wants to spend the rest of his career in the military. We expect those who exploit the existing system – the financiers, politicians and state-protected unions – to give up their inflated profits.

We expect so much from everyone else – and so little from ourselves.

“You should give up your lucrative and comfortable public sector position,” we say, “though I will not give up spending time with my cousin who supports the war in Iraq.”

“You should give up your war profiteering,” we say to mercantilist corporations, “though I will continue to party with my friends who fully support the state pointing its guns at my head.”

Is it any wonder that the Ron Paul revolution could never have succeeded?

Is it any wonder that for the past few hundred years, libertarianism has made virtually no progress whatsoever?

The answer is very, very simple.

If we want to free the world, we have to stop lecturing others about our ethics, and start living them ourselves.

If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine of course – but if you don’t want to live your ethics, can you do the rest of us a favour please?

Please – just stop talking about “ethics,” and thus discrediting those of us who are actually trying to make a difference.

A Transcript of Freedomain Radio Podcast 70: “The Parable of the Apple – or, How to control a human soul...”

(A transcript of Podcast 70 from www.freedomainradio.com. The original podcast is available here: http://www.freedomainradio.com/Traffic_Jams/how_to_control_a_human_soul.mp3)

Good afternoon everybody. It is Wednesday, at about 4:27 on January the 25th. I hope you’re doing well. We are going to chat about a most exciting topic today. Not there all not exciting, but this one in particular is juicy to the point almost of being overbearing to one’s intellectual taste buds, to mix metaphors so much that I might as well put my brain on frappe.

So, the topic that I’d like to chat about today is the question of exercising power. How do you exercise power over another human being? How do you corrupt them? How do you take his natural integrity, intelligence, and all the wonder that is the human mind, and turn it against itself and get it to eat itself and get it to be sort of a snake consuming its own tail? How do you wrap people up in neuroses, and how do you make them obedient? How to get them to subjugate themselves to your will without you even having to lift a finger, barely even an eyebrow? And the reason that I want to talk about this is that I’m very interested in starting a cult. No, actually, I think you’ve got to know the weapons of your enemies if you’re going to successfully oppose them. You need to know what they are doing so that you can unravel the damage that historically we’ve all had done to us in this rather messy culture that we live in, so that we can not only begin to reverse the effects of this kind of power structure within our own minds and hearts and souls, but also so that we can help other people unravel the mess that they have become.

I view certain damages that are done early to the mind in life as pretty irrevocable. The mind is not so plastic that you could, say, for instance, be locked in a cupboard for your first twenty years and up as a normal human being. You do experience some particular phases in your brain development which are pretty central and may or may not be reversible, and generally the earlier the experiences the less reversible they are.

Thus I am not saying that we can lickety-split fix ourselves up and be right as rain, but we can at least learn to strengthen where we are weakest. There is always adaptability within the human mind, as we know from seeing people who have terrible brain injuries who find other ways of adapting. So I think that it is well worth having a look at the methodology by which one twists the human mind so that we can to some degree allow ourselves or invite ourselves to become untwisted – which is quite a bit of work, let me tell you! But it is entirely satisfying in its conclusion.

I myself make no claims to be perfectly sane by any stretch of the imagination. I suffered, in a sense, my own intellectual “foot binding” just like everybody else, but what I have done is explored the aches and creaks of my mental joints, to the point where I think I have a pretty good idea or fairly good idea of how a straightening out could occur and what it might look like.

So, let’s start at the very beginning, which is: how do you get people, how do you get children, to detach themselves from two basic things: sensual evidence and simple facts? It really is amazing, when you think about it, how power structures work to do this, and the fantastic success that they have in this area.

So: how do you get children to ignore the evidence of their senses, the evidence of the senses transmitted through the autonomous nerve system which is absolutely outside of our control? We can choose to open our eyes or close them, but we can’t choose, if we open our eyes, not to see – I mean other than pulling a King Lear or, I guess, a Gloucester, gouging out eyes.

We don’t have any control over the actions of our autonomous nerve system in the perception and transmission of external, material reality, or in providing the evidence of external, material reality. So it would seem fairly hard to get children, who love to explore the world, and curl and uncurl their limbs, and figure out object constancy, and figure out how the world works, and so on to stop processing reality. It’s just what children love to do – that’s what a lot of logic games are all about. That’s what a lot of physical games, sports and so on, are all about – exploring the world, controlling one’s body, controlling one’s mind, focusing, and becoming disciplined in a sort of happy way towards the exercise of one’s creative and intellectual powers.

