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 through this horrible fork in the road where they’re told things that directly contradict the evidence of logic and their senses – which they need, which they must rely on in order to survive as an organism, which they are passionate about, and enjoy the exercise of and development of. This direct assault on one’s identity as a species, as an animal, as a rational creature…

Every child faces this fork in the road, and the destruction and corruption that is everywhere in society flows directly out of this particular fork in a way that we will talk about a little bit further as we go along.

Let’s continue with the steps to destroy a child’s mind. So – there’s this child at the dinner table, and everyone is very seriously telling this child that there is this invisible apple to eat and that they are eating it and it tastes goooood!

What is the child to do?

There is this unbelievable fork in the road, where he either has to hate those who are attacking him in such a fundamentally destructive manner, or he has to doubt his own sanity and capacity to survive as an organism, as a life, as a human being. It is this fork in the road that triggers the true destruction of what a psychologist might call the “true self,” or our honest self, or our integrity, or what I might just call our actual personality, our real personality.

Our bodies have a natural growth to them. We’re going to grow, going to get to a certain amount of height, a certain amount of the average weight. But if we’re put in these horrible contortion machines, then we’re going to end up with an unnatural body, which is all we’ve got to work with. It’s like the foot binding metaphor I’ve used before, that if you’re like these Chinese women in the 19th Century and you have your feet bound for a number of years, you end up with these horrible little curled-under stumps – and that’s what you have to work with. There’s no “original foot” for you to get back to, but there is an “original foot” that you could have had if they had not been bound.

That’s sort of how I feel about the personality structure of a human being, that we’re sort of warped by these insane experiences, but we can get back to something a lot healthier, and that’s the purpose of my conversations with the segments of the world who enjoy this conversation.

The fundamental break that occurs, is a reality break, or a break in belonging, or break in attachment, that occurs at this “dinner table from hell.” The problem that the child is facing is, the statement that sort of scrolls across our minds at these moments. (And I don’t know if you can remember yours. I can sort of remember the after effects of mine. I don’t remember the one directly, but I remember very shortly thereafter. I can mention later if it comes back to my mind.) The statement that is going to scroll across the child’s mind when he or she is at this dinner table is, “I am now doomed to live in an asylum.” And that asylum is called “the world.” That asylum is called “my family.” That asylum is called “those who are close to me.” That asylum is called “society” or “normalcy” or however you want to put it. The basic statement is that, “I am now condemned to live in an asylum.”

That terrible statement encompasses both the options that the child is really facing. The first option is that those around him or her are trying to harm the child and undermine the child’s capacity to have any kind of trust in those who claim to care about him,” and that is, as you know, a horrible thing to contemplate or face.

That is one aspect that is going to occur.

The second aspect that is that people are lovingly and actually seeing these apples, but that the child, is in no way capable of perceiving them, and is therefore fundamentally flawed, dangerous, and sort of mentally ill as a living organism, as a human being.

So the asylum that the child is now facing is that he lives in a world of insanity, and either he is sane but those around him are telling him or pretending to him that he is insane – which means that the asylum is composed of those around him – or, the asylum is actually that everyone else around him is sane, and that he’s the only member of this asylum.

However, the asylum is absolutely there – the asylum is either his own mind or everyone around him. This is the break in belonging that occurs for a child when people around him tell him that things are there and exist and are real that he can clearly and plainly see are not there, don’t exist, and are not real.

Now, of course, the question becomes: “Why does he of often believe that it is him? Why doesn’t he just believe that it’s everyone else around him who is just messing with his head, and just take that approach to the problem of being lied to?”

Well, that is a perfectly valid and logical response, and we’ll get back to that in a second, but first I would like to deal with the problem of virtue.

The problem that power has is not with other people who want power, but rather with people who are moral.

Morality is the opposite of power. Morality is the opposite of dominance. Morality is the opposite of subjugation, or exploitation, because morality is all about finding what is common and true in the world – common to all human beings and true empirically and also biologically – and therefore it’s not about subjugation, because it is creating one rule for everyone, and the only way that you can have subjugation or exploitation is if you create different rules for different people.

Thus the real threat that power structures face is not from those who would wrest that power structure away from them, because they can be beaten or even if they can’t be beaten, the vast majority of those who benefit from a power structure are not those at the top, but those in the hazy middle – you know, the money changers, the legislators in the background, the middle managers and so on.

