Freedomain Radio Podcast 5
So, why don't we get started right away with two topics that are on my mind at the moment. The first, is the problem of the argument from defense – or, the argument regarding defense.
I was chatting about this with my wife last night, and I guess I boiled over in frustration thinking about the number of times I have been talking about the argument against violence – you know, “violence is bad”, “violence is bad”, and I think we're all fairly clear that it is, in fact, bad. But, what people always get hung up on, it would seem, is they always have to put this caveat in, like “violence is bad… except, for, um… SELF-DEFENSE! So, I'm not allowed to go out and shoot someone, but if someone is about to shoot me, I can shoot them”, and so on… Everybody knows this argument. So, why was I boiling over in frustration? Well, I've always had a mania for intellectual consistency, and simplicity, and clarity, and Occam's Razor, and all that kind of stuff, and what I got irritated about, after years of thinking and talking about this topic, is that we always have to say this thing!… It sounds like we're letting violence back into the equation, as a moral contradiction. Like, OK, violence is back in and now we have to limit it, and justify it, and control it, and manage it, and then [in with] the police, and the justification of self-defense on the part of other people, and so on—Like, I can defend an old woman who can't defend herself… So, given that I'm trying to get out of pure theory, and work with what has actually occurred in my life, and what actually occurs within the world both past and present – but first and foremost starting from my own life. Not of course, that I'm the measure of all things, but if I have a theory about morality, then the first place that I can look for proof or disproof is in my life. So, I guess I'm the lab, the experiment. So, I'll tell you a little bit about my experience with violence, and why I think that there's really no need to take this approach, that we always have to put “oh, except for self-defense”, into our stuff against violence. I grew up in a pretty violent family, I guess. My mother and my brother—my father left when I was very young—my mother and my brother were both emotionally and physically violent people, and I never, never raised a hand in self defense! I mean, call me a weenie, whatever you like, but I just was never able to justify within my own heart, and my own soul, the idea of fighting back against those who had done me wrong.
I guess part of it was, I've always had this mania for consistency and I was against violence from as long ago as I can remember. The second, is of course, is that I think—deep down in my gut—I got a very strong sense that it wasn't going to work! I mean, if my mother was going to hit me—and I was like, eight years old—what would hitting back do? Well, all it would do, is it would escalate, right? And, of course, I wasn't bigger than my mother in those days, and by the time I did get to be big enough, to actually hit her back without it escalating, I had already gotten a good deal of the theory down about non-violence, and no longer felt that it was a good thing to do morally. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't forgive my mother, and I don't like her, and I don't associate with her, in any way, shape, or form, because I think she's morally evil, and corrupt, and a bad person, because to me, beating up on kids: pretty bad. That's about the worst thing that you can do. If you hit a guy in a wheel chair, at least he can call the cops, he's got some place to go that's not your house, and you don't have any legal authority over him. But, beating up on a child—they have no options, no escape—unless they want to thrown themselves into the ‘tender' hands of child services, they're absolutely doomed. And, so, that is something that I just never wanted to do—and I never did!
I guess, one other time, when I was probably around thirteen or fourteen, I was playing with a friend of mine on our balcony—I think I was forcing him to participate in one of my radio plays, that I was very big on writing back then—something slipped, and my elbow went into his face. I was trying to pull a tape out, or something like that. He was hurt. His eye stung, and he started crying. Oh, I felt so terrible—even though it was an accident, I just felt absolutely terrible! Of course, even the thought of being violent, even through accidental means, was just repulsive to me.
Those are the only two times that I've ever—I guess the one extreme being that my childhood was subjected to quite a lot of violence, but the other being that one incident that I recall very clearly, causing somebody else direct injury with my body, and just feeling unbelievably terrible about it. So, for me at least, the theory that if you are bullied, you then become a bully is just not valid, because I was bullied continually, and have since the very beginning of my life, had this absolute horror and hatred of violence—both physical violence (you know, the whacking and beating), but emotional violence, too. You know, the kind of screechy screaming that certain people get into when they don't get their way. I consider that to be pretty horrendous behavior as well.