This is a perfectly natural development for children, so how on earth is it so possible and seems so easy to twist children into these obedient neurotic slaves to power, which so many of us end up becoming to one degree or another – not just slaves to power, but infected with this wild Stockholm Syndrome, wherein people end up loving the state? They love religion! They love God! They love all this stuff! It’s more than just, “Well, you know, I was raised this way, and so I guess this is what is considered normal, and what do I know?” I mean, people will go out and have banner-waving, cheering, standing ovations, mad stampede crowd lunacy for the president or for the Pope or for leaders or members of the cultural elite or the political elite or even the economic elite to some degree.

I mean, they are not just hammered down. They are hammered down, reforged, reshaped, recharged, reenergized, and reformed as people who love slavery to the point where they think slavery is freedom! I mean, we live in a 1984 universe, intellectually, and the only reason we don’t live in a 1984 universe physically is because there’s some leftover still from the Enlightenment and from capitalism is which have managed to keep us going to some degree, in a diminishing kind of way. But intellectually, we’re are just… It’s “Spanish Inquisition time” as far as people’s ability to reason goes.

So how is it possible that human beings who are so constructed to love freedom, to love the exercise of ability, to love rationality, to automatically transmit or receive the evidence of the senses, how is it that human beings are so turned against all of this as children?

Well, the first thing that you need to do in order to begin the process of destroying a child’s mind is you to set up categories, empty categories, which are moral absolutes. I know, it’s not exactly in the kindergarten book, but trust me – well don’t trust me, let me reason it out and see if you believe me. This is how it works: You, with great reverence – as the corrupting teacher, or parent, or person with authority – with great reverence, you vividly describe and are enormously passionate about things which the child cannot see.

Of course the first example of this that leaps to mind for most people is God, but that’s just one aspect of these crazy kaleidoscopes of fantasy that children’s brains are squeezed into and cut up on. So, of course, God - people all say: “Let’s have grace, let’s pray, let’s worship.” Of course, Santa Claus is just one thin edge of the wedge in all of this.

So first you speak with enormous reverence and passion about things which the child cannot see. And the child, of course, is baffled. You are playing enormously on the power that you hold over the child – I mean, you hold the power of life and death over this child, there’s simply no way to get around that. That is just the nature of biology: children will cleave to the wishes of their parents above all else, because without the parents there’s no survival, and so, biologically, those children who fought the moral absolutes or commandments of their parents just tended to die off. Parents have absolutely no problem sacrificing children to abstract moral ideals, as we see throughout the history of the world in terms of wars and religious torture and even beatings.

That child is going to inevitably cleave to the will of the parent – and so what you do, if you use are this evil, corrupting parent, is that you will – wild-eyed, or calmly, or passionately, but with some kind of reverence – talk about things that aren’t there, as if it’s perfectly natural, that you would talk about these things that don’t exist.

You basically say that there’s an invisible apple on the table – and this would be your basic approach to wrecking a child’s mind very early on in life.

The child knows apples, and he knows oranges, and he’s getting the hang of that stuff. So he’s maybe two years old, two-and-a-half years old – maybe if he’s bright eighteen months – so he’s getting the hang of material reality, and how to describe things, and categorize things, and understand them.

So what you do, to start to undermine the child’s sense of competency in the physical realm, in the realm of the senses, is you all sit down to dinner – and there is nothing on the table.

Then you, with great solemnity, reach over and pick up an “invisible apple.” You pick up this invisible apple, along with the whole family, and with great solemnity you all take a bite out of this invisible apple, and you say, “That is the best apple I have ever tasted in my life. It tastes like all the sugar and chocolate and glucose and fructose and caramel you can dream of all piled together. It’s a mouth orgasm that I just can’t even speak about!”

And everybody agrees. This is “The Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome.”

Everybody agrees, and then everybody mimes, and so on.

The child, of course, is completely bewildered – let’s say is the youngest child. The youngest child is just completely baffled – he can’t for the life of him understand what on earth is going on. Everything has kind of made sense so far. Every sort of concept or abstraction that he are building on based on the evidence of his senses kind of makes sense.

In the beginning, when you’re playing with a little baby, you roll a ball that they can see. You roll it under a blanket and they just lose interest, because they think it’s ceased to exist. At some point – a couple of months, six months, seven months, eight months – they begin to develop object constancy, where they go, “Ahah! The ball that has rolled under the blanket has not ceased to exist, it is simply under the blanket!” And then they pull the blanket off the ball and continue to play with it, if that’s what they want.