This sort of bureaucratic parasitical power structure feasts on subjugation and is deathly afraid of morality, because if morality is applied to the situation, the whole gig is up. That’s why they focus so much on owning morality in these power structures.

So who they really have to worry about are those concerned with goodness, who are concerned with morality and righteousness, with brightness and logical consistency.

So – how does this invisible apple eating madness contest, how does it deal with the problem of somebody saying, “You know, you guys are just immoral! You’re trying to harm me, you’re trying to exercise power or control over me!”?

(I mean, obviously that would be highly unusual for a child to say – in fact, I think it would be fairly unprecedented for child to say that, but you never know, they might, as they get into their teenage years or so on…)

So those who are keen on destructive and exploitive power structures, those people are deathly afraid of the moral man, the moral woman, the person who logically points out the inconsistencies in what they’re doing, and the hypocrisy, and the immorality. So what they have to do, the gradient that they have to mix in, is that only bad people can’t see the apple.

Seeing the apple is thus always portrayed as synonymous with virtue.

Thus – if you say to this child, “Mmmm, mmm, mmm! That invisible apple tastes fantastic!” well you’re not going to get a lot of allegiance from the child because the invisible apple doesn’t exist, so it’s not going taste good to them. So why on earth would they involve themselves in this charade?

Well, of course, what you do is say: “Only a only a good little boy or a good little girl can see this apple!”

Again, we’re back to “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which is fantastic – one of the most amazing stories in all of literature, in my view, and entirely unappreciated by those who study politics, because it is politics. I mean, it’s exactly what politics is – and religion, for that matter, and nationalism, and racism, and sexism, and all of the “isms” that so corrupt our natural and common humanity and interconnectedness.

So you say that only a good little boy can see the apple – and the more good you are, the better the apple tastes!

This, of course, is the false dichotomy that is used to trap those children who have a natural inclination towards logical consistency or morality, which is the people that they are most concerned about or afraid of. So the elders say, “Only good little boys can see the apple!”

So, of course, you’re faced with another choice, but now you have a moral element.

You’re not faced with either “I’m insane or they’re insane – either I’m unable to survive or they are trying to kill my mental development.” Now you have an additional element layered into the sickness – or in this case the inculcation of an illness in another – it sort of follows the same pattern as a viral invasion in your body would.

Now you have an additional layer, which is: this lie only enslaves you if you want to be good.

What if you don’t care about being good? We’ll get to that in a second – but if you do care about being good, if you have that sort of empathetic sensitivity and moral nature, it’s sort of innate within you (and I’m not saying this is by any means the majority of people, but it certainly does exist), then you’re going to be very interested in being a good person.

This moral lie also raises the stakes of questioning those who are “totally sure” that there is an apple there and maybe you just can’t see it. You could at least stay at the level of sensual error, an error in the senses or in interpretation of the senses, so maybe they really can see the apple, but if I tell them that they’re wrong, I’m telling them that their sense apparatus is faulty, or their conclusions are faulty, or maybe they’ve been struck with some sort of ailment that they are not aware of that is affecting their vision or their ability to process physical or visual stimuli.

The child obviously isn’t going to say it in that sort of manner, but that’s still a thought that can occur in the mind of a child, how can something “exist” that patently does not exist? They can still trust their senses, and then they can say, “You people who are telling me that this thing exists, you’re obviously not doing very well in terms of your ability to process things, because it quite obviously doesn’t.”

The wonderfully invasive and horrible thing that happens when you begin to say, “Only good boys can see the invisible apple,” is you now raise the stakes for that boy to contradict you. If you’re the evil, corrupting parent, you’ve now raised the stakes for the boy to contradict you, because now you’ve said that only immoral people cannot see the apple.

Thus if you’re the child, you’re then faced with this choice: you then either say, “I’m an immoral boy and I can’t see the apple,” which is sort of surrendering the premise and giving up something even more important, in a sense, than sensual competence (or the ability to process information correctly), which is your moral nature, your goodness.

I would rather be blind than evil, so let’s just say that it would be pretty catastrophic for anybody interested in or with a natural bend towards morality, empathy, and an ethical approach to things to label themselves as evil because they can’t see the apple.

So then, if you don’t want to label yourself as evil – and you can’t approach the parent who is telling you that the apple exists from the standpoint of error, because the parent has said, “Only evil boys can’t see the apple, evil people cannot see the apple. Good people can see the apple” – you are truly stuck.

If you say, “Dad,” or “Mom – I don’t think that you can see the apple because there is no apple there!” – you’re automatically calling them evil, and you’re not going to have a whole lot of luck when you are a child calling your parents evil.