So what does this mean in terms of moral theory? Well, I guess I grew up in a pretty bad neighborhood, I had a violent family, some of my friends weren't exactly fisticuffs kind of guys but I guess they were a bit more emotionally than physically violent, although I've never known anybody who has been involved in a fist fight. I knew one guy, once, who was a network administrator for my company, who claimed to have been a bouncer, who had to diffuse some fights, but I don't know if it was real or just bravado. So, I don't know anybody who's ever used any physical violence, again, except for my own family, and I have never myself used any form of physical violence that was intended. So, I guess what I'm saying, is that I've never had any need for self-defense, and I would bet that most of the people listening to this have also never had any need for self-defense. I mean, if someone did come up and, I don't know, stick a knife in my back and say “give me yer wallet!”, I'd be like, “Yeah! here's my wallet! You want the keys to my car? Here's my wedding ring! Anything!” That's just stuff! That can be replaced! Who cares, right? But a perforated spleen is probably something that is a little trickier to repair.
So, I do understand the theory that ‘violence is bad, except for self defense'—except for the not so minor fact, that I've never actually seen self-defense in operation. I do understand the theory, of course, that everybody on the street may have a gun, so robbers are less likely to whatever, and I'm certainly not suggesting banning guns, because I'm a libertarian. But, I just really don't get the idea that self-defense is the way to go. An ounce of prevention, of course, is worth a pound of cure. So, what I would much rather do, is set up a society where violence was kind of, virtually, more or less, non-existent—and I certainly believe that is possible, because it's certainly possible in my life, that I'm able to get through the day without using any violence. The problem with the argument from self-defense is, it says, “well, violence is OK under these situations, and then violence is OK on behalf of defending other people, and then you get the cops, and with the cops you get the taxes, and with the taxes you get the wars, and all the public debt, and general slow slide into dictatorship that we're all on the slippery slope towards. So, I guess what I'm saying, is that violence is wrong, violence is bad, and self-defense doesn't work. So, of course, when you then say self defense is not morally valid, then people say, ”well, what about England in 1940? They had Hitler, they had the invasion, and they had to fight the battle of Britain, and Operation Sea Lion…“, and so on… I think that's a perfectly valid thing to bring up, and if you take mainstream history to be gospel, then that particular example of self-defense seems perfectly justified. Well, if Hitler had overrun England, and blah blah blah, the fall of freedom, and so on.
But, I guess I'll bring a couple of thoughts up, in opposition to that theory. If it's valid for the British government to use violence in that circumstance to defend the country, then we also have to look at the role of the British government in bringing that violence about. I guess I'll drop a couple of historical facts into the mix, to see if we can't clear this up a little: the British government put public education in—in the 1870's I think it was—in England; took control of the central banking much like happened in America; fought this horrendous war, the First World War (1914-1918), got the Americans involved, and smashed the Germans with the help of America's 100,000 troops; and in 1918, imposed this unbelievable Treaty of Versailles on the Germans, for a war, let's say, that it was not particularly clear then or now exactly who started—whose fault, I guess, it was—and of course, which achieved nothing other than to further fragment, shatter, and demoralize European civilization, and to destroy any capacity for Classical Liberalism—or what we would now call libertarianism—to continue to flourish. But, the British government imposed this unbelievable Treaty of Versailles on Germany, with reparations that would've continued up until 1980, believe it or not! And of course, enforced this, and enforced that there was no military for Germany, and so on…
So, they hoped to pillage Germany for hundreds of billions of Marks, and said ”you can't have an army, you can't have a navy, you can't have an air force“ (I think they were allowed a standing army of 100,000 or something). So, of course, the Germans say, ”Fine, OK. Well, we lost. We accept that. You allied with the Americans and beat the pants off us. So, we're going to pay you your money, but hey, given that we're the government and we're not so big on paying at the expense of giving goods and services to our friends and punishing our enemies, what we're going to do is we're just going to print a whack-load of Marks, and then we are just going to hand them over to you, and we're going to have inflation like you wouldn't believe. We're going to absolutely destroy our economy, but you are not going to find that the Marks we give you are worth very much.“ So, you know, what happened? Well, naturally, as you know, I'm sure, the German economy was destroyed in the twenties, the middle-class was completely wiped out, you had people standing on rooftops shooting people because they were so frustrated. I read a story about a guy who had brought out an annuity, which was supposed to give him a comfortable living in his retirement. He cashed in his annuity, went across the street and bought a cup of coffee, because that was all his annuity was worth at that time because of the hyper-inflation.
So, you had an enormous amount of—let's just say British government interference, although it's the French and the Americans as well, of course. But, the British government did an enormous amount to destabilize Germany, to destroy the system of Classical Liberalism by participating in this absolutely horrendous war that just wrecked—killed ten million people, and of course, left an enormous number of people wounded or widowed, and thus dependent on state largesse—the foundation of the income tax, introduction of the passport system—everybody knows that the First World War was just the death nell of Classical Liberalism.