Every abstraction that the child has built up on – that letters mean things on the page that mean objects that are transmitted through the senses, and there’s a correlation between concepts and instances – all of the amazing and fantastic developments of neuron complexity and brain complexity that is going on in a child’s mind for the first couple of years – it all sort of comes to complete shuddering halt during this imaginary fruit eating dinner table conversation, because everything that he’s eaten before has substance, and tastes, and he can see it, and everybody else can see it, and now the whole family, everybody around the table is “eating” something and he can’t see it.

So then you think, as a child, “Well, maybe everyone else can see it!” So you reach out to where everybody seems to be taking the fruit from, and you can’t feel anything! Well what you gonna do? I mean, it’s a bizarre and deranged situation!

There was a play that was put on in the 1930s, I think it was – “Gaslight” – where a man was trying to drive his wife insane, so he just rearranged things within the house. He would put a picture up and they would all comment on how lovely the picture was, and then he’d take the picture down off and she would then say, “Well, where did the picture go?” And he’d say, “What picture?” And she’d say, “Well, the picture we were talking about.” And he’d say, “Well, we were never talking about a picture, what you mean?” He would be completely baffled, and he’d continue to do this over and over again and, of course, completely messing with her sense of reality.

This kind of behaviour at the dinner table is just so astoundingly corrupting and destructive of the child’s mind.

The child’s first reaction is horror and fear, because one of two things is occurring. Either he’s lost the ability to process essential sensual information – which, to living organism, is a death sentence – and a murderously horrible death sentence, because it’s going to be a slow, horrible death. You either can’t figure out what to eat, or you try to eat a pinecone or you can’t hear the lion coming, or you try to drink water and it turns out to be blood or urine, and it just becomes a horrible death sentence if you lose the ability to process essential sensual information - that’s just a terrible thing to happen! There’s almost no worse fate to an organism other than simply a quick death.

So, either the child has lost the ability to process sensual information, or the child has the ability to process essential information and his entire family is lying to him about a very essential fact.

Those are two absolutely, unbelievably terrible options for a child, a young child, to face. “Either I’ve lost the ability for my brain to work effectively with reality, and therefore I’m going to face a life of incredible struggle, danger, and death, and it’s going to be very short life at that, too. Either that has happened, or my family is lying to me in such a fundamentally destructive way that I would actually prefer it if they just beat me across the head with a stick!”

At least you feel that, it doesn’t interfere with your ability to process reality, it doesn’t make you doubt your senses, it doesn’t make you believe in things that aren’t true, it’s just like, “Ow, that hurts,” and you take cover or go for shelter or whatever, but this is much worse! This is worse than a direct assault on the body – which at least reaffirms the evidence of the senses in a brutal kind of manner. This is a direct assault on one’s capacity to trust one’s own senses and one’s own mind to perceive reality!

We can’t survive without a successful or accurate perception of reality at the material level. So it’s a death sentence that the family is passing upon this young mind that is opening to all the wonders of the physical world when they are miming and saying, “Mmmm, that tastes wonderful,” and everyone’s pretending that that they’re eating, and if they’re not eating and they’re lying, it’s unbelievably destructive! It’s the worst kind of abuse, to tell a child that his entire brain has ceased to function correctly!

So the child is placed in an absolutely impossible situation – and if you want to look at the foundation of all the corruption of power that exists within the material world, within human society – everything from a cop pulling you over when you’re going 1km an hour over the speed limit and giving you a big fine because he’s got to meet his quota, all the way to the deaths of millions in the gulags – you can trace it right back, all the way back, to this one core central moment, when the child is faced with people he has to trust, creating a situation where he either has to hate them for their direct assault upon his capacity to understand the world and to live within it – because they’re lying to him – or he has to look within himself and say that he is insane and deranged, and reality no longer makes any sense, and that as an organism he is not going to survive.

Every single aspect of human corruption, and human evil, and human madness, and human hatred, and human fear that is existential in nature, goes directly back to this fork in the road that every child faces when he are in a society, when he is in a family that pretends to believe in things that are not sensual, not rational, not provable, not logical, not true.

Even more horribly, the child also recognizes that his parents and his siblings have no problem doing this to him! How is this going to affect his capacity to love them, and to love himself, and to love the world, and to love the society he’s in if people are perfectly willing to do this to him. In fact, they want to do it to him! They’re not even being forced to it, they’re not even indifferent. It’s a staged show, because every human being that comes into society who is not insane by nature is capable of blowing this nonsensical, irrational, crazy scheme right out of the water, and thus must be inoculated against empirical reality, truth and reason, from the very beginning. Everybody recognizes the risk that is involved in this, and everybody recognizes the danger of somebody breaking through this sick ice and actually finding out the truth about the nonsense that people call truth and reality, socially. So every child goes