That’s why they layer in this moral dimension. They raise the stakes to the point where if you say you can’t see the apple, then you are evil, but if you say that the apple doesn’t exist and “you guys are trying to screw with my head,” then because the parents have layered in the moral dimension, they cannot withdraw from the position. They have now used the argument from morality – and once you take the argument from morality out of its scabbard, it’s a sword that you just can’t sheath again. It’s out there, and it’s just a fact. You simply cannot withdraw from that; you lose all parental authority.

So that is a pretty important aspect to what happens in this particular realm. You can’t call those who are telling you all this corrupting, immoral nonsense evil, because they simply won’t accept it. And of course, even as a child, the horror of what is occurring at this moment is so hard to understand. It is just so hard to understand and to process this kind of unbelievable destruction of your identity and complete rejection and repudiation of your mental development and crippling blow to your self esteem. I mean, this is the root of neuroses and religious fanaticism and people who grow up to become dictatorial or bullying or overly subservient, this is where the root of all of this starts from.

So if they can get the person who is moral, who’s interested in morality, or the child who is sort of good by nature, wants to please, wants to be a good person, then, by getting the person to believe that if they can’t see the invisible apple they’re bad, well then you torture them and you set them up with this lifelong quest to see an invisible apple which they just frickin’ well can’t do! You’ve put them into this mode of a dog chasing its own tail for the rest of its life and that person is then going to pose absolutely zero threat to the power structures that exist in the world, because he’s going to be so consumed with his own inability to see this invisible apple that he’s not going to raise any sort of basic or sensible questions to those in power.

So that’s how you defuse the moral kid.

There’s another kind of kid who doesn’t necessarily – let’s just theoretically call that person “the older brother” – that person does not have the same amount of natural empathy, probably because that person is now complicit in the destruction of their younger siblings’ minds, and so they have a lot more aggression and a lot more natural dominance built into their personalities. (Whether that’s innate, or based on the fact that they’re an older sibling, I don’t know, but it does seem to follow that pattern; I mean, the birth order is pretty important. Of course there are exceptions, but that’s fine, I can live with exceptions. As long as there’s a general trend that can be identified, that’s good enough for me.)

So this naturally aggressive person becomes, in this moment, when this occurs to him or when he’s inflicting it on someone else, this person becomes cynical.

And that’s perfectly fine for those in power.

If you’re chasing your own tail and wondering why you can’t be a better person and see this magical, invisible apple that everyone else can see, you’re no threat. You’re going to work, you’re going to pay your taxes, you’re obedient, and you’re always like, “Oh, what else can I do to become a better person? I really wanna be a better person!” Blah blah blah.” You’re just running around chasing your own tail, you’re no threat to anybody in power because you’re just sort of a complying weenie.

If, however, you are a more aggressive person, then you’re going to look right through that invisible apple and say, “Everyone’s a jerk, there’s no such thing as goodness, everything’s just about power and control.”

But you can’t use the argument from morality, because you’ve given up your values, you’ve given up the idea that there’s such a thing as right and wrong, good and evil, and you’re just saying, “Yeah, well, this is what they tell you just to control you.”

(I wanted to mention this point earlier but it escaped my mind, one of the ways that you would test the theory of the fact that a lie that is told to children that is not moral in nature can be withdrawn, but a lie that is told to children that is moral in nature or is presented as moral in nature, that it cannot be withdrawn, you would obviously contrast something like Christianity – which is a lie told to children that is moral in nature, or thought to be moral in nature, or fantasized to be moral in nature – versus the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and so on – which are lies told to children that are not moral in nature – whether parents end up withdrawing this and sort of “Hah hah,” but you don’t get this with religion, because religion is presented as moral in nature, therefore it can no longer be withdrawn from the discussion, because then you’ve portrayed yourself as an unbelievable, destructive hypocrite, which parents generally aren’t that keen on doing, because they want to continue to pillage their children’s time and attention for the remainder of their natural born lives.)

So if you do have this more aggressive style of personality, then when you’re faced with this terrible choice at the dining table, which is to believe that you are insane or other people are bad or trying to control you, then what you do is: you say, “Well I don’t care about the moral argument, that just as nonsense, because I don’t believe in morality, I don’t believe in right or wrong, everyone’s just trying to mess with me!”

So then you become sort of pugilistic and aggressive, and you’re mad, and you’re angry, and you’re cynical, and you’re nihilistic.