So, you get the First World War. After the First World War, you get the Germans, who just print money to pay off these ridiculous reparations. There's a lot of damage done to the British economy at the same time, because you either take money which is worthless (because they're just printing it), or you take goods, which destroys your own economy. I mean, if you take a million shoes from German shoemakers, and ship them over to England free of charge, I guess it doesn't take a lot to guess what happens to the British shoemakers. They suffer, and go out of business. Then, of course, they're dependent on the state for unemployment insurance, and so on. So, you have a situation where the British government destabilizes Germany, directly participates in this war, and then what do they do? Well, in order to get Germany back on its feet, they start lending lots of money to Germany (this is one of the things that contributed to the depression). Then, of course, they exacerbate the depression by having these terrible trade policies, and strengthening the unions, and increasing government spending, and raising tariffs and protections. So, governments could not have come up with a better plan for producing dictatorships in central Europe, than the course that they followed from about 1914 to about 1930.
Ok, so let's just say that the British government had some hand in the creation of Nazi Germany. Well, what happens then, when Nazi Germany is created? Well, you have people who believe that the British government is protecting them, because they have ensured that Germany is unable to re-arm. Right, that's the big deal out of the Treaty of Versailles: you can't have Alsace-Lorraine, you can't expand outside of your borders, you can't do this, you can't do that… But, you have this dictatorship growing. You have Mussolini in Italy, you have Hitler in Germany, and everybody says, ”Well, it's OK, because the government has this treaty, which is going to ensure that Germany never re-arms!“ Well, everybody knows what happens. Germany re-arms, they fly a bunch of people off to Russia to get trained as an air force. They have these flying clubs, which seem to fly these suspicious mono-planes with guns. I guess their hobby is extreme grouse hunting! They sign all these useless documents designed to keep Germany's aggression from boiling over, and then they allow Germany to invade the Rhineland, and to invade Austria, to invade Czechoslovakia, to invade Poland—and then, of course, they finally go to war! So, is it really the case to say that the British people had the right of defending themselves, and thus, it's a good principle? Well, if the British people had successfully defended themselves against the existence of a government to begin with, well then, you wouldn't have had these problems at all! So, I don't really see that as a really strong argument as to why self-defense is valid, and just, and good. To take the argument one step further, the British people win the war, and the next thing they do is vote in the left-wing socialists! They dump Winston Churchill who's become pretty socialistic in his old age, and has this magic belief that he can twirl Stalin's empire around the tip of his finger, and make everything happen well if they just happen to meet once a week. But let's not worry about how power corrupted Churchill, but rather, let's look at what happened to the British people after they ”won“ the Second World War. Well, what do you get? You get massive increases in taxation. You get massive trade-union, welfare-state, free health care, national debts begin to rise like you wouldn't believe. So, really, what did they win? Well, they won a couple of years of peace, and then they won the increasing economic stagnation that began in the sixties, and increased to the seventies. I know this, because my mother was clever enough to recognize that England was headed towards socialist Hell, and so we fled England in 1977, shortly before Thatcher came into power. Of course, were did we flee to, but to Canada, which is North America's socialist loony-bin corner! So, could it really be said that the self-defense that occurred in WWII produced good results? Well, no, of course not! I mean, of course not, because it's all based on violence! If self-defense is a principle, then the first person you need to defend yourself against is the government, and that doesn't work anyway. So, in which situation would self-defense be a valid approach to a problem? Doesn't work in wars, and doesn't work when somebody comes into your house with a gun. The only conceivable time that I could see self-defense being a valid thing to do, would be some group of kids or teenagers have come in and they don't want to steal from you—they want to rape your wife, and kill you, let's say, or rape you and kill your wife. Well, then I could see having a gun around and shooting them, blah blah blah, but you know, really, predatory, rapey, home-invasions? I mean, what, 20 times a year, 10 times a year, in an entire country? Is that really enough to hang an entire principle on which opens up the capacity for violence and the police and the state and the armies and navies and air forces? I just don't think it's the case, at all. Last but not least, I'd like to mention—or at least talk about—the idea that self-defense, or violence itself: People say, ”well, you know there are violent people in the world, and you need a government, and the government needs to protect us…“, and this, that, and the other… There's a million arguments against that, but I'll just settle on one right here, right now, which I had with somebody I work with at my current company a little while back. He was a Christian, so of course, he had this belief that people were bad and only through Christianity and right thinking could their evil impulses be restrained, but let's not get into all that this time! I've got plenty of commuting time to work over all of that nonsense! But what he did do, was he said it's impossible to imagine a world where violence didn't exist. Now, I understand that. I read the papers. I know what's going on in the world, and there's lots of violence out there. However, I'd like to offer you an invitation: Have a look at not the papers, or Iraq, or other places in the world where violence is going on, not hand-chopping in Saudi Arabia, or anything like that. But, have a look at the world that you live in. The world that you exist in. I betcha, dollars to donuts, that you don't have any violence in your life. Now, let's say some exceptions: just stuff that's common, like maybe you'll spank your kids, or maybe you'll yell at your wife or husband from time to time. But I'm not talking about spanking. I mean, I disagree with it, but let's not get into that right now, either! I'm also not talking about yelling at your wife. I think that's also a very bad thing to do, and my wife and I never do that to each other. That's not to say we don't disagree, but it's very civil, it's very pleasant. But, compared to something like war, compared to 100,000 Iraqis murdered, compared to planes going into towers, spanking and yelling is really not violence , compared to all that kind of stuff.
