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[0:00] Hi everybody, it's Stef from Freedomain Radio. Hope you're doing well.
We are going to plow on with a little bit more exposition on the nature of politics and, in particular, the question of participation, which is a pretty important question in the realm of understanding your relationship to those who sort of put themselves within this penumbra over here, which we can see, called the government.
Now, one of the things that you'll hear quite a bit in discussions around politics is that you participate within the system.
And generally, what is put forward is the idea that through the ability to vote, you get to choose who it is who is going to be running the government.
You don't get to choose the government as a whole, of course, because like like 99.999% of the government is not votable, bureaucrats, civil servants, police, military, and so on.
[0:58] But you will get to choose some titular leaders from a variety of approaches, all of which, of course, involve the basic mechanism of pointing a gun at citizens and taking money, time, resources, and so on from them in order to redistribute it as pretty much the government sees fit.
Now, you may prefer that some of your money gets spent a little bit more on, say, welfare than the military, but really that's what you get to vote for.
There's no guarantee that it's going to occur, as we talked about last time. and the very sort of interesting question around democracy which historically has been viewed as a rather large threat throughout history not considered the ideal either of course by the founders of philosophy in ancient Greece nor by the founding fathers in America who considered what we have now which is an unlimited democracy where basically it's sort of brute majority rule that that was a very dangerous form of government and one which was not sustainable and never historically has been sustainable because the problem with the reallocation, let's say for want of a better phrase, is the reallocation of resources causes a kind of feeding frenzy at the state where you get massive debts and what we would normally call counterfeiting in the form of printing fiat currency and so on and this just causes a fiscal collapse in the state which the citizens certainly don't vote for and rarely find out until right near the end.
[2:26] So this question of participation is quite central. One of the, if not the central justification for a democracy is the idea that we voluntarily participate in the process, that the system reflects our wishes and desires, and because we voluntarily participate in it, because it's a contract that we voluntarily enter into, we are then bound to obey those in the government who tell us what to do.
[2:52] So, if I go and lease a car for four years, I am bound to pay for that car.
I've entered into a contract voluntarily of my own free will, and therefore I am bound for a period of time to pay the car or to return the car and pay damages if I can't pay the car.
But basically, it's viewed as a contract, and I would say perfectly rightly so.
So now that then is transferred over that concept of the voluntary entering into of a form of social contract in the form of our relationship with those in the government is that it's a similar sort of situation.
We vote and we agree to abide by the results of that voting.
[3:37] And if we don't really like the results of that voting, then we're generally given one of two choices.
The first choice is that we can enter into the political fray ourselves, and we can choose to run for office with a different platform and hope to convince people and this, that, and the other.
That's one option. And the second option, of course, is to leave the country that you don't agree is being run by the laws or the society that you consider to be valid, right?
So I have over the years been invited a large number of times to leave the country that I'm living in because I disagree with the principles of democracy because, not as a sort of personal opinion, but because it simply follows from all of the logical rules that we're sort of all the way from back to metaphysics and the mad demon of Descartes.
All of these rules and observations and logical arguments we've been putting forward have led us to the conclusion that you simply can't legitimately make up moral rules and just say, well, a guy who's in the government can do X, a guy who's not in the government can do Y, and you just make up arbitrary distinctions between people, calling one of them the government, one of them the citizens, and so on, that those moral rules are not logical, nor valid, nor binding on other people unless they are universal and consistent and logical and everything that we've talked about in part five on ethics.
[5:05] So let's have a little chat.
About this question of participation within the government.
Now, there's a number of ways in which entering into a contract to lease a car is quite a bit different from voting.
First of all, you have a one-to-one relationship with the car company that you're buying or leasing the car from.
You do not have to buy the car. You can use alternate forms of transportation, buses, taxis, personal helicopters, your legs, whatever you like.
And you can revoke your contract.
Very few people would sign a completely ironclad contract that says if I don't continue to pay this car, I'm going to go to jail or something.
There usually is a purchase-out clause for these kinds of things.
And your choice to lease a car places no direct obligations on other people.
So there's lots and lots of highly varied differences between a voluntarily entered into contract in the free market market versus what we call a sort of social contract in the realm of government.
With government, you don't have a choice whether to buy a car or not.
You have to buy a car. You're not allowed to read anything other than a vague marketing brochure. You can't ever get a refund.
[6:22] And you also, whether you use the car or not, whether you can drive the car or not, whether you have legs or are morally opposed to driving, you have to pay for the car, whether you take it it home or not.