Again, you’re absolutely zero threat to those in power. I mean, you can rail if you want, you can fight the cops, you can get mad at them, you can yell epithets at them and so on, you can throw rocks at the police cars – zero threat to those in power. I mean, just absolutely no threat. You might as well just be spitting in the wind and hoping to bring down a cloud with your thoughts.

This is sort of the duality that occurs, and this is somewhat dependant, perhaps, on what occurs, perhaps on birth order, on personality type, the way that in which it’s applied.

You could just have jerky parents who are overbearing… “orifices,” let’s say, to keep my iTunes rating… Those parents are sort of going to yell at you and bully at you and drag you around, and that may produce somebody who’s more aggressive.

And then you have the other type of parent, generally it’s more associated with the feminine, who’s sort of soft and gentle and just sort of disappointed if you don’t see the apple and wants you so desperately to be a good person and guilts and manipulates you and so on – and that is the type of person who’s going to be more of the compliant woman or man through that kind of emotional problem…

Once you have created this invisible category of virtue that is not associated with any logic, is not associated with anything material or anything verifiable, or anything rational, or available through the senses, once you’ve created this incredible imaginary category of virtue, and you have forced your child to have to kowtow to that concept – well, you’re set! I mean, you’re absolutely set!

This child, who grows into an adult, is going to be completely compliant for the rest of his or her natural life. You have won the battle. You have completely realigned their reality processing to not have any concern with things like facts, except as sort of a lesser kind of way, like “I’ve got a drive and put my signal on, and I’ve gotta get groceries and I’ve got to eat when I get hungry and wash when I’m dirty.” I mean they’ll deal with it at that sort of basic level, but when it comes to anything to do with the virtue, they have no interest in fact. In fact (haha), facts are a direct threat to them, because they have now had to swallow this whole lie and base their whole attachments on their family and their basis of their identity and, if they’re moral in nature, the root of their morals on a falsehood!

So any time you start bringing up facts, these people are going to get angry, or petty, or pouty, or withdrawn – they’re going to use some negative emotion to try and coat and repel anyone who gets close to talking about the truth with these people.

This is what Noam Chomsky calls the “narrative.” (I mean, he’s a crazy lefty, but he’s got some good points!)

The “narrative” is the story that people are told about the moral history or the nature of their country, good versus bad, us versus them. The British are great, the Germans are evil, we have nothing in common except right after the war, then we’re going to give money to the Germans . . . . I mean people just make this stuff up all the time – 90% of the e-mails I get is people just making up stuff and thinking that it’s got something to do with reality.

But when you start bringing facts to bear on these people, they start getting hostile in one form or another, either passive-aggressive or otherwise aggressive – and that’s because once they had to swallow this madness of the invisible apple, what relationship to facts could their ethical reasoning ever have in the future?

It simply can’t exist.

Once you believe that something that is invisible is the center of morality, and the center of truth and right and all that is good in the world, what possible reference could you have to facts about ethics in the future? Or about anything, for that matter? About the existence of things? You’re going to be drawn toward emotionally compelling stories, you’re going to be drawn toward emotional bullying, and you’re going to be drawn towards just making other people feel guilty for not believing you, or being aggressive and basically saying, “Well if you believe this or that you’re a bad person.” But you’re not going have any reference to a single fact, or a single statistic, other than those that are made up by people with a like-minded view.

But you’re not going to have any reference to any facts. You’re going to have instantaneous answers that you make up on the spot based on prior prejudices. How could it be otherwise? You’ve already accepted as the core of your reality processing that invisible things exist and have supreme value and ultimate moral authority. How on earth are you going to process anything from even a remotely reality-based or empirically-based or fact-based standpoint ever again? Well, you can’t!

And that’s fantastic for the people in power, because if you can’t track anything to do with material reality, if you can’t track anything to do with facts, if you can’t apply logic and empiricism to something like morality, you’re completely helpless. You are a lamb in a slaughterhouse when it comes to being abused by power, by those in power, by those willing to use violence to achieve their ends.

You’re absolutely without defenses in this realm. You can groan, and you can grumble you can roll your eyes, and you can write in your blog that you’re mad at things and so on. But it really doesn’t matter: you’re fundamentally, absolutely, and completely helpless, because how are you going to question the morality of those in power with reference to logic and facts and our common humanity, when at the very beginning of things, you swallowed this invisible apple and called it tasty? Your reality processing and your logical processing and your central processing is completely wrecked. You might as well drive a car off a cliff and then try and win a race with it. It’s just wrecked, it’s smoking, it’s wheels have fallen off! I mean, it can be repaired, of course, but it takes a lot of work, and the first thing you have to do is recognize that it’s broken.