So, to look at your own life, and say, ”Well, did I get my job by holding a gun to someone's head?“—Well, unless somebody from the Sopranos mindset is listening to this, which I highly doubt, then I'm betting that you didn't get your job by holding a gun to someone's head! Did you force your wife to marry you? If your kids really disrespect you, do you pull out the brass knuckles and really pound them into a pulp? I bet you, you don't. When your friends disagree with you, tempers might flare, but I bet you all refrain from beating each other senseless. I bet you, that you live a life that is free of violence—that there is no violence in. Other than, you've got to pay your taxes, and you get pulled over for speeding, and all that kind of stuff. So, when people say to me, ”Pacifism can't work“, ”Anarchy can't work“, ”There's so much violence“, and ”if people don't want to be violent, all the violent people will take over“, I just don't find that at all credible. I've known thousands of people in my life. My wife has known thousands of people—she's treated hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Violence doesn't really happen. Yeah, I know people get stopped on the street and get hit over the head, or whatever. But, I'll tell you: that violence is all completely avoidable! I've never had anyone mug me! Okay, once, when I was eleven, somebody said ”give me your lunch money“, or whatever, right? Not exactly the end of the world, as I knew it. I've never been in a fist fight, I've never known anybody who's been in a fist fight, I've never known anybody to hit anybody else, I've never known any of this to occur. I don't know anybody with whom this has occurred. It's not like I grew up in some kind of gated community, where I just didn't know any bad people. Of course I did. I grew up in a pretty bad neighborhood, and I had a pretty violent family. But, nonetheless, I just don't know that many people who use violence. Even the cops that I've talked to, don't like using violence. They're full of bizarre illusions about the good that they're doing, and the need for their services, and the fact that they're not thugs is somehow defined for them in a way that makes them comfortable. But, they still don't like using violence. So, what I'm trying to say, is that a world without violence, a world where violence just is not part of peoples' social interactions, is absolutely and entirely possible, and if you doubt me, just have a look at your own life, and look at how you resolve disputes, look at how you deal with things! Yeah, you get frustrated. Yeah, you probably yell at people you shouldn't, and whatever. But compared to things like war, and what the government does in terms of taking income away from everyone and all that, it's really not very common. Where violence is common is where you get a bunch of sociopaths in uniform who are overseas, who are paid to go and kill people, and are told that the reason they have to go kill people is “Kill or be killed,” or it's “Save the babies in their cribs,” or it's “If we don't get them, they're going to get your kids.” If you put people through the dehumanizing process of becoming police officers or becoming soldiers, and then you pay them to go and do these things for money that they extort out of a helpless population that's legally disarmed, and tell them that what they're doing is morally good and to question it is morally evil, well if you create that enormous disparity in power and motivation and funding—i.e. If I obey you, I'm well paid and if I disobey you, I go to jail—well of course you're going to get violence! Of course you are.
Exactly as if you put, as Milgram's experiment did: he divided college students into two groups, one called “The Prisoners” and the other called the “Prison Guards”—I think this was in the sixties before a bunch of killjoy ethics legislation came down the pipe. If you put an enormous amount of power disparity and motivational disparity in a group of people, which to me is the exact definition of something like politics or the government, then of course you're going to get violence. Of course you are.
For example, if a Congressman's kid gets caught with pot, nothing happens. And if a black kid gets caught with pot, well, they toss his ass in jail and throw away the key.