And the choice that you make in terms of preference for the car is entirely determined by majority rule.
And by the way, the only cars that you get to choose from are those whose manufacturers have bribed the government to begin with in return for preferential favors and money coming back from this sort of situation.
So I don't think it's at all fair to say that there's some sort of contract involved in, living in a certain country or being born in a certain country, because that would be like saying if I own an apartment building and I rent apartments, saying that anyone who's born in that apartment owes me 50% of their income for the rest of their life, and that's just the way it is.
Being born into a particular country does not create a legal or contractual or moral moral obligation to those who call themselves the rulers of that society.
That's sort of ridiculous. You might as well say, because you're born black, you have a moral obligation to be a slave.
I mean, this is an argument that we would consider completely corrupt and evil in other situations.
I'm just sort of trying to expand our understanding of these ethics so that we can look at the problems within a state or a democracy just a little bit more clearly.
[7:49] And to use the marriage metaphor once more, if I said to my daughter, you can choose between these two or three men, all of whom have pretty bad track records, and you can't go and check up on them, and you're going to be married to them for four years, and after four years, you can choose to divorce one, but then you have to marry another, and you have to give up half your income to these men, and if you disobey these men, they will throw you in jail, we would consider that to be Taliban-esque in its suppression of the rights of women to choose, yet because, well, for a variety of reasons we can get into another time, we have an enormous degree of difficulty seeing that something we would consider morally abhorrent to inflict upon our own children in terms of choosing their marriage partners, we find perfectly acceptable when it comes to how we run a society or the government as a whole.
[8:42] Similarly, if I said to my son, I'm going to offer you two jobs that you can choose from, and you have to stay in those jobs for four years, and if you don't show up to work, then I'm going to throw you in jail after four years.
You can choose the other job if you don't like the first job and if you refrain from choosing then I will choose for you and your choice is going to be one of 500 votes about what kind of occupation you should have we would consider that to be highly repressive and dictatorial and unfair and unjust and immoral and so on yet of course the disposition and use of violence within society which is really what the government is all about is far more serious than the choice of a marital partner for an individual and far more serious than the choice of an occupation for an individual yet we would never accept the kind of moral paradigms that are at play in justifying the government we would never accept those in other situations within our own lives and of course this is not how you live right this is not how you live at all when you decide that you want uh to uh somebody to landscape their front yard because it looks like a mess you'll go over and and talk with them, and cajole them, and maybe offer to help, and so on.
But you're not going to get all your neighbors together, get a bunch of pitchforks and torches and go over and lynch the guy if he doesn't fix up his yard.
[10:05] But of course, if you go to the government, and you say, I want a law saying everyone has to fix up their yard, it's kind of what you're doing.
You're initiating the use of force against somebody who's not doing anything to harm anybody, given that having an unattractive front yard doesn't really cause you to lose blood. It may cause you to lose sleep, but that's your choice for perhaps being a little oversensitive.
[10:27] So the way that people live their lives is through voluntary negotiation, participation.
I would imagine that there's just about nobody here who is watching this who has ever robbed a bank or held up a highway, a train or a bus or something like that.
And so we work within our lives through voluntary peaceful negotiations.
There are domestic violence and domestic disputes and so on, but those are not used as justifications for the state.
State so if it's true and i think that it really is that we have to have universal moral rules if we are to have any moral rules and given that we know that universally preferred behavior does exist it's just a matter of defining it then we really can't morally justify a state in fact we do have to condemn the idea of a government as a an invisible penumbra or or an invisible cloud that surrounds certain people during certain times of the day and gives them rights abilities and empowers completely the opposite of what is considered moral for the general population, that concept of a state must be considered an illogical, non-binding, and frankly quite corrupt concept, because it really does posit that there are different states of human existence that all have different rules, when there's zero biological or factual basis for imagining that there are such distinctions.
[11:47] So let's have a look at, we're going back to our handy-dandy whiteboard here for those on the audio.
[11:54] It's beautiful. And we're going to look at this question of participation, and we'll talk just a little bit about why it's so hard for us to see this.
Because as we've talked about before, we have this relationship with our blue penumbra, or cloud, called the government.
The government has the right to arrest or kidnap citizens and and incarcerate or imprison citizens, you know, sort of more and more somewhat at whim.
It's not completely that way, and we're still relatively free relative to other societies, both throughout the world and, of course, in history, although not as free as we used to be, and obviously we're trying to diagnose something before it becomes terminal.