You’ve got to recognize that your mind is kind of broken, your mind is kind of damaged. What they call “the norm” is an asylum, what they call the norm is mentally ill. What they call the norm is people who believe in things like a government. Government doesn’t exist! There is no such thing as the state! There’s people with guns, and there’s people who obey them. That’s it. There’s no such thing as the state, no such thing as countries, no such thing as gods, or demons. It’s all just such a complete nonsense. Even gender exists in reality. You have biological differences that you can categorize. But nations don’t exist in reality. Culture doesn’t exist in reality.

Culture is just – and I’ll do another podcast on this – culture is just the scar tissue of the child abuse of the invisible apple. I mean, why do Americans believe different things than French children? Why does everyone love their own country and love their own culture? Because of child abuse! Because that’s what they’re told, they’re told all these false things!

My wife is told, “Oh, the Greeks are the best, we gave the world this and that and the other,” and the Italian kids, “Oh, Italians are best,” the British: “Oh, the British are the best.” It’s all just nonsense. You’re filling your children up with complete idiocy and falsehoods and telling them that it’s all “morality” and self esteem based. It’s complete child abuse. All culture that is not based on this simple observable facts of reality is just scar tissue that grows over being lied to as children. But we can deal with that another time.

I think it’s very important to understand the number of things that you’re told as a child that don’t have any kind of reality, that you are told to be loyal to, that you are told to believe in, that you are told to infuse with some sort of moral energy – they’re all complete falsehoods. And the wonderful thing about it is that concepts have no voice. This is the sort of nail in the coffin as far as obeying things like this state and politicians and priests and the military. If “the country” is virtue – my country right or wrong – if the country is virtue, if the country doesn’t exist, then the country obviously can’t tell you what to do. If God is goodness, but God doesn’t exist, then God cannot tell you what to do. So who gets to tell you what to do? Well, the person who claims to represent this fantasy abstract. So it’s how one human being bypasses another human being’s legitimate anger of being bullied and told what to do.

The priest doesn’t say, “Give me your money because my name is Bob and I want your money.” The priest says, “Give God your money, because God wants you to give him your money, because God says ‘help the poor.’” It’s not, “Obey me,” its, “Obey this abstract entity that I made up – because only I know what it wants!”

I mean it is ridiculous! It is absolutely insane! These things don’t exist – and because they don’t exist, they can’t voice anything, and so the people who make them up and get you to believe in them say that you have to obey: “Oh not me. It’s not me. It’s for the good of the country. The country. Your country needs you!” No! Roosevelt needs you! People who profit from the war need you to go and get killed. Your country does not need you because countries don’t exist! God is not telling you to do anything, the priest is telling you to do things! Crazy lunatic monks 5,000 years dead are telling you to do things! There’s no such thing as God, or country, or state. They can’t tell you to do anything because they don’t exist! It’s like trying to get paid with the idea of money – it doesn’t exist! It’s a mere conceptual tag that is imperfectly derived from physical instances – and in the case of country, it’s not even derived from anything. It’s a line in a map in somebody’s head. Your country doesn’t need you – countries don’t have needs because countries don’t exist!

And that’s how they bypass your natural resentment at being told what to do, and it’s time that we got that natural resentment back. Your country doesn’t “need” you – George Bush needs you to go shoot people, or he wants you to. If you reframe that a little bit more accurately in your head, you’ll just see why I say it’s so insane.

George Bush says “I want you to go shoot that guy,” you’re gonna be like, “Well who the hell are you?” But you drape him in all this pomp and circumstance and he is the President of the United States. Well “President” doesn’t exist, it’s just a weird little conceptual label for a political fantasy. The “United States” doesn’t exist, “Iraq” doesn’t exist. There’s desert and there’s people, there’s no such thing as Iraq, no such thing as the United States, they simply don’t exist. A tree exists; the concept of tree, or the abstract notion of a forest, does not exist. A tree exists, a forest does not exist. A forest is an aggregate, it’s a collection, it does not exist.