So, to sum up, I don't think that the principle of self-defense is particularly valid. I can't find except in the most extreme situations that are so unbelievably rare, like who cares, right? Like, yeah, I work out, even though I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Self-defense I really don't care about, as far as the principle goes. And the problem I have with the principle of self-defense is it opens up all of these possibilities for the use of violence and the institutionalization of violence in the form of the State, and in the form of police, and armies and so on.
So “No” to the defense of self-defense, I guess you could say. Self-defense is itself indefensible.
Anyway, the second point is that life without violence seems to be entirely possible . Entirely empirical. I've never experienced a fight, I've never seen a fight, nobody I know has ever seen or experienced a fight. I don't even know anybody that has a gun! When I was younger, I knew a couple of people who hunted, but not the norm. It's far from the norm. It is extraordinarily unusual in society except if you train people for it and pay them to do it and give them no consequences and tell them that it's right to use violence. Then, you will get violence! But you don't get that, if you don't have a government, that just doesn't happen! So if this makes sense to you, and it certainly makes sense to me. I'm not saying it's the be-all and end-all, because that doesn't happen until I come with a syllogistic proof for all this stuff, which is my brain-bending task at the moment. Don't listen to the cynics. Don't listen to the people who tell you “Violence is somehow endemic to human nature, that we're savages, look at all the wars, people are just bad…” That's all nonsense. People just aren't bad. People don't like using violence and if you want another chunk of proof for that, look at the amount of conditioning that it takes for somebody to be comfortable or at least desensitized to using violence. There's a reason that you're put into basic training for months and months and months. And there's a reason that only certain people are allowed to come into a volunteer army. You have to have a tendency for a lack of empathy or desensitization, and then they have to just pummel you for months and years to get you to actually be comfortable with violence.
I mean, look at the amount of propaganda: cop shows and war movies and so on. The amount of propaganda that people are subject to in order to get them to be comfortable with the violence is just staggering. If it were such a natural human condition, we wouldn't need it. I don't need a lot of propaganda to have a sexual drive or to want to eat chocolate or to want to sit on the couch when I'm tired. That stuff just happens because it's part of my physiology and part of my nature as a human being. But in order to make people violent, you have to do a heck of a lot. You have to beat ‘em as kids, you have to yell at them as adults, you have to pay them, you have to tell them that it's all moral, you have to subject them to endless propaganda, you have to brutalize them emotionally in boot camp… You have to do a lot to twist someone into being a violent person. To me, it's similar to when, I think it was in China, I guess mid-19th to early 20th century the foot binding was very common. So you've got these women who had their feet bound up in excruciating tightness, and their feet were mutated, their toes were growing into their heels, it was just horrendous. So yes, it's certainly possible to shape a human foot into a ball, but it's not exactly the natural state of a human foot, which is to grow strong and straight. And yeah, some people are born with six toes and dropped arches, but that's very much the exception. There is a natural and healthy human foot and there is a natural and healthy human soul, which is not always the most patient and kind of entities, but definitely not some murderous, violent, “if I don't get my rent reduced, I'm going to go shoot someone” [person]. That's just not how people are. There are people out there who are like that, just as there were Chinese women with bound feet, but what you need to do is to look at the circumstances that produced these personalities rather than imagine or believe that these personalities are somehow natural, that “There's lots of these human predators out there, and boy oh boy.” One final example, just cause I'm almost home and I've got another two minutes. Just look at religion. When children were forced to go to Sunday School and everybody had to be religious and if you weren't religious you were shunned and you were an outcast, then wow, wouldn't you know it, lots of people: pretty religious. But now, if you look at the modern middle-class, kids really aren't taught to be religious. Yeah, they go to church a couple of times a year, maybe a wedding or two and Christmas and Easter maybe, but they don't really go for this whole religion thing. And so the natural state of the human soul is also atheistic, and I know I'm using the word soul and blah blah blah, but I just mean that for the totality of consciousness and emotional apparatus and physiology and so on. The natural state of a human being is pacifist and atheistic and they don't believe in a government, really. Sure, there's tons of people out there to the contrary, but that's just a mark of an enormous amount of pressure that's been put on them emotionally, physically and so on to conform to all of that nonsense. And as soon as we start correcting people's thinking, proving a better argument, and showing the value and the morality of a better world of pacifism and forget about self-defense and don't be violent, then we'll have exactly what we need, which is people who believe in [non-]violence and the natural virtue of the human soul and boy won't that be just a beautiful, beautiful world! Thanks for listening.