[12:39] So we say that the people within the government have the right to use force against those not in the government and against themselves when they go home and so on, right?
These people in the government sort of have to pay taxes as well.
So these people can use force.
These people cannot use force.
[12:58] And we talked about the taking of income from the general citizenry and so on.
And what will often be talked about is that everybody talks about this particular interaction as if there's no gun in the relationship, as if there's no violence, no tasers, no incarceration, no arrest powers, no military powers, no legal rights to use force based on whatever, right? Right. Marijuana is illegal.
And so suddenly everyone has to get thrown in jail. But it used to be legal.
Was it evil before and good now? What changed? Well, nothing, of course. Right.
And so based on the legislation that the government passes for itself, it claims and acts loud the right to use force against citizens.
And there's sort of direct force, like if I don't pay my taxes, I'll get arrested.
If I resist, I'll get shot. and then there's sort of indirect force which is more of a fraud wherein my income is pretty perpetually eroded through the overprinting of currency of fiat money and i'm not going to do a series on economics because that would be fairly lengthy and involved and i'll wait till i can work full-time on this but you can look at sort of lots of senses of indirect force so when the government either goes through a fiscal collapse because it's overspent itself, as all governments in history have done, or, heaven forbid, or I wouldn't exactly put a lot of money on this possibility.
[14:23] Or the government reigns in its spending like 90% in order to pay off the national debt, then basically the people who are, and raises taxes and so on, these people are paying for the bills run up by previous generations, which again is a form of indirect violence right of debt, and particularly national debt and the overprinting of currency are strong indications of indirect violence and so on.
[14:45] So, what happens is, there's an enormous amount of energy in society that is really devoted to pretending that this interaction, this, I call it the gun in the room, that there is no gun in the room, right?
That it's two people sitting down and voluntarily negotiating, citizens and government, that it's a partnership, that there's moral obligations on the part of the citizens, and so on, that it's voluntary, that it's contractual, that it's peaceful, that the transition of power is non-violent, and so on.
And an enormous amount of intellectual and creative energies are poured into obscuring the gun in the room.
Now you went through i would imagine most people did went through 12 to 14 years of state education now i i'm not going to jump onto the conspiracy bandwagon because i don't think that you need to at all the government uh in terms of uh the forcible education of children and what i mean by that is that even if you have and i know there are some places that have vouchers and so on but But the government still regulates all the schools and provides permission to use the vouchers if you're in, I think, Belgium and places like that.
[15:59] But in general, a government school is not going to gravitate in its teaching towards pointing out that the government is kind of like force, right? It's kind of violent.
[16:13] Because that's sort of inevitable, right? It's like imagining that a commercial for General Motors is going to point out really negative and horrible things about General Motors.
Of course not. They're going to put a positive spin on things.
They're going to bury the bodies in the closet. it, they're going to try and put as positive a spin on things as possible.
[16:30] Online dating, where you don't click on the guy's picture and see him picking his nose and he says, I neglected my plant so much that they died.
Would you like to go on a date, right?
When people are putting forward first impressions and trying to manage or trying to put forward the best impressions, then you can sort of predict what their behavior is going to be.
It's not a conspiracy theory, for instance, to say that you're probably going to look quite good when you go for a job interview if you want the job.
So the fact that particular circumstances breed particular kinds of behavior based on how the person wants to control and manipulate the outcome of that interaction is not a conspiracy theory at all.
And so expecting that government schools are going to teach citizens a lot about the coercive nature and sort of fundamental violence that government represents, to me, it would be absolutely inconceivable that that would ever be the case.
So, sort of the first thing to understand is that, you know, for, I don't know, 14 years, it is here in Canada, 14 years, and I went to a number, I went to school in England, I studied some schools in Africa, I've gone to a number of different, I've been to public and private schools in England, and schools here, I went to three universities, did graduate work and so on, got a master's degree, and it was universal, right, it was absolutely universal that...
[17:54] This gun in the room was never allowed to be talked about.
To use a sort of psychological parallel, there is something you probably have heard about in psychological circles, if you follow these kinds of things, that if there's some significant dysfunction within a family, that it's referred to as the elephant in the living room.
Everyone has to kind of step around the elephant in the living room, and so everybody's living with this invisible elephant in the living room, but nobody points out that there is, in fact, I actually think it's visible, an elephant in the living room.
And the very same sort of thing here is the case with the teachers, right?