But if they can get you to believe that these things do exist, then they can say, “Your country needs you to do this, God needs you to do that, your father needs you to do the other!” Tell you what: “father” does not exist. There’s a guy who had sex with your mother whose name is Bob who’s telling you what to do. “Your father, your mother.” I mean, in order to speak sensibly about Christina’s family, we had to start referring to them by their Christian names. You can’t refer to these things in any kind of abstract way that makes sense. “Father” is a category, it doesn’t exist. It’s like “forest.” It applies to more than one person, therefore it doesn’t exist.

“You listen to your father.” “You listen to Bob.” Which one sounds more compelling? If you obey a category, you feel like you’re obeying something larger than the person who inhabits it. “I’m obeying a priest, I’m not obeying Ralph.” Because if you say that you’re obeying Ralph, you kind of feel like a slave, right? But if you say, “I’m obeying the will of God,” you feel a smug kind of virtue creeping over you and fogging up your head. And that’s exactly what the point of all of these abstract moral abstractions are. They’re designed to bypass your natural animal resentment at being ordered around by idiots. And as soon as you stop believing in this nonsense, then you get some healthy anger, which allows you to push back at these people who just make up all this stuff to cripple your minds and to cripple your animal instincts, to cripple your natural self esteem and feel a healthy push back at people who tell you what to do.

And that’s why I dislike these categories so much, because they are the root of abuse. They are the root of exploitation. They are the root of the destruction of the human mind and the human personality and human morality. Humanity’s capacity for morality is completely destroyed if you come up with these all-powerful, overarching moral constructs that have no existence and therefore have to be “interpreted” by individuals who are only doing it to exploit you. I hate these things! They are the cancer of the human soul. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in “The Gulag Archipelago,” secrecy is our cancer. And in this case, dishonesty is our cancer.

There is no invisible apple. Your family was brutalizing you. There is no state, there is no God, there is no country. There is no such thing as a municipality or a city. There are things, there are buildings, there are people, there are guns, there are trees. There are no concepts that exist anywhere in the world. They exist in our minds as useful ways to organize physical objects and that’s it. They mean nothing. They have no existence whatsoever. And to obey a concept is as ridiculous as trying to eat the idea of food. It is as ridiculous as trying to chop down a forest without touching any single tree. It is completely insane! And this insanity is a sickness that human beings have to outgrow, we have to fight our way out of this fog that is placed here to exploit us.

We do this in compassion for ourselves and compassion for those who are our fellow exploitees, but perhaps it’s possible also to find just a shred of compassion for those who claim to be our masters and are as absolutely enslaved in this sick fantasy, as enslaved as everybody else. George Bush is not a free man. Vladimir Putin is not a free man. They’re slaves! They’re slaves to this illusion that we all feed into and try and live on. I mean, it’s not about fighting the rulers; it’s about fighting the falsehoods. It’s not about bringing down the government; it’s about exposing the facts. It’s not about overturning authority; it’s about affirming the truth.

And if we can do that, if we can affirm the truth, if we can simply state the facts that have been so long obscured to us in our own hearts because of the corruption that we all faced as children, the lies that we were all force fed as children, the terrible and horrible choices that we all faced as children, if we had the strength to face up to that, and to speak the truth, and to stay in the conversation about what is real, and what is true, and what exists in reality, rather than what exists as sick exploitive fantasies in other people’s minds, then by god we can free the world! By god we can wake humanity up from this nightmarish ten-thousand-year slumber of the damned! We can end war, we can end poverty, we can end hunger, we can end violence, we can end murder and theft and rape! Because all of these sicknesses can be traced back to that awful crossroads early in life, when we are forced to choose loyalty to lies and corruption over the truth. And if we can reach back to that part of us that could never believe in such sickness, that could never believe that the world is an asylum peopled by those who have power over us – who are insane.

If we can reach back to that part of us that never believed, reach into that part of us which never believed those lies, then we’re really can remake the world. We really can bring a new light to humanity – ha, new light? – it’s the first light! The Enlightenment came close, but they all backed away, because they couldn’t get rid of the state, and they couldn’t get rid of God. They all became Deist and allowed it to trundle along, and so the cancer grew back.

We can make a new world that will be as unrecognizable to us now as we are to people in the Fifteenth Century. We made that leap in the past because we started to recognize things like property rights, and the common humanity of all, and we began to question authority, and remove the state, and remove the intertwining of state and religion, and there’s absolutely no reason why we can’t continue to do it, but we have to continue to tell the truth at all times. So thank you so much for listening, I hope this has been helpful. It’s been quite exciting for me, and I will talk to you soon! : )

Ron Paul and Personal Liberty - Three Videos

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