So the teachers in the public school system, and it's not like they have these big meetings where they sit down and say, you know, how can we obscure the violence of the government to our children?
It's not like that at all. It's just, it's inevitable, right?
Whoever pays the piper, whoever pays the bill gets to call the tune, right?
Whoever pays the piper calls the That's what I was trying to think of.
And so the fact that the government funds education is not going to be very likely to result in a clear and objective view of government, just in the same way that if all of the schools, let's say there is a company town, everybody has a job at the Ford plant, and Ford funds every single one of the schools.
It's not that the kids won't be taught to read and write and basic arithmetic and so on, arithmetic, but if a private company like Ford ran all of the schools in a particular town...
[19:24] It seems unlikely that Ford, you know, would talk maybe about the anti-Semitic nature of Henry Ford or any forms of corporate corruption or any sort of instances where there was improprieties in overseas factories or anything like that.
It just wouldn't be the case. You might not get a heavy focus on all the virtues of Ford, but you sure as heck aren't going to get, in a Ford-funded public school.
[19:47] Negative impressions or even objective impressions of Ford. It's simply not possible.
This is a bias that's highly, highly recognizable when we think about it in the free market or in the private sector.
We don't look at a series of ads from a company and say, that's objective science and fact.
We say, no, they're trying to make a case for the virtue and benevolence and benefits of associating with them. And the same thing is completely true when it comes to state schools.
They're not going to focus on any sort of objective critiques or libertarian critiques or anarchist critiques of the state.
They're going to talk about how the state saves the environment and the state protects the workers with health and safety legislation.
And the state educates the children and runs the roads and runs the electricity and delivers the water and saved the world from fascism in World War II and rescued Western civilization from the Great Depression.
And if there wasn't a state, how all these bad things would happen.
And these things are not, you know, there's no sort of state propaganda class or anything like that.
It's just kind of inevitable you know if you can accept that an advertiser who is funding particular ad campaigns is going to want to present a positive view of whatever product or service or company he's representing then you can at least accept that there's going to be the same kind of bias in state schools.
[21:05] Now, of course, in the media, there are very similar things at work.
The state doesn't directly own the media, but the state, in just about every Western democracy, and not to speak of all of the totalitarian dictatorships out there, the state licenses the media, the state can revoke the license for the media, the state owns the airwaves, of course, you have to just think of the FCC in the United States.
[21:26] And so, again, there is no explicit thing, like, if you talk about the gun in the room, we're going to pull your license.
But people are, you know, kind of nervous about all of that kind of stuff.
And similarly in universities this question of tenure has quite often resulted in the fact that people with unusual let's say opinions don't get hired because they can't ever get fired same thing of course we've talked about with public schools and the other thing of course is that because the government and its power looms so large in their economic and social life not to say political then the people in the media need government representatives to give them information so that they can publish in the newspaper.
And for an interesting exercise, which I talked about in a podcast, just try picking up a newspaper and sort of thumb through it and see how many stories don't relate directly or indirectly to some decision or choice or rule or legislation or taxation or policy of the government.
I sort of found about 90 to 95% of stories, excluding the ads, are related to information about the government, which means that the media, it's not that they're government mouthpieces, but they absolutely need people in the government to cooperate with them in order to get the information that their readers are looking for, and readers are looking for it because the government has such power that you kind of really do need to get that information if you're going to be effective in what you do.
[22:45] So this particular relationship between the government and the citizens, there are enormous amounts of energy put into talking generally about the beneficial natures of governments and not talking about this sort of fundamental aspect of the fact that if citizens don't obey their government, then the governments can throw them in jail.
This is quite different from anything else in society.
If you don't want to shop at Walmart, Walmart doesn't get to throw you into jail or impress you into one of those greeter things, as one of those greeter people.
If you choose not to subscribe to a particular internet service, you don't get thrown in jail.
If you choose not to obey the government, then you will get thrown in jail unless you're lucky and they haven't noticed you are sort of living outside the radar. So.
[23:40] The question around the visibility of this violence, to me, is quite obvious, that you have an enormous amount of highly skilled communicators who have explicitly or implicitly a kind of vested interest in the existence of the state.
You won't get a lot of public school teachers talking, for instance, about the virtues of privatization of education, because, of course, they get two months off in the summer, they get PD days, they get fairly well paid.
They're almost impossible to get fired and so for most of them and of course really competent people don't generally want to be in that kind of environment so generally they're not going to say and of course they've got pensions they've got retirement benefits and so on so they're not going to say well what we should do is privatize the schools because they know that their own jobs would change considerably now of course i believe that their job satisfaction would go up enormously and they'd actually feel uh that they were effectively teaching children facts rather than obscuring truths and you know wasting their time but you can't imagine really that people who are strongly benefiting in a material sense from the existing system are going to argue against it it's a sort of bias that you really can't expect any more than you expect a commercial to speak about the problems of a product, so the fact that this may come as a surprise to you should not come as a surprise to you if that makes any sense.
[25:07] There is an enormous amount of energy that is poured into the obscuring of the basic facts and nature of state violence by a very large group of fairly well-paid public intellectuals which we don't sort of have to get into right now but you can sort of do the research if you like and look it up yourself and i've also talked about it in a number of podcasts now in the few minutes that we have left i would like to talk about a way of using this understanding or this configuration to talk about the question of war.
And the question of war is a pretty central one, and of course war is just about one of the greatest evils, if not the greatest evil, that is capable of being inflicted within society, and.
[25:52] And, even if you, you know, I think I mentioned this before, even if you don't count war, though, last century, in the 20th century alone, 270 million people were murdered by governments.
And that, of course, is a sheer horror, a sheer horror of existence that goes on around the world. If you throw wars in, another tens and tens of millions of people are considered killed, murdered.
But it's over, you know, it would be around 350 million people murdered by governments.
If you just count sort of direct assassinations, incarcerations, gulags, concentration camps, and so on, forced evacuations, forced collectivization of farmland, and so on, you have 270 million people murdered by governments in the 20th century, probably about another 100 million killed in wars and this is not to count all of the lives that are lost through the lack of progress that excessive government brings or impedes.
So we do face a significant problem with governments and I just sort of like to talk about war very briefly just so you can understand how this analysis, just checking if this is visible, actually I'm going going to do all this in black so that we, I think you kind of get the idea of the colors now.
[27:09] So let's have a look at how war works and how our analysis might do something towards getting rid of war, right?
[27:18] I mean, surely if we can do that, that would be a good day's work, I would say.
So when we think of war we can think of country A and country B and they're currently in a state of war now the obvious thing about war is that it is hugely consumptive of people and resources right I mean airplanes and tanks get blown up people get killed and so it's very expensive And fundamentally, war is a very expensive proposition.
Now, when people look at war, they generally think country A is at war with country B. And that's the direct relationship.
But that's really not the case. And I'll sort of make the case as to why that's not the case.
And you can let me know if my case is sensible or not.
Because the primary relationship the thing that enables war is not the declaration of war i mean writing down on a piece of paper doesn't create the money that is required to fund the war, but the primary relationship in war is not the aggression between the the governments the armies the soldiers or whatever that's that's secondary that's an effect of a much more a primary relationship.
[28:37] Which is the aggression that governments inflict upon their own citizens, right?
Because if you can't take the tax money from the citizens and you can't conscript the citizens, enlist the citizens, or bribe them to join the military using the other citizens' money, then war is completely impossible, right?
[29:03] The state is war. The state is the initiation of the use of force.
We always think of it as between countries, but it's far more accurate to say that war is only possible not because people declare war who are leaders and they sign papers and they make speeches, but because the violence is initiated against the citizens.
Right now when the violence is initiated against the citizens the citizens not wanting to get thrown in jail will cough up their money and we'll just talk about a non-draft non-conscription basis here but the violence in the red is uh initiated against citizens citizens then cough up money and we'll say resources and children but let's just sort of focus on the money for now and the money Money is then used to fund the war.
I mean, sort of very fundamentally, war is the result. War is a symptom.
War is a symptom of the primary violence that governments use, which is violence against their own citizens, in the form of taxation.
[30:11] And the last thing that I'll say is that this particular configuration is very, very important to understand.
[30:18] This, of course, is fundamental to what governments do. We could say that this is war.
We could also say that it's the welfare state. We could also say that it's public education.
We could say that it's the war on drugs. We could say that it's foreign policy.
We could say just about anything that we want. But the most fundamental thing to understand is that once this relationship, where the governments can aggress against citizens and take their money using force or the threat of force, once this relationship is established, then anything goes, right? Anything goes.
A lot of people, when they focus on the government, they'll focus, they'll sort of pretend like this doesn't exist, right?
Everything's sort of below the dotted line, which is the aggression against the citizens. they'll say well the government should do this and the government should not do that and maybe the government should do this as well but all of that is kind of meaningless because the very fundamental thing that it's occurring within society is that governments the people and of course there's no such thing as government as we've talked about before a people sort of individuals.
[31:24] Are claiming and executing on the moral right to point guns at their neighbors and take their their money.
And so it's, you know, when you sort of get right down to it at a core moral level, it is not dissimilar from what we would call a sort of gang of organized criminals or mafia and so on, who come into a neighborhood and who say, we will provide sort of protection to you. And all you have to do is give us your money.
And if you don't give us your money, maybe your store will get burned down.
And that happens a couple of times and people go, oh, okay, well, I guess I'll sort of pay my protection money.
What you would say in that kind of situation, I'm not going to ask you to sort of absorb that as a primary syllogism or a primary sort of parallel to the existence of a state, but just for a moment, if there was a mafia gang or some gang of organized criminals in a particular neighborhood that was threatening citizens and providing some protection and services, then I don't think that what you would say is what we need to do is have people People keep paying this criminal gang their protection money, but we need to get better criminals to run it.
[32:34] But we need to find a way to reform this criminal gang, but still have people keep paying the money to it.
I think what you would say is that the first thing we need to do is to prevent the money from being paid to the criminal gang, because there's no point, no possibility of reforming that gang after they've got the money, right?
They're not going to need to listen to you. so that sort of analysis is the approach that i certainly take having worked through all of these proofs from the ground up to understand the true nature of the state which is of course a group a gang that claims the right to use violence against citizens.
[33:08] That the most fundamental thing to understand about all of that is that once you get this situation set up where people claim and take the right to take money at using force or the threat out of force from citizens.
What happens after that? Completely impossible.
[33:23] If you want to get rid of war, you have to get rid of taxation.
If you feel that the welfare state is undermining and destroying the possibilities for the poor to work their way into a decent condition, reforming the government is absolutely impossible.
You need to end taxation. If you're against the war on drugs, you need to end taxation.
Everything that the government does that is bad and gets it's worse is a result of taxation and a result of its right to use a force right and the end does not justify the means it doesn't matter what the government does with your money after it takes it i don't get to steal five hundred dollars from you and give a hundred dollars to charity and say hey i guess that makes us even no the actual act of theft at the point of a gun or the threat of incarceration is the fundamental evil that government represents what the government does does in terms of providing services and roads and charities and so on, doesn't matter because the primary relationship is one wherein somebody's pointing a gun at you and if you don't comply with their wishes, they will aggress against you.
I mean, let's not kid ourselves about that. That is what is very different between the government and Walmart.
Walmart isn't going to come to your house and drag you kicking and screaming to the store and force you to buy goods. That would be a laughable situation.
[34:34] But that happens all the time with governments. That's the fundamental nature of government, which is that it claims the rights of a group of people who claim the right to use force.
[34:42] So just sort of what I want to sort of give you a taste of when you sort of take this analysis into problems that we have within society.
[34:50] I think it's fairly clear that if you want to go to the root of the problem rather than just sort of trim the branches, if you want to go to the root of the problem, then you have to go to the root, which is the moral justification claimed for the government for the right to use force.
Once you get rid of the idea that there's a government, once you get rid of the idea that those in power, sort of quote power, are somehow fundamentally different from you and I, then you begin to understand that their use of force is absolutely and totally morally illegitimate and corrupt and evil.
And once you take away that ethical justification for what it is that they're doing, then the system will actually fall quite quickly.
And of course, You will need no violence to do it, but you just sort of have to understand and take away this moral sanction or the moral approval that you give to the government and look at this relationship with clear eyes, because philosophy is all about discovering the truth, however uncomfortable sort of it may make you.
You need to sort of look at the stuff with clear eyes and understand the nature of the relationships that you're currently enmeshed in and your lack of voluntary participation and the fact that you are doing what they say because they're threatening you with the violence does not make that right and you can make up all the fairy tales in the world that you want to justify that but we have worked pretty hard over the last couple of hours to try and eliminate the validity of fairy tales by by working through a rigorously logical series of steps to understand the nature of government and of power.
[36:19] So I hope that this has been helpful for you. Please drop by.
Actually, I've just revamped the website. I think it looks pretty cool.
Freedomainradio, www.freedomainradio.com. And I've got lots of podcasts, and I'm going to take a break from the videocasts because they're quite time-consuming.
But I hope that you will come by and listen to the podcasts, podcasts, and I will talk to you on the boards.
Thank you so much for listening as always, and have a great day.